wtf people. Use your brains. It's totally irresponsible for you to be spreading this to everyone else.
Ironically, even the actual terrorists decided to back down in fear from it, suspend their terrorist activities, and teach themselves how to wash hands properly.
https://www.politico.eu/article/coronavirus-isis-terrorists-...
From my understanding, this isn't really true. "Stopping the spread" is an unreasonable and incredibly difficult undertaking. Isolation is about reducing the rate of cases. It's likely that similar infection numbers will be reached over the course of the whole pandemic no matter what. Nobody is going back to "normal life" any time soon - the only question is how drastic the counter-measures will be.
Or more critically, if we learn that lasting native immunity is even possible.
For the coronaviruses which cause the cold (such as CoV-OC43) the adaptive immune response is not particularly strong and immunity lasts only months. -- not due to mutation, but because of behaviors in the immune system which we don't yet understand. This has contributed to the difficulty in creating a vaccine for the prior sars virus.
As a result, the whole "get people immune for next season" idea may be a largely pointless goal. The best comparisons we have so far suggest that it is, though we just don't have enough information yet.
From what I understand, work on developing a SARS vaccine stopped because the epidemic was over, and there was no longer an interest or will to continue working on it.
In addition, here's what Vincent Racaniello of This Week In Virology[1] had to say about antivirals:
"We could have had antivirals against all coronas or many coronas if we had put the money in to making them, but there was no interest and therefore companies which need to make profits were not interested in pursuing them, but they could have been developed and stockpiled and been ready.
"So if you had infinite money and people you could say, 'Let's get a bunch of RNA polymerases from bat SARS-like coronaviruses and design something that will inhibit them all.' I don't think it would be that hard because they're very conserved. But without the financial incentive... so, antivirals are kind of a different thing because you could develop them and bring them, you could even do a phase one and then have them ready for actual testing when there's an outbreak."
[1] - at about 1 hr and 33 minutes in to episode 590 - http://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-590/
Antivirals for sars-cov-2 seem MUCH more likely to arrive quickly than a vaccine, and I wouldn't be surprised to find that several of the things currently being tested (some of which are already approved for the treatment of other conditions) are effective.
I'm just imagining some programmer in a future interview talking about their familiarity with async functions in Javascript. The interviewer glances down at an app named "Mirror Test Pro" that cross-referenced that claim against an old HN post revealing ignorance about the upshot of social distancing. It consequently overlays a red "X" on the programmer's avatar. "Thanks, we'll be in touch," the interviewer says as the programmer is shuttled out the door.
And I'm imagining many such programmers becoming frustrated when a breach of MTP data reveals why they kept getting rejected in interviews. They would band together and write a powerful DDOS tool to exact vengeance upon the world that humiliated them. Lucky for the world, their sudden, synchronous silence gives enough advanced warning to thwart the attacks while their CPUs helplessly whir on one giant blocking call.
In Italy the number of people that end up in ICU is 10%. Now think of the population of people that are in your area and how many intensive care beds that are available to them... do you think your local hospitals can handle 10% of that number? Probably not. This is what makes it a big issue.
Wait, what? Source?
I haven't found exactly the 10% in ICU (and I'd be especially interested in the percentage of young people requiring ICU), but yeah basically 80% mild cases and the others needing assistance.
Which doesn’t shows that there isn’t a single consensus source yet. The article points out one source with 25.5% severe and another with 13.8% severe. Meanwhile for critical, it shows the numbers 4.7% and 6.1%.
While OP isn’t entirely accurate, for off the top of the head numbers, it’s not wildly off base either it seems.
Now let's factor in that in a developed country there are some 0,5% hospital beds total capacity. Let's say that Covid-19 can have at disposal half of those beds.
If you do not do all you can to flatten the curve, you are probably looking at a 10% death rate over infected population, if not more.
That's over 6 million people in the UK.
IMHO, you have to do something to buy more time, although it is yet to be seen if lockdowns will be effective enough as this guy seems to be too strong.
> For COVID-19, data to date suggest that 80% of infections are mild or asymptomatic, 15% are severe infection, requiring oxygen and 5% are critical infections, requiring ventilation.
Ventilation would have to be done in the ICU, in my understanding.
Source: 06/Mar/2020 Situation Report from https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...
The trick is you need to get R0<1, so that when a new case pops up, it dies out instead of blowing up. You do that with mask wearing, hygiene, aggressive contact tracing, broad scale testing, and strict isolation. You keep people alive that get the virus by having good medical care.
