What Happens After the Lockdown? (medium.com) 278
BeerFartMoron writes: Recently there has been a proliferation of modeling work which has been used to make the point that if we can stay inside, practice extreme social distancing, and generally lock down nonessential parts of society for several months, then many deaths from COVID-19 can be prevented. But what happens after the lockdown? In an article studying the possible effects of heterogeneous measures, academics presented examples of epidemic trajectories for COVID-19 assuming no mitigations at all, or assuming extreme mitigations which are gradually lifted at 6 months, to resume normal levels at 1 year.
"Unfortunately, extreme mitigation efforts which end (even gradually) reduce the number of deaths only by 1% or so; as the mitigation efforts let up, we still see a full-scale epidemic, since almost none of the population has developed immunity to the virus," writes Wesley Pegden, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematical Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. "There is a simple truth behind the problems with these modeling conclusions. The duration of containment efforts does not matter, if transmission rates return to normal when they end, and mortality rates have not improved. This is simply because as long as a large majority of the population remains uninfected, lifting containment measures will lead to an epidemic almost as large as would happen without having mitigations in place at all." "This is not to say that there are not good reasons to use mitigations as a delay tactic," Pegden adds. "For example, we may hope to use the months we buy with containment measures to improve hospital capacity, in the hopes of achieving a reduction in the mortality rate. We might even wish to use these months just to consider our options as a society and formulate a strategy."
"But mitigations themselves are not saving lives in these scenarios; instead, it is what we do with the time that gives us an opportunity to improve the outcome of the epidemic."
"Unfortunately, extreme mitigation efforts which end (even gradually) reduce the number of deaths only by 1% or so; as the mitigation efforts let up, we still see a full-scale epidemic, since almost none of the population has developed immunity to the virus," writes Wesley Pegden, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematical Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. "There is a simple truth behind the problems with these modeling conclusions. The duration of containment efforts does not matter, if transmission rates return to normal when they end, and mortality rates have not improved. This is simply because as long as a large majority of the population remains uninfected, lifting containment measures will lead to an epidemic almost as large as would happen without having mitigations in place at all." "This is not to say that there are not good reasons to use mitigations as a delay tactic," Pegden adds. "For example, we may hope to use the months we buy with containment measures to improve hospital capacity, in the hopes of achieving a reduction in the mortality rate. We might even wish to use these months just to consider our options as a society and formulate a strategy."
"But mitigations themselves are not saving lives in these scenarios; instead, it is what we do with the time that gives us an opportunity to improve the outcome of the epidemic."
The infection rate should still be lower (Score:5, Insightful)
That's simply because people have acquired some new habits, thorough hand washing and at least reduced distancing being among them. So where the previous spread rate was 2.3, now it might have been 1.8 (totally making it up). Every reduction in spread has exponential payoff.
Re:Lots of errors (Score:2)
Probably not a bad idea to cancel SPECTATORS at... (Score:3, Interesting)
But there's no data in support of the idea that the athletes themselves would have been in any danger whatsoever, were they to have faced off in empty gymnasiums [flying there and back on chartered airlines].
Of course, without the crowd noise, people would have quickly realized what an utterly ridiculous waste of time the modren game of bassetba
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It's not that out-there. Football* stadiums have been caught on a few occasions piping in extra crowd noise through speakers to help create the atmosphere, when the actual crowd is too small or unenthusiastic.
*Not handegg.
Re:SHOCKED AT A "MATH PROFESSOR" (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with the model is that it assumes a delay and nothing else.
But that is unrealistic.
A delay in mass infections gives us time to manufacture more ventilators and masks. We can make more chloroquine (although it is still not clear if it works).
Most importantly, a vaccine may be available soon, especially if we streamline the testing and approval process.
If mass infections are unavoidable and a vaccine is not ready, we may be better with controlled inoculations with skin pricks rather than waiting for people to be infected via their eyes or lungs. Inoculations reduced smallpox mortality from 30% to about 1% seven centuries before a vaccine was developed.
Re:SHOCKED AT A "MATH PROFESSOR" (Score:5, Funny)
Re:SHOCKED AT A "MATH PROFESSOR" (Score:5, Interesting)
Most importantly, a vaccine may be available soon
Most estimates are 12-18 months. I wouldn't call that 'soon' (althought for vaccine development, that would be some kind of record). We can't continue in this state for that long.
we may be better with controlled inoculations with skin pricks rather than waiting for people to be infected via their eyes or lungs. Inoculations reduced smallpox mortality from 30% to about 1%
Hm, I've never heard of this method before. I actually agree that we should try to do a controlled 'burn' (for lack of a better term) among zero risk populations. Give it to everybody under 15 (that has no underlying health conditions) and quarantine them for 2 weeks( they can even be quarantined with their friends, instead of the current situation of just facetiming each other). I have two young kids and would actually LIKE them to get this so that they won't be transmitting it. I could send THEM to the grocery store :-)
Although I have a feeling that our modern, risk adverse, overly-regulated society would never go for this.
