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Tokyo Olympics “looking at a cancellation” if coronavirus not contained

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Re: Tokyo Olympics “looking at a cancellation” if coronavirus not contained

#271
post #59
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And apparently it can survive on a stainless steel surface for 36 hours. [0] Also from [0] however: "Sunlight will cut the virus ability to grow in half so the half-life will be 2.5 minutes and in the dark it’s about 13m to 20m. Sunlight is really good at killing viruses. That’s why I believe that Australia and the southern hemisphere will not see any great infections rates because they have lots of sunlight and they…

If it's inactivated at only 30 degrees (86F), that suggests an unconventional combat strategy of just heating buildings to that temperature—that's basically a hot summer day. We're not talking an autoclave here.

It depends what they mean by "inactivation" : is it dead or does it "reactivate" at cooler temperatures ?

Re: Tokyo Olympics “looking at a cancellation” if coronavirus not contained

#272

I've been checking for updates on the virus several times a day since it first started being reported in Western media around Jan 20 (in part because it's been a fun distraction, in part because I have friends in Wuhan). I like to think I'm generally an optimist, but I think it's been clear for several weeks now that this is going to have a significant worldwide impact. There are just too many factors in favor of unc…

Living in Tokyo and just returned from Seoul yesterday. It's striking how differently the countries are handling this issue. Korea is pretty much on lockdown -- the government and the population are being quite proactive. Masks everywhere, thermal guns at junctions with high human traffic. Water fountains shut down, etc. Even the airport staff at the eateries were undergoing temperature checks before interacting with…

My favorite thing in Tokyo (I wrote sarcastically) is being on over crowded trains in the winter and their policy of not running the ventilation systems "because it's winter".

Re: Tokyo Olympics “looking at a cancellation” if coronavirus not contained

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

COVID-19 is unlike anything before (in modern times). Especially HIV. You don't catch HIV by boarding the subway, eating in a restaurant, or running a marathon. For most people, avoiding unsafe sex is enough to avoid HIV. But if COVID-19 spreads to their country, people's daily lives will be significantly disrupted. SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika are a little more like COVID-19, except they never propagate that far.

> boarding the subway, eating in a restaurant, or running a marathon There's no evidence that you are remotely likely to catch COVID-19 by doing any of those things either.

Then why is China shutting down public transports, telling people to stay home, and cancelling public events? Hmm?

Re: Tokyo Olympics “looking at a cancellation” if coronavirus not contained

#274
post #190

I've been checking for updates on the virus several times a day since it first started being reported in Western media around Jan 20 (in part because it's been a fun distraction, in part because I have friends in Wuhan). I like to think I'm generally an optimist, but I think it's been clear for several weeks now that this is going to have a significant worldwide impact. There are just too many factors in favor of unc…

Similar level of interest and tracking, and I thought the same about CCP and their ability to enforce order, but this [1] gives an interesting counter argument, with an interesting hypothesis [2] below: > Tufekci argues that one of the second order effects of a surveillance society is that people act strategically to minimise the chance of punishment - and so their behaviour (and the data it generates) ceases to be a…

Sure, it's like those stories about governments incentivising people to hunt pests by paying for body parts...eventually people circumvent the metrics in a counterproductive manner, in the animals case by breeding the pests instead of capturing them.

Re: Tokyo Olympics “looking at a cancellation” if coronavirus not contained

#275
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or mosquitoes and the malaria they spread... Malaria was responsible 405,000 deaths globally in 2018 according to [0]. [0] https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/world-m...

How many people do you know with malaria? It's a tropical region disease. In a pandemic of Covid-19, it is going to affect people all over the world in every region.

> How many people do you know with malaria? It's a tropical region disease.

Malaria is not inherently a tropical region disease. It routinely plagued Europe until the 1950s. Russia for one example had a huge Malaria outbreak in the early 1920s as did Eastern Europe broadly.

"Gustavo Pittaluga (1876-1956) estimated that in 1923, 18 million people suffered from malaria in Russia, and that sixty thousand deaths occurred out of a total population of about 110 million (Anigstein, Pittaluga, 1925). Similar observations were made throughout the whole of eastern and south-eastern Europe and the former Ottoman Empire."

http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104...

Re: Tokyo Olympics “looking at a cancellation” if coronavirus not contained

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because it infects so many millions. Covid-19 right now looks a magnitude more deadly with significant long term health consequences for many who survive.

> a magnitude more deadly Probably not. Case fatality rates don't accurately show the "deadliness" since many people have likely been infected but been asymptomatic or had mild illness that didn't cause them to seek medical advice. > significant long term health consequences for many who survive There is no evidence for that, and it doesn't make sense given the available data. Some number of people have long-term hea…

Yes, it is a magnitude deadlier than the flu.

We now have 4 independent estimates that place the Infection Fatality Ratio at about 0.5% to 1.7% which is between 5x and 17x deadlier than the flu (0.1%): https://twitter.com/zorinaq/status/1230977769795776512 Incidentally, this makes COVID19 comparable to the 1918 Spanish Flu (IFR ~2%) according to experts (see link above). And keep in mind the IFR, unlike the CFR, is the metric that takes into account undetected mild or asymptomatic cases.

«There is no evidence for that»

There is, see https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... : In those who survive intensive care, [...] aberrant and excessive immune responses lead to long-term lung damage and fibrosis, causing functional disability and reduced quality of life.

Re: Tokyo Olympics “looking at a cancellation” if coronavirus not contained

#277
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Living in Tokyo and just returned from Seoul yesterday. It's striking how differently the countries are handling this issue. Korea is pretty much on lockdown -- the government and the population are being quite proactive. Masks everywhere, thermal guns at junctions with high human traffic. Water fountains shut down, etc. Even the airport staff at the eateries were undergoing temperature checks before interacting with…

I’m in Tokyo and having a very different experience than you, nearly everyone on the trains are wearing masks and all customer facing staff I see now. Someone hit the emergency button on the train a few days ago because someone was coughing without one (there was a PSA asking people not to do that). It’s mostly foreigners I see walking around without masks now, but I agree it’s still ramping up. I honestly don’t see…

on a side note, i have a week of PTO booked in tokyo then a week in kyoto/osaka, leaving friday. do you think its safe to travel?

Re: Tokyo Olympics “looking at a cancellation” if coronavirus not contained

#278
post #74
post #37

Would a vaccine for Covid-19 work if the virus can re-infect people who have already recovered from it?

Vaccines can involve a number of techniques that can provoke a stronger immune response than a natural infection.

...which notably was the case in one of original SARS vaccine attempts.

Re: Tokyo Olympics “looking at a cancellation” if coronavirus not contained

#279
For those of you curious about the state of COVID-19 in Japan, I created an open source tracker that has gained a lot of momentum.

Source Code: https://github.com/reustle/covid19japan/

Tracker: https://covid19japan.com

Twitter Thread: https://twitter.com/reustle/status/1229313493808992257

Re: Tokyo Olympics “looking at a cancellation” if coronavirus not contained

#280
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> boarding the subway, eating in a restaurant, or running a marathon There's no evidence that you are remotely likely to catch COVID-19 by doing any of those things either.

Then why is China shutting down public transports, telling people to stay home, and cancelling public events? Hmm?

Because they're an authoritarian state, grasping at straws, and they can. The new politicians in Wuhan are connected directly to Xi, and they're doing all kinds of stuff that has no scientific basis, just to be doing stuff.
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