Corona virus

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xMustard wrote:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5CZ7SS06es

This was a good video, but not quite a great one.

My main complaint is that it does a particular thing that a lot of "skeptic" vids do, which I'm going to call "refusing to name the stupid." The RationalWiki types like to label such behavior "dogwhistling," but refusing to name the stupid is not dogwhistling because dogwhistling is a coded signal and refusal to name the stupid is a lack of signal. Whereas dogwhistling is an encoded indication of group membership, refusing to name the stupid is usually the silence of a content creator with moderate views and a radicalized audience who is neither willing to radicalize themselves, nor risk alienating his audience by attempting to moderate their views. It's not an indicator that one is a crackpot or even a crackpot sympathizer; it is an indicator one likes taking money from crackpots and is vulnerable to self-censorship in fear of being cancelled.

In any case, I don't like that the video refrains from actively calling out the "COVID19 is a false flag" crackpots.

But overall the video is good, because whether or not a potential solution makes sense has more to do with the solution itself than the problem it's trying to fix. For example, medieval doctors would respond to the very real problem of human illness by prescribing bloodletting and applying leeches to drain blood. It was well known by then that a person who loses blood gets weaker and, if enough blood is lost, dies; this didn't prevent it from being advocated as treatment. It's totally possible for a problem to be thoroughly legitimate and its proposed solution to be complete horse shit.

Our current response to COVID19 is almost completely horse shit. We are prescribing a cure that is worse than the disease, and will ultimately kill more people than the virus would have if it had ran through humanity completely unopposed. Only a fool would set about to destroying his society in the hopes of saving 2% of it.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Well, our government has decided that '100 people indoors' is somehow the new threshold for okay. Who the fuck are they kidding?

Our Chief Medical Officer flat-out said,

“A short-term, two to four week shutdown of society is not recommended by any of our experts. It does not achieve anything."

I don't think our politicians realise you don't play chicken with a pandemic.

Meanwhile schools are not only still open, they're aggressively enforcing attendance, but have taken...measures to keep parents off school grounds?

There's more threat to children from riding school buses than there is from COVID-19. I wouldn't go so far as to say that canceling school "doesn't achieve anything," but what it does achieve against COVID-19 is not worth the cost.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

I'm genuinely shocked how quickly I've become anti-government. This isn't like me at all. I waver whenever I dwell on it. It's that much against my nature. But the evidence is too strong now. These idiots are ploughing the bus into a wall and the worst thing is they've watched other buses do it first.

God bless President Trump for his role in leading you to enlightenment.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

BTW My name's not Charan. Leave that to the people who don't care to know or understand me. Call me W.

In that case, I demand you refer to me as Mike Degrassi Tyson.

I mean sheeit, I don't even get on people who call me Scott.

https://www.news.com.au/national/scott-morrison-schools-should-remain-open/news-story/98825afacacafcd126aca1f0d8c0760b

This is going to have disastrous repercussions. They're all but saying 'it's too early to go into lockdown, but we probably will at some point'. I'd almost be more understanding if they were just plain stupid and saying 'we don't need lockdown, period'. But this whole 'well, we will later but it's not serious enough yet'...in the face of a confirmed pandemic where extreme seclusion works (shit, Kansas is shutting down their schools for the rest of the YEAR), is utterly untenable.

Did China close down its schools?

The situation in the US is getting worse and worse. Looks like Trump couldn't scare the coronavirus away. Wonder if the country will become the next epicenter, it did get infected slightly later than Europe.

Right now it's a race to the bottom between the UK, the USA and Australia, but going by their leaders that's probably been true for a while. My money's on the UK. Closer to Europe, especially the virulently nonchalant France, trying to pull off the 'herd immunity' desperation attack before their super meter is fully charged, and much more into pub-gatherings to watch sport than either of the other two.

I hear that some doctors say the only way to stop the virus is if 70% of the population get infected. If that was true, why weren't hundreds of millions Chinese citizens sick? Why aren't the deaths there in the millions too? Doesn't make sense, feels like a propaganda made in an attempt to "save the economy" at all costs.

Germany still hesitates to go fully into lockdown. They probably want to wait until the crisis is Italy tier.

My test came back negative. I'm still not allowed to leave my appartment, obviously.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Right now it's a race to the bottom between the UK, the USA and Australia, but going by their leaders that's probably been true for a while. My money's on the UK. Closer to Europe, especially the virulently nonchalant France, trying to pull off the 'herd immunity' desperation attack before their super meter is fully charged, and much more into pub-gatherings to watch sport than either of the other two.

France is on lockdown so not sure what your on about.

It's the netherlands and the UK that are doing the herd immunity strategy.

Still doesn't refute the point scrotie is making that the costs in the future due to economic loss might result in more deaths then 1%, the herd immunity strategy might be "immoral" now but save more lives down the road which begs the question if "immoral" is the correct term to utilize to describe it.

Post-mortem analysis will tell who made the correct choices, which is fine im all for allowing multiple approuches so we can learn the most because covid-19 isn't the actual problem, but a future bug with a 50%+ mortality rate is.

I only view this situation as a "test drive scenario" of a global lockdown in case of an actual serious infection going around.

Peace,

-Boem-

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Johny_Snow wrote:

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Italy's total number of cases rose 12.6 percent to 31,506 - the slowest rate of increase since the first cases were reported on February 21.

Looks like the lockdown is finally taking effect
...

Hope so, but it'll be a long way since we'll be back to normal. We still have to reach the peak, and some city are already at full medical capacity, moving the more severe cases to other parts of the country.
Take it seriously people, shit is dead seriuos and the lockdown I've been experiencing these past days is no joke - I'm still going to work and it's sad to see how everything is different now than just 10 days ago...
Stay safe.