This paper says the paper is worthless (Score:2)
> The problem with the model is that it assumes a delay and nothing else. But that is unrealistic.
Indeed. They figure that if you do absolutely nothing but delay, all you've done is delay. Um will yeah ...
> delay in mass infections gives us time to manufacture more ventilators and masks. We can make more chloroquine (although it is still not clear if it works)
There are at least five different medications that show promise, including preventatives. Assume that each drug has a 70% chance of being wort
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Or it is possible that, by retarding the virus spread through the population, the natural selection of a less aggressive strain is less likely to happen.
This puts the population not exposed yet to the current virus strain (or a milder variant) at risk of having to deal with potential deadlier strains of the same virus. Just like what actually happened in 1918.
I like your idea of controlled inoculations, but I don't know if it's been used in modern times.
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Or it is possible that, by retarding the virus spread through the population, the natural selection of a less aggressive strain is less likely to happen.
An important factor in the evolution of a less aggressive strain is the number of generations. A delay means a narrower but deeper transmission tree, so more generations. An evolutionary change to a less aggressive strain may be MORE likely if we can delay the spread.
The delay is achieved by reducing R0. If R0 drops below 1.0, the virus fades away. So the delay exerts strong evolutionary pressure on the virus to become more infectious. The best way to do that is to lighten the symptoms so there is more
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The other thing that slowing the spread really helps with is not overwhelming hospitals. If everyone gets COVID-19 at once they won't be able to cope, if everyone gets it over the space of a year there will be beds and equipment available to treat the symptoms.
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This (the practice of Variolation) worked for Smallpox because there are two strains of the Smallpox virus: Variola Major and Variola Minor. The Major variant is about 30x more deadly than the Minor variant.
The practice of Variolation was to infect people with the mild Variola Minor strain, which turns out to give immunity both to that strain, and the much more deadly Major one.
This practice wouldn't help with COVID-19 since although so far there are about 8 strains, all are equally deadly, so there is no b
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I am quite flattered to have my own personal troll (and a non-AC at that). But you sound deranged. I may be just part of the act, but if not, you should see a mental health professional.
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But the rest of the USA is pretty much utterly unaffected by this thing: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/a... [buzzfeednews.com] [buzzfeednews.com]
FYI that is a map of total infections, not infections per capita (NY still looks bad in infections per capita). Here's a map per capita by county [github.com].
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That's simply because people have acquired some new habits, thorough hand washing and at least reduced distancing being among them. So where the previous spread rate was 2.3, now it might have been 1.8 (totally making it up). Every reduction in spread has exponential payoff.
The problem is that even the extreme measures taken so far in Italy, etc., appear to be borderline insufficient. Italy's lockdown has gotten the daily confirmed case growth rate down to 4% (from ~20%), but even 4% means an utterly overwhelmed healthcare system (orders of magnitude worst than now) in a few months. I think it will continue declining, and will probably get to a point where the active case count starts to decline, rather than rising. But it's just barely enough.
This doesn't mean we're due f
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This doesn't mean we're due for perpetual lockdown, but it does mean we're probably in for a very long lockdown
If we were 100% locked down, the virus would die out within a month as it would have no one to spread it to. But of course that's not possible, so the next best option is to "flatten the curve" and prevent the 1% death rate from shooting up to 10% due to a lack of hospital capacity.
There are 924,000 hospital beds in the US [aha.org]. Assuming we reach herd immunity after 60% of the population has been infected, of which 10% need hospital beds, and each of those needing it for 2 weeks, we can do the math:
US population
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Yeah, because every time some crisis comes around and people have to modify behavior, they never go back to how they were before the crisis. See: SUV sales in 2006, today.
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Back in 2006, SUVs averaged around 14 MPG. Now they average around 21. So a 50% increase in MPG is substantial and makes that "bad behavior" a lot less of an issue.
I'm not sure where your source is, but I took a look at autos.com and saw very different figures. In 2006 all full sized SUVs were within the ranges of 13-16 / 17-21 mpg. In 2020 they range from 13-19 / 17-25. An improvement for sure, but more of a 10% improvement and not the 50% increase you mention.
Compact SUVs showed greater improvement because of more hybrid options, but those had over 20 mpg even in 2006 so they obviously aren't what you were referring to.
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Trump's EPA? Forget it, I won't trust anything from that administration.
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Still not sure how you get those numbers from your link. When I search for sport utility vehicles in 2006 I get similar figures to what I saw at autos.com.