The aggressive contact tracing, isolation, and good medical care don't scale. If you have only dozens of cases, you can afford to aggressively isolate and put a lot of manpower into tracing every case. You give the virus no breathing room. If there aren't too many people needing medical care, you can also provide them much better care.
This is why you need the lockdown -- to get R0<<1, to bring down the case count dramatically so that these other measures can work.
We could have just started with Phase 2 outside of China, but we didn't spin up all of the things that you need for Phase 2 in time. The countries that are doing the best had previous SARS experience, which was successfully eradicated with these measures, so they knew what to do right away and were institutionally prepared to act quickly.
The sooner and more aggressively we start, the shorter the lockdown has to be. Half measures that leave R0 above 1 don't help much and just prolong the lockdown.
Take my liberty now so that I can have it later.
Actually no, it's the opposite. "flattening the curve" means spreading the period of time infection spreads to not overwhelm the medical services at any one point. So the quicker we slow down the spread, the longer it'll take to get back to normal.
The idea we can completely stop the spread at this point is unlikely, the best we can do is slow it.
I wonder if there will be a process of grief leading to acceptance about this event, I feel we are in denial now, tending to anger. Next will be bargaining (I think evidenced by isolation and hording) or maybe not - maybe the population will simply fail to process this.
The UK government has also completely denied the “herd immunity” thing is part of any active policy. But that hasn’t slowed down social media... or HN for that matter.
All advanced societies are built on the exploitation of someone else, you just did not get to see who those people were.
Note: I am not endorsing the choice - just observing.
This stuff always involves complicated choices.
For example, would you advocate a policy of taxing all restaurant owners at a 90% marginal rate forcing most into bankruptcy to pay for a very expensive new medical treatment that only works on the elderly and extends their life just a few years?
If you proposed that do you think it would be unanimous or controversial?
Do you believe that, in normal circumstances, we should repurpose all money typically spent on primary education and firefighting to go to elder care instead?
If you weren’t arguing for that last year then you believe in complicated trade-offs too.
The concept of trade-offs is the absolute core basis of all major public policy decisions.
It’s also the basic of many personal decisions. If you’re familiar with hospice care or a DNR order then you know that end of life questions have trade-off calculations as well, even within families or between life partners.
Pretending this is a binary decision is just nonsensical.
In rereading your post carefully, the answer is yes. You did describe it that way and offer a reason to think it’s not so bad. Doing so is shameful.
Marines say "no one left behind", for a reason, because it creates a group... A society.
The UK decision smells like eugenics.
Hell, the young and healthy can go skydiving 100 times and have less chance of dying vs coronavirus.
Nevermind the not dying part. Over 50% of ICU spots in France and the Netherlands for coronavirus are taken up by people under 60. Pneumonia this severe can cause permanent lung damage.
*some of you will die even without the virus, more of you will die than normal because of it, this is awful, but true.
UK seems to be playing a very dangerous game.
The higher death rates have occurred in places where the health system was overrun.
Of course with the current trajectory the UK health system will be over run.
Claiming you can isolate at risk groups well enough while the whole country is going about its business is just putting your fingers in your ears and going lalalalala.
It is like seeing an experiment playing out at a societal scale. We are all looking at it from a personal level, but successful societies have always been built on sacrifices of various kinds - their costs or others (colonization)
The future benefit being get the state out of medicine.
I don’t subscribe to this view at all but having read Rees-Mogg’s daddy’s book, the Soverign Individual i will happily stake my house on the above being very close to the victorian geezer’s view on this.
AFAIK viruses tend to mutate to be less lethal because killing the host is bad for reproduction.
random source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
>This is a common occurrence with influenza viruses: there is a tendency for pathogenic viruses to become less lethal with time, as the hosts of more dangerous strains tend to die out
The ideal evolutionary strategy is to produce excess bodily fluids from sweating, coughing and sneezing, while not making people so sick that they lay down and stay home, let alone die.
Viruses don’t get bonus points for being lethal, unlike certain video games.
I'm not changing anything unless I get ill. And then, it will only be to stay away from at-risk people and large gatherings. If I worked in an office, I'd work from home, but I work from home already. I'm certainly not going to barracade myself in my house for weeks/months.
That's just my perspective, and one which may explain why you're seeing this behaviour from other Brits.
