COVID-19

[slowtraveler]

There's now 3 types of the ccp virus spreading around:

https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020 ... 2004999117

The channel has a bias, which doesn't?, but I haven't found anything inaccurate from them yet and they cover more up to date than any other source I've found: they cover the 3 types as well here.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2yrVoxNB9gQ

[steveo73]

In the end, nothing changes the scientific fact that the only way to effect a cure for a virus is through herd immunity.

What about social distancing until the virus dies out ? What about developing a vaccine ?

There isn't one way only to deal with this situation. I understand personal opinions on various ways of handling this situation but the idea that the only factual way to deal with any virus is to just let everyone catch it is completely delusional. I doubt that this has ever worked in the past. Border controls and quarantining would have been used to cope with viruses over time. Vaccines and other scientific advancements have also been highly successful.

[Ego]

@steveo, A vaccine is herd immunity. That is 18 months away. A virus with these characteristics - a pandemic - will spread regardless of social distancing. It simply slows the spread.

[classical_Liberal]

Epidemiologist and virologists cannot be the final word on these decisions. We need a council or group who can understand the nuance of modeling and balance economic costs/benefits with public health costs/benefits. It will have to be a group rather than an individual because they will need to make politically impossible decisions that balance lives lost tomorrow vs lives lost in two months or two years. Today we are stuck in a situation where those making decisions are focused on the next news cycle or the next election.

Well put! This is why a technocracy run by scientists will never work. Deferring to expertise in an ultra-specialized society means the scope and scale of societal interventions are looked at unidimensionally (I think I just made up a cool new word). Yes, the best way to stop COVID is "X", but that doesn't mean its the right thing to do. I'm not arguing for any specific policy here, it's just the INTJ scientific minds that dominate this board seem to miss this point too often. This is basically the same argument @Brute used to make for climate change policies.

[steveo73]

@Ego & @ classical_Liberal

Plenty of viruses have been stopped in the past without a vaccine and without everyone getting it (the last SARS virus is a good example). It's not just herd immunity unless by that you mean everyone social distancing and the virus dies out. You can flatten the curve but you can also squash it completely. The flattening the curve approach to me is not a viable option if at a later point you just end up in the same situation.

I do agree with your point though in relation to the actions society needs to take. This is a very similar issue to global warming. It's firstly a risk issue and then it's an appropriate treatment issue. The modelling with regards to this virus is exactly as per the modelling in relation to global warming. Specialists tend to exaggerate significantly and provide worst case scenarios in their "factual and scientific" models. It's not deterministic science. There are all sort of variables in reality that models do not cater for.

I think we need global political bodies with power and that are well run. Well run definitely means being really clear about the accuracy of scientific forecasts that use poor quality data to model complex processes. It has to be a risk based management approach where scientists are considered SME's.

[ertyu]

this one can't be stopped with just getting Ro below 1 with social distancing. You can achieve it temporarily in places, but other places always stay as potential reservoirs. Additionally, animals continue to be a reservoir - when I heard domestic cats and zoo tigers can get it easily (dogs, I believe, less so) - well, that means that there's a population of potential carriers that lick their fur to groom themselves, then humans pet them... we won't be able to just eradicate it, there will always be a pool of it somewhere to restart it. like it or not, we're in the game of slowing it down now, and that's the best we can hope for. a vaccine is the only thing that saves us 'cause that shit's going endemic

[slowtraveler]

Cats and ferrets seem susceptible. Thanks for sharing it. I'll need to tell my sister, she's crazy for cats.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... 0.015347v1

[saving-10-years]

@slowtraveler. Its a non-peer reviewed article so be cautious. Nature website has this to say about the study.

Other scientists say the findings are interesting, but cat owners should not be alarmed just yet. The results are based on lab experiments in which a small number of animals were deliberately given high doses of the virus, SARS-CoV-2, and do not represent real-life interactions between people and their pets, says virologist Linda Saif at the Ohio State University in Wooster. There is no direct evidence that the infected cats secreted enough coronavirus to pass it on to people, she says.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00984-8

[slowtraveler]

I also found the nature.com article first but chose to link direct to the study in the likely chance somebody judged the article rather than checking its sources for the study.