Re:The infection rate should still be lower (Score:5, Insightful)
And as South Korea has demonstrated. If we had had a good testing regimen and contact tracing program early on... we could even drop R0 below 1.0.
The lockdown is to give us a do-over and pretend it's March 1st again but actually take this thing seriously.
MONOLITHIC HIGH TRUST SOCIETY (Score:2, Interesting)
Contact tracing only works in monolithic high-trust societies.
But ever since their crown jewel which was the 1965 immigration act, the Frankfurt School has turned much of the United States into one great big polyglot sewer of filth & degeneracy, wherein no hominid trusts another hominid.
OTOH, flyover country USA is still monolithic and high trust, and you see almost no COVID-19 whatsoever in monolithic/high-trust territory:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/ [buzzfeednews.com]
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OTOH, flyover country USA is still monolithic and high trust, and you see almost no COVID-19 whatsoever in monolithic/high-trust territory:
I wonder which will be Americas first megachurch cluster.
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"The intensity of color on this map will in large part reflect the extent to which different states have rolled out testing for the virus. New York has so far led the way."
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Even now delivery drivers are spreading the virus. Even now we venture into the world for essential activities like buying new guns. We are going to be a wolrd that is infected.
That is not to say we are to be immune. Until a vaccine is developed, we will have large number of cases. But the reason for the actions right now is to slow the spread to a mana
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Every reduction in spread has exponential payoff.
Except, it doesn't. Bob is 85 and has heart problems and is at high risk to die from COVID-19. Whether Bob gets infected in one week or six months doesn't matter. So unless we are prepared to crash our economy until a viable vaccine is developed (12 to 18 months if things go well), then Bob needs to take extreme measures to protect himself. Now there is some benefit to short term lockdown (time to get equipment/supplies/hospital space etc.) to help reduce deaths due to just having no beds/respirators av
Re:The infection rate should still be lower (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, the longer this goes on, the more data we have about which treatment approaches work and which ones don't, which could significantly improve the survival rate.
For example, I feel like the medical community is relatively sure at this point that IL-6 overproduction (a "cytokine storm") is the cause of the most serious complications (based on similar behavior in the original SARS). At least one small-group study in China appeared to show that IL-6 inhibitors (Tocilizumab/Actemra, specifically) halted the progression of the disease in its tracks. In that stud, patients with breathing troubles didn't end up progressing to require ventilator assistance, and even the ones who were pretty seriously messed up got better. To be fair, the study contained only 21 people, but some were pretty serious, and 19 were discharged in an average of 13.5 days after treatment [chinaxiv.org], and the other two were "recovering well" at the end of the study. Given that most of the patients were relatively late-stage, with lung lesions, a 100% success rate is way better than you would expect by chance (about a factor of 2.5 more live patients than you would expect). There are now active drug trials on that and other similar drugs, trying to verify that it wasn't a fluke.
And then, there's the study on chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine. I have less faith in that one, because the mechanism of action seems like a bit of a stretch, and the patients were apparently not nearly as severe, so the odds are higher that their improvement was due to random chance. But they're doing proper trials on that now, too.
And there are teams of researchers around the globe using computer modeling to try to design antivirals that either reduce the virus's ability to bind to receptors on cells or reduce its ability to reproduce. There's a decent chance that eventually one of those could yield fruit.
So the difference between getting it now and getting it at some arbitrary point in the future is probably the difference between having a 40% chance of surviving and a nearly ~100% chance. Of course, we have no way to know when the medical community will turn that corner until they do, which is what makes any sort of modeling challenging.
It's called Flattening the Curve (Score:3)
Re:It's called Flattening the Curve (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:It's called Flattening the Curve (Score:5, Insightful)
well, china and south corea disagree.
haven't read the paper, but the stress on the healthcare system is in any case a determining factor in the total number of deaths, this is bloody obvious, just look at italy and spain (and for the time being, possibly new york, but you can be sure there will be many more of these shortly). the effect multiplies because deficient protection just decimates medical staff and everything goes downhill from there.
it's true that flattening the curve just delays infections, but stressing medical capacity over a critical threshold will add a lot of deaths that could have been avoided, that's the whole point. the question is how big a pile of bodies can you tolerate before returning to 'normal life'.
other than that, any models make only sense on a local base, factoring in these issues. i don't think that global models are of any real use.
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To be fair to this paper, what it's legitimately saying is that the people who claim to "flatten the curve" are actually hiding an even bigger death rate by moving it to happen after the time they are modelling. Unless you do something more than that (like, for example testing [slashdot.org]) then there's no such thing as flattening the curve. I think this is likely because R0 is too high for coronavirus due to asymptomatic spreading so there's no easy way to achieve slow but stable infection.
Even if exactly the same number of people got it with a flattened curve (they wouldn't as R0 would end up lower and less would be infected).
