Animals Use Social Distancing to Avoid Disease
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
We’ve also been doing this forever. If I go somewhere and someone has a runny nose and is coughing, I am going to stay away. Nothing new here.
COVID is different in the sense that we assume everyone has it. We distance from healthy looking individuals.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20101253v...
0.25% is what the preprint says for overall infection fatality rate -- 1 in 400 probability of dying if you are infected.
And for the 2017-2018 flu season, the odds of dying from it were 1 in 5400. [2]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
The overall odds that you have died from corvid-19 this season so far in the US are 1 in 2433 (based on 411 deaths per Million population at https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ ).
Often the "not horrible odds" argument is made by someone being dismissive of folks who are following health orders -- I still look both ways if I cross the street.
Literally, by spouting your 1/2433 odds, you being disingenuous for most people. A person could greatly reduce their personal odds by taking extra vitamins and eating healthy and getting good sleep, entirely without wearing a mask.
Your street crossing example is an example of you following a health order for your own personal safety. You could simply use the crosswalk without looking - that would be you relying on others to wear their mask to ensure your personal safety.
When you make your personal safety dependent on my goodwill, I'm going to let you fall, hard.
Your point seems to be that folks should not follow health orders since the odds are good for most people, and that you will do your part to make sure folks will get what they deserve?
People haven't worried about flu death rates or (insert other disease) death rates before. Why should I go out of my way to protect someone who won't protect themselves by staying home locked away from the world?
After I recovered from my COVID, why should I wear a mask if I'm COVID antibody positive? To make you feel better?
Q: Can asymptomatic coronavirus disease be transmitted?
A: Asymptomatic transmission refers to transmission of the virus from a person, who does not develop symptoms. There are few reports of laboratory-confirmed cases who are truly asymptomatic, and to date, there has been no documented asymptomatic transmission.
IIRC, I've read the WHO tends to drag its feet with new information, and is usually the last major organization to come around to new findings. They might not be the best group to listen to in a fast moving area like this.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/04/health/239-experts-with-o...
> But interviews with nearly 20 scientists — including a dozen W.H.O. consultants and several members of the committee that crafted the guidance — and internal emails paint a picture of an organization that, despite good intentions, is out of step with science....
> But the infection prevention and control committee in particular, experts said, is bound by a rigid and overly medicalized view of scientific evidence, is slow and risk-averse in updating its guidance and allows a few conservative voices to shout down dissent.
> “They’ll die defending their view,” said one longstanding W.H.O. consultant, who did not wish to be identified because of her continuing work for the organization. Even its staunchest supporters said the committee should diversify its expertise and relax its criteria for proof, especially in a fast-moving outbreak....
> The W.H.O. has found itself at odds with groups of scientists more than once during this pandemic.
> The agency lagged behind most of its member nations in endorsing face coverings for the public. While other organizations, including the C.D.C., have long since acknowledged the importance of transmission by people without symptoms, the W.H.O. still maintains that asymptomatic transmission is rare.
> “At the country level, a lot of W.H.O. technical staff are scratching their heads,” said a consultant at a regional office in Southeast Asia, who did not wish to be identified because he was worried about losing his contract. “This is not giving us credibility.”
Science is much more rigorous than this article- but it's a fun read.
You mean these names? They're linked in the article.
https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa939...
They're credible enough and this action public enough that the WHO got the message: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/health/coronavirus-aeroso....
> we're relying solely on the credibility of the author from the NYT. Given the incentive structure of being an internet blogger (sensationalism = $$$$), that credibility is very limited.
The NYT isn't a blog.
because WHO is a top of the pyramid standards body (of sorts), they are slow to adopt new lines of thinking. Very waterfall, not agile. When the ISO updates a publication we have a near zero expectation it will be amended any time soon.
WHO follows a similar mechanism, which, prima facie, seems fitting — until it's not — COVID-19 being the glaring counterexample we're living through right here & now.
I would add that they only state that there are few reports of truly asymptomatic cases (thus suggesting that asymptomatic cases don't exist) and thus so far there have been no documented case of asymptomatic transmission, which is to be expected if asymptomatic cases don't exist.
But the WHO are medical professional people. And I am not. Like most people.
And I want to be able to trust the professionals.
And trusted and cited for medical facts all around.
But if they would be caught bending medical facts to political will .. that would be not helpful.
The same confusion happened over masks.
https://www.physiciansweekly.com/covid-19-viral-shedding-can...
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejme2009758
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/931898
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0869-5
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/sars-cov-2-viral-load-and-the-...
Annoyingly, this translates into one's pet parrot doing its best to pretend it's not sick and makes it hard to tell when you should take it to the vet.
Individuals won't indicate that they are sick unless there's a statistical advantage to doing so. Non-social animals don't get help from their peers, and traveling birds can't help their weak peers fly even if they tried.
Humans kick people out far before the stakes are that high. I'm reminded of how people with Leprosy were treated before there were drugs to treat it.
Generally speaking "hanging around with the least fit members of your species" is a losing strategy if you want to not starve long enough to reproduce so it should come as no surprise that evolution selects for the trait of avoiding the least fit members of one's species to varying degrees (depending on the specifics of the species and the type of "least fitness" in question).
They "care" (in as much as they care for anything) about results...
One of the reasons why was because they had some of the strongest containment measures in the entire world. One of the strategies they did early on was to have a very strict quarantines of villages/regions known to have infections. They would quarantine second and third degree connections to people who were infected. It may seem extreme, but given the fact that the number of total infections is fewer than 500, it's hard to argue that it wasn't effective.
Which is more of an infringement on liberty, a temporary quarantine or permanent death?