[edit] Yeah, I thought this comment might be controversial. General response seems to be that I should be more scared than I am, and that I should do more than I am to stop the spread of the disease. I'm still not scared, and I still feel my response is proprotionate at this time.
https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/nieuws/nederland/artikel/5056536/se...
As the classic asks: Do you feel lucky, punk?
What matters is what the level of risk is, and what the cost of reducing that risk is.
I feel lucky.
This assumes that you can get comprehensive treatment from the healthcare system. If you can't, the numbers get very scary, even for the young (relatively speaking). If we really want the "herd immunity" strategy to work, we should still start containment now in order to flatten the curve, accounting for long lags due to the incubation period. "Wait and see" is not a viable approach, and other countries were mistaken in trying it.
The whole point of the social distancing strategy is that it's not just about you.
You might still need intensive care and not get it?
You might be infected and not know it?
This is really a huge gamble you're making, for your health and others'
So I addressed that by pointing out that most people risk the lives of others, but do care about the potential harm.
Now you've gone off on a tangent, and made an entirely different point, but presented it as an argument related to your first comment, or my response to it. It is neither.
I understand your position to be: Something bad is happening, and anything other than the most extreme response is to be criticised. Which is usually the response to be expected on Internet forums, so I'm going to move on now.
Suppose you caught it. It means you may get sick for several days. Sucks, but hey. However, it also means you'll be contagious for the next couple of weeks. Before you get sick, but also after you got better. Anyone who comes in contact with you runs a risk of catching it from you.
What does that mean "contact"? Simple. You're basically shedding viral particles. An invisible cloud of them hovers around you. A cough, talking, touching anything ranging from toilet seats to doorknobs to tables,... You basically leave a trail of particles that has the potential to infect others long hours after you've passed by. And you wouldn't even realize you're doing it.
Because this is exactly where you'll get a demonstration of power laws in action. Suppose 1 person infects 2 others over the course of those weeks, those will go on to infect 4, 16, 32,... you'll get what's going on here. Basically, you're that first match in a stack of matches that got lit, and before you know it, the entire stack has burned down.
Why is that bad? Because maybe two or three hops from you, there's a specialist, a couple of nurses, a few people who are designated to help out elderly people and maybe a couple of people with health conditions such as asthma, COPD, diabetes, high blood pressure,...
You didn't just got sick, you also provided a gateway for the virus to jump to all those people as well. Meaning all those who got sick can't provide healthcare anymore; and a ton of people end up in an already strained healthcare system.
And that's discounting people who have bad luck and end up having a heart attack, a stroke or a bad accident. If the ICU's are overloaded with COVID patients, stark choices will have to be made on who gets to live and who is left to die. That's where they are in Italy right now.
We aren't just talking about "patients", we are talking about your and other people's loved ones. Parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, friends,... That's what we are discussing here.
Wrapping up. If you think that barricading yourself in your house for weeks/months is a "no go", well, you're not gonna like what's going to happen next either.
Stay in your home. Avoid contact if you can. Follow the WHO recommendations. Be responsible about this. That's how you help saving lives.
Who should we believe, them or CaptArmchair?
Given your apparent self-centered attitude and lack of empathy, I would guess that it will not bother you one bit.
That's not possible, because we don't yet have enough information about covid-19. We're still trying to work out what the death rate is!
> It's just not that scary unless you're in an at-risk category. I say this as a British male in my 30's.
So far we think your chance of death if _you_ (30 years old, no comorbidities) get covid-19 is between 0.5% and 1.5%.
And that's if the hospitals are not overwhelmed. One thing that will overwhelm the hospitals is people like you spreading disease.
By the sound if it, your risk analysis (also based on incomplete information) has lead you to believe that I should take some measures that I am not. That does not concern me.
Good choice. Look at what Italy and Spain are doing now. Stay at home as much as possible, don't hang out with others. Wear personal protective equipment if you must go out for some reason.
Italy's had 1800 death, Spain 300, UK 30. They're all roughly the same size population (60, 50, 70 million)
As I've said in other threads on this, I would assume that the earlier you lock down, the longer you have to stay locked down. Or you risk a second peak.
There's a balancing act, given that it's not possible now to stop the spread, only slow it. Lock down too early and you do a lot of damage to the economy and by extension the country. Lock down too late and people die from lack of care.