Way less people would die, as the hospital system would cope better.
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flattening the curve would be the death curve. Infection rate is a pointless measurement. Not everyone is tested and not everyone actually presents with symptoms. But if you can slow the infection rate, then, hopefully, there would enough ventilators available to keep the mortality rate at its current rate. It is when there are no ventilators or medical beds that the 20% that have a severe reaction start dropping like flies with no medical help. Albuterol will only help to a certain extent,
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They already have a treatment with a 100% success rate
That's a lie. Stop spreading lies.
The word you're looking for is "vaccine" (Score:5, Insightful)
Mitigation buys us time to develop a vaccine. An innoculated public can then return to being social again.
Unfortunately a fully innoculated public is anywhere from 12-24 months away.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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Trump's budget calls for cutting the CDC and NiH funding in 2021. Congress will no doubt ignore that. But it does show in precise terms what that administration thinks about science and the American people.
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I'm not really certain of that. Obviously a vaccine for one strain does not work on another. I kind of feel the preliminary work that was done was almost all the work that would help make a Covid-19 vaccine. Shelving them did not really hurt imho.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
the psychologicals involved (Score:4, Interesting)
The psychologicals here are fascinating.
On the one hand, many folks will become depressed & commit suicide simply because of being unemployed, whereas others will be gleeful that they don't have to go to work "anymore".
Anecdotally, in my observations, the problem children, who were so horribly psychologically maladjusted when being shipped off to gubmint indoctrination centers every morning at 07:00, are now, after a couple of weeks at home with their parents, acting much more like little angels.
The psychological benefits of NOT being locked down in those Frankfurt School brainwashing prisons every day is nothing short of miraculous.
Again, in my anecdotal observations.
We have yet to see what happens, however, when all of these newly released felons realize that they can commit any crime short of murder and not be arrested by the police.
That could get very ugly, very fast.
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You pointed out most was I had in mind (but you're more comprehensive), so if society adopted some of the norms in lockdown as new normal, the worse case scenario might be that in 15 years the depression due to isolated society get to become the largest "silent killer" that's bigger than obesity.
In better cases we get to have a decrease in mental illness due to increased family interaction / scrutiny and less behavioral (mental) problems due to failures of education system and more sleep. Plus a likely pl
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not civil war, it would be civil disobedience. There is not enough cops and national guard to watch everyone coming and going. Basically the current strategy is to slow the infection rate in order for
1) hospitals to still handle the 20% that have severe reactions in order to keep mortality at 1%
2) buy time for the rollout of the new vaccine
3) prove immunity so that the antibody therapy becomes a viable treatment
4) give time for the virus to mutate, because most often a virus mutates to be less deadly, not t
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12 -24 Months of shutdown will effectively cause 70% unemployment (or worse), and will almost certainly end in civil war, possibly worse.
total shutdown won't be that long. the vaccine will indeed not be ready sooner, but improvements in care and treatment can progressively ease the situation at least to the point where shutdown can be scaled back somewhat. that will be the new normal for a long while but it won't be the same everywhere and it will be dynamic, a delicate balance between letting scores of people die or letting societies break down.
there is enough wealth in the world to address this issue. what i'm not so sure about is if those
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there is enough wealth in the world to address this issue.
You haven't been to most of the world, then. I can't even imagine what's going to happen when this explodes in places like India.
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Not to mention that most of the wealth in the world isn't held in cash or even physical goods. Bezos doesn't have $100B laying around in a vault. That is the value of stock he owns. Stocks aren't going to hold their values if things go very poorly. Further, selling large quantities of stock only devalues it further.
Re: The word you're looking for is "vaccine" (Score:3, Interesting)
Economies are human made concepts. Yes this does show your system was inadequate. Maybe fix it?
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Economies are human made concepts. Yes this does show your system was inadequate. Maybe fix it?
Goods and services are not "human made concepts", except in the most meaningless, pedantic sense. They are things that need to be made and done.
Numbers in computers that represent "dollars" are "human made concepts" though. You can pass those numbers out like candy, but if you don't let people go to work then the goods won't get made and the services won't get done.
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Mitigation buys us time to develop a vaccine. An innoculated public can then return to being social again.
Unfortunately a fully innoculated public is anywhere from 12-24 months away.
And that is optimistic. It took years to develop vaccines for SARS and MERS. These vaccines are still not readily available as testing is incomplete.
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Mitigation buys us time to develop a vaccine. An innoculated public can then return to being social again.
Unfortunately a fully innoculated public is anywhere from 12-24 months away.
And that is optimistic. It took years to develop vaccines for SARS and MERS. These vaccines are still not readily available as testing is incomplete.
The only part that takes a long time is the testing. To check it works. And to prove it is safe.
