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Past Time to Tell the Public:It Will Probably Go Pandemic, We Should Prepare Now

virologydownunder.com

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Re: Past Time to Tell the Public:It Will Probably Go Pandemic, We Should Prepare Now

#301

Post by maxerickson »

jacquesm wrote: post #235
maxerickson wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of examples in the news... Or do you somehow think there is currently no response?

The response so far seems to have concentrated on containment. That has - you could argue this - failed. The next logical step is to declare a pandemic, according to the CDC there are now cases in 32 countries with confirmed community spreading in about half of those. Note that a pandemic is only related to the geographical spreading in combination with the risk factors (highly contagious, relatively high mortality r…

Eh, I was wrong, it essentially has already been declared a pandemic, in as much as that happens anyway:

https://www.afro.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus-covid-19

"On the advice of the Emergency Committee, the WHO Director-General, declared the COVID-19 outbreak a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC)."

Re: Past Time to Tell the Public:It Will Probably Go Pandemic, We Should Prepare Now

#302

Post by SahAssar »

droithomme wrote: post #281
SahAssar wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But would you say, in a general sense, that it is better to assume malice rather than mistakes/incompetence/stupidity?

If one is responsible for ensuring security, they won't be very effective unless they realize malicious actors masquerading as the incompetent exist and are active.

If I am working on security critical software I don't try to determine the intent of anyone at all, everyone is assumed malicious and their code/actions reviewed as such.

My question was in a more general sense, do you assume that all mistakes are done on purpose to conceal some sort of plot?

Re: Past Time to Tell the Public:It Will Probably Go Pandemic, We Should Prepare Now

#303

Post by snackematician »

jacquesm wrote: post #177
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The plans the US already has for a flu pandemic should mostly carry over, no? COVID is probably worse than the seasonal flu, but it's not outside the reasonable range of what a flu pandemic could do.

> it's not outside the reasonable range of what a flu pandemic could do. By about 3-4 orders of magnitude, it is. The flu tends to kill about 60K people annually and most of those are old or very young or already had a compromised immune system. This is with the figures known so far and before there is a vaccine around 2-3%. If left unchecked it would overwhelm available health care capacity pretty quickly. The Chine…

> This is with the figures known so far and before there is a vaccine around 2-3%.

There's still a lot of uncertainty around the fatality rate here. For cases outside China, the fatality rate so far is about .2%, compared to about .1% for seasonal influenza. By contrast, in Hubei the reported fatality rate is around 4-5%. (Numbers are as of last week so might be slightly outdated now).

My guess is that the 2-3% estimate is too high. In Hubei there is probably a reporting bias towards counting the more sick cases -- mild or asymptomatic COVID cases are probably being reported less often.

Re: Past Time to Tell the Public:It Will Probably Go Pandemic, We Should Prepare Now

#304

Post by iends »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #157
DevX101 wrote: post #134

This is one case where it's worth overreacting to. Biological epidemics are the only thing that has had the capacity to kill >50 million people in a year. In my risk classification hierarchy I put pandemics above nuclear war and wayyyy above terrorism. Yet we've spent trillions on the war on terror the past 20 years while there's no coordinated plan in the U.S. for this yet. If there's even a 2% chance of this going…

The plans the US already has for a flu pandemic should mostly carry over, no? COVID is probably worse than the seasonal flu, but it's not outside the reasonable range of what a flu pandemic could do.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/31/coronavirus-china-trump...

Are you confident in this administrations ability to handle national crisis in light of the funding and personnel cuts mentioned in the above article?

Also, why has the CDC testing so botched thus far?

Re: Past Time to Tell the Public:It Will Probably Go Pandemic, We Should Prepare Now

#305

Post by DanBC »

platz wrote: post #193
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The plans the US already has for a flu pandemic should mostly carry over, no? COVID is probably worse than the seasonal flu, but it's not outside the reasonable range of what a flu pandemic could do.

Do 29 year old doctors typically die from the flu?

Health care professionals will tend to be vaccinated against flu, so they are less likely to get it, so you'd be looking at a very small population which is why you don't see more deaths.

If we widen this slightly to healthy but unvaccinated 29 year olds we do start to see deaths from flu.

