COVID-19

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jennypenny
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Re: COVID-19

Post by jennypenny »

Augustus wrote:
Thu Apr 30, 2020 11:03 am
People who are high risk can stay home, no one is asking you to go outside.
But that's not really true. If you're high risk and everyone at your place of employment goes back to work, are you going to be allowed to stay home? What about if you only have a family member who's high risk? How tolerant do you think employers will be? If they want to do a staggered return to work/school, they'll have to make sure that those who should continue to stay home are protected from being punished. Even with that though -- if obesity is a risk factor, are you going to make everyone who's overweight stay home? What's the cut off for high risk? They could lower the full retirement age for social security and then ask all 62+ to stay home. I think it gets kinda tricky with younger people though. Employers are not known for being magnanimous.

btw ... I didn't say everything was fine. My point was that 25% unemployment is very different today than 90 years ago.

7Wannabe5
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Re: COVID-19

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@jp:

I agree with your take, but it is my understanding that unemployment benefits are now available for anybody who quit (or was forced to resign) their job because high risk. However, it may require a medical note.

Freedom_2018
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Freedom_2018 »

I see the vaccine logic....so in other words if R0 < 1 we do not need a vaccine...so from a pro-lockdown approach...let us only do things that keep R0 <1...which currently has meant blanket lockdown for most people (since any vaccine seems far off...and even if available we will have same issues that you mentioned above ). That would be the expert/logicians approach which is probably what govts have been following.

Now comes the real world impact of these decisions and maybe time to take a scalpel approach versus hammer... especially for a virus that is not that highly morbid. I wonder if by flattening curve we have allowed a longer time for virus to mutate into more harmful (could be less too) variants for infection round 2?

7Wannabe5
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Re: COVID-19

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@Freedom_2018:

The virus replicates through MANY generations with possibility of mutation in every replication within each body it infects, so meat space allotted is likely more important than time allotted towards mutation.

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Ego
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Ego »

Riggerjack wrote:
Thu Apr 30, 2020 9:19 am
What are the long term effects, because that is the more relevant question to ask, even with her risk factors.

The truth is, we don't know.
Yes, fear of the unknown.

The words "ground glass opacity" paints a terrifying picture. Lung opacities are normal with pneumonia.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/cor ... ung-damage
Some lung damage seen in the Wuhan study cases are likely to gradually heal or disappear, Wang and colleagues suspect. However, in some patients, lung abnormalities will harden into layers of scar tissue known as pulmonary fibrosis. That scarring stiffens the lungs, making it hard to get enough oxygen. People with pulmonary fibrosis typically suffer shortness of breath, limiting their ability to be physically active.

Certain patients are most at risk of developing this type of scarring. They include elderly patients who’ve had severe bouts of COVID-19 pneumonia, patients with other illnesses such as cancer or diabetes and those with other lung conditions caused by smoking or pollution.


How many of those people had lung opacities and damage prior to covid? The complications are the same as those experienced by people who have had sever non-covid pneumonia. It takes time for lungs to heal.

jacob
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Re: COVID-19

Post by jacob »

@Freedom2018 - Yes, it's called "the hammer and the dance" which is a lockdown for the first wave following by suppression for subsequent waves. This is the strategy followed by most countries that acted too slow to apply the suppression strategy to the first wave that faster and more effective countries (New Zealand, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore) succeeded in. See https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavi ... 9337092b56 ... The point of the lockdown was to hit the reset button.

The suppression strategy is cheap in both money and lives but it requires very effective and functional governing with people doing "the right thing" in terms of thwarting the virus. Most the countries which successfully employed the suppression strategy had prior experience from SARS both in terms of governmental institutions and public memories, so there was no initial denial or dawdling.

Freedom_2018
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Freedom_2018 »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Thu Apr 30, 2020 11:54 am
@Freedom_2018:

The virus replicates through MANY generations with possibility of mutation in every replication within each body it infects, so meat space allotted is likely more important than time allotted towards mutation.
Not sure how to think about that.