If plenty of people are happy to die to save the economy and American way of life. There should also be plenty of people after this drags on a while, willing to risk a partially tested vaccine to save the economy as well.
Assuming they didn't just want you to die, to save their place in the economy...
Re:The word you're looking for is "vaccine" (Score:4, Interesting)
If plenty of people are happy to die to save the economy and American way of life. There should also be plenty of people after this drags on a while, willing to risk a partially tested vaccine to save the economy as well.
The primary danger of a partially tested vaccine is the likelihood of vaccine-induced enhancement of the viral infections. This is the most significant reason these vaccines need to be tested thoroughly (or at least the most significant reason for a coronavirus vaccine). Four categories of infections where this is particular problematic are flavi-, paramyxo-, lenti-, and coronavirus. HIV vaccines have similar problems as well.
If they were just worried about side effects, the authorities may be willing to begin vaccination with limited trials. It is far less likely they will be comfortable with doing the same for a coronavirus vaccine though.
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Mitigation buys us time to develop a vaccine.
This isn't correct, for the same reasons you mention later in your post. We cannot keep up these mitigation efforts for 12-24 months. These efforts are simply to flatten the curve of infections, a term which is becoming cliche. If too many people need to be treated all at once when we aren't prepared yet, the mortality rate will climb as the infected lose access to adequate medical care.
None of these efforts have much chance to stop the majority of us from contracting this virus over the next year, with no
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Modeling is as good as assumptions (Score:2)
Fundamental Tenet of Ecological Dynamical Systems (Score:2)
There's a very fundamental tenet of ecological dynamical systems, which holds that if a parasite kills all of its hosts, then necessarily the parasite itself will also go extinct [by the very definition of parasitism].
Ergo it is ALWAYS in a parasite's best interest to evolve to be less lethal to its hosts.
Ergo ergo any model of a specific parasitism, which does NOT assume DECLINING mortality rates in the hosts [
And that's assuming that it "evolved". (Score:2)
Of course, that's assuming that COVID-19 actually "evolved", and requires one to ignore the intellectual 800 lb gorilla in the corner of the room, which is the possibility that COVID-19 was artificially engineered by humans...
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Of course, that's assuming that COVID-19 actually "evolved", and requires one to ignore the intellectual 800 lb gorilla in the corner of the room, which is the possibility that COVID-19 was artificially engineered by humans...
Even if it was artificially engineered by humans ..eyeroll..
It is still mutating [nextstrain.org] (slowly) and that doesn't mean it couldn't evolve further from here.
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There's a very fundamental tenet of ecological dynamical systems, which holds that if a parasite kills all of its hosts, then necessarily the parasite itself will also go extinct [by the very definition of parasitism].
Ergo it is ALWAYS in a parasite's best interest to evolve to be less lethal to its hosts.
What if the virus isn't sentient, and doesn't have a best interest to consider...
Evolution has plenty of dead ends. Everything doesn't always turn out for the best.
Possible, but highly unlikely. (Score:4, Informative)
That's possible, but it's HIGHLY UNLIKELY.
All of the laws of Ecological Dynamical Systems say that it is likely [with NEAR CERTAINTY] that the virus will evolve into something less lethal.
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Ergo it is ALWAYS in a parasite's best interest to evolve to be less lethal to its hosts.
It's only killing 1-2% of it's hosts, so it still has plenty of hosts left. No reason for it to evolve.
Wow - you just led me to something fascinating... (Score:4, Informative)
Thanks - you just caused me to learn an important little factoid.
There are about 325 million people [wikielections.com] in the United States, but only about 2.8 million deaths [cdc.gov] in the United States every year.
However, the overwhelming majority of people in the United States are of age 85 or younger [indexmundi.com], which, as a first order approximation, ought to give very roughly
So either the Boomer hump in the distribution hasn't yet started dying off, or else every year we are being invaded by a million more "immigrants".
/. discussion, no one can honestly make statements about the percentages of hosts killed by the virus because no one has any earthly idea as to the DENOMINATORS of the fractions involved.
And the numbers on foreign immigration [pewresearch.org] would tend to support the latter conclusion.
PS: As I stated way the heck up at the top of this
And beyond that, my point would have been that even if the virus were to infect 100% of the population every year, killing 1% = 1/100 of the population every year wouldn't amount to all that much, since we were already going to be losing much more than 1/85 of the population every year anyway [although, as I discovered, with this massive immigration invasion, it turns out the numbers are vastly less than that].
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The key assumption of all models I have seen is that mortality rate will remain consistent. This is obviously not true.
It's not obvious to me any existing treatments actually work.
as more treatments (e.g. Avigan, hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin) become available and then eventually a vaccine.
Don't count your chickens before they hatch.