How do you check whether a study is peer reviewed?

[saving-10-years]

It says so at the top of the Biorxiv site this appears on that its not reviewed (I would expect publishers to say this up front).

Credible academic articles are usually peer reviewed _before_ they get to publication. Its a process which is meant to spot flaws in methodology or analysis and is generally a to and fro process where the reviewer suggests improvements, queries things and asks for extra information or clarification. It is unpaid (review process) and so it takes months to get something peer reviewed and then published. So non-peer reviewed can be really useful at this time and that alone is not a criticism. The query that the Nature site makes about how realisticthe method of infection in the lab was (amount and where placed) is the sort of thing that would come up in a peer reviewer comments. The author can then respond and change their analysis or provide extra supporting info.

If you want an idea of how trustable an academic source is you could look up their citations on Google or see what else they have published.
The first named author is always the lead (main researcher) so looking at that you can see that this author has studied animals and infuenza transmission before and been published in credible journals*. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Jianzhong+Shi+

Sadly not all journals are credible and not all peer reviewers either. HTH.

[ertyu]

Note that with Covid, non-peer reviewed isn't necessarily grounds for dimissal of the study. The peer review process is time-consuming. With covid, time is of the essense. Thus many will make their studies public *before* any peer review process takes place. In fact, imo it is highly unlikely that properly peer review studies emerge before 6 months to a year from now. Yes, do check out the publication history of the authors if you need to reassure yourself they're legitimate researchers, but biorxiv.org is as reliable a source you can get given the time constraints. They clearly state that the material there isn't peer reviewed, but imo that doesn't mean it isn't credible. There are 1550 covid studies there (https://connect.biorxiv.org/relate/content/181), which seems to indicate that's just where covid studies go for the time being.

[jacob]

Well put! This is why a technocracy run by scientists will never work. Deferring to expertise in an ultra-specialized society means the scope and scale of societal interventions are looked at unidimensionally (I think I just made up a cool new word).

I don't think public health specialists are that daft. All the textbooks I've read (<- kinda makes me sound daft) recommends a comprehensive approach that takes cultural aspects (features and bugs) into account as well dedicating a chapter or two the importance of cultural concerns. Some leader+culture combinations have handled this very well and some have struggled. Sweden is an example where both epidemic policy AND communication is handled by the state epidemiologist, that is, a bureaucrat rather than the government, but this only works because Swedes have great faith in the technocratic institutions. It would never work in the US.

In the US the public health experts needed to consider that CV19 was politicized early on so the public has different concerns and responses depending on red/blue party identity. The infectious agent doesn't care about human political opinion, but this means constructing a communications strategy that optimizes/satisfizes two distinctly different public reactions. For example, it needs to consider different reactions in terms of mask usage when the goal is to preserve them for the health care system. Perhaps this includes lying. It's easy to think that telling the truth is always the best policy, but doing so prevents outcomes that were thwarted because people failed to understand the importance of that truth in the early stages. This concern is a biggie. How many masks ended up in garages because some people thought they could and even should make a quick profit on "all the hysteria". Shit, I know a free market zealot who went on and on for a couple of weeks about this (supply cornering) being a great example of the market solving the supply/demand problem. How would you deal with this effect when communicating? Perhaps it was better to lie and say that masks don't make a difference---which is simplistic---than to say that masks make more of a difference for a nurse who is continuously exposed asking people not to use them because supplies are limited. Ditto, if you tell the public to "please don't panic", you can be sure that a significant subset of the population will do exactly that and buy extra just in case. Much as truth is nice, it's easy to underestimate the power of stupid reactions to that truth.

(The counter argument would be that experts should just tell the truth anyway and let the chips fall where they might. Even if the result is a disaster, at least they told they truth. Many experts do in fact do that once a certain cynicism has set in. However, this would be an example of not accounting for cultural aspects.)

Politicians add other concerns and that is good. The Clade-X exercise viewtopic.php?p=207290#p207290 ... shows all the different concerns being taken into account over the timeline and the difficulty of getting on the same page. This has the same problem as above but even more complicated. For example, a lockdown might hurt the economy which in turn is what the re-election strategy hinges on.

