In some of the worst hit areas of Italy, it looks like they're already triaging people or considering it.
Edit: What actions can we take to reduce the spread of this misinformation effectively?
Edit: I did expect a serious response to this from someone that might know more about effectively delivering feedback to the algorithms that display this content. Frankly, it seems like the nonchalant responses(to say the least) are contributors to why this misinformation continues to proliferate.
BTW, some internet lore:
"The social dynamics of the net are a direct consequence of the fact that nobody has yet developed a Remote Strangulation Protocol." -- Larry Wall
exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally.
Autoimmune diseases are under diagnosed, but some estimates say it's more than 1% of the population. That's roughly 3.3 million Americans that may be taking medications that reduce the efficacy of their immune system.
TLDR; Don't assume everyone is healthy / carries the same risk, even if they look healthy.
Edit: Fixed my math.
Also, apparently serious illness can increase the chance of miscarriage in pregnant women:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/specific-groups/pr...:
> Pregnancy loss, including miscarriage and stillbirth, has been observed in cases of infection with other related coronaviruses [SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV] during pregnancy. High fevers during the first trimester of pregnancy can increase the risk of certain birth defects.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3203382/:
> Conclusions. The observed birth depressions were consistent with pandemic influenza causing first trimester miscarriages in ∼1 in 10 pregnant women.
But seriously, I wonder if we can take the lessons from mitigating a biological viral epidemic, and apply them to mitigating an informational viral epidemic.
At first, you made me think about how a quarantine/isolation plan could be implemented on the internet. Something that is controlled mostly by a limited number of entities.
However, what if there was a habit for individuals to "feel clean" after exposure to misinformation? Something that could be accomplished on a personal level. Like washing your hands or brushing your teeth. Something where afterward you feel like you contributed to both the community and your own wellbeing.
Advising people to stockpile food this early is sure to make the situation even worse.
Funny, it occurs that the little increase of radiation in that region really had no significant effect on cancer rates, but those people didn't know that. I still can't explain why government officials keep doing such stunts. Maybe there should be a Wikipedia list for these.
It reveals how leaders think of their constituents - they are not approaching this from the perspective of informing the public on how to best deal with this real but not world-ending danger, instead they are thinking of it in terms of "stopping the cattle from stampeding."
Because the cattle stampeding can actually be world ending. Particularly for the trampled cattle who were likely in little danger from the start.
See also, run on facemasks and other supplies.
All of it actually, as tea is a licensed plant in Turkey.
If the food stockpiling can be spread out so that a lot of it happens before the first local case is announced, then it will ease the burden on the system when the crisis arrives. Buying extra toilet paper at Costco does not stress the system if you do it months before there's a big problem, and it will ease the load during the crisis because you won't be buying toilet paper then. However stockpiling after the run has already begun might not be so useful...
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/specific-groups/hi...
FEMA also recommends you always have days or weeks of supplies stockpiled in case of unpredictable natural disasters. Everyone in my main circle of friends knows you should have a stockpile for this reason, and the lack of one is talked about more as an embarrassment. But online not having one seems more like a badge of honor. Its just weird to me.
Also, if you have grocceries delivered overall demand stays the same. So no additional stress. Also it is way easier to protect and monitor delivery drivers. The group is much smaller than all shoppers.
Fun fact, delivery personnel can only be protected if enough PTE gear is available for them and not horded in someones garage or wherever.
Completely agree. Telling everyone to go out and stockpile food is just the sort of dangerous, panic inducing rhetoric we don't need right now. Follow recommendations of professionals. No large gatherings, etc. But there is no need to panic. And certainly no need to tell people to behave in a manner consistent with panicked people.
I don't think so. The problem is you don't want people to freak out and overdo it now, and you don't want them to freak out and overdo it in the future if some drastic measures are needed.
I think it would be totally prudent to give people specific sensible things they can do to prepare for the worst case. E.g.
1. Keep an extra week's worth of household consumables and whatever food they typically eat on hand.
Don't go splurge on 100 lbs of rice and pinto beans and two years worth of toilet paper. This isn't going to be a like nuclear war: public utilities will remain online, the water supply will be safe, food will be available in stores. The only possible issue with these products is that people may not be able to go out and buy them as frequently as they're used to.
2. Keep an extra month's worth of prescription medications, for similar reasons.
3. Buy a couple of small bottles of hand sanitizer (like travel size), for use on the go, which will last XX weeks for a typical person. But no big deal if you can't find any since washing your hands works well.
It's a prisoner's dilemma. It's in the interest of the country for the officials to say "don't panic" even if/when the reasonable response it to panic. In an individual interest is to panic before the government says, "panic".
The alternative is, obviously, that cases keep rising until a newspaper leaks on a Sunday night that your government will imminently start restraining you. Is it then time to panic?
The flu deadly, and this is worse.
Cancer is deadly, people with the flu recover just fine in 99.9% of all cases.
Influenza, at least when paired with pneumonia as the CDC does for reporting purposes, ranks in the top 10 killers.
Most likely they are referencing this study showing 40% of people who had SARS had long lasting effects https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
While COVID-19 mutated from SARS it has a number of characteristics that are different so I don't think it's reasonably to assume it'd be the same. Could be worst or better.