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So you figure because they aren't yet proven that nothing ever will be and we might as well all eat a gun?
There is evidence for several treatments, and now id s great time to try them more widely and pick the best ones. Meanwhile, we get more ventilators and beds ready.
Test test test - we are not living in the 20th c (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, I was about to comment on that too. Testing and tracing will go a long way to mitigating the spread and should, in theory, allow even more time even though the general population is allowed to resume "normal" activities. Countries should be able to get onto a reliable digital tracing system and have much better testing in place so that people who are infected can still be isolated. That should mean even longer for containment, during which time there can be more modelling, more understanding of the vi
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Yeah, I was about to comment on that too. Testing and tracing will go a long way to mitigating the spread and should, in theory, allow even more time even though the general population is allowed to resume "normal" activities. Countries should be able to get onto a reliable digital tracing system and have much better testing in place so that people who are infected can still be isolated.
Yes the China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan model of digital tracking probably would allow a lot more 'normal' activities to safely resume.
Although there is at least one high profile Freedom Loving Country where that level of surveillance probably just wouldn't fly. Even if it ironically, would allow them to have more day to day freedom.
Depending on your government, it might not be worth giving up your Freedom for some freedom.
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How much use, really, would "contact tracing" be in a city where someone "comes in contact" with, oh, 200-1000+ people on a single shopping trip to Walmart? Or uses mass transit to get to work?
Seriously. If I'd tested positive for C19 10 days ago & they asked me to list everyone I'd "come in contact with" over the previous 5 days before that, my honest answers would have been:
1. Three or four specific people, and
2. Approximately 18,000 random strangers who'd been to one of the three Walmarts, four Publi
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It's almost as if we were in 1920 rather than 2020, living in a time before rapid testing for viruses was available.
Exactly.
0:35
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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How do you know that you can keep the health services from being overwhelmed without restrictions without major economical impact? Is there any data to suggest that? Additionally, while widespread testing is definitely very helpful, it is still going to miss a major data point as 80% of infected people don't need medical attention, so they will not get tested. This means that even if there was an unlimited supply of tests at medical facilities, you will miss 80% of people who have been infected but made it
Intermittent social distancing (Score:2)
As time passes, we will have more tests, we will have better habits and mitigation measures (facemasks?), we will have better treatments (quinine?). Social distancing will become less utilized, and eventually life will go back to normal.
still very early to be inventing conclusions (Score:2)
I have no doubt that some people are going to jump on this and say "just let it happen and we can get back to our lives" and claim that all of the restrictions were pointless and a waste of time. But in this immediate moment we're all just scrambling to get a hold of the spread. Sure, it's important to see how the modelling plays out and I'm sure that government decisions will be guided by those models as we move forward. But we shouldn't expect that anyone actually has a proper handle on what the "right" t
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I thought this was obvious. (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought it was obvious that we were locking down society and practicing social distancing in the long term until one of two things happened: either (a) we develop herd immunity through the development of a vaccine, or (b) we develop herd immunity because the disease runs through the entire population.
That's because of the number of asymptomatic carriers, and the fact that you cannot simultaneously test every human being in the world to know where those asymptomatic carriers are.
And I thought (a) was preferable to (b) because even in a best case scenario, if we assume it takes about 1/2 of the population to gain immunity through the infection and it has a 0.5% death rate--both fairly optimistic guesses--we're talking world-wide around 20 million dead. And that 0.5% death rate assumes a first-world health care system that hasn't become so overloaded we have to let people die for lack of the tools to save them. Without that the death rate jumps perhaps 6-fold or even 10-fold to around 200 million dead.
Which means I thought it was obvious that we were going to be in this for the long haul, meaning we need to start figuring out how we're going to live our lives for the next year or two in this state, or at least coming up with mitigation strategies (such as everyone wearing masks everywhere) which would help us resume some semblance of a normal existence until we either (a) have a vaccine, or (b) see tens of million dead of this thing world-wide.
Re: (Score:2)
Wearing a mask will help you from transmitting the disease if you are sick, although if you are sick you should stay home and not be in public. Here in Canada, this goes beyond merely a suggestion, and is actually an explicit directive.
Anyways, wearing a basic mask has an imperceptible contribution to avoiding catching the disease for an otherwise healthy person that is practicing good hand hygiene. The only time wearing a simple mask that covers your nose and mouth will make any statistically signifi
Mitigation measures (Score:2)
And a lot of countries are finding success with facemasks [maskssavelives.org]. In six months, our testing capability will have improved by an order of magnitude or more. So it is unreasonable to assume that the transmission rate will be the same six months from now as it was two months a
One Endgame Could Be Near Perfect Testing. (Score:2)
There is work underway to produce really fast at-home tests. A drop of blood, saliva or mucus on a strip that changes colour.
