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Social distancing slowing not only Covid-19, but other diseases too

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Re: Social distancing slowing not only Covid-19, but other diseases too

#111

Post by _ea1k »

clairity wrote: post #98
scrollaway wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "car accidents" fallacy. 1. "New thing X puts us at risk of losing Y lives every day." 2. "We lose Y lives to car accidents every day". 3. "Ergo, X is harmless!" Except you now have 2Y lives lost every day. Furthermore, car accidents kill an insane amount of people, and cars suck. This is not the bar.

the fallacy is couching it that way. no one says “it’s harmless!”, but rather, they ask “is this more or less dangerous, and is it more or less costly?” so it’s absolutely a credible gauge of risk, or more colloquially, a bar. that’s how we figure out an appropriate response, by looking at what we’ve done in similar situations. and yes, it absolutely sucks that we accept a million deaths a year worldwide due to cars.…

I completely agree. I often use the car accidents as a statistical bar. Its really a big part of what made me realize how serious covid19 would be if we didn't adjust pretty aggressively. The numbers really could have eclipsed car deaths and that is already a huge number.

I don't think that is going to happen now, though, thankfully.

Re: Social distancing slowing not only Covid-19, but other diseases too

#112

Post by maxerickson »

rossdavidh wrote: post #91

Hypothesis: people who are stuck at home have more time and inclination to check their temperatures, even when they don't feel sick.

That wouldn't generate an unusual number of 'fever' readings, and then a pretty simple model would do some accounting for repeated use of each thermometer (so 'extra' normal readings shouldn't be reducing the expected number of 'fever' readings).

Re: Social distancing slowing not only Covid-19, but other diseases too

#113

Post by saalweachter »

andreygrehov wrote: post #94

Randall Munroe did a small section on eradicating the common cold in his What-if book, the basic idea is if that all of humanity stayed away from each other for a week or two then the common cold would die out as it can't survive outside of the human body for more than a week and normally survives by continuously hopping from host to host.

This current situation had me wondering how hard it would be to coordinate a regular -- maybe not yearly -- global self-isolation for say 2-3 weeks at a time.

Aside from the difficulties of getting everyone in the world to agree that the first three weeks of February during a leap year are observed through social distance, it doesn't seem like it would be as bad on a recurring basis as it is during an emergency like this. You could plan for your self-isolation in advance, so there wouldn't be a rush for supplies the way there is now; you would already know not to schedule anything for February; you'd probably still have to solve some money problems for a large number of people, since being able to WFH probably anti-correlates with living paycheck to paycheck.

If you could actually eliminate -- or at least, dramatically reduce the incidence of -- common colds and seasonal flu through such a scheme, it would probably be worth both from a QoL standpoint for the everyone in the world (would you trade 3 weeks of cabin fever every four years for never having another actual fever?) and from an economic standpoint (three weeks of predictable low productivity is almost certainly better than the unpredictable constant costs associated with illness and death).

Re: Social distancing slowing not only Covid-19, but other diseases too

#114

Post by maxerickson »

sroussey wrote: post #109
eunos wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even easier and also reliable, normalize wearing surgical masks. Outside of Asia, wearing a surgical mask before the outbreak might invite some funny looks.

Why? I mean, sounds good if you are sick, but rather you stay home.

Lots of people, for lots of illnesses, are infectious without really having any symptoms.

Re: Social distancing slowing not only Covid-19, but other diseases too

#115

Post by macintux »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #29
Analemma_ wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As of right now, covid-19 is killing about 2,200 people/day, compared to about 3,300 people/day for car accidents. So it hasn't caught up yet, but it's still on an exponential climb and will probably get there in another week or so, and then keep right on climbing. This whole "the flu/cars/heart disease is way worse" shtick people are leaning on has got to stop. It's true until exponential growth suddenly means it's…

Wouldn’t the number of people the virus will kill will reach a maximum and then decline rapidly as the remaining population will be immune to it?

The maximum, absent strong measures, will be immense due to the fact that some significant percentage of patients require intensive care/ventilation for weeks.

Imagine 5% of the world’s population requiring hospitalization all at roughly the same time. We don’t have 350,000,000 ventilators and hospital beds and health care professionals to take care of them, so the death toll and general suffering would be unimaginable.