I would not assume that at all. Containment is still possible in a looser sense; many places in both Italy and Spain may end up being disease-free in a shorter period of time by locking down things early, and then they can contribute healthcare resources to places where the disease is more widespread, or even be put under some sort of protective "reverse" quarantine with less strict measures.
Essentially the whole things a massive balancing act, allow a certain amount of infections, but not too many the health service gets overwhelmed.
Even China's now getting more infections from outside than in, which is only going to grow.
The consensus is that you can't stop it now. So your plan might be an even worse idea, a cascading lock down, that lasts even longer. The only hope being summer stops it like flu, but then you're left with a potential resurgence in autumn and even more lock downs.
some are rational, some petrify and can not move, some try to face it, some turn inside, some turn outside.
some old people are going out on purpose, if they petrify they will not be able to live anyway.
anyway, it is not easy for anyone when the mass is moving in such volatile way, not to mention individual responsibility towards the group is stressed to extremes (as you can see people fighting over toilet paper for example)
i am also staying as isolated as i can, but from time to time i force myself and my family to go out in the forest, to see that the world is not burning yet.
Would be great to see if Boris Johnson and his cabinet and their close ones are staying home or not.
The problem is not getting the virus. But, if everybody gets it at the same time. That will make hospitals collapse as queues of people wait for treatment.
If Goverment officials have access to health care, it does not matter for them what happens to the rest of the population.
Herd immunity works. And one hundred years from now what the government did is irrelevant. The problem is the suffering that may be caused to the current UK citizens.
It may work, but the price to pay if it doesn't is very high. It not only includes lives but the long term trust in the government and its institutions, that is quite eroded already.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-h1n1-pandemi...
Or back in 2014?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2014/1...
Why is the world taking such an extreme reaction towards a disease that's less deadly and infectious than ones from 5 and 11 years ago where there wasn't an air of extreme hostility directed towards people for not worrying?
Is it because the name is scarier? Is it because it's not a flu but a coronavirus?
Because I still remember those, those were genuinely scary, mortality rates were high for healthy people, there were millions of cases around the world, and it was highly infectious.
Yet, there was no massive global quarantine, the world didn't end, and life went on.
Why should a disease that is less bad in every conceivable way be so much more panic inducing?
Because it's worse in every way: the initial containment has failed, the base immunity does not exist, the transmission rate is much higher, and the virus is more deadly.
Explain this, because this is the part I just can't wrap my head around. How is a disease that's deadly towards a much smaller percentage of the population 'more deadly'. Children aren't affected, anyone under the age of 60 is mildly affected barring pre-existing health problems. How is that more deadly than, a 30% mortality rate for young otherwise healthy individuals in the case of 2009's pandemic?
That doesn't explain how it's more deadly. More deadly implies it kills more people faster. This is very much not the case no matter how much it's spread and by comparison, it's still contained more than both of those other pandemics were. Those each affected millions of people over a few months.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
We're at 167,543 with a total of 76,590 recoveries as of this comment.
For a website full of people used to dealing with big numbers there sure seems to be a lot of blind just ignoring of said numbers in exchange for emotional reaction.
Furthermore, the "deadliest" viruses in terms of rate and velocity of death are not as dangerous to the population as a whole, because most of the infected people fall over dead before infecting anyone else.
> We're at 167,543 with a total of 76,590 recoveries as of this comment.
We're also doubling the number of cases every 2.5 days in those countries that haven't managed to contain the spread. In Italy, that number (~20,000) has exceeded the capacity of the healthcare system.
For all ages, it's basically 12-24x more lethal than the flu. For 0-19, 12 to 25x For 20-49, 6-16x For 50-59, 9-21x For 60+, 4-7x
Also, this virus may be as deadly in Africa as H1N1... but Southeast Asia seems to have learned good lessons from 2009 and been better prepared.
People are locking down to AVOID a 2009 rerun.
Corona will probably never "go away" again unless we want to fundamentally change the way we live (which I think won't happen), so the only option right now is to slow the spread until more research has be done and the infrastructure has been built up to deal with severe cases.
But the fault lies with the government, they know and should know better
So yeah they probably are making them cannon fodder, whether its intentional or not, the incentives would let higher ups look at the proposal and say "by golly that makes so much sense", whereas the rest of the world wouldn't consider this proposal as killing two birds with one stone and just reject the proposal.
I'm not gonna panic, and keep going as usual, with the recommended precautions. Ideally I don't want to get infected, but if I do, oh well, such is life.