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U.S. will suspend all travel from Europe for 30 days

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Re: U.S. will suspend all travel from Europe for 30 days

#841

Post by stronglikedan »

Frost1x wrote: post #109
unlinked_dll wrote: post #30

Regardless of the ability of people to travel to the UK or Canada and get here (which people have done for a long time with other nations we don't take kindly to) it's absolutely going to reduce the number of people who will travel across the pond. Which is the goal, reduce infection rates. My concern is how economies are going to respond to the US being cut off from Continental ports for a month, which as far as I c…

>Which is the goal, reduce infection rates. Based on the localized infection cases I see across the US and have been watching as well as the characteristics of the virus (life outside host/on surfaces, in air, the degree of asymptomatic transference, etc.), it's well beyond containment IMHO. Travel isn't going to do too much to reduce infection rates alone. We need significant cultural changes to reduce infection rat…

The current administration in the US has been more proactive than any previous administration during any previous outbreak, despite the deluge of criticisms that were surprisingly absent during said previous outbreaks. The measures that have been taken thus far are more than aggressive enough, based on the information we currently have. We're just a few steps away from shutting everything down completely, which wouldn't be good for anything at this point. It doesn't get much more proactive than that.

Re: U.S. will suspend all travel from Europe for 30 days

#843

Post by hastes »

stronglikedan wrote: post #841
Frost1x wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Which is the goal, reduce infection rates. Based on the localized infection cases I see across the US and have been watching as well as the characteristics of the virus (life outside host/on surfaces, in air, the degree of asymptomatic transference, etc.), it's well beyond containment IMHO. Travel isn't going to do too much to reduce infection rates alone. We need significant cultural changes to reduce infection rat…

The current administration in the US has been more proactive than any previous administration during any previous outbreak, despite the deluge of criticisms that were surprisingly absent during said previous outbreaks. The measures that have been taken thus far are more than aggressive enough, based on the information we currently have. We're just a few steps away from shutting everything down completely, which would…

Be careful here with an opinion like that, it doesn't fare well most of the time unfortunately.

Re: U.S. will suspend all travel from Europe for 30 days

#844

Post by logfromblammo »

Containment has already failed. That's why COVID-19 was declared pandemic.

Governments, and their public health employees in particular, should be switching to management, mitigation, triage, and treatment now. The assumption is that everybody will get it. The goal now is to ensure that a person occupying an ICU beds will be treated and recovered by the time the next patient needs to be admitted into it.

Issuing more extensive travel bans now are driving in the rear-view mirror instead of keeping eyes on the road ahead. It's already here, and spreading in the community.

First priority is viable testing. You can't manage what you can't detect.

Then it's like controlling a nuclear chain reaction with irregularly-shaped fuel in a randomly-configured reactor. You want to eventually consume all the dangerously radioactive fuel, but you don't want a runaway reaction and core meltdown either. So you stick control rods and moderator fluids and neutron reflectors in as needed to control the rate of the reaction, based on your monitoring, and just keep doing it until all the unreacted fuel is gone. And the whole time, people are dropping dead from the radiation. But then the reaction finally burns itself out, and you can breathe easy again, then reflect upon your failures to revise your plans for the next one.

The federal response has already failed. Now is the time for lots of smart people, who can adapt quickly, to implement ad hoc measures at the local level, based on local conditions, and draw on their public health emergency budgets, that hopefully weren't cut or raided already, and their preparedness efforts, that hopefully actually exist.

Re: U.S. will suspend all travel from Europe for 30 days

#845

Post by kkdaemas »

bart_spoon wrote: post #825
defined wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Death is not the only thing that coronavirus can do to you. You can spend weeks or months in therapy before you are recovered, or you can get scarring in your lungs - or worse - that leaves you with a permanent disability. Not to mention damage to other organs. I think many are discounting, or are unaware of, these other nasty possibilities. We don’t know enough yet of the prevalence of these effects, but we do know…

> You can spend weeks or months in therapy before you are recovered, or you can get scarring in your lungs - or worse - that leaves you with a permanent disability. Not to mention damage to other organs. Given that we've only been tracking the virus closely for 2 months, and we've only had a decent sample size of patients for only about 1 month, you really can't be making claims like this at this point.

Some survivors of SARS had significant long-term health complications. It remains to be seen if this will be the same.

Re: U.S. will suspend all travel from Europe for 30 days

#846

Post by penagwin »

Seenso wrote: post #830
blaser-waffle wrote: post #826

Earlier quoted context omitted.

