COVID-19

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BWND
Posts: 76
Joined: Sat Jun 02, 2018 3:08 am

Re: COVID-19

Post by BWND »

I'd imagine Chenda is correct. There will be lots of people that perhaps don't even have a washing machine. I'm thinking about big share houses and the like. In the UK, dry cleaners and laundrettes are essentially the same thing. You don't see too many of those laundrette shops with a pile of coin operated washer driers.

7Wannabe5
Posts: 9372
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 9:03 am

Re: COVID-19

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

In today’s White House press conference, Dr. Birks stated that CDC independent analysis of incoming U.S. data was very much in alignment with the IHME projections Jacob linked above.

So relieved the U.S. will be moving forward based on this model!

George the original one
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Joined: Wed Jul 28, 2010 3:28 am
Location: Wettest corner of Orygun

Re: COVID-19

Post by George the original one »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Sun Mar 29, 2020 6:07 pm
So relieved the U.S. will be moving forward based on this model!
Relieved, but look at how huge the uncertainty cloud is when you look ahead more than two weeks! I mean, for Oregon at the peak, they're estimating we'll need from 65 to 3,000+ beds.

thrifty++
Posts: 1171
Joined: Sat May 23, 2015 3:46 pm

Re: COVID-19

Post by thrifty++ »

76 new cases in NZ leading to 589 total probable and confirmed cases.

Average of 1,728 tests per day being done.

12 in hospital expecting to be released soon - but still only one person in serious/critical condition.

3 people have been arrested for breaching lock down rules.

So that's a fatality rate of 0.17% and a serious/critical rate of 0.34%. Hopefully things continue this way.

There was a group of 60 backpackers at a party that the police attended in Queenstown. Really ticks me off. They should all be put into quarantine and deported.

bostonimproper
Posts: 581
Joined: Sun Jul 01, 2018 11:45 am

Re: COVID-19

Post by bostonimproper »

Devastating effect of misinformation: hundreds die in Iran from drinking methanol, trying to prevent coronavirus.

Tyler9000
Posts: 1758
Joined: Fri Jun 01, 2012 11:45 pm

Re: COVID-19

Post by Tyler9000 »

Novartis CEO says Malaria drug is biggest hope against coronavirus

"Pre-clinical studies in animals as well as the first data from clinical studies show that hydroxychloroquine kills the coronavirus," Narasimhan told the newspaper.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/novartis ... 52054.html

classical_Liberal
Posts: 2283
Joined: Sun Mar 20, 2016 6:05 am

Re: COVID-19

Post by classical_Liberal »

Ego wrote:
Sun Mar 29, 2020 3:21 pm
He has been contacted by several headhunters offering $5500 per week plus housing to relocate to Seattle.
Also, thats net pay. Nurse travelverse for ICU has 5K weekly net contracts in many places at this point. Temp lifting of license restrictions cuts down on the BS/waste of time bureaucratic nonsense. The only time I've seen contracts paying this much have been very temporary union strike busting gigs.

CS
Posts: 709
Joined: Sat Dec 29, 2012 10:24 pm

Re: COVID-19

Post by CS »

That is definitely war wages. I think oncology is going to take a bit hit over the next 12-18 months unless they can get some mandatory testing in place - it is by definition a department of high risk people.

thrifty++
Posts: 1171
Joined: Sat May 23, 2015 3:46 pm

Re: COVID-19

Post by thrifty++ »

I keep hearing reports from everywhere about insufficient medical equipment to deal with this pandemic. This seems to be a big part of the problem. I noticed that lots of countries are rejecting equipment from China due to insufficient standard. https://www.msn.com/en-nz/news/world/co ... spartanntp

Im wondering where more equipment of decent quality is going to come from when so many places seem to be reporting supply problems. Im wondering what countries manufacture large quantities of relevant equipment of decent quality. I suspect maybe Germany might be one place and that might be part of why they are managing it so well with such low fatality rates.

IlliniDave
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Joined: Wed Apr 02, 2014 7:46 pm

Re: COVID-19

Post by IlliniDave »

thrifty++ wrote:
Mon Mar 30, 2020 3:34 am
Im wondering where more equipment of decent quality is going to come from when so many places seem to be reporting supply problems. Im wondering what countries manufacture large quantities of relevant equipment of decent quality. I suspect maybe Germany might be one place and that might be part of why they are managing it so well with such low fatality rates.
In the future we're probably headed to a system with a lot more built-in redundancy. Lots of countries will cultivate or expand the ability to produce basic medical supplies themselves. So in the future I think there will be numerous choices.

I'm not sure what to make of the issues regarding quality/efficacy of Chinese-made stuff reported recently. Maybe it's simply the pains of restarting production. Could be PPE is being scrutinized more and the quality of the Chinese-made stuff is consistent with what they were doing before covid-19.

ertyu
Posts: 2893
Joined: Sun Nov 13, 2016 2:31 am

Re: COVID-19

Post by ertyu »

IlliniDave wrote:
Mon Mar 30, 2020 6:26 am
I'm not sure what to make of the issues regarding quality/efficacy of Chinese-made stuff reported recently.
This is a combination of two things. One, a lot of stuff was manufactured fast, and had issues. Two, there are crooks, and there's a language barrier. A sentiment I've heard on the internet, by Chinese people: "well, if you buy from unlicensed companies, what do you expect??' Now, I don't know what licensing this is, but it seems to me that some cost-cutting western dumbass went for the cheapest thing without doing any dd on the supplier and then blamed it on "the chinese" when the supplier never claimed to have whatever license this was in the first place -- but then the westerner didn't ask for it either. Internally, the chinese gvt also had an issue with fake masks and supplies, tons of which were confiscated and destroyed + people prosecuted, but I guess the sociopathic crooks who were not above trying to sell it to their own medical professionals and people were also not above trying to peddle some of it abroad.

