The Coronavirus Thread

Discussion in 'Random Thoughts' started by purr1n, Mar 16, 2020.

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  1. Kernel Kurtz

    Kernel Kurtz Friend

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    While the current pandemic tends to kill primarily old or ill people, the Spanish flu in 1918 tended to kill young healthy people.

    You never can tell with mother nature.
     
  2. Deep Funk

    Deep Funk Deep thoughts - Friend

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    Until 1900 give or take, seasonal diseases, especially during warmer seasons were quite common. Also in Europe by the way.

    My dad is from the 40ties and 50ties. His view on this Covid19 outbreak is that we should simply keep ourselves clean and healthy. If you fall ill, quarantine yourself and hope you have mild symptoms.

    He grew up in a time without health and safety regulations as we know them today. He likes modern medicine but he is too sober to indulge in it. He is tougher than he looks.

    Especially the Western world has been spoiled in the recent decades. Fear and acceptance of death are not as common as they used to be say 50 years ago or even a century ago. Some people will be in for a shock.
     
  3. haywood

    haywood Friend

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    The problem isn’t just that the disease can be deadly, it’s that many people who are infected exhibit no symptoms and so it can spread very rapidly throughout the population. Then because so many have been infected those that do have more severe cases overwhelm the health care system. That affects not just people with the virus but like someone else mentioned those who need health care for other reasons as well.

    Of course we can’t just shelter in place forever, so it’s important that we get testing squared away. If you’ve already had it odds are you won’t be reinfected and do can’t spread it to others. There was an article about antibody testing in Santa Clara county I think where the number of infected was statistically 40-50x what the “confirmed” case number was.

    https://www.sfgate.com/news/editorspicks/article/Santa-Clara-antibody-test-coronavirus-results-case-15208216.php
     
  4. Kernel Kurtz

    Kernel Kurtz Friend

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    Life expectancy in most of the world has at least doubled in the last century. Partly due to modern medicine (esp antibiotics), and partly due to better sanitation, clean water, more food, etc. Check out the stats for South Korea, the country many are using as a benchmark for public health today;

    https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy#life-expectancy-has-improved-globally

    I expect these curves to flatten as we run up against some very hard problems. I don't think we will see a 100 year average this century, maybe never (and I won't see it in any case).
     
  5. crenca

    crenca Friend

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    This however is not related directly (though indirectly) to this Covid pandemic. It reminds me of my wifes old (now retired) partner. He would stand at the nurses station with the patient list and say "In England, his person would be dead, and this person would be dead, and this person...". He was from India, but had been trained in England and spent 20 years there practicing. USA is not there, aka full on rationed care - which is nothing less than a bureaucratically/politically directed reduction to the standard of care that politicians sell the public on promises of equality, reduced cost, "single payer",etc. Not that our system is not without problems, but I will take our problems over Canada's all day long.
     
  6. wormcycle

    wormcycle Friend

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    Agree, but if there is long wait time anyway, and if all non-essential surgery is stopped, and is likely to be stopped for months.. you get the picture. Is not going to get any shorter.
     
  7. penguins

    penguins Friend, formerly known as fp627

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    Now that this has gone on for a little more, it seems like there is a little more info about transmission via a casual pass by, grocery run, etc. - which also leads me to what I complained about many pages back - we should have used masks from the start and procurement issues =/= legitimate medical needs (and if we all had masks to start with there would probably would have been less cases overloading the system).

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/...-hair-newspaper-packages-mail-infectious.html


    Am also wondering when things will go back to normal here...
     
  8. Biodegraded

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    I think you're overstating the case in Canada - at least, that the same thing is happening in every Province. Here in BC, where COVID-19 hospitalizations have been reducing since early April, there's discussion of easing restarting elective surgeries in the next few weeks:

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/covid19-restrictions-bc-1.5535716

    As has been the case from the start, modeling of the projected load on the health system is being constrained by actual patient-number data - see the second and third graphs. In the third one, estimates of contacts (proxy for infections) as percentages of 'normal' are informed by measured changes in mobility (incl. Google location data, slide 29 of this pack):

    https://news.gov.bc.ca/files/COVID19_Update_Modelling-BROADCAST.pdf

    And estimates of hospitalizations at different 'contact percentages' come from epidemiological modeling (R0) and constraints from other jurisdictions (eg slide 18).

    I'd be very surprised if Public Health Ontario didn't have similar data and projections available for your local situation.
     