Re: Past Time to Tell the Public:It Will Probably Go Pandemic, We Should Prepare Now

#306

Post by strangeloops85 »

dkarl wrote: post #140

The article becomes much less edgy if you know what the authorities are actually saying. For example, the American CDC, in USA Today[1]: "Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters Friday that U.S. health officials are preparing for the coronavirus to become a pandemic." "'We’re not seeing community spread here in the United States, yet, but i…

As many public health experts and virologists are now pointing out (and as I am sure many at CDC have long realized), there's no way to know if there's community spread without actually testing for it. Current testing capacity is severely limited - which is baffling really, given that Korea is running like 6000 tests/ days now. Part of it is a logistical / technical screw-up:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/20/cdc-coronavirus-116...

For example, if you're a doctor with a case of atypical pneumonia, there's no way to actually test a patient for it unless there's clear China (possibly Hubei!) travel history. And that could take 3-7 days. However, consider the Canadian ER doctor who a few days ago decided to ask for a test for a woman who had traveled back from Iran recently - turned out she had it, and it revealed to us unexpected, but very real vectors of transmission.

These technical issues have to be solved, otherwise there's no way to distinguish this from regular seasonal flu cases and pneumonias, until - like in Wuhan - the atypical cases bubble up. At that point, it's really too late to do much containment.

Re: Past Time to Tell the Public:It Will Probably Go Pandemic, We Should Prepare Now

#307

Post by hackinthebochs »

jcranmer wrote: post #282
hackinthebochs wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how many of them required anything but the standard response from authorities? I can't think of any aside from Katrina and Maria. But it's when an atypical response is warranted that authorities ability to respond is tested. Based on that metric, the track record is poor. There's also the concern of incentives. The authorities are incentivized to treat every emergency as requiring nothing over and above the stand…

> And how many of them required anything but the standard response from authorities? What do you mean by "standard response"? It seems to me that you have a working definition that is less an objective standard and more a subjective, circular definition of "anything that didn't fail." Take Hurricane Harvey for example. The rain Houston received was record-breaking: ~30" in the course of a day or so, when the previous…

What I mean by the "standard response" are actions that are just some variation of: mobilize national guard, provide emergency shelter, distribute emergency rations of food, provide mobile health care, etc, and usually to some reasonably localized geographic location. Basically the sort of responses where simply modeling your response after the previous similar disaster is sufficient. The problem with Katrina and Maria was precisely that the playbook from prior disasters was inadequate either due to the type or scale of problems faced.

Re: Past Time to Tell the Public:It Will Probably Go Pandemic, We Should Prepare Now

#308

Post by droithomme »

SahAssar wrote: post #302
droithomme wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If one is responsible for ensuring security, they won't be very effective unless they realize malicious actors masquerading as the incompetent exist and are active.

If I am working on security critical software I don't try to determine the intent of anyone at all, everyone is assumed malicious and their code/actions reviewed as such. My question was in a more general sense, do you assume that all mistakes are done on purpose to conceal some sort of plot?

> everyone is assumed malicious and their code/actions reviewed as such.

Yes we are in agreement.

> in a more general sense, do you assume that all mistakes are done on purpose to conceal some sort of plot?

Obviously not and no one is claiming that. The extremes of never assuming malice and never assuming incompetence are ... extremes.

Always starting with a presumption of innocence is said to be a useful premise for a criminal justice system. And always starting with a presumption of malice is a useful premise for security oversight. Not just code but other things like Secret Service details and plane boarding. It's assumed that boxcutter is for hijacking, so you have to give it up. It's presumed that bottle of water is some sort of chemical to be used in making a bomb, so you have to give it up. It's presumed that baby is a secret bomb, so the baby is going to be scanned and inspected. An unrecognized wellwisher rapidly approaching the President on stage at an event is presumed to be an assassin and will be tackled. A car of lost people looking for a wedding location which is approaching a US security checkpoint in Iraq or Afghanistan without slowing down will be machine gunned. A suspicious man, under the influence, who is staggering along down the center of the road in Baltimore who does not follow orders to stop and get on the ground and who instead reaches into his pocket for his id, cell phone, or breath mints, will be shot dead. Malice is the default assumption in a wide variety of security contexts.

Re: Past Time to Tell the Public:It Will Probably Go Pandemic, We Should Prepare Now

#310

Post by dbcurtis »

jacquesm wrote: post #247
Freak_NL wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was another planet in another time. We (Earth) are the descendants of the B arc.

Ark. Besides that, I wonder how many people missed that bit of circular reasoning in thhg.

> Ark

Yes, thanks! I knew arc didn’t look quite correct, but my spelling is sketchy enough without being under-caffeinated.

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