What if say we had not done any mitigation and allowed people to carry on as usual...nay encourage them to congregate so that the virus ran rampant through the masses....so lots of meat space as you say...would that result in more mutations versus current 'flatten the curve' abd extend timelines approach?

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Alphaville
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Alphaville »

Augustus wrote:
Thu Apr 30, 2020 12:03 pm
My main point this entire time is that this virus is not containable.
As long as the Pences of this world refuse to wear a mask when visiting a hospital, yeah, not containable.

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Re: COVID-19

Post by jacob »

@Freedom2018 - For an RNA virus with this gene size, virtually every single "offspring" from every single infected cell will be a mutant rather than a clone of the original virus. Some of these mutants will do better and some will do worse in spreading to other cells (where they will mutate again) and ultimately to other humans.

In general, as infectious diseases evolve (in the aggregate) the surviving virus "individuals" tend to become more asymptomatic and less virulent so as to have a better chance of infecting others before either killing the host or putting them in sufficient isolation to prevent further spread. IOW, the symptomatic side-effects of the disease provides an incentive to evolve away from expressing them.

If we let the virus wash through the population, we're removing this feedback mechanism.

On the flip side, it might be argued that trying to thwart the virus like that might induce it to become more virulent or aggressive so as to jump sooner and further. However, that's not how it usually works. Very aggressive vira (high attack rate) usually start out that way, typically after jumping from some reservoir. Ebola is a good example of that. An example of a disease which has become more benign over time would be chicken pox.

Freedom_2018
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Freedom_2018 »

Alphaville wrote:
Thu Apr 30, 2020 1:15 pm
As long as the Pences of this world refuse to wear a mask when visiting a hospital, yeah, not containable.
I think it is more of a political statement. Leaders of the 'most powerful nation on earth ever' would not want their followers to think we have been muzzled (mask) by China.

I totally understand the move and in some ways to me (a naturalised US citizen), there is something of the American Spirit about it.

There I said it 😁

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Alphaville
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Alphaville »

Freedom_2018 wrote:
Thu Apr 30, 2020 1:27 pm
I think it is more of a political statement. Leaders of the 'most powerful nation on earth ever' would not want their followers to think we have been muzzled (mask) by China.

I totally understand the move and in some ways to me (a naturalised US citizen), there is something of the American Spirit about it.

There I said it 😁
so the american spirit is all about the reckless endangerment of others for “the looks” and then blaming someone else for it?

wow...

7Wannabe5
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Re: COVID-19

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Covid is RNA based, so it mutates more easily than DNA based viruses. Random mutation would likely be a function of population over time. The only way the virus population can increase is by finding another body to infect. In my amateur opinion, this virus does not kill fast or frequently enough to experience selection pressure towards more mild mutation. However, if it is the case that some majority of humans currently have innate physiological barrier to infection, there may be some selection pressure towards breaching that barrier in the future. That future could arrive more quickly if the virus encounters a large unprotected population of youth such as in Africa. Obviously, if a virus can mutate to the extent it can hop across species, it could also mutate so as to infect more/different humans.

Freedom_2018
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Freedom_2018 »

Alphaville wrote:
Thu Apr 30, 2020 1:31 pm
so the american spirit is all about the reckless endangerment of others for “the looks” and then blaming someone else for it?

wow...
No.. actually currently it seems like it is to sit home and indulge in essential services like smoking pot, drinking and ordering pizzas while being internet tigers and posting 'stay at home' virtue signalling memes on Facebook while calling everyone a 'hero' while ardently waving their victim card.😁

Seriously though, if people truly don't understand (whether you agree or not) with what I said above, they really are the ones still scratching their head about how an unsuitable person like Trump won...other than believing in foreign collusion or that half of their countrymen are racists 🙂

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TheWanderingScholar
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Re: COVID-19

Post by TheWanderingScholar »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Thu Apr 30, 2020 8:45 am
@TheWanderingScholar:

I was roughly quoting “A Short History of Progress” by Wright. My initial take was we were heading on runaway train to pandemic due to minimization of degrees of separation between stressed wilderness and international travel. The economy/finance would be obvious candidate for house of cards. Sociopolitical discourse / decision making would be dinosaur, because given how much worse the plague was, it seems to me that 1665 decision making was actually better on many levels and people had the same inborn tendency towards letting sentiment or momentary personal druthers influence risk taking. However, I agree that decent argument could be made for applying each to any.
Oh crap. Apologies that reference went over my head.

simplex
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Re: COVID-19

Post by simplex »

jacob wrote:
Thu Apr 30, 2020 9:28 am
Germany started opening up on 4/20 (one of the first EU countries to do so) and have subsequently seen R0 increase from 0.7 to 0.96. Here comes the dance.
It seems R0 in Germany decreased (30.4: 0.76, see https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/N ... -30-de.pdf)

The German calculation model uses nowcasting, and is one of the most advanced in use now (in terms of data basis and real world applicability). If you read German, a nice overview is here: https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/Infekt/Ep ... /17_20.pdf .

Most models in use are SIR type models, but with many populations, modelling different age groups and/or social/occupational groups. Additionally these models sometimes contain stochastic variables or Monte-Carlo type simulations are done. Sometimes even Bayesian type stats.
For large countries or heterogeneous countries, sometimes different models are used for different areas (cities / rural). The nice thing of these models is that it is relatively straightforward to include information like overall traffic density (i.e. from telecom data).

Agent based models are of limited use for overall prediction, because there are to many parameters to fiddle with, easily leading to overfitting and/or unstable models.

Hristo Botev
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Hristo Botev »

Friend sent this to me this morning; thought it was a good read on how we got to where we're at (and why so many of us are so confused): https://www.theatlantic.com/health/arch ... ty/610819/

jacob
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Re: COVID-19

Post by jacob »

@simplex - As it happens, I do read German, so thank you for the reference. It's interesting how this kind of modelling is very similar to nucleosynthesis calculations which I used to do for a living. Here, too, we would sometimes try to infer unmeasurable reaction rates (the analog to beta and gamma) between various isotopes (the analog to S, I, R, etc.) based on astronomical [spectroscopic] observations of the abundance of those isotopes in various stars (the analog to case counts of various demographics). Other methods than ODEs were also used.

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Alphaville
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Alphaville »

Freedom_2018 wrote:
Thu Apr 30, 2020 1:45 pm

Seriously though, if people truly don't understand (whether you agree or not) with what I said above, they really are the ones still scratching their head about how an unsuitable person like Trump won...other than believing in foreign collusion or that half of their countrymen are racists 🙂
I think most reasonable people can understand the confluence of narcissism with obtuseness without having to agree with it.

As for racist neighbors... well...

China China China China China China China, yes? :lol:

I mean, I detest communism, but we knew far in advance things they didn’t tell us, and our own narcissism and obtuseness got in the way. Let’s blame everything on China though. So foreign!

-

Anyway, we should get back to “health questions” and learn to respect hospital rules.



I’m still waiting for tests, masks, and gloves. I lie: I have a limited quantity of gloves for emergencies. And I gave my N95 maks to my wife’s parents who need them more. But I’m still waiting for our country to catch up with what’s really needed. Wishful thinking is not a cure—it’s a disease more dangerous than the virus.

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Alphaville
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Alphaville »

I mean I’m still waiting for a test that can tell me if I’ve already been exposed and have developed antibodies, but we’re only able to test critical people in the USA. Everyone else is sent back home to self-quarantine.

We know from South Korean studies that reinfection is highly unlikely.

So how about we answer that question before we start ask things like “when is bla bla blah reopening”?

Show me the tests. I have great insurance but will gladly pay out of pocket.

This aticle is now... 37 days old?

https://medium.com/@ASlavitt/why-we-don ... fee1c47264

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Alphaville
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Alphaville »

Augustus wrote:
Thu Apr 30, 2020 6:24 pm
Santa is not real, and there is no tooth fairy. :lol:
Correct. The tooth fairy won’t save you from a Covid-related stroke even if you’re not old yet.

Locked