Re: Social distancing slowing not only Covid-19, but other diseases too

#116

Post by triceratops »

bluedevil2k wrote: post #6

I was thinking if we go all in on this stay-in-place and we get it working around the world, could we eliminate measles? Chicken pox? Any other human-virus disease that relies on human-to-human contact to spread?

You're thinking of Solaria[1], from Isaac Asimov's Robot series. It's not a great society, all things considered.

We already have measles and chicken pox pretty well licked with vaccines. Smallpox was eliminated in the wild, polio is nearly there. There's no need to change our entire way of life permanently just for diseases we can easily vaccinate against.

1. https://asimov.fandom.com/wiki/Solaria

Re: Social distancing slowing not only Covid-19, but other diseases too

#117

Post by james_marks »

andreygrehov wrote: post #94

Randall Munroe did a small section on eradicating the common cold in his What-if book, the basic idea is if that all of humanity stayed away from each other for a week or two then the common cold would die out as it can't survive outside of the human body for more than a week and normally survives by continuously hopping from host to host.

Do you remember the rest of his anecdote, and the massive disruption and starvation he speculated it would cause?

We’re actually seeing a hint of what he described, thankfully not near the full scale.

Re: Social distancing slowing not only Covid-19, but other diseases too

#118

Post by _ea1k »

Analemma_ wrote: post #15
ShorsHammer wrote: post #13

The lockdown of non-essential businesses has essentially reduced traffic accidents here to zero when usually there'd be a over a hundred deaths and few thousand injuries per week. By comparison there's only been 20 deaths from covid-19 over the space of 3 months, nearly all of them elderly people with pre-existing conditions. Yet people are emotional creatures and not all deaths are equal.

As of right now, covid-19 is killing about 2,200 people/day, compared to about 3,300 people/day for car accidents. So it hasn't caught up yet, but it's still on an exponential climb and will probably get there in another week or so, and then keep right on climbing. This whole "the flu/cars/heart disease is way worse" shtick people are leaning on has got to stop. It's true until exponential growth suddenly means it's…

I still think the comparison is useful. Cars and their (horrible) rate of serious injury and death seem to be the worst thing that people readily accept. Showing that covid-19 can be worse than that can be enlightening. And it obviously becomes exponentially worse if the hospital system overloads.

Re: Social distancing slowing not only Covid-19, but other diseases too

#119

Post by maxerickson »

zaroth wrote: post #92
sudoaza wrote: post #4

I was hoping for this, lets do social distancing a tradition for every winter

I’m just trying to get my head around this... I wonder if people are just ignorant of the widespread devastation caused by the lockdown, if they feel like people devastated by the lockdown did not “do enough to prepare” and so somehow deserve it, if they somehow believe people will be made whole by trillion dollar handouts, or what? I personally know two family businesses which have laid off all their employees and m…

A coordinated reduction of time spent in groups doesn't have to be extreme to have a pretty big impact on infection transmission.

Like state health departments could declare that influenza is trending in the state and businesses could have less face to face meetings, and maybe churches cancel some of their non-worship gatherings, and so on.

For example, the orange scenario on https://covidactnow.org/state/MI includes possibly closing schools. States are doing the ones down at the bottom of the graph, social distancing is less severe and less effective, but still compares favorably to not adjusting behavior.

School closures in response to infections could probably be done more aggressively than we usually do now, but doing it on a statewide basis also probably doesn't make sense.

Re: Social distancing slowing not only Covid-19, but other diseases too

#120

Post by o-__-o »

ceejayoz wrote: post #101
o-__-o wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont understand what millions of millions of test kits will do. I’m not going to get tested because I have no symptoms. If I had symptoms I would stay in lockdown until it got worse. I don’t see rationale for anyone going to get tested just because (and based on some of the photos from drive through testing, a very easy way to contract COVID yourself)

What if you're an asymptomatic carrier? The drive-through test sites are pretty well thought out. You're not likely to get the virus from the car in front of you.

the human element will always be a failure mode. Every photo I have seen in my area has shown the testers either reaching into the car or having contact with the patient. So you may be asymptomatic or you may not, but then you possibly end up catching it at the test site but your test was negative so you continue about your routine and start spreading it for real.

Not saying the above scenario is a reason not to get tested, I’m saying it’s an argument against getting tested for the sake of getting tested. I am safer and I am making the world safer by locking myself down until this passes. See China as example. I urge you to do the same..

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