Overall, like with climate change, it comes back to the problem that many participants in the system are not fully informed and that some opinions in the debate are therefore uninformed, misinformed or even disinformed. For example, the debate is often phrased in terms of the economy vs lives... but what if shutting down hard and fast is actually better for the economy as well because it can restart sooner? This also requires an expert level understanding. However, in these days it's not difficult to find some "expert" to support pretty much any opinion one has. This works particularly well if the public is not informed. Now you have the opposite problem. Instead of truth or experts informing opinion, you have opinion informing the appearance of truth. Alternative facts and all that.

This is also why the responses in ASEA worked well because the leaders could tell an already experienced public, that "this is just like last time, so we'll get through this again if we do this and this and this and you already understand why..". E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyZwtKJn-Ac

[Seppia]

E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyZwtKJn-Ac

This video has been a phenomenally powerful AD for Singapore in my household.

[slowtraveler]

Edward Snowden discussing the 2nd order and long term effects of the current systems being put in place for this situation*. Something I found fascinating from the clip, was that never before in history have so many people taken a sabbatical from work and had such time to think and process during a time that the government is so clearly stressed- it gives us opportunity to create not just change but revolution in the system.

What I don't know is revolution towards what? Cleaner environment, more connection to people, more accountability from governments for the people, more people's voices being implemented in government, hopefully more open information sharing from all governments, country/regional independence, more awareness of the sinister players in the game and accountability for their actions.

Implemented how? Governments directly communicating with their people such as Seppia showed Singapore has done above, universal basic income, telecommuting is already widespread now, people are already out there trying to help eachother however they can in most countries and even adopting lonely grandparents, boycotts and limits on regimes until they transition to honest communication as teammates, bringing production home (regionally, not necessarily all per country) rather than so focused in China (ie-Europe, MERCOSUR, NAFTA, ASEAN) but set up using more environmentally clean technologies than the industrial revolution era factories.

More privacy? Most people don't value privacy so much as I thought, the trade off in convenience is too great and people trust their government, it seems. Using a dumb phone or keeping a phone off in a faraday bag would stop most tracking but it's over the top in most cases.

So long term, maybe this helps us as a whole to facilitate this transition towards a green, ecologically conscious, honestly communicating network of countries that work together.

Is there anything I missed?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5OAjnveyJo

[JL13]

@Ego & @ classical_Liberal

Plenty of viruses have been stopped in the past without a vaccine and without everyone getting it (the last SARS virus is a good example).

you're describing an elimination strategy. The only western nation implement this is New Zealand. The rest of us are using a suppression strategy.

It's easier for NZ, they are an island nation (easy to lockdown borders), and have a population density of 46ppl per square mile. Compare that to NY which is 26,000 per square mile.

And NZ might fail also.

Think about how hard it was to contain the HIV epidemic for decades. and it's pretty easy to test and trace that disease (compared to a respiratory disease). No one got HIV by entering an elevator that someone coughed in 18 hours prior.

[Jason]

No one got HIV by entering an elevator that someone coughed in 18 hours prior.

Granted. But if you entered the wrong "elevator" during the AIDS crisis it didn't matter how long ago someone "coughed" in it.

[subgard]

It seems that the solution for what to do before a vaccine is ready is a kind of reverse engineering triangle between testing, tracing, and social distancing. If you do one to the extreme, you don't have to do the other two much.

Testing - Some proposals for getting back to work require 20 million tests administered daily (just in the US!). At this level, we wouldn't need much tracing or social isolation.

Tracing - This is by far the most cost effective and practical, but the least politically palatable. If everyone's smartphone location was constantly monitored and tracked (and they always kept it with them and the gps on), the need for testing and social isolation could be greatly reduced.

Social Distancing - If everyone simply wore PPE when coming within 10 feet or so of anyone not in the same household, the need for testing and tracing would be greatly reduced (although this is probably less practical than the 20 million tests a day proposal).

The likely solution will be a moderate amount of all three.

[Ego]

Coronavirus Vaccine Could Be Ready in Six Months: Times

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... nths-times

A vaccine against the coronavirus could be ready by September, according to a scientist leading one of Britain’s most advanced teams.

