Nobel laureate predicts a quicker coronavirus recovery
latimes.com
latimes.com
In other words, if we stop panicking, and big hotspots don't implement extreme social distancing measures, we won't be fine.
A certain level of panic is required to enforce efficacy of these social distance programs, so it seems dangerous to spread this message less people begin to act out of self interest.
A certain level of taking life and death situations seriously and doing the next right thing towards controlling the situation is required, from everybody.
cf Anna, “The Next Right Thing” Frozen 2 https://youtu.be/p5B_EhxqAJo
Panic = people dying needlessly
The problem with such a headline is it can be misinterpreted to mean you don't need to make any effort whatsoever for things to "be fine." I think this is not a great signal to send.
Most of the US hopefully isn't going to become a "big Italy", besides a few unfortunate hotspots. Other areas will still see heavy infections, but likely without overwhelming the hospital systems, if we maintain at least some far more moderate social distancing measures for another year.
...I do worry about the Deep South, due to poverty and lack of leadership by governors in that area.
My hope is that the most vulnerable areas will get some relief from local issues because of the availability of online resources.
I run a Citizen Planners subforum. I write a bit about making money online. Etc.
There's a lot of free information available online and the internet proved to be a hugely helpful thing for me when I was homeless. It's proving to be a big deal for helping people cope in the face of quarantines, etc.
I'm cautiously optimistic -- assuming we continue to take it seriously and don't decide it's time to dance in the streets and party like it's 1999.
I expect that possibly tonight the government will impose a stronger quarantine as a result, which is a shame. I had hoped we'd collectively better at following advice.
More specifically in response to you: is there a way to discuss with you one of these days what you're working on and perhaps in particular how perhaps advice on how we might help the homeless here? I'd very much like to chat about that, whether via email or some other channel.
I think the bigger issue that we'll need to address after we handle the case influx is how we'll go about achieving herd immunity.
I'm starting to think it might be wise to consider letting small, not-at-risk populations out with the intention of allowing the virus to spread in a fashion that wouldn't overwhelm the health systems. A controlled burn, if you will. I'd definitely join in to something like this.
you can start now by volunteering to join the vaccine trials....
Question to the virologists on HN: human cells have some limits on how many generations they can be copied, have there even been similar mechanisms observed in viruses?
Evolutionary, a virus that can only replicate a few times is a dead end. That’d be like mule, a viable life form, but one that cannot reproduce successfully.
Think about the mechanisms of cells with generation limits, I’d intuit that they preform functions related to morphogenisis (we only want this bone to be this long), and forcing evolutionary iteration by limiting the maximum age of a individual. I’d posit that extreme longevity is an affront to evolution.
I could be totally off my rocker with the second part, but I’d like to think that a basic knowledge of biology and an obsession with cellular automata might have given me a useful intuition.
It would very much depend on how - and if - the different ribosomes and other cell mechanisms responsible for copying the viruses RNA (or DNA in some cases) would deal with the virus.
The effect you'd see would be a species jump, followed by a very virulent episode fizzling out when the copy errors accumulated to the point that the copies would no longer be viable.
Note that human stem cells and cancer cells do not have a limit on how many times they can divide. This is because they possess the enzyme telomerase.
Also, note that in human reproduction, there is an unbroken lineage of cell divisions through generations (egg and sperm are produced by specialized cell divisions called meiosis, and combine in sexual reproduction to develop a new human who can eventually produce more egg or sperm).
However, it is true that differentiated somatic cells (most of the cells in your body) cannot divide indefinitely.
A virus, unlike a differentiated somatic cell, does not have an intrinsic limit to how many times it can replicate. It hijacks cellular machinery to make an exact replica of itself (+/- any replication errors a.k.a. mutations that occur).
However, a virus that becomes evolutionarily unfit could go extinct. If you look at phylogenetic trees of viruses, there are many branches that go extinct (become a dead end). But there are other branches that continue succeeding. All of this is driven by evolutionary dynamics rather than by a lack of telomerase leading to a hard limit on the number of times the virus can replicate.
Now, just to blow your mind, oncogenic viruses like certain strains of HPV can induce human cells to produce telomerase and become able to divide indefinitely! Wowww this is so confusing!
He predicted the Chinese cessation of outbreak correctly because China consistently implemented the lockdown plan across regions and had strict measures to make sure of compliance.