Many survivors end up with "honeycomb" patterns in their lungs because the immune system response blew holes in alveoli, which then merged together as they healed.
A recent study on the novel coronavirus found that 14% of patients ended up with this honeycomb pattern as well. (They call it "ground glass opacity".) https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Out of the mild cases, some are comparable to severe flu with symptoms like cough, fever, achiness all over and sometimes (10%?) diarrhea. There's a difference in that symptoms common in flu and colds such as runny nose and sneezing are not associated with Covid-19, this is more targeting the lungs. Something like half of mild cases would get pneumonia i.e. bed-ridden with fluid in your lungs and difficulty of breathing; that's significantly beyond most cases in flu, but comparable to the complications of a bad flu, which sometimes results in pneumonia. That's counted under the mild cases, as there are no invasive procedures required and you're going to survive this without hospitalization - that is the criteria for a mild case, it doesn't imply that the patient would call it mild, it means that they'll feel shitty in their bed but not die.
Moderate cases (perhaps 10-15% of total, reports vary significantly between countries) have severe pneumonia that would require hospitalization and supplementary oxygen. If you try to go to work with a case that turns out to be moderate, that's where you can become the "videos of people collapsing" event because during that single day you can get worse and start lacking oxygen. Still, you're going to be mostly conscious and survive that if you're in a hospital, i.e. if the hospital system isn't totally overwhelmed.
In severe cases (something like 5%) you can't breathe on your own even with extra oxygen. This requires intubation and ventilation for a prolonged time (weeks), which is a limited capacity (both in terms of ventilators and of the skilled medics needed to do that), a big strain on your body, and you're going to die if hospitals can't provide that. And there are reports from Italy that even right now with just 7500 confirmed infected cases they can't ventilate everyone who needs it, and they need to triage who won't be getting it.
We have data that older people are much more likely to die. However, as far as I know, data does not suggest that young people are less likely to get hospitalized and need invasive interventions - it's just that they are strong enough to survive the ordeal. The case of Italy/Lombardy first known case may be illustrative of severe cases in younger patients - it's a 38 year old marathon runner, he's supposedly released from intensive care yesterday as he's able to breathe on his own again. He was hospitalized for a bit more than three weeks, two of those in intensive care with artificial breathing/ventilation.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/italy-to-quarantine-over-10-mi...
Some hospitals have run out of IC beds already, many more to follow this week. Whole wards have been converted.
Shut down all schools? all flights stopped? All businesses closed? mandatory stay at home quarantines with food drops done by the govt?
This thread discusses the health care system in one part of Italy being stretched to the breaking point:
So far.
Without supply and strong backend infrastructure, panic will only cause situation to worsen as people crowd up to get supplies, find them out of stock and blow themselves up over it.
Panic will also cause a shortage of human resources which are required to handle the situation. People will line up over small issues and displace those who truly need the help like what happened with masks and hand sanitizers. Hospitals won't be able to keep up. The staff will have other problems to deal with as their toddlers or family members are in panic at home due to schools, offices etc everything shutting down.
Mortality rate for people under 40s is not high. When you consider the risk factor, you would be more likely to die from using escalators and stairs over a period of 1-2 year.
Stop overblowing/underblowing the thing.
Mortality in your 30s for COVID-19 is around 0.2% which is twice that if flu overall making the rate much, much higher than normal for that age group.
If you do not give people social permission to take reasonable precautions when things are still good, the panic that happens when things get bad will be worse.
> Panic will also cause a shortage of human resources which are required to handle the situation. People will line up over small issues and displace those who truly need the help like what happened with masks and hand sanitizers. Hospitals won't be able to keep up. The staff will have other problems to deal with as their toddlers or family members are in panic at home due to schools, offices etc everything shutting down.
The more people are able to take reasonable precautions that involve social distancing and self-isolation, the more drastically we can reduce the number of people infected, and the less impacted the healthcare system will be.
> Mortality rate for people under 40s is not high.
It's still higher than the flu, and the risk of hospitalization is still pretty high.
"Healthy people under 40" are not the only demographic that should be considered when responding to a pandemic. Many people are not "healthy people under 40". Many of us have dependents who would be at grave risk if they were to be infected with the virus. The danger to them is significantly higher than the flu.
There are no vaccines, and no treatments for this disease. Our only recourse is to reduce spread through social distancing. Fortunately, unlike with the seasonal flu, it may still be possible to stamp out this disease.
> stretched to the breaking point
If you don't want people to panic, maybe you should avoid this rhetoric?
Here's a good site for the numbers: https://lab24.ilsole24ore.com/coronavirus/ - look at that growth curve :-(
- Hospitals have a harder time sourcing equipment and treating other conditions, because of the demand
- Violence against perceived bringers of the illness (Asians, refugees, etc)
- Economic damage leading to long-term pollution (poor people burning wood and coal for survival)
- Economic damage leading to violence & war
It was linked in the thread, had you cared to read it.
Nobody panicked in Italy, and now they’re in a general lockdown! Clearly, they should have taken social distancing measures sooner, as we should now.
