San Jose: Three TSA agents test positive for Covid-19

Then again, though we have one of the highest per capital prison rates in the world, most are non violent drug offenders so there may not be much to worry about.

This animation helps understand the concept: https://thespinoff.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Covid-19...

Each sick person will only, on average in unmitigated conditions, get two or three other people sick. If you consider just a single infected person that doesn't seem that infectious at all. Yet because this is an exponential process that won't slow down until a significant fraction of the population is infected or immune 2-3 is enough to go from a couple people sick to most of the world in fairly short order.

Yet if you can reduce that 2-3 down to 1 or below even with relatively half-assed measures like telling some people to stay in inside, isolating known-infected and likely-infected persons, closing down some major spreading venues, telling people to wash their hands or use surgical masks... presto chango the disease dies out and no more than a tiny percentage of the population will get infected.

If the half-assed measures reduce the exponent but don't get it below 1, eventually most people will still get infected but it will take a lot longer. That extra time means the hospitals get less overloaded and lots of additional lives are saved because many covid19 cases require serious medical intervention (forced respiration). It also potentially creates time for better treatments to be created/discovered.

The best time to start seriously addressing this would have been weeks ago when it became clear that it was spreading from unknown and non-isolateable sources inside the country-- at least to the extent that it could be done without major damage... before there were thousands (likely hundreds of thousands now; given the observed spreading rates) of cases circulating in the US. But so long as the vast majority of the people who could eventually be infected are not yet infected, it's STILL a good idea.

On top of the risk we're facing from hospitals overloading, there is also a lot of potential for widespread panic once testing catches up and the numbers go from a rounding error to "big and scary looking" overnight. Beginning countermeasures earlier should help reduce the panic both by decreasing the peak infected numbers and by making it clear that the issue is being addressed.

The problem is there are only so many ICU beds available. If we self-isolate and slow the spread, then we can keep the number of dangerously ill people below our capacity limits, and make sure that everyone who needs care gets it. This is what Japan and South Korea have done. Italy did not react fast enough and now the fatality rate there is approaching 8%(!!).

With very strict measures, we might even stop the epidemic in its tracks. So far, only China is on track for doing that.

We already know we don’t have enough ventilators or enough staff to care for the ill if we end up with a similar growth curve to what they’ve seen in Italy.

https://www.flattenthecurve.com/

Or if you want more math, here's why putting into place extreme measures even one or two days later can make outcomes significantly worse

https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...

Yes, it will.

One thing that tends to get neglected is that in a lot of diseases, most people don't pass the disease on very well (maybe infect one other person) but a small number of people (superspreaders or superinfectors) pass it on EXTREMELY effectively.

If you can block the superinfectors by quarantines, that is like putting control rods into a nuclear reactor--you slow the progress dramatically.

Slowing the spread gives vaccine and antiviral researchers a fighting chance to win the race, gets us to summer where if we’re lucky enough that this virus is seasonal it’ll go away, and, most importantly, “flattens the curve”, as your parent commentator already pointed out.

2. When it gets bad, schools will be closed anyways, and parents will need to figure out how to handle childsitting.

3. The longer we delay closure, the worse off everyone else will be.

Shutting down schools is almost assuredly an effective measure to slow the spread of the disease. And slowing the spread is the overriding public health imperative. Even if the same number of people get infected, fast transmission means the healthcare system gets overloaded with all the patients at once.

A 5% reduction in the rate of transmission could plausibly reduce the number of fatalities by 50% or more. We need to do everything possible to institute "social distancing" to slow the process done.

Isn't this the underlying plot of Maze Runner, and a bunch of other books/movies?

A decade of young adult fiction dystopian worlds of only young adults, followed by an actual decade of dystopian world of only young adults.

- Inconvenient labour laws regarding sickness, people are and will be afraid to take sick leave

- A lack of public healthcare, the US system does not seem designed for a collective approach.

- A higher rate of diabetes compared to the rest of the developed world which seems to be affecting quite a lot the impact of the virus.

Initially I was thinking its the testing part. If you test nobody then nobody is sick. But that's not the case because with such high level of mortality, we would know that people are dying from COVID-19.

So my take is - what I read via WHO, is that this virus has two or more strains, one more deadly than another. So its quite possible that one or more passengers from China traveled to Italy with that more deadly type in them.

Of course next logical question would be - is it only in Italy or we have those in other countries and perhaps incubation period is longer? That's probably a billion dollar question...

But since it is very contagious and dangerous to the elderly, it's still a good idea to distance yourself from at-risk groups. The panicked overreaction probably won't see the backlash that it deserves, because there is a kernel of truth that social distancing can help to protect a small number of the most vulnerable people.

Also, it's easy to point fingers in hindsight. A lot of the decision-making up to this point has been based on extrapolations from very incomplete information.