We can now read the report on COVID-19 that so terrified every public health manager and head of state from Boris Johnson to Donald Trump to the dictator of El Salvador that they ordered people to stay in their houses. Here's a brief rundown -

Link - https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf?fbclid=IwAR3qYsg2gz3RCjAXbJAs7pPQw-yiUTr-5nvxLAR2p-CHk9t13vc2SL9RqhU (only 16 pages)

The COVID-19 response team at Imperial College in London obtained what appears to be the first accurate dataset of infection and death rates from China, Korea, and Italy. They plugged those numbers into widely available epidemic modeling software and ran a simulation: what would happen if the United States did absolutely nothing -- if we treated COVID-19 like the flu, went about business as usual, and let the virus take its course?

Here's what would happen: 80% of Americans would get the disease. 0.9% of them would die. Between 4 and 8 percent of all Americans over the age of 70 would die. 2.2 million Americans would die from the virus itself.

It gets worse. Most people who are in danger of dying from COVID-19 need to be put on ventilators. 50% of those put on ventilators still die, but the other 50% live. But in an unmitigated epidemic, the need for ventilators would be 30 times the number of ventilators in the United States. Virtually no one who needed a ventilator would get one. 100% of patients who need ventilators would die if they didn't get one. So the actual death toll from the virus would be closer to 4 million Americans -- in a span of 3 months. 8-15% of all Americans over 70 would die.

How many people is 4 million Americans? It's more Americans than have died all at once from anything, ever. It's the population of Los Angeles. It's four times the number of Americans who died in the Civil War...on both sides combined. It's two-thirds as many people as died in the Holocaust.

Americans make up 4.4% of the world's population. So if we simply extrapolate these numbers to the rest of the world -- now we're getting into really fuzzy estimates, so the margin of error is pretty great here -- this gives us 90 million deaths globally from COVID-19. That's 15 Holocausts. That's 1.5 times as many people as died in World War II, over 12 years. This would take 3-6 months.

Now, it's unrealistic to assume that countries wouldn't do ANYTHING to fight the virus once people started dying. So the Imperial College team ran the numbers again, this time assuming a "mitigation" strategy. A mitigation strategy is pretty much what common sense would tell us to do: America places all symptomatic cases of the disease in isolation. It quarantines their families for 14 days. It orders all Americans over 70 to practice social distancing. This is what you've seen a lot of people talking about when they say we should "flatten the curve": try to slow the spread of the disease to the people most likely to die from it, to avoid overwhelming hospitals.

And it does flatten the curve -- but not nearly enough. The death rate from the disease is cut in half, but it still kills 1.1 million Americans all by itself. The peak need for ventilators falls by two-thirds, but it still exceeds the number of ventilators in the US by eight times, meaning most people who need ventilators still don't get them. That leaves the actual death toll in the US at right around 2 million deaths. The population of Houston. Two civil wars. One-third of the Holocaust. Globally, 45 million people die: 7.5 Holocausts, 3/4 of World War II. That's what happens if we use common sense: the worst death toll from a single cause since the Middle Ages.

Finally, the Imperial College team ran the numbers a third time, this time assuming a "suppression" strategy. In addition to isolating symptomatic cases and quarantining their family members, they also simulated social distancing for the entire population. All public gatherings and most workplaces shut down. Schools and universities close. (Note that these simulations assumed a realistic rate of adherence to these requirements, around 70-75% adherence, not that everyone follows them perfectly.) This is basically what we are seeing happen in the United States today.

This time it works! The death rate in the US peaks three weeks from now at a few thousand deaths, then goes down. We hit, but don't exceed (at least not by very much), the number of available ventilators. The nightmarish death tolls from the rest of the study disappear; COVID-19 goes down in the books as a bad flu instead of the Black Death.

But here's the catch: if we EVER relax these requirements before a vaccine is administered to the entire population, COVID-19 comes right back and kills millions of Americans in a few months, the same as before. The simulation does indicate that, after the first suppression period (lasting from now until July), we could probably lift restrictions for a month, followed by two more months of suppression, in a repeating pattern without triggering an outbreak or overwhelming the ventilator supply. If we staggered these suppression breaks based on local conditions, we might be able to do a bit better. But we simply cannot ever allow the virus to spread throughout the entire population in the way other viruses do, because it is just too deadly. If lots of people we know end up getting COVID-19, it means millions of Americans are dying. It simply can't be allowed to happen.

How quickly will a vaccine be here? Already, medical ethics have been pushed to the limit to deliver one. COVID-19 was first discovered a few months ago. Last week, three separate research teams announced they had developed vaccines. Yesterday, one of them (with FDA approval) injected its vaccine into a live person, without waiting for animal testing. Now, though, they have to monitor the test subject for fourteen months to make sure the vaccine is safe. This is the part of the testing that can't be rushed: the plan is to inoculate the entire human population, so if the vaccine itself turned out to be lethal for some reason, it could potentially kill all humans, which is a lot worse than 90 million deaths. Assuming the vaccine is safe and effective, it will still take several months to produce enough to inoculate the global population. For this reason, the Imperial College team estimated it will be about 18 months until the vaccine is available.

During those 18 months, things are going to be very difficult and very scary. Our economy and our society will be disrupted in profound ways. Worst of all, if the suppression policies actually work, it will feel like we are doing all this for nothing, because the infection and death rates will be very low. It's easy to get people to come together in common sacrifice in the middle of a war. It's very hard to get them to do so in a pandemic that looks invisible precisely because suppression methods are working. But that's exactly what we're going to have to do.