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On March 29 2020 12:40 Sharkies wrote:
- The other reason I am unfortunately pessimistic is because lock-down measures in large parts of Europe have been in place for 10-14 days. The average incubation period for the virus is 5 days, so actually the quarantine measures if effective should be showing up in official numbers already (as they did in South Korea, Singapore and China). While European numbers have slowed, they do not look like stopping at the moment.
Effectiveness depends a lot on the details, though. It's been very effective in Singapore but they are super strict and the fines for breaking quarantine are like 10k usd + jailtime. In Italy they just implemented fines a couple of days ago from what I read, so clearly they saw the need to be more strict even now.
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Money situation is definitely starting to rear its ugly head. People who previously hoarded are trying to return items (unsuccessfully). I know a lot of people who are seeking side jobs to make ends meet. Hawaii is one of the highest cost of living states, average rent/mortgage is easily around 2k/month for a typical family household.
The stimulus check for 1200 bucks will do fuck all.
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I just read on a german news site that Trump won't lock down the corona hotspots. Like what?
Why? The numbers are getting out of control, especially in NYC. So he's basically saying: "Thousands will die, deal with it. Vote for me in November, thank you."
What's the plan? Is there a plan? Has there ever been one?
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On March 29 2020 16:12 LG)Sabbath wrote:Show nested quote +On March 29 2020 12:40 Sharkies wrote:
- The other reason I am unfortunately pessimistic is because lock-down measures in large parts of Europe have been in place for 10-14 days. The average incubation period for the virus is 5 days, so actually the quarantine measures if effective should be showing up in official numbers already (as they did in South Korea, Singapore and China). While European numbers have slowed, they do not look like stopping at the moment.
Effectiveness depends a lot on the details, though. It's been very effective in Singapore but they are super strict and the fines for breaking quarantine are like 10k usd + jailtime. In Italy they just implemented fines a couple of days ago from what I read, so clearly they saw the need to be more strict even now.
Exactly this. Countries with a lot of centralized power (China, Singapore) can impose much more severe penalties to ensure quarantine measures are complied with. The centralilzation of power can lead to many other issues of course, but in times of crisis this can be useful. As with most things in life, there are two sides to a coin.
There was also another post later about why USA cannot quarantine New York (in similar fashion to what China did to Wuhan). Two thoughts on this: (a) much more legal complexity. New York governor Cuomo was threatening legal action against any attempt to impose isolation of New York. Can't imagine anyone in Wuhan attempting that in China. (b) unfortunately it is probably too late in the USA. The virus has spread widely from places like New York to other parts of USA. At the start in China, Wuhan was truly an epicentre, with other parts of China only seeing dozens of cases per day (so there was still enough time left to track down and isolate everyone
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Why don't the governors of heavily afflicted states lock down themselves? Even in Europe most (all?) borders are closed for personal travel.
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My perspective is far less about the authoritarianism and far more about culture. It's not like the US doesn't have the ability to declare martial law and try to lock people down for their own safety, the problem is culturally that would result in not only people flagrantly defying the orders but the enforcement mechanism being confronted with well armed opposition.
I think having a functional state apparatus is also an important component in avoiding more widespread shutdowns as demonstrated in S.Korea where with rapid/extensive testing and contact tracing, even moderately sized outbreaks can be contained with serious, but not draconian measures. But not if your society would flout self-quarantines, travel between regions while infected, be Florida, etc.
On March 29 2020 21:01 schaf wrote:
Why don't the governors of heavily afflicted states lock down themselves? Even in Europe most (all?) borders are closed for personal travel.
Lots of reasons, but yeah as someone in WA I def support this. Also independently reaching out to China, Cuba, whoever to help meet needs they can't rely on the federal government to meet their obligations on (PPE gear, ventilators, etc.).
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So according to the stats here:
https://covid19info.live/
The lockdown measures here in Germany seem to be slowly taking effect. Growth is apparently mostly linear in Germany right now, with the total new cases per day mostly stable over the last three days. Disease is still growing, but linear is a lot better than exponential. Our death rate is still a lot lower than those of all other countries, and i have no idea why.
The US doesn't look as good, though. Growth is massive, increasing, and as far as i understand you still don't have taken comprehensive lockdown measures? At this trajectory, stuff is going to be really bad.
Italy and Spain both have massively higher death rates than anyone else, which i find to be pretty scary, because as far as i understand this is mostly based on their healthcare systems being completely over capacity. Which is something that the rest of the world might also experience if we do not manage to slow this disease down a lot.