These things can be created in the millions, on existing equipment, fast. Billions after a decent ramp-up.
So we have the end game where everyone tests themselves every few days. If they are immune and not carrying, they can live normally. If they are not immune, then they have to be careful. But if everyone who tests positive reports it and quarantines themselves and their close assoc
Football (Score:2)
Let us take a group of low risks, healthy people. Prepare equipment aka PPE. have remedies ready ( whatever remedies are out there ). Infect them, quarantine them, then when they are over it it let them free with the rule they practice a modicum of social distancing. There is some ri
Coronavirus treatment not cure, reduces symptoms. (Score:2, Interesting)
If the major symptoms can be reduced to unpleasant but not health-threatening, we can all go back to work.
FDA Approves Anti-Malarial Drugs Chloroquine And Hydroxychloroquine For Emergency Coronavirus Treatment [forbes.com] (Mar. 30, 2020)
One doctor's experience is a step toward having a complete understanding of the use of that drug, with others:
Dr. Vladimir Zelenko has now treated 699 coronavirus patients [techstartups.com]
Re: (Score:3)
For those who have been skeptical: Dr. Zelenko is a member of a Jewish community. Any poor reporting would have received immediate, detailed complaints. What he has said is logical. Much more research is definitely needed.
Pure 100% grade A bullshit.
Re: (Score:3)
At least in the initial 80-person study, only 15% of the patients treated had any respiratory failure. So at most, only 15% of the patients even would have qualified for any of the drug trials. And emphasis on "at most". And one patient still died. This is basically consistent with what you would expect from a placebo, within the margin of error.
If the remaining 619 patients were similarly distributed, and th
Re:Coronavirus treatment not cure, reduces symptom (Score:5, Interesting)
Your dumbass has posted this in every coronavirus related thread on this site. THIS IS UNPROVEN BULLSHIT. Every source you list has significant right wing bias or is completely fabricated and has no backed data beyond one quack doctor claiming something that is statistically impossible (appendicitis has a great survival rate, but it is not 100%). It would be great if HCQ and a z-pak is an effective treatment, but until a decent study with real scientific methodology is completed we have no solid evidence to support this claim. Furthermore, dangerous rhetoric like this is putting Lupus and RA patients lives at risk because they are losing access to HCQ. These are not abstract people to me, I have several close friends that have serious Lupus cases and this drug is actively saving their lives.
I don't know if you're a bot, a paid shill, or just some zombie follower of pseudoscience quackery, but you really need to stop this shit.
Many top managers think only of maximizing profits (Score:2)
Lockdown then test / track (Score:3)
If you lock down hard enough (Like Wuhan) you can get a large decrease in the number of cases to the point where a S. Korea style tracking and isolating will work.
This has been suggested in many places for example (but many others besides):
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo... [medium.com]
https://covidactnow.org/ [covidactnow.org]
Which match casual simulations. The basic hammer part has been shown to work by China and the mitigation part by S. Korea.
I fear that the US leadership has a fundamental misunderstanding of the mathematics of the virus spread, and a lot of people will die as a reasult
Simply delaying the curve doesn't help all that much (see the covidactnow site above) we will still have a million or more dead if we let the virus generate herd immunity.
A vaccine will of course fix things, so that is a FAR higher priority than ventilators (which are hopelessly trying to fight an exponential with a linear).
Poor decision making in he US is going to cost a huge number of lives, AND destroy the economy. We don't need to accept this. Really - the Korea and China examples demonstrate that.
"what do we say to the god of death?" apparently the answer is "OK, I guess, whatever".
I've never been so deeply disappointed in our government. We have been outsmarted by a virus.
Lockdown buys us time. (Score:2)
It spreads out the peak of infections so that treatment facilities and the medical profession aren't so overwhelmed.
It spreads out the peak of deaths so that the funeral/mortuary profession isn't so overwhelmed.
It buys us time to produce, acquire, and set up treatment facilities.
It buys us time to scale up testing, and to research and develop better tests.
It buys us time to research and develop therapeutic treatments to improve survival rates.
And yes, it buys us time to research and develop vaccines.
Also, i
A little short sighted (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't believe that this still needs to be explained. By flattening the curve, you're not making a huge impact on the amount of infected and deaths. You're spreading that over a longer period of time as to not overwhelm hospitals. By not overwhelming hospitals, it means that cancer patients can still get their chemo. That people suffering from other life threatening diseases can get care that could save their lives. Care that wouldn't be there if hospitals are overrun by Covid19 patients. By flattening the curve you're allowing OTHER people that have otehr life threatening ailments to have a better chance at surviving whatever ails them.
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"you're not making a huge impact on the amount of infected and deaths. "
This is NOT true.
By staying separated and letting the virus die off, we are reducing deaths from 2.2 million to 200k.