  9. Kernel Kurtz

    Kernel Kurtz Friend

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    Granted our wait times for elective surgeries can be long here and it sucks that some have been forced to wait even longer. It's now fairly clear that our preventative actions have kept (most) hospitals from being overwhelmed, as well as given them time to do some planning and restocking. I expect elective surgeries will be one of the first things that is restarted, and if case numbers start to rise, they will be the first to be cancelled again. I'm sure thought will also go into moving resources around to keep the COVID and non COVID patients as separate as possible. If I were 70 and waiting for a knee replacement, would I want to go spend time in a hospital treating a bunch of COVID patients? YMMV
     
  10. wormcycle

    wormcycle Friend

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    Well I am 69, my wife goes to work every day in a large teaching hospital, one floor above two COVID19 units with 60-70 patients. She works from her office, her team does the same. No one was infected. So I am not really that far form the CV reality. There are no problems with isolating the COVID19 units from the rest of the hospital, I am pretty sure all hospitals operate that way.

    What we can be reasonably sure about is that relaxing the restrictions would most likely increase the number of infections.
    But we have no idea whether that would or would not overwhelm the hospitals because we do not know what percentage of the population has antibodies today. It may be three times the number of confirmed cases, most likely, as the preliminary results from Stanford show, it is 10 times or more.
     
    Last edited: Apr 19, 2020
  11. Biodegraded

    Biodegraded Friend

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    The indication from the Stanford serology study that a large proportion of people have been exposed without getting (very) sick is compelling; but don't you find what happened in Wuhan, Italy, and NY compelling also?

    If we don't know what proportion of the population has antibodies today but we do know that enough people to overwhelm hospitals can get very sick very fast, I'm fine with erring on the side of caution/safety.
     
  12. monacelli

    monacelli Friend

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    Update of the plot of daily deaths in major metro areas. It looks like NYC has finally turned a corner, but too early to say what the trajectory will look like from here. Some cities lag NYC though, with deaths still increasing in Hartford and Philly. Deaths also not meaningfully decreasing in Detroit yet.

    [​IMG]
     
  13. Psalmanazar

    Psalmanazar Most improved member; A+

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    That’s a bad analogy. Roman cultural penetration and material goods are much more present in the late Empire, the Dominate, after the Western “big economy” collapsed, when the empire was mostly ruled by Balkan psychos heading a military machine that sidelined the economic big wigs and local aristocracies. The average person had a much higher standard of living in late Antiquity when the empire had long lost any pretensions of not being a military state with a more localized economy.
     
  14. Friday

    Friday Friend

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    I'd actually be more cautious in taking the Stanford results at face value. One issue is that they don't share their code for replicating their analysis, and another is that the number of positive tests they obtained is potentially consistent with a scenario where all the tests were false positives. This doesn't mean that none of their tests were true positives, but it does mean that the estimated prevalence could be too imprecise, to the point where it would be inadvisable to base policies on.

    Full breakdown on their analysis here, by a guy who isn't a bullshit quack like mercola and openly states the limitations of his knowledge with regards to the subject:
    https://statmodeling.stat.columbia....-in-stanford-study-of-coronavirus-prevalence/
     
  15. wormcycle

    wormcycle Friend

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    Random antibodies tests are being repeated in Massachusetts and other places so there will be no need for analysis and counter analysis by quacks or not quacks. That's just waste of time.
    No one is going to rely on one study, but the real quackery is assuming that the total number of infections equals the total number of confirmed positive tests. Particularly in light of the models that predicted hundreds of millions of infections.
     
    Last edited: Apr 20, 2020
  16. Kernel Kurtz

    Kernel Kurtz Friend

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    Of course hospitals always have infection controls in place. In spite of that though, hospital acquired infections are still unfortunately a thing, and CV is not going to help. In a lot of places health care workers are being infected at a much greater rate than the general population, regardless of their training and equipment. I hope your wife stays safe, if she is not on a ward obviously the risk is much lower.

    He does get right to the point. Even if the post infection rate is tens times the number found by PCR tests, it is still a small percentage of the population. Whether the real number is 2%, 4%, 8% - sure, it is great for downward revising the fatality rate, but we are still an awful long way from saying the other 90+% are safe, nevermind any sort of herd immunity. I think it is still safe to say the health care system is at risk if it allowed to get out of control.
     
  17. Zampotech

    Zampotech Friend

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    I absolutely agree with you.
    Of course, the coronavirus is a serious problem.
    I also think that the effeminacy of modern society is no less a problem. Pampered people can be subjected to primitive manipulation using only the fear instinct. Fear can paralyze the mind.