COVID-19 doesn't mean there aren't regular flu / colds going around, too. Long distance travel and exposure to those who have been (e.g. hugging your wife got off a plane from Spain 2 days ago) is still a top predictor for exposure.

> COVID-19 doesn't mean there aren't regular flu / colds going around, too. Which is exactly why everyone with those symptoms needs to be tested. One of the most important things we need to do right now is detect the people who got the virus through community transmission. > Long distance travel and exposure to those who have been (e.g. hugging your wife got off a plane from Spain 2 days ago) is still a top predictor…

> Which is exactly why everyone with those symptoms needs to be tested.

This. I'm in my twenties so it's very possible for me to get COVID and only experience cold like symptoms (or less!). I'm sorry to everyone, but I won't self-quarantine myself for 14 days just because I have a stuffy nose (it's likely a cold right?). I'm fortunate enough to have the ability to take time off/work remote - but what if it's a cold this week and COVID in two weeks? I can't take a month off.

I'm from West Michigan - ATM there's very little testing available, and I'd only be tested if I had recently traveled. But we're past the point where recently traveling is such a big indicator - we're seeing plenty of community transmission for me to believe it's very likely everywhere already, and any lack of cases is because of a lack of testing.

Re: U.S. will suspend all travel from Europe for 30 days

#847

Post by rimliu »

defined wrote: post #340
corel_ wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure where this level of panic is coming from. Numbers are about to spike everywhere pretty much no matter what anybody does, because better testing and funding has become available. Quarantining an entire continent, and even worse than this badly doing it, seems to be an astonishing overreaction. The average age of death for coronavirus victims is 83. The mortality rate seems to be as low as 0.6% in South Ko…

Death is not the only thing that coronavirus can do to you. You can spend weeks or months in therapy before you are recovered, or you can get scarring in your lungs - or worse - that leaves you with a permanent disability. Not to mention damage to other organs. I think many are discounting, or are unaware of, these other nasty possibilities. We don’t know enough yet of the prevalence of these effects, but we do know…

AFAIK besides spending weeks in therapy, other possibilities are not confirmed for COVID-19.

Re: U.S. will suspend all travel from Europe for 30 days

#848

Post by learnstats2 »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #504
zuminator wrote: post #498

Is there anywhere in the US where we are doing random testing of residents to determine what the real infection rate is here? From all I can see we're currently just adding up the number of people who have come in with symptoms and tested positive instead of getting a real handle on what percentage of the population is infected. The CDC website right now says that there are 938 total cases.[1] That's laughable. At th…

I would think we be able to estimate fairly correctly. I assume pretty much everyone who dies from it would end up in a hospital and counted. And since we know the death rate, we know for every 1 death there were x who have it and will/have recovered.

The death rate is likely to vary depending on the strain and on the ability to treat effectively, both of which may change over time.

Re: U.S. will suspend all travel from Europe for 30 days

#849

Post by rimliu »

defined wrote: post #357
jki275 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No we're not. That's absolutely absurd to claim. It might -- MIGHT -- kill 2-3% of people who are highly susceptible to it, people who are in their 70s+, people with cardiac and respiratory disease. Maybe. We don't even know that will happen, because we can probably save a huge percentage of that population as well. You're fearmongering, and it's bullshit.

This is false. Studies done in Wuhan show that people with CVD have well over a 10% mortality rate. In addition, COVID-19 has the potential to cause permanent disability if it does not kill you first.

I assume the first sentence in your comment describes the rest of it?

Re: U.S. will suspend all travel from Europe for 30 days

#850

Post by blaser-waffle »

hcknwscommenter wrote: post #665
gwright wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The president didn't say that the virus is a partisan hoax. His actions clearly indicate he doesn't believe it is a hoax. The president did claim that some criticisms about his handling of the situation were a "new hoax" in the same way he has labeled previous unfounded criticism and accusations as hoaxes.

"His actions clearly indicate he doesn't believe it is a hoax." Huh? He called Fox News and said on air ""So if, you know, we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people [with COVID-19] that get better, just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work, some of them go to work, but they get better,"" His whole schtick until just about a few hours ago was that the risks were all hugely overblown. I am als…

I don't know if I'd call that blatantly partisan. Stupid, perhaps, or a hamfisted attempt to prevent panics and economic crashes, but it's not especially political.
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