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Things are absolutely going to keep getting worse in the US, and because of the different approaches among the states, I expect it'll take the US much longer to arrive at an equilibrium point than other nations like Germany.
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On March 29 2020 21:01 schaf wrote:
Why don't the governors of heavily afflicted states lock down themselves? Even in Europe most (all?) borders are closed for personal travel.
Because too many people work in "essential services" so a lockdown would severely affect them, especially truckers and commerce. I'm 40 minutes from NYC and right now people aren't going out too much. So much commercial traffic comes through lower CT from NY/NJ that shutting the borders down would clog everything up. They'd have to enforce checkpoints at the borders to ensure only commercial travel comes through, or else it means nothing.
Being right outside NYC is surreal during this. I hear from my coworkers that downtown Manhattan is a ghost town, and though I don't usually go into NYC unless to visit friends/go to an event, it makes me want to go check it out to just witness it.
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On March 30 2020 00:35 Simberto wrote:So according to the stats here: https://covid19info.live/The lockdown measures here in Germany seem to be slowly taking effect. Growth is apparently mostly linear in Germany right now, with the total new cases per day mostly stable over the last three days. Disease is still growing, but linear is a lot better than exponential. Our death rate is still a lot lower than those of all other countries, and i have no idea why. The US doesn't look as good, though. Growth is massive, increasing, and as far as i understand you still don't have taken comprehensive lockdown measures? At this trajectory, stuff is going to be really bad. Italy and Spain both have massively higher death rates than anyone else, which i find to be pretty scary, because as far as i understand this is mostly based on their healthcare systems being completely over capacity. Which is something that the rest of the world might also experience if we do not manage to slow this disease down a lot.
Sounds like in Germany, a disproportionate fraction of the cases have affected the younger population relative to Spain and Italy? At least according to this source.
Despite more than 25,000 infections, the fifth-most in the world, Germany’s mortality rate is only 0.4%, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from state health authorities. At the virus’s epicenter in Italy, by contrast, some 9.5% of people confirmed to have the infection have died.
There may be many reasons for the disparity, but they all boil down to one thing: Covid-19 has not yet hit as hard among the oldest and frailest members of Germany’s population. Authorities are testing and tracking mild cases aggressively, and more than 80% of those confirmed are in people under the age of 60. In Italy, despite similar demographics, the picture is vastly different, with the virus disproportionately striking the old.
Additionally, I wonder if another cause is that even though Spain, Italy, and Germany notionally have a similar case load, the reality is that the latter has fewer uncounted cases. Death rate might be a bigger indication of how many people were infected in the weeks before than anything else, more than whether or not hospitals have the ability to process these cases. If that's true, maybe Germany just doesn't have as many actual cases as Spain and Italy.
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Yeah, true, the amount of testing you do on people who are not currently in hospital does influence the mortality rates a lot. And the two effects you mention can also easily be linked. If the disease is usually milder in the younger population, then fewer of them will be tested simply because they are less symptomatic.
So your hypothesis is that Spain and Italy simply don't test the healthy looking younger people as much, and thus have a large amount of undetected mild cases, (and a higher apparent rate of infections amongst the elderly) which increases the mortality rates? I agree that that sounds plausible.
Hospitals being unable to process people definitively does impact mortality, though. So you cannot simply extrapolate from mortality rates onto actual infection rates. I'd probably guess that the best number we have should be people who enter hospitals with covid-19. Because at this point, anyone in a hospital with any symptoms will probably get tested, no matter which country they are in. Their survival chances are then influenced by the amount of care that is available to them.
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On March 30 2020 01:31 Simberto wrote:
Hospitals being unable to process people definitively does impact mortality, though. So you cannot simply extrapolate from mortality rates onto actual infection rates. I'd probably guess that the best number we have should be people who enter hospitals with covid-19. Because at this point, anyone in a hospital with any symptoms will probably get tested, no matter which country they are in. Their survival chances are then influenced by the amount of care that is available to them.
That's definitely true, but probably a much smaller effect than the number of people who are infected. I'm not sure if there have been any studies done on this yet, given the highly fluid nature of the situation, but I suspect that the majority of people who would die from the infection, will die even if they do receive care. You could certainly save a lot of them - probably 20 to 40% is my guess - so it's definitely important to put in that effort, but the biggest effect will be from not being infected in the first place. That being the case, I suspect that death rate is a far better metric for actual infection than any sense of whether or not the hospitals are overwhelmed at the moment.