    I want to show you an old Russian cartoon "Сockroach"
    It is in Russian, so I will make a short translation:
    A cockroach appeared in the forest where happy animals live. He has already intimidated all the animals. An attempt to stage a rise against a cockroach when approaching led to a wave of panic among the animals. After that the cockroach demanded to allocate one child from each family of animals for its food. A kangaroo came running and mocked the animals ' fears of a cockroach. The animals drove the kangaroo out of fear. Arrived Sparrow did not know that the cockroach is a threat to animals and ate it.
    This fairy tale was written in the 30s and was banned because of an undesirable analogy with Joseph Stalin.



    I wish everyone and myself to maintain sobriety of mind, and to have healthy criticism and self-criticism.
     
    Last edited: Apr 20, 2020
  18. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    When my grandmother died, I made it a point to have my kids see her corpse in the casket. They were ages 7 and 11 back then. It didn't occur to me, but it was pretty horrifying for them to see the dead body a loved one who doted over them. My eldest the girl burst out in tears. I only found out later that it wasn't sadness but shock and fear. My grandmother's body had been in the freezer for 10 days so it didn't look so good either. My dad wanted to make sure that all the relatives had time to fly in and pay their respects. I figured a good life lesson because it will be me one day in that box.

    A few years ago, the mother of one my daughter's friends called my wife to bitch about my daughter adding her daughter to midnight group chat that included a boy. Oh wow, chatting with a boy in junior high school! The harm.

    It's no longer helicopter parenting in the USA where parents constantly hover over. It's lawnmower parenting, where parents remove all obstacles and risks, leaving their children as fragile snowflakes. I blame "cancel" culture among our young ones as a result of this. Can't handle someone being Christian and giving to associated charities? Out them as anti-LGBT, shame them on the Internets, and boycott their businesses. Heck, maybe even go to their businesses and start up trouble. All because they can't handle that they can't get their way.
     
  19. YMO

    YMO Chief Fun Officer

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    Agreed. My friends generation (including my other half) are all the really hard left Bernie supporters who are Bernie or burst. When I attempt to talk to most of them, they are so hostile to viewpoints that they are disagreeing that it is quite scary.

    Then again, it is not only those who are on the left who is having this problem. I also have a few friends on the right who get triggered if you call Trump a socialist or point out the tons of flaws of their viewpoint. Nowadays I guess people want to live in their bubble.

    So here's something that I like to point out. So my GF got really pissed/triggered that I read one of the Milo Yiannopoulos books. For her, reading anything from him is reading hate speech. She had a problem that I read something by him. So she will never read the book, and will say the book sucks since it was written by Milo. So I read his Dangerous good a little while back. Some points he made was fair, but most of it I disagree with period. It is the fact that you can't even attempt to read it without being shit on is scary. Hell, I'm very Pro-Choice as long as no one pays for it with public funds. I still read some stuff from the Pro-Life moment because living in a bubble sucks. Is a lot of points of the Pro-Life moment IMO I disagree with? Yeah, I do. However, now we are getting to the point that even attempt to read something that is non-popular is enough to be banned. Borderline censoring speech by some of my friends at least from my viewpoint. And I f'ing hate it. I can even point out evidence to some of my friends that their data is wrong and they get so pissed off that they will not want to talk to you.

    I dunno man, you just can't live in a bubble. I also noticed that most of my friends on both side of the political crap had parents who like you said were lawnmowered. I still thank my dad at the time for teaching me to clean up my bed room and also READ before signing. I think it is due to both of my parents were immigrants to the US, and they brought their biases and different viewpoints in raising children.

    Standard Rant Over
     
    Last edited: Apr 20, 2020
  20. Deep Funk

    Deep Funk Deep thoughts - Friend

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    Reminds me of my youth at home. I was not quite allowed to read occult or otherwise harmful work because "Christianity." Philosophy my mother did not understand but when she saw a book about humanism she flipped.

    Thing was I was simply curious even when I was still religious. Yet she wanted to share the experience of Lord of the Rings with us because "Christian values" and whatnot.

    At one point I kept asking why until she was out of answers. She always wanted to be right but when you don't know, you don't know and she gave up. I was not doing stupid things with my life. Additionally after a while authority based on religious stupidity deserves the death stare. (Not joking, my family is a cluster-f**k of drama, stand your ground or get trampled on. I am happy I no longer mingle with them.)

    Once I had enough money I left and never looked back. That bubble of stupidity would kill any potential I could have in the future.

    I see a big bubble now in how the average citizen now in NL is stuck in complacency. People are so complacent that they need a Covid19 application to feel safer. An application adds nothing. Facing the fact that you know too little to save your own life (even if you were a medical specialist) will make you realise that your mortality is on the balance.

    Memento f'ing mori.
     
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