271–280 of 436 posts
New York City declared a state of emergency first, then the state. I guess the U.S. is in a state of emergency because it is shutting down flights. For a while people were accusing WHO of inaction, finally WHO declares a pandemic and they start accusing other people of inaction.
The structure is that an outbreak creates a crisis in one spot even though others are currently unaffected.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
But the early stages of disease spread _are_ exponential. And I find that people really fail to understand the meaning of that, and how scary numbers like "new confirmed cases doubling every two days, 500 new cases in France yesterday" truly are.
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…
> Treating you in emergency now might involve kicking someone else off respiratory support. 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.…
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.…
It is surprising to me to. If this was Star Trek world, you'd have computational models built by experts shared and discussed the very first day, forming the very foundation of the discussion and policy around the virus. I know of a certain company whose entire purpose is building and selling a product that lets you plug in equations of complex, dynamic systems and play with the models to understand and predict thing…
People who model the effects of climate change, like Nate Silver and the 538 crew, run thousands of simulations and present a summary. Even then you can get hung up on the "unknown unknowns".
For instance 1970s estimates of nuclear reactor accidents assumed the main risk was that the pressure vessel was going to burst. That's an easy risk to control, so you hardly ever hear of a pressure vessel bursting at a chemical plant, but all the time people blow up or suck in storage tanks that can't handle 1 psi of under or overpressure.
Now really a legacy nuclear power plant melts down 100% of the time if the power goes out and they can't start the emergency generators. That happens a lot more than bursting pressure vessels!
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France has 11x Denmark's population and 4x it's confirmed cases, so it seems like doing nothing worked better.
Denmark's case number has increased far more than that of other countries in recent days. They probably had to act as they'd overtake Italy in less than a week with cases/capita if growth continues like that.
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It also depends on the country's government. Afaik in Germany the country's government can't force schools to close or public events to be cancelled. These decisions have to be taken locally (at state/city or even district level). All the health ministry can do is tell people "you shouldn't do A B C and you should do X Y Z"
No, that's not the real reason. In the places where they have shut down schools, they can't really do it either. But when government says "do X" and has good reasons, the institutions comply. I'm in the board of a private institution in a country with a shutdown order, and there was really no discussion between the board members that this institution would shut down too, despite there being no legal backing at all.
Not saying it's good or bad, but it's definitely a different system.
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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…
At the risk of being down-voted, I'm not trying to start a political debate. I'd just like to know, as someone outside the USA, how this is affecting the election campaigns there. Are personal costs of the pandemic encouraging people to support subsidised healthcare, and therefore a left-wing party? Or is the xenophobic rhetoric of "blame China/Europe/travellers/etc" causing people to support a right-wing party? I al…
This is likely the same segment of the population who have a strong incentive to go to work ignoring risks of community spread. They live pay check to pay check and can't afford to be sick and take time off.
As an emergency measure, the federal government should carry all costs associated with virus testing. Any individual who is quarantined or must stay home to care for those quarantined should receive direct cash transfers to off-set the immediate economic dislocations this causes.
The current federal administration's argument for suspending payroll taxes does nothing for those who are unemployed or work in the informal, cash economy.
Luckily, at the state and local level officials appear more competent placing the health related impacts above politics. As an example, the governor of New York took the unprecedented step of quarantining New Rochelle just outside New York city.
If there is any possibility of a silver lining from all of this, it would be how the U.S. electorate might see the true economic cost of allowing roughly 10% of the population to be uninsured. To me, it is immoral that the richest nation on earth permits those who are most vulnerable not having equal access to adequate healthcare.
Finally, as an indication of how the federal government continues to politicize the pandemic, the Secretary of State continues to call the Covid-19 pandemic, Wuhan virus, as an insult to China.
As a US citizen lucky enough to not be significantly impacted by all of this, I'm deeply embarrassed by such an outrageous insult from a federal official.
1) Test kits are not helpful because of their high false positive rates.
2) The goal of these activities is to slow the spread, because it is not possible to stop.
3) Slowing the spread gives vaccine developers more time