The number of people dying today relative to how many people were infected several weeks ago seem much more in line with overall suspected death rates when you look at data in Germany than in the US or especially in Italy or Spain. My suspicion is that quality of testing is the key differentiator here, not healthcare access.
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On March 29 2020 21:02 GreenHorizons wrote:My perspective is far less about the authoritarianism and far more about culture. It's not like the US doesn't have the ability to declare martial law and try to lock people down for their own safety, the problem is culturally that would result in not only people flagrantly defying the orders but the enforcement mechanism being confronted with well armed opposition. I think having a functional state apparatus is also an important component in avoiding more widespread shutdowns as demonstrated in S.Korea where with rapid/extensive testing and contact tracing, even moderately sized outbreaks can be contained with serious, but not draconian measures. But not if your society would flout self-quarantines, travel between regions while infected, be Florida, etc. Show nested quote +On March 29 2020 21:01 schaf wrote:
Why don't the governors of heavily afflicted states lock down themselves? Even in Europe most (all?) borders are closed for personal travel. Lots of reasons, but yeah as someone in WA I def support this. Also independently reaching out to China, Cuba, whoever to help meet needs they can't rely on the federal government to meet their obligations on (PPE gear, ventilators, etc.).
But political systems are rooted to political culture. An example which comes to mind was the french school (France was quite a centralist country) which was teaching the same program and had for objective to link people by history as a common past leads to a common future while USA is praising the teaching of a miryad a histories and a World History depending of the community hence you don't have much solidarity because there isn't a community of interests. (well, the individualism praised by liberalism isn't helping either but it is once again directly linked to a mean of governement, federalism or even some sort of feodal capitalism against centralism and a bit of regulated economy).
I guess our conclusion might be the same, you can't expect the same intervention/coordination of the federal state and solidarity than in asiatic countries or some europeans.
Oh and it seems like the epidemy is declining in Italy, 5.2k infected, it was 5.9 yesterday and Friday and 6.2k thursday. Same for Spain, it is the second day of declining infected numbers.
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My Mom lives in Florida and she said there's still huge influx of travelers both on planes and cruise ships. She said 29 flights per day from New York :/ Abysmal leadership to contain this.
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Antibody tests that can show if you have had the virus are coming now and are quite cheap. They wont help diagnostics but they will be very valuable for evaluating actual disease spread. Swedish goverment estimated that they would be able to do those kind of tests in about 2-3 weeks.
Also with better test kits for current disease being more avalible you can do sampling of random individuals to see currently infected. This gives you an overview of how many people have asymptomatic infections.
The army tested 3000 people in Stockholm from a random draw and the results will be ready by the end of next week.
These two types of tests will start giving a much clearer picture in the near future.
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On March 30 2020 02:44 Starlightsun wrote:
My Mom lives in Florida and she said there's still huge influx of travelers both on planes and cruise ships. She said 29 flights per day from New York :/ Abysmal leadership to contain this.
Are there people on the planes? The rules that keep airlines their flight spots at airports mean they have to keep flying with zero passengers even. If anything so they can be at the airport where their next flight is scheduled. It all is completely wasteful and messed up. The airport here in PDX is really empty even with flights going in and out.
Can't speak to cruise ships.
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On March 30 2020 03:08 BlueBird. wrote:Show nested quote +On March 30 2020 02:44 Starlightsun wrote:
My Mom lives in Florida and she said there's still huge influx of travelers both on planes and cruise ships. She said 29 flights per day from New York :/ Abysmal leadership to contain this. Are there people on the planes? The rules that keep airlines their flight spots at airports mean they have to keep flying with zero passengers even. If anything so they can be at the airport where their next flight is scheduled. It all is completely wasteful and messed up. The airport here in PDX is really empty even with flights going in and out. Can't speak to cruise ships. The fact that hasn't been suspended during this crisis is mind boggling.
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On March 30 2020 03:08 BlueBird. wrote:Show nested quote +On March 30 2020 02:44 Starlightsun wrote:
My Mom lives in Florida and she said there's still huge influx of travelers both on planes and cruise ships. She said 29 flights per day from New York :/ Abysmal leadership to contain this. Are there people on the planes? The rules that keep airlines their flight spots at airports mean they have to keep flying with zero passengers even. If anything so they can be at the airport where their next flight is scheduled. It all is completely wasteful and messed up. The airport here in PDX is really empty even with flights going in and out. Can't speak to cruise ships.
Not sure if there's people on the planes... I hope not.
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Moscow finally locking down. About time with 1000 cases, I have no idea if it will be enough but am pretty sure our police is capable of enforcing it.
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EPT