Well, that is how you get linked on Twitter. Traffic is everything it seems...
How does that differ from a widespread flu outbreak? All this says to me is that you don't take the flu seriously.
What else do you need to know that it is serious?
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...
Worth noting that the stringent measures taken by Hong Kong to curtail the coronavirus have also helped reduce the spread of the flu: https://www.ft.com/content/ad7ae6b4-5eab-11ea-b0ab-339c2307b...
I have noticed that when people are emotionally inflamed about a subject they tend to lose objectivity, gravitate towards like-minded opinions, and selectively pick at certain data. When that selectivity demands data that isn't available the gap will be filled with an assumption.
On Reddit, which does not have a limitation upon negative vote totals, you can fine tune this behavior to study group dynamics, which is reflected in the comments.
What question? You asked "how is this different from the flu" and I answered.
If you want to know why I thought you weren't taking this seriously, it's probably because you're making an ill-informed comparison with the flu. The World Health Organization has already addressed how the two diseases are different on their twitter feed.
Why did you ask which question when you devoted a paragraph to answering it? It feels, and this is just my personal opinion, that you cannot read but you like to hear yourself talk. If that’s true, and it probably isn’t, then you either like to attack people for narcissism or you are just easily confused and embarrassed by it.
> I never suggested in any way that these diseases were similar.
Don't be obtuse. It's implied in your initial question.
> Why did you ask which question when you devoted a paragraph to answering it?
If you have a question you don't feel was answered, please clarify. Don't waste your time speculating about my possible narcissism.
> Don't waste your time
I prefer to waste my time watching memes about people hoarding toilet paper.
There's no equivalence between making an inference about the meaning of your words and their implications (an inference I was clearly not the only one to make) and you trying to psychoanalyze me.
> I prefer to waste my time watching memes about people hoarding toilet paper.
Clearly you have plenty of time to waste. If you ever wish to return to the original discussion, I'm game.
> How does that differ from a widespread flu outbreak?
Uhh, are you having a stroke?
The average life expectancy is 82.
Before "throttling" the next person that says it, have you considered these people's opinion that this will not be anywhere near as bad as a regular flu season and far from a severe one which is over 600,000 deaths globally? There's a good chance corona is displacing a lot of the deaths that would have occurred anyway due to the flu.
As far as things are going, the infections and death toll is nowhere near what flu has already inflicted on the global population in the last 4 months.
Why are people not taking the same precautions for the flu in the last few years? Why do people suddenly care so much? It's very much a media driven situation.
SARS in 2002 had no cases anywhere after two years of outbreaks. Something to think about. History can look back on these comments here and judge.
A proper comparison would be the average life expectancy of someone who is 81. The comparison you make gives the impression on average these people were all going to die next year which isn’t the case. E.g. in 1994 in the US the life expectancy of an 80 y/o male was 7 years, female 9 years. [1]
https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/your-life-expectancy-by-...
Remember, the 1st amendment guarantees the right of free association and assembly in the United States. Even though I'm voluntarily limiting my exposure to at-risk populations, I will not comply if someone tries to forbid me from moving around; that would set an awful precedent.
In the first case, Assange would be protected by due process and a public hearing (that is the present US law for quarantine orders). In the second case, there might be a problem. You do not want the government using an emergency as an excuse to grab unlimited and unchecked power.
And I would certainly flee the area if it were couched as an order rather than a request; I will not put myself in a position where I am essentially under arbitrary arrest by a capricious authority which changes its response every few hours, and I am shocked that anybody would.
At the very least, individuals with the disease are endangering their fellow citizens if they don't isolate. Arguably, employers that do not make reasonable accommodations for sick employees are also guilty of public endangerment.
Of course, their is always the risk that the drastic measures persist once the threat to public health dies down, but it's by no means necessary that such will be the case.
Remember: even a small decrease in the growth rate of a disease spread can result in a large decrease in the total number of cases that occur.
Measures taken do comparatively little to address any one individual's risk or concerns. Addressing individuals simply isn't viable or useful.
Taking measures to assure population health, dynamics, spread, total healthcare system load, etc., are what matter.
As someone who'se quite the champion of individual rights, for now: individual rights be damned in the interest of community health.
Please note that this statement has multiple elements, all critical:
- The overall interest is community health outcomes (CHO).
- Individual rights not associated with CHO are not affected. Rights suppressions not advancing or relating to CHO are inappropriate.
- The principle is temporary, for the duration of the epidemic, or until such time as any control is utterly futile.
Epidemiological response is about reducing vectors, contacts, reservoirs, and susceptibility, as well as second-order risks. Limiting movement, enhanced disease monitoring, contacts-tracing, quarantine, free treatment, mandatory vaccination (if available), financial aid and intervention to individuals, businesses, and the financial sector (in that order), rationing, if necessary, and measures taken against community-detrimental actions (a long list: disinformation, misinformation, hoarding, price-gouging, intentional contamination or spreading disease, flouting quarantine/curfew, requiring sick workers to work orfiring them, etc.)
That leaves a broad set of other rights, but is a substantial curtailment.