261–270 of 436 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Russia shutdown its borders pretty much straight away and IIRC they have hardly any cases.
I believe only Moscow faces restrictions for travel from Europe. Maybe they just had much less travel anyway and that's why few got infected.
https://metro.co.uk/2020/01/30/russia-closes-2700-mile-borde...
- He describes this as more like a "winter" than a "blizzard" in that this is going to go on for months;
- No one really knows what the mortality rate is but it's become clear there are certain risk factors eg the fatality rate among people over 70 in China is about 3x for men than women but men are much more likely to smoke than women in China in this age group.
- Keeping schools closed is a mixed bag. For one, kids below 9 or so don't seem to get sick or die. In China only 2% of cases are under age 19. There are other diseases like this (eg Hepatitis-A). If you keep kids home, some people will lose their jobs or simply be unable to work as they take care of those children. Some of those people will be health care professionals. The lack of those will likely kill people;
- It's unclear yet what other risk factors (other than age and smoking) there are. Obesity in the developed world is a big cause for concern as this unfolds. A stat quoted is that 45% of people in the US aged 45 and older are obese or severely obese;
- It's largely a question of when not if you'll get this;
- It's a myth that we'll have a vaccine before ~18 months. You can't rush this. It's like trying to rush a pregnancy.
- Italy is a window to how most places will be in ~3 weeks;
- We, as a society, have a short attention span. We could've developed a vaccine for coronaviruses after previous outbreaks (SARS/MERS) but there seemed to be no appetite for that when they faded;
- Disruptions to the supply chain are likely to be the biggest problem. We don't stockpile anything and we're dependent on China for a lot of medical equipment (eg respirators) and a bunch of essential medicines, some of which people will die if they don't receive.
The guest here (Michael Osterholm) is an expert on infectious diseases and the author of Deadliest Enemies [2].
I can't speak to the reaction of different governments. It's no surprise there's variance. This probably comes down to just 1 or 2 personalities.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3URhJx0NSw
[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Deadliest-Enemy-Against-Killer-Germs-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. Besides, it's a lose/lose proposition for the gov anyway. If they do act, people will blame them for the cost of the action. If they don't, people will blame then for the cost of not acting. Nobody will pat them on the back, except a few intellectuals, for acting. In fact, economically, the virus spreading is an opportunity to fire people you couldn't fire before, get rid of an old population costing money a…
>the virus spreading is an opportunity to fire people you couldn't fire before, get rid of an old population costing money We have become very cynical people.
old people are the base voters for many populist ruling party in Europe
It's disappointing that the WHO and national agencies seem not able to adequately inform the public about their assessment of the situations, the models they're using and the conclusions they're drawing. Right now, the most shared article on Corona is written by a growth hacker from SF who cobbled together an Excel sheet and recommends it to people to decide whether they should close their companies or stay at home.…
Exactly this! I kind of understand the WHO, the broad public, including media, doesn't care about models and such things. Providing to much details can have the opposite effect, instead of calming things down it could spark more fear. On the other hand, online stuff like said growth hacker can draw a lot of attention. This will end up in the mainstream. That diseases aren't exponential, who cares when exponential cur…
Shouting this point does more bad than good. Outbreaks are exponential in their initial stage, to an extremely good level of approximation. Sure, they're ultimately s-shaped, but we're far from the bend point. That the growth starts to deviate from the exponent a tiny bit when half of your country is sick isn't a useful observation right now.
The graph this blog draws doesn't work that way. The whole point of not overloading the medical system - and definitely not getting it at 100% capacity, is that once you're at capacity, it's not just COVID-19 treatment which stops (which means, all those people who would otherwise survive die) - it's all treatment. Get appendicitis? Routine surgery, can be done in a few hours. And will definitely kill you without tre…
This has been my standard reply to the "It's just a flu" concept for some time now.
Aside from all this, it's incredible how difficult it is for people to think about this using all the info available (long onset of symptoms, asymptomatic spread, high % of hospitalizations / intensive care, etc) plus thinking in the long term.
I know the generalized idea is no face masks if you don't have symptoms, but if we all used them it might have a good effect on curving the spread.
Unfortunately, western cultures associate face mask with sickness, and are frowned upon.
I see how the struggle for economic reasons, but I have too little faith in them being smart enough for that plan and doubt they have good enough data scraping by the max capacity line so closely with confidence. Even the graph in the article is weird, why is there a sharp limit at max capacity in the T2 curve? the virus doesn't care about max capacity....
Yeah, no. Nice hyperactive imagination to find any plausible justification for inaction. The intuitive impulse is there (trade off hospitals getting "creamed" vs. shutting down economy), but the implementation isn't realistic, so with the incubation period and lag in testing, all governments act too late. It's an impossible control problem. On the other hand, maybe the right time to act is to watch your stock market.…
https://www.onvista.de/etf/VANGUARD-FTSE-ALL-WORLD-UCITS-ETF...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about 99% of your income? Your assets? How much is a stranger’s life worth to you.
Slippery slope fallacy. We are nowhere near that point.
It's disappointing that the WHO and national agencies seem not able to adequately inform the public about their assessment of the situations, the models they're using and the conclusions they're drawing. Right now, the most shared article on Corona is written by a growth hacker from SF who cobbled together an Excel sheet and recommends it to people to decide whether they should close their companies or stay at home.…
Exactly this! I kind of understand the WHO, the broad public, including media, doesn't care about models and such things. Providing to much details can have the opposite effect, instead of calming things down it could spark more fear. On the other hand, online stuff like said growth hacker can draw a lot of attention. This will end up in the mainstream. That diseases aren't exponential, who cares when exponential cur…
This is the problem. Not that our institutions are failing to deal with the problem, but that our media has vastly overblown the whole situation in order to scare everyone witless so they'll keep clicking on news updates and watch those ads.
With the secondary effect, of course, that all searches for information end up at a media outlet trying to scare people, and not the appropriate primary source of suitable information.
And the tertiary effect that an institution presenting non-sensationalist data based on research is dismissed as an "inadequate response" if it doesn't match the hyperbolic media frenzy.
We should be shutting down newspapers, not schools.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I interpreted it like this: deaths are less expensive than lost productivity. This might actually hold given the groups that are the most at risk are probably least productive: the old and the infirm.
Not aimed at you, but, I am disgusted at even a mention of these kind of 'calculations'. And yes, I am prepared to take a hit in my earnings, paying higher taxes if needed after this if that is what it takes for at least one person more to live.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that this spreadsheet is communicating several things well but I share it as a "reasonable bad case back of the envelope calculation". And if we mean the same article, it actually does a reasonable job at outlining the uncertainties around testing and national differences, and focuses on what is probably the most robustly comparable data point we have: Number of confirmed deaths. The problem with models used…
Exactly why replacing by something simplistic doesn't fly. I'll go on a limb and say if I tried something similar in this guy's field, I would be destroyed for publishing it. And rightly so.
I also would wish for better explanations from the scientists actively working on it. My first go to is RKI.