From what we see, few western countries have bended the infection trajectory sufficiently to see the outbreak ending soon. Some people’s behaviors and general lack of mask wearing don’t help. (I think Germany may eventually accomplish that. The 2-person-max meeting rule and relatively extensive testing should help.)
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
We must read professional epidemiologists, like Marc Lipsitch of Harvard, whose expertise is more relevant and who don’t have nearly as rosy a view on the epidemic. (Marc is also on Twitter.)
There's an expected lag, we saw that in the Wuhan lockdown. Beyond a certain density of infection though, maybe it just won't be effective enough.
Wuhan lockdown was Jan 23rd and cases continued to rise for some time after because there is an incubation period, and additional family (and maybe within apartment building?) infection.
Italy lockdown is just where they were Wuhan was on Feb 2nd or so, it didn't look like it was slowing down enough for them at that point, but then did.
The trajectory will bend down. Whether it's sufficient we'll see in a couple of weeks, but that might be too late.
Assuming 1 person knows 100 people, it would take 1 million deaths to seriously warn 100 million. And since it takes 3-4 weeks from infection to death, during which the warning still wouldn't be personally grave, and infections continue to spread. Thus, the population will be infected until herd immunity is sufficiently high (~60% of population if R0 is ~2.5). [1]
If hospitalization rate is 15% & Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) is 1%, then 9%/0.6% of the population will be severely ill/die within 1-2 years, respectively, just from this one disease. One can do further arithmetic for a given country.
The 'solution' above is clearly unacceptable to the vast majority of people.
[1] Herd immunity threshold Vc= 1 - 1/R0, where R0 is basic reproduction number of a disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity#Mechanics
Germany is doing better than most in Europe by the former measures.
South Korea also had a higher infection growth rate since they tested extensively. Because of that they can identify cases and contain the spread.
Perhaps you'd like to do so. If not, consider that this is a singularly bad time to be spreading misinformation, no matter how plausible you may find it. People are already frightened enough.
Again, doesn't take a genius.
nothing more complicated than that.
However, China lied about human transmissibility of the virus until Jan 20.
They lied about where the virus came from including lying that it was an American invention.
They also did not count pneumonia deaths caused by the virus: https://www.wsj.com/articles/relatives-wonder-whether-pneumo...
They have also kicked out american media so there are no independent fact checkers on the ground.
Their official death rate is also lower than every other country's.
Thus, the null hypothesis is that china is lying, like they always do. A claim that they are not lying would need to be supported by evidence. Otherwise this is just the fallacy of an appeal to authority.
China sees drop in new coronavirus cases; all new cases imported, March 22
https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/fmz3d6/while_china_c...
Translated: On March 20th, A local community management issued a notice, stating that one of the unit has 2 patient found, the unit will be sealed and no one is allowed to enter or exit.
It essentaily means that they are starving to death in the room.
Don’t trust the Chinese government’s propaganda
Do you see what I mean about seeming like a conspiracy theory? Heinlein's Red-baiting about Soviet cosmonauts unpersoned when their early space capsules failed and stranded them, despite being nonsense, had at least the virtue of originality. But that was over half a century ago. I'd like to hope our standards have risen in the interim.
Stop with the unfounded speculation and fearmongering.
You have no data to back up your totally spurious allegations. Are you just outright speculating? If you're going to say something so bold, citations are necessary.
What we do know is this:
- Apple has re-opened their factories and all 42 Apple stores in all of China [1], and closed their Apple stores in the entire rest of the world [2]. There is absolutely no reason to believe that Apple would do this except in the face of evidence. What kind of PR nightmare do you think they'd be inviting if it was discovered they put lives at risk to placate the PRC?
- Tourist attractions and factories are re-opening. [3]
- The WHO said: "China’s bold approach to contain the rapid spread of this new respiratory pathogen has changed the course of a rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic. A particularly compelling statistic is that on the first day of the advance team’s work there were 2478 newly confirmed cases of COVID-19 reported in China. Two weeks later, on the final day of this Mission, China reported 409 newly confirmed cases. This decline in COVID-19 cases across China is real." [4]
- I've no doubt this will be confirmed via observation of atmospheric release of nitrous oxides in short order.
Fine, if you don't want to believe China, Apple or the WHO (and soon NASA), you better have some data, otherwise it's just breathless unsubstantiated fear-mongering and conspiracy theories.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/13/21177964/apple-stores-chi...
[2] https://nypost.com/2020/03/17/apple-extends-coronavirus-trig...