America has a deeply-ingrained "rugged individualism" cultural myth that includes the notion that sometimes the pioneer in the wildneress starves to death or gets set upon by wild beasts, and that's "just a thing that happens," "just God's will," "the price of freedom," etc.
'Liberty or death' is a nice slogan, but it is in no way a core part of what made the US the most powerful empire in history.
'Liberty' has always applied to a very small culturally white subset of the population. 'Death' came to the rest.
The US got through World War 2 relatively unscathed compared to the rest of the world with its manufacturing infrastructure and vast natural resources intact, profited from loans made to aid Europe's recovery, entrenched its military hegemony leveraged by being the sole nuclear power, and made the US dollar the world's reserve currency.
Sometimes people need to understand (I know this is not a popular opinion) that for the general good they need to give up their liberties for a while.
Following your logic, we should say that people must have sufficiently armored vehicles to go out, so that it's safe in case they're hit by a drunk.
This plainly doesn't work. Social problems can't be fixed by individualist solutions. The vast number of people who are in the huge risk class (probably a quarter of Americans) can't be forced to stay in house arrest to avoid death, when much easier solutions could prevent the disease from even existing, as seen in Vietnam.
A few weeks of highly localized, tight quanatine are nothing compared to what is going to happen and be required to prevent millions from dying in the US alone. Unfortunately that ship has long sailed away..
Even hard core libertarians accept government force to contain epidemics.
I'm saying the principle is clear.
A quick Googling suggests about 60 million people over 65 in the US. Then we should add some millions for problems like diabetes. So, 1 in 5? 1 in 4?
Further, some young people seem to have permanent lung damage from the disease.
As David Friedman put it:
> "There may be two libertarians somewhere who agree with each other about everything, but I am not one of them."
AFAIK, the classic "minarchist" position is that the reason to even have a government is to provide certain important Public Goods that can't be provided otherwise.
Those are (1) National defense, (2) A legal system with courts, jail, police etc, (3) Fighting epidemics. (3) is far less discussed (until 2020), but it's agreed on when mentioned.
Is it still OK to restrict freedom to just keep people in fear?
Unfortunately some people want to ruin things for everyone.
Seriously,
"More than 820 million people are hungry globally"
"https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/15-07-2019-world-hunger...
820 million people on this earth were hungry in 2019.
When you are hungry, really hungry, which is not something most people in the western world know about, and also have only limited dirty water supply, then you have other problems, than a new disease, all the rich, old people are scared about.
So no, it is not at all realistic, to have the world in its current state, in effective lock-down, without causing more harm, than good. Unless you don't care about the poor in the first place.
The vaccines on trial and in research, may not work.
Containment does work. Isolate the sick. Lock down for 4 weeks. Face masks everywhere. Keep socially distant. Avoid indoor settings.
Get groceries delivered, or have an employee inside do the shopping and packaging, and you pick up the order outside.
These are hard choices, but it can effectively kill this virus in 4 weeks. It’s not rocket science anymore.
Bats been all over the world much longer than humans have [1]. Pangolins are widespread across Asia and Africa, and have been for 10s of millions of years [2]
> also might have been exposed to milder coronaviruses in the past (common cold, etc).
The whole planet has been exposed to milder coronaviruses in the past and present - that's the "common" part. They are so common that they are a confounding factor in the current COVID19 antibody tests, thus reducing the confidence of a positive test result in areas that don't have a known outbreak.
1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10914-005-6945-2#....
I could imagine in some circumstances it isn't. The slowest in your group will likely be first targeted / caught by a predator.
If you are in a herd and can be near another other herd member, it would not be beneficial to be near the one that predators are likely to target. If you are near that member, any mistake you make while running away might be your last. Less so the further away from that member (and the predators) you place yourself.
Predators do not always catch their prey. A fit herd can escape without any of its members being eaten. A herd benefits from having its weakest members culled, not by having weak members. No herd animal I can think of would slow down a trek for its weakest members.
Here’s a story about albinos in Africa but harmful superstitions and brutal people are rampant throughout the world, western or otherwise.
https://www.cnn.com/2016/06/07/africa/africa-albino-hunted-b...
Citation? I can't find any sources, even non-credible ones, on Google. In fact, your comment is the top result for me when I search 'vitiligo "stoned to death"'.
A genius university Dean recently re-labeled "Social Distancing" to "Physical Distancing". Lets not be "socially distanced", but rather simply "physically distanced".
Just putting this out there in hopes that it catches on.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/15/world/social-distancing-l...
https://globalnews.ca/news/6717166/what-is-physical-distanci...
There were a few news articles about changing the name, heard it on the radio for a few weeks, etc... but literally everybody in my bubble refers to it as social distancing.
Social Distancing has the first mover advantage on Physical Distancing.
Or is that a social study article that takes a look to how the majority of the homo sapiens (the prevalent animal species in this rock) are now under social distancing recommendations?
The later is probably devolution at play, from having fallen into a too cushy a life in non-evolutionary time ranges (modern cities)...
IMO if someone in your group starts vomiting can mean the food we just ate is bad so would be safe to throw up sooner then later.
I was raised with animals in a village and I have no trouble with cleaning animal excrement but human excrement's smell instantly has an effect on my stomach(I had to get some samples for a medical test from my son poop). But sure there are daily working with such thing and they get used to it.
Because past societies were much more open to bodily functions and accepting some degrees of "dirt".
I think there are still many people around the world that are living in extreme poverty and I am sure they still feel disgusted by shit,bad food and putrefied bodies - so are you basing your theory on something you read or is something you think is correct , I will be happy to change my mind so please inform me.