chenda
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Location: Nether Wallop

Re: COVID-19

Post by chenda »

Might be a stupid question but why is it proving so difficult to quickly manufacture things like ventilators ? Too much outsourcing, fragmented supply lines, lack of in house expertise ? I would have thought companies like Boeing or Airbus must have enough analogous expertise to manufacture this kind of thing.

ertyu
Posts: 2893
Joined: Sun Nov 13, 2016 2:31 am

Re: COVID-19

Post by ertyu »

costs money to switch from whatever they were making originally then switch back. they don't want to - they lobbied trump not to invoke the wartime act that forces them because "muh profits." trump is an idiot who cares about whether CEOs approve of him and not about the good of his country. So he sucked at invoking that act to the full extent and in a timely fashion - just like he sucked at everything else when it comes to this epidemic

now, i am not american. technically, this isn't even my country. but i lived in the states for a number of years, and it makes me mad that this is being done to the american people, so many of whom will die absolutely needlessly (or lose loved ones to needless death). the expertise and the wealth exists in the US that the extent of the deaths was completely unnecessary. politicians telling gullible rednecks that all is good so they have time to get out of the stock market at the top. a president who would ration away medical supplies from democratic states because hey, they wouldn't vote for him anyway.

fucking unconscionable.

nomadscientist
Posts: 401
Joined: Fri Mar 13, 2020 12:54 am

Re: COVID-19

Post by nomadscientist »

Money cant be readily converted into anything you want with arbitrary time pressure. There are hard bottlenecks in places and even where there arent much of the ability to build or do anything is knowledge in the minds of a finite workforce.

Jason

Re: COVID-19

Post by Jason »

chenda wrote:
Mon Mar 30, 2020 7:27 am
Might be a stupid question but why is it proving so difficult to quickly manufacture things like ventilators ? I would have thought companies like Boeing or Airbus must have enough analogous expertise to manufacture this kind of thing.
With Boeing you'd have to factor in the cost of additional crash carts.

7Wannabe5
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Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 9:03 am

Re: COVID-19

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Modern production only remotely resembles the production line of the WWII era. For instance, modern auto production is “over-engineered” towards keeping human workers safe while working with robots. It is my understanding that the best a giant corporation that usually operates as a conglomeration of multitude of highly specialized parts can do to help is to team up with companies that are already producing ventilators or something like unto ventilators and lend them some muscle in breaking through limiting factors to boosting production.

My other thought was that it might be quicker to get 1000 small generalized shops that usually do custom or prototype work on the task. NOTE: I am not a manufacturing engineer-just somebody likely to have had coffee date with one.

IlliniDave
Posts: 3845
Joined: Wed Apr 02, 2014 7:46 pm

Re: COVID-19

Post by IlliniDave »

ertyu wrote:
Mon Mar 30, 2020 7:40 am
costs money to switch from whatever they were making originally then switch back. they don't want to - they lobbied trump not to invoke the wartime act that forces them because "muh profits." trump is an idiot who cares about whether CEOs approve of him and not about the good of his country. So he sucked at invoking that act to the full extent and in a timely fashion - just like he sucked at everything else when it comes to this epidemic
Cheap, good, fast. Pick any two.

And that's before the regulatory stuff kicks in, which prohibits "fast". Probably takes years normally to get a medical device like a ventilator approved for use in an ICU from starting at the drawing board. Non-medical device companies don't have the right infrastructure to deal with that regulatory bureaucracy.

That's one of the unseen problems of mammoth regulation. You narrow the field of suppliers to almost nil. Small companies can't afford the regulatory overhead, few others want to eat the cost of entry to such a market. Even with streamlining that's been done over the last month, my understanding is that the barrier is intimidating.

Asking companies that are seeing their revenue strangled to bear the entire startup cost is another issue. Even among large corporations relatively few are sitting on a significant hoard of cash.

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Bankai
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Bankai »

The first sign of times to come? It's all good to be self-isolating as working from home introvert with a massive war chest. It's a completely different world for many others out there on no income/savings. You can't just shut a society for months and expect everyone to obey - this is aginst human nature.
Police with batons and guns have moved in to protect supermarkets on the Italian island of Sicily after reports of looting by locals who could no longer afford food.
https://www.gulf-times.com/story/659546 ... on-looting

ZAFCorrection
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Joined: Mon Aug 14, 2017 3:49 pm

Re: COVID-19

Post by ZAFCorrection »

Manufacturing tools have have usually been very specifically designed and hacked to within an inch of their life to optimize for producing exactly one kind of part. Same goes for every process. To get from widgets to ventilators, you're probably better off just moving the engineers to a warehouse with generic parts and tools standing by. The original factory is not going to get you anywhere faster unless there is a lucky coincidence.

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Bankai
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Bankai »

The moral debate is not lives vs money. It is lives vs lives. It will take months, perhaps years, if ever, before we can assess the wider implications of what we are doing. The damage to children’s education, the excess suicides, the increase in mental health problems, the taking away of resources from other health problems that we were dealing with effectively. Those who need medical help now but won’t seek it, or might not be offered it. And what about the effects on food production and global commerce, that will have unquantifiable consequences for people of all ages, perhaps especially in developing economies?

Governments everywhere say they are responding to the science. The policies in the UK are not the government’s fault. They are trying to act responsibly based on the scientific advice given. But governments must remember that rushed science is almost always bad science. We have decided on policies of extraordinary magnitude without concrete evidence of excess harm already occurring, and without proper scrutiny of the science used to justify them.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The ... s-we-think

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