Re: (Score:2)
It helps but not all that much. see
https://covidactnow.org/ [covidactnow.org]
You need enough of a lockdown to cause the virus to decline in order to get deaths down. Then after that, unless you are willing to do massive tracking the way S. Korea does, you face a continuing series of epidemics until there is a vaccine - maybe a year out.
I think you need to lock down hard - enough to pretty much extinguish the virus. The half-way measures in the US are just not enough to do that.
First things (Score:5, Funny)
First, I'm going to the barber. I needed a haircut when all the lockdown stuff started and now I'm looking like a wild orangutan.
Second, I'm gonna go get some barbecue and sit outside and eat it with other people. By the time the lockdown's lifted, I figure it will be mid-Summer and the weather will be really nice.
Everything after that is gravy. This shelter-in-place stuff is getting to me. I'm getting close to Netflix' final boss and when that's done, I'll have nothing left to do but talk to my wife, and don't nobody want that, least of all my wife.
Lifting lockdown isn't magic. (Score:2)
Distancing, ending handshakes and other disgusting practices etc will still be wise.
As for barbers, I've not paid for a haircut since 1990 and the time and fuel I'd have wasted otherwise are considerable. Commercial clippers (I use Andis) with #50 ceramic blades make short work of haircuts. Your barber will remain highly likely to be exposed so misbegotten nostalgia for haircutting social ritual is best dispensed with...forever.
You can choose not to be bothered. Harden up, adapt, relinquish trifles and pres
Masks and Hazmat suits (Score:2)
Go ahead, don't lockdown and keep partying (Score:2)
After 3 weeks of lockdown, Italy's daily new cases [worldometers.info] is finally coming down, after hovering around/below 6k every day for about a week, now at about 4k past two days.
Spain seemed to be a few days to a week behind Italy.
In another week, Italy could have this under control with around 150K total cases. By then, NY alone would have comparable number of cases.
Yeah, go ahead, believe this article and keep on partying. By mid-April the daily death toll would be so high that everyone would be screaming why the cit
Social isolation is the norm for /. readers. (Score:2)
I doubt very much will change in our lives lock down are not.
False duality (Score:3)
These types of discussions suffer from false duality. The two choices aren’t lockdown versus everyone doing everything like before. There's a thousand steps in between. And once testing becomes trivial in a few weeks, we will see lots of different levels of activity in different places depending of infection levels, mask availability, treatment efficacy and dozens of other factors.
There are already different conditions in different places, from total lockdown to just advising people to keep their distance.
Vaccine next year, tests ramp up next month, masks in the summer.
All the World's Words (Score:3)
What happens after the lockdown? Begin with recognizing terms not applied to prisons.
Value of the delay cannot be overstated (Score:3)
We have relatively few tests that are way too slow, insufficient understanding of treatment options, and no vaccine as well as the lack of capacity mentioned in the article.
If during the pause, we succeed in a 15 minute, 10$ test, then we can test much more aggressively and target a total lockdown among the relevant. The current 'mass quarantine' is tricky because they have to still let people go out to keep things going and so for some people it's frequennt contact with coworkers and customers and for everyone else it is occasional contact. If you knew where 99.9% of the disease was, you could have a real quarantine for those affected in a targeted fashion, and then the disease could burn out.
Obviously, it also gives time for the medical community to reflect upon the experiments done and conduct experiments to ascertain any strategies for improving the prognosis with early treatment.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Not arguing that China doesn't lie, but eve they couldn't hid a million deaths. There is lots of reason to think that what they are reporting is vaguely right (give a factor of 2 or something) and it is what you would expect as a result of their actions. The virus isn't magic - it spreads from person to person. If you prevent people from ever being near each other, the virus would die out.
The surprise would have been if it didn't work .
I think its much more likely that they are hiding the negative conseque
Re: (Score:2)
but eve they couldn't hid a million deaths.
But they don't have to HIDE any deaths. They just have to deny that the cause of death was COVID-19. And nobody is claiming a million deaths, but there is some evidence of tens of thousands, which in a country of 1.3 billion is barely a rounding error.
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mitigate until you have verifiable treatments or a vaccine. Afterwards things go back to "normal" with normal probably being a great depression.
Probably not a great depression afterwards. (It will still be bad) We understand a great deal more about the economy now and would obviously do things differently this time, in order to kickstart a recovery.
We at the absolute least know how to boom and bust. Even that would be better than a bust and flatline for multiple years.
Re: There is no "after the lockdown" (Score:2)
Tin foil hat time.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, the media has in general been saying that this *is* worse than the flu, agreeing with medical professionals who have offered their opinions on the subject.
Also, of course it is obvious that a mask can contribute to a measurable extent to prevent transmitting the virus by