The situation in Europe will be much worse a month from now than it is today, unfortunately. I'd bet on this ban lasting closer to 90 days than 30.
Numbers are about to spike everywhere pretty much no matter what anybody does, because better testing and funding has become available.
Quarantining an entire continent, and even worse than this badly doing it, seems to be an astonishing overreaction. The average age of death for coronavirus victims is 83. The mortality rate seems to be as low as 0.6% in South Korea or as high as 5% in Italy. Italy is especially vulnerable because it has the oldest population in Europe which is one of the factors that is leading to the 5% figure from there. It is not an End of Days zombie apocalypse.
I recently watched a speech by a US mayor which essentially said that the panic over Corona is going to do much more damage to people than the actual virus and I tend to agree. Simple quarantining measures mixed with best practices for infection control until we have more information about the virus seems perfectly fine. Blowing up the global economy is complete overkill and is a typical move from an administration whose response to topics are either to ignore them or sledgehammer them.
1. Reducing the transmission rate lowers the total number of people sick at one time. Lowers the ultimate number who contract it. And pushes the peak infection rate out.
2. The above numbers are very sensitive to r0.
3. An exponential when it hits looks like a wall. You end up with a significant percentage of the population sick at once.
Could be my model being shitty but it looks like at high r0 there is a momentum effect which drives the total number infected above what you would expect.
Note this is a “mean-field” model (everyone evenly mixed together) so take it with a grain of salt...
A few percent is a lot. World War II killed 3% of the human population, and that's where we're headed if we don't stop it.
The coronavirus, in a single country, has killed 5% of infected people and elder people or those with pre-existing conditions are majorly overrepresented in infection rates.
>World War II killed 3% of the human population, and that's where we're headed if we don't stop it.
This isn't just wrong. It's irresponsible for you to be saying these types of absolutely incorrect things.
I'm not sure how you think how critical it is. I personally have never had this issue and do not mind at all to lay still for a whole year to try to reduce the risk of this happening.
Unless all the people you love are over 80 (in which case the chance of them dying before Corona hit was not much less realistic than it is now) that sentance is just completely false.
Why spread such fear and misinformation?
Unless none of the people you love are over 70, that sentence is completely true.
Yes, killing 5% of infected people is serious, especially when viruses of a similar family regularly infect 20% of the population, and the population has no inborn resistance to this partical virus, and it is, provisionially, more infectious than similar viruses.
Simple models suggest we'll have 500k deaths or so by 2021. Of course, it could be less than that, but it could also be more. It's almost certain we'll end up with some days with a 9/11 worth of deaths; it's just a question of whether that's a few days or for months on end.
You're fearmongering, and it's bullshit.
Additionally, for someone calling others' claims bullshit, your numbers have no correspondence to reality. In Wuhan, the 3% number was for the general population; for the 70+ age range, it was ~20%.
In almost all examples in human history, whenever a disease stopped, it was either because it burned through most of humanity, or because people decided to make it stop. They don't stop themselves.
You're pretending we live in the 1400s. We don't.
You're pretending we will take no measures to control this at all. That's simply not the case.
the US gov't has spent the last 1.5 months doing nothing to contain this at all. ending flights from europe isn't going to do anything to help if they aren't testing people and preventing spread inside the country
We are testing people, and we are doing quite a bit to prevent spread inside of the country and out.
[1]https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa-coronavirus/
But it is real and it has the potential to seriously damage the economy.
A tanked economy will harm far more people than this virus.
If the ban gives sufficient reassurance to the chicken littles to induce them not to sell their stocks and invest in toilet paper, it will be a success.
The reason why it's going to go this way is because we won't have the capacity for everyone who needs critical care. And the reason we won't have the capacity is a) lack of proper investments imagining this scenario, where in Japan and South Korea they have this capacity because they've had this experience and know better; and b) lack of discipline to weld ourselves into our homes or even voluntarily self-quarantine in order to slow things down and effectively give us more critical care capacity.
I spoke to 1/2 dozen people today who are traveling. Three think they have this thing, and have 3 of 3 symptoms. I told them not to travel. They said "Oh well" and are traveling anyway. That's what we're dealing with. A total lack of personal responsibility, upon which both the free market and our democratic government is based - and so far this is about as far as we've come.
