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When Will Coronavirus Social Distancing Be Over?

theatlantic.com

21–30 of 80 posts

Re: When Will Coronavirus Social Distancing Be Over?

#21
Long before things are completely back to normal, we'll have a "new normal" that allows businesses to reopen under strict anti-virus protocols.

We can't do it in North America yet because we don't have enough masks, gloves and other PPE.

Example from China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddx_z1Qtn9w&feature=youtu.be

Re: When Will Coronavirus Social Distancing Be Over?

#22
post #13
post #4

My wife is already talking about moving out of the city to get a bit of space and it's only been two weeks indoors for us. Anecdotal, of course, I think the desire to be away from others is going to persist a while.

Interesting. I wonder how prevalent and deep such reflections will be upon people after this. It’s possibly the best thing we could have done for the people who claim to be ok with the standard of pollution and climate change baked into an oil based civilization. Like pulling your hand out of a warm bath of water it’s been soaking in for a few seconds and plunging it back in the same water feels much warmer.

Density of human development also has benefits, though. The US lifestyle is especially bad at some of this. People think that their car-centric suburban or exurban life is away from chaos and closer to nature, but actually, they are driving their cars everywhere, increasing costs of getting goods to them, destroying the planet in the process.

Re: When Will Coronavirus Social Distancing Be Over?

#23

I think a worst case scenario is one in which: - The virus becomes seasonal, like the flu - Like the flu, every year there are new strains (so surviving it doesn’t grant immunity) - And we’re unable to develop a vaccine for it Someone please correct me if I’m wrong but this scenario implies that the situation we’re in now becomes the new normal. Every year, we’ll lose an additional percentage of our elderly and those…

This is what happened with Spanish flu, but people lived with it, and each year it got less deadly, and it still persists to this day as Influenza A [1]. Personally I assume if it's more than a 6-month ordeal people would accept the losses rather than fundamentally changing the economy as we know it. 1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2749954/

The Spanish Flu is estimated to have killed around 50 million people worldwide (google) in 1918 when the world population was 1.9 billion. Just linearly that would be around 200 million today.

Re: When Will Coronavirus Social Distancing Be Over?

#24

Worthless article. Basically says 1-month to years. Well thanks Sherlock.

The article is giving you the answer to the question. The real world has this thing called uncertainty. There are a lot of different ways things could go, amd if the article said itll be uber in 4 months exactly, that would be total bull. If the only thing people consider "worthy" reporting is reporting that oversimplifies hard questions and pretends there no uncertainty to give simple, pleasing and wrong answers, and the reporting people consider "worthless" are articles that grapple with the complexity of a situation ultimately leading to unsatisfying answers but with a sense of why its unsatisfying, well, that would make sense with what news reporting looks like today.

Re: When Will Coronavirus Social Distancing Be Over?

#25

The words "contact" and "tracing" didn't even appear once in the article. Are people outside of Asia not even considering test'n'trace as a possibility? Privacy concerns aside, it seems like an effective way to save lives without forcing everyone to stay home indefinitely.

Contact tracing was happening at the start, and it'll presumably happen again once caseloads become manageable. As you'd expect with such a quickly moving story, coronavirus predictions have a huge splintering problem; most people writing about it don't have all the facts.

Re: When Will Coronavirus Social Distancing Be Over?

#26

The words "contact" and "tracing" didn't even appear once in the article. Are people outside of Asia not even considering test'n'trace as a possibility? Privacy concerns aside, it seems like an effective way to save lives without forcing everyone to stay home indefinitely.

Contact tracing is great for diseases like SARS and MERS, but it just doesn't seem to work adequately for this coronavirus Even Singapore is being forced to enact stricter and stricter lockdown measures. Also, you're not even going to get it to work as well as it did in Singapore unless the virus is coming from a known, external set of sources that allow you to narrow down the pool of potential cases.

(Public Health England in the UK had a fairly competent, though not totalitarian-level, contact tracing program. They stopped a while back because it became evident that despite their best efforts, the disease was becoming so widespread that it was reaching the limit of their contact tracing resources and most of the infections were probably unknown community spread that couldn't be found via contact tracing anyway. Other countries are likely similar.)

Re: When Will Coronavirus Social Distancing Be Over?

#27
post #4

My wife is already talking about moving out of the city to get a bit of space and it's only been two weeks indoors for us. Anecdotal, of course, I think the desire to be away from others is going to persist a while.

My friends and I in London are already salivating at the prospect of going to the pub, night clubs and music festivals. Each to their own.

I think the unstated assumption is that there won't be any more pubs, night clubs, and music festivals, as we knew it.

Re: When Will Coronavirus Social Distancing Be Over?

#28
post #9

If I understand it right, in a “perfect universe” if every person was able to stay home for 14 days and also perfectly avoided infecting anyone then the virus would effectively have died off. The 14 day’s might not be the exact time required but it illustrates a concept. We of course can’t uphold that perfect universe. So we’re stuck using that technique to slow it’s roll enough that it won’t overwhelm and kill like…

It’s interesting to think about how many other viruses would perish if there were no new hosts for them to live in. Maybe we should start doing this every year as a sort of cleansing of viruses? 3 weeks in February - quarantine weeks. Every year.

Re: When Will Coronavirus Social Distancing Be Over?

#29

The crux of the article: "The answer is simple, if not exactly satisfying: when enough of the population—possibly 60 or 80 percent of people—is resistant to COVID-19" But then in the next paragraph nonchalantly says "though we don’t yet know if recovering from the disease confers any immunity at all" I'm not sure sure how articles like these get published.

You don't need to have an answer before you ask a question.

Re: When Will Coronavirus Social Distancing Be Over?

#30
post #16
post #9

If I understand it right, in a “perfect universe” if every person was able to stay home for 14 days and also perfectly avoided infecting anyone then the virus would effectively have died off. The 14 day’s might not be the exact time required but it illustrates a concept. We of course can’t uphold that perfect universe. So we’re stuck using that technique to slow it’s roll enough that it won’t overwhelm and kill like…

It would be longer than that. At 14 days, some people would just start exhibiting symptoms. However those can be mild enough to disregard. I believe recovery would still take another week. Then multiply that by the number of people with whom you cohabitate. And that assumes you didn’t go food shopping or collect your mail.

It seems like the basis for a numerical model to understand the phenomena.
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