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesasquith/2020/03/21/no-new-...
[4] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-chi...
They literally locked people in their homes in the entirety of Wuhan (population 19 million) for a month and sent drones after them if they walked out. It's really not possible for a disease to spread if people are physically isolated. That much is settled science haha.
The difference is China kept people apart by force, and much of the west doesn't have the necessary respect for authority to do so voluntarily. One comment I replied to here someone literally quoted me the national anthem as their justification for going outside and ignoring the shelter-in-place orders.
If there's one thing a totalitarian government can do effectively, it's lock people indoors.
They may well have been wrong, or made mistakes early on. You can't exactly claim that the US' response was bang on the money the whole time either. Remember two weeks ago when Donald Trump told us this was nothing to worry about then the next day declared a national emergency then the day after invoked the defense procurement act then did nothing with it? Remember a few days ago when he called it the "deep state department" in front of Fauci who couldn't contain his laughter? Is Donald Trump a propaganda arm of the Chinese? Uh actually wait don't answer that, but you get my point.
It's usually incompetence not malice. Provide sources, not speculation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Health_Organization#Fina...
If anyone truly knows I'd like to hear it.
The other alternative is social distancing, so you can reduce R0 (the number of people each infected person passes the virus on to) from something like 2.5-3 down to less than 1. Then it dies back by itself. This is what China and South Korea succeeded in doing.
I remain astounded by the level of certainty people can have about things which they barely understand at all.
> Levitt said the social-distancing mandates are critical
...as long as we practice fastidious social distancing, which, at least in the U.S., big parts of the country are utterly failing at...
> The goal needs to be better early detection — not just through testing but perhaps with body temperature surveillance...and immediate social isolation.
...and if we have widely deployed testing, which the U.S. government has failed at spectacularly.
So: We're going to be fine if we take this seriously and have a coordinated, competent government response. I'll be in my doomsday bunker if anyone needs me.
1. The fact that the author is a Nobel laureate adds no weight to his conclusions. The Nobel laureate who invented PCR was otherwise what I would describe as "crazy" - he was a notorious HIV denialist for years. Not saying this Nobel laureate is, but Nobels go for novel discoveries, not for being the best scientist.
2. Look at the amount of extreme lockdowns that have been deployed in China for months to get this reduction in transmission (assuming they aren't lying). There was a Twitter thread posted here recently describing the current situation in Wuhan, and their "lightened" levels of current restrictions are way more intense then any of the shelter-in-place restrictions in the US.
> He analyzed 78 countries with more than 50 reported cases of COVID-19 every day and sees “signs of recovery.” He’s not looking at cumulative cases, but the number of new cases every day — and the percentage growth in that number from one day to the next.
> Levitt acknowledges that his figures are messy, and that the official case counts in many areas are too low because testing is spotty. But even with incomplete data, “a consistent decline means there’s some factor at work that is not just noise in the numbers,” he said.
We will solve this, one way or another. It won't be easy, and there will be a ton of pain (a lot of which is already being felt). But a solution will be found (my best guess: probably a vaccine in the medium to long run, and in the short to medium term stronger testing and isolation regimes to let us get back to some semblance of normal life again)
I think there is just cause for spreading fear until people get it into their heads that this is serious and behave accordingly, at which point the focus needs to switch towards keeping people optimistic and healthy in isolation without social interaction.
The alternative is millions of deaths and a collapse of our medical system.
In the U.S., our nearly complete lack of leadership at the federal level set us back by at least a month, but state and local governments are catching up fast.
This will be a death toll that hasn’t been seen in a lifetime. Yeah, maybe the economy won’t collapse. Maybe it will. Regardless, it’s unkind to downplay the severity of the situation.
COVID19 is scary and we should respond, but we are panicking well out of proportion to the threat. We should continue to make our best effort to prevent it from spreading while getting society back to some kind of normal footing, and then use the lesson as an opportunity to improve our preparations and planning for the next time.
This is one of those cases where the disease is far worse than the cure.
For 2017, the most recent year, it's ~450 deaths total for the UK [1], vs an anticipated infection rate of 20% of the adult population and 50% of the rest. That's 450/15M, 0.003%.
Reported death rates are O(1%) for Covid19.
Could you explain that discrepancy?
The BMJ (British Medical Journal) has some discussion of the controversy of over-reporting of flu deaths here [2].
Re those CDC figures, do you really have ~200,000 people hospitalised with flu each month in USA?
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[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...