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

Post by zaroth » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 5:37 AM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #119

zaroth wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Post by dehrmann » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 6:20 AM UTC

nullc wrote: post #110

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 we know for sure that it* doesn't have an animal reservoir? [*] The common cold is a half dozen distinct viruses.

Post by dcftoapv » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 6:30 AM UTC

rossdavidh wrote: post #89

It's fascinating data, and I'm glad it's being taken, but...I am a bit skeptical that we can draw any reasonable conclusions from it without limiting the data to long-term users. It seems implausible that there has not been a significant change in the health-consciousness of the typical purchaser in the last month or two, vs. prior to that. I can't tell you what the change would be, but I find it highly implausible t…

Post by o-__-o » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 6:52 AM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #130

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)

By the time you feeling symptomatic, our current understanding[0] is that you've been shedding the virus all over the damn place for the past 2-14 days[1], spreading germs everywhere you've been. By the time you feel sick, it's too late . It's spring, are you really going to self-isolate for 14 days just because you sneezed once ? What sounds better, going to get tested, so you can know if it's a sneeze and you can g…

Post by stOneskull » Thu, Mar 26, 2020, 6:56 AM UTC

myself248 wrote: post #128

saalweachter wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've theorized this about sexually transmitted diseases, too. It's even less realistic to imagine compliance, but suppose everyone only had sex with people who were born the same year as them. Any given disease would lose the ability to spread into younger people, and simply fall off the end of the age conveyor-belt.