The European flights being cancelled, seems sane to me. It's not about 1 or 10 people being sick per plane. It's reasonable to assume after a 6-12 hour flight, that everyone on board is infected if there was even 1 person infected at the start of the flight. I don't know the exact number of incoming European flights per day, I think it's about 80-110K passengers? That's what this stops.
Stopping all domestic travel would be better. Short term pain translates into tens of thousands fewer deaths over the next 3 months. China got a handle on this for now because they welded people in their homes. We aren't doing that which means we haven't slowed it down that much let alone stopped it.
Stopping cargo, if that turns out to be accurate reporting, I think is an overreaction.
[1] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-infection-outbreak-...
[2] - https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1234879949946814464?s=2...
[3] - https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/10/simple-math-alarming-ans...
[4] - https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-...
[5] - https://www.kff.org/hivaids/fact-sheet/the-hivaids-epidemic-...
EDIT: I originally didn't post sources, so I backfilled those in and slightly tweaked the numbers to match.
EDIT 2: I adjusted the numbers again because as a reply points out one of my sources updated their estimates.
However, I do believe that a lot of inaccurate information is being presented. The public attention on this subject is enormous, making it a ripe topic for the media to profit from alarmist headlines.
[0]The source of the 40%-70% figure has since dramatically altered their estimates, and added several qualifiers.
[0]https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1234879949946814464?s=2...
> Summary: Should have said 40-70% of adults in a situation without effective controls.
There's an enormous difference between 40-70% of everyone and 20-60% of adults - specifically if no countermeasures are deployed.
We should be trying to promote risk assessments that are situationally correct.
I mentioned that here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22552973
> [0]The source of the 40%-70% figure has since dramatically altered their estimates, and added several qualifiers.
> [0]https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1234879949946814464?s=2....
After reading the entire thread, he didn't say "zero attempts to mitigate infection". He said "without effective controls". He also said " Increasing evidence that the extremely intense control measures in China have reduced transmission while they are in force. As long as such intense control measures are in place it is possible to imagine keeping the number infected well below 40%. I don't believe most countries (maybe not even China) can keep such controls for months or a year, the minimum time frame for potentially having a vaccine. But even more moderate ones if effective could reduce incidence considerably". Not even Italy has gotten to the extreme measures that China was implementing. Also if you read his more recent tweets you will see that he thinks the European travel ban is futile.
Overall it sounds to me like that 20% number that I have been using since your first post is the updated number based off of our current mitigation strategy. I don't see any indication that he thinks that number is too high given the current path. Once again, I am completely open to learning otherwise if you have something that you can point to that clearly states otherwise.
We don't know enough about the virus to predict almost anything about it and are learning more every day.
I feel like people have already made up their mind about this by reading some extremely poor sources rather than bodies like the WHO so are going to panic no matter what people say.
The best option here would be for me to come back in a month and we'll reexamine the comment. 625,000 is literally insane.
[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51835856
[2] - https://www.wbaltv.com/article/what-percent-of-people-in-the...
I saw another seemingly reputable estimate today - some disease person on Joe Rogan's podcast, who was saying that 96 million people could get it, of which 48 million would need to be hospitalized. This makes no sense unless you are predicting a virus mutation. We're not even close to seeing 50% hospitalization rates.
I can. Look at how seriously China shut down cities etc and it still spreads, though much slower. Do you think western nations will take the level of action China has at all or in anyhting similar to the same time frames?
And to be clear, when I say 'I can' I'm not claiming Im right or predicting anything, I really dont know. But this seems as likely as any other scenario especially when experts are saying levels around this.
Source: https://futurism.com/neoscope/scientists-warn-coronavirus-mo...
You can spend weeks or months in therapy before you are recovered, or you can get scarring in your lungs - or worse - that leaves you with a permanent disability. Not to mention damage to other organs.
I think many are discounting, or are unaware of, these other nasty possibilities. We don’t know enough yet of the prevalence of these effects, but we do know they happen.
Given that we've only been tracking the virus closely for 2 months, and we've only had a decent sample size of patients for only about 1 month, you really can't be making claims like this at this point.
> Fatality is the wrong yardstick. Catching the virus can mess up your life in many, many more ways than just straight-up killing you. "We are all young"—okay. "Even if we get the bug, we will survive"—fantastic. How about needing four months of physical therapy before you even feel human again. Or getting scar tissue in your lungs and having your activity level restricted for the rest of your life.
[1]: https://www.newsweek.com/young-unafraid-coronavirus-pandemic...