Sarah Gilbert, professor of vaccinology at Oxford University, told The Times on Saturday that she is “80% confident” the vaccine would work, and could be ready by September. Experts have warned the public that vaccines typically take years to develop, and one for the coronavirus could take between 12 to 18 months at best.

In the case of the Oxford team, however, “it’s not just a hunch, and as every week goes by we have more data to look at,” Gilbert told the London newspaper.

[Ego]

In the end, nothing changes the scientific fact that the only way to effect a cure for a virus is through herd immunity.

Plenty of viruses have been stopped in the past without a vaccine and without everyone getting it (the last SARS virus is a good example). It's not just herd immunity unless by that you mean everyone social distancing and the virus dies out. You can flatten the curve but you can also squash it completely. The flattening the curve approach to me is not a viable option if at a later point you just end up in the same situation.

That is not a cure. It is a delay. SARS was not cured.

The only cure for individual viral infection is individual immunity (exposure or vaccination).
The only cure for a viral pandemic is herd immunity (exposure or vaccination).

[George the original one]

Oregon Health Authority as of 8:00a Sat, Apr 11
- 1447 Positives
- 27191 Negatives
- 51 Deaths

Cases by County
- 22 Benton (Corvallis) - Note two are actually in Washington state, though they're residents of Benton County.
- 121 Clackamas (Oregon City)
- 6 Clatsop (Astoria)
- 10 Columbia (St. Helens)
- 1 Coos (Coquille)
- 1 Crook (Prineville)
- 3 Curry (Gold Beach)
- 53 Deschutes (Bend)
- 12 Douglas (Roseburg)
- 1 Grant (Canyon City)
- 4 Hood River (Hood River)
- 44 Jackson (Medford)
- 17 Josephine (Grants Pass)
- 25 Klamath (Klamath Falls)
- 35 Lane (Eugene)
- 4 Lincoln (Newport)
- 51 Linn (Albany)
- 3 Malheur (Vale)
- 263 Marion (Salem)
- 5 Morrow (Heppner)
- 343 Multnomah (Portland)
- 30 Polk (Dallas)
- 1 Sherman (Moro)
- 4 Tillamook (Tillamook)
- 14 Umatilla (Pendleton)
- 4 Union (La Grande)
- 1 Wallowa (Enterprise)
- 9 Wasco (The Dalles)
- 330 Washington (Hillsboro)
- 30 Yamhill (McMinnville)

Cases by Age Group
- 35 19 or younger
- 159 20-29
- 216 30-39
- 269 40-49
- 258 50-59
- 261 60- 69
- 153 70-79
- 96 80 and over
- 0 Not available

Hospitalized by Age Group
- 3 19 or younger
- 15 20-29
- 21 30-39
- 50 40-49
- 51 50-59
- 92 60- 69
- 65 70-79
- 48 80 and over
- 0 Not available

Hospitalized
- 345 Yes
- 980 No
- 122 Not provided

Sex
- 780 Female
- 658 Male
- 9 Not available

Hospital Capacity
- 295 Available adult ICU beds
- 2215 Available adult non-ICU beds
- 80 Available pediatric NICU/PICU beds
- 150 Available pediatric beds
- 768 Available ventilators
- 334 COVID-19 admissions
- 101 COVID-19 patients in ICU beds
- 54 COVID-19 patients on ventilators

80 new cases.

Oregon Health Authority as of 8:00a Sun, Apr 12
- 15277 Positives
- 28231 Negatives
- 52 Deaths

Cases by County
- 23 Benton (Corvallis) - Note two are actually in Washington state, though they're residents of Benton County.
- 125 Clackamas (Oregon City)
- 6 Clatsop (Astoria)
- 10 Columbia (St. Helens)
- 1 Coos (Coquille)
- 1 Crook (Prineville)
- 3 Curry (Gold Beach)
- 54 Deschutes (Bend)
- 14 Douglas (Roseburg)
- 1 Grant (Canyon City)
- 4 Hood River (Hood River)
- 46 Jackson (Medford)
- 18 Josephine (Grants Pass)
- 25 Klamath (Klamath Falls)
- 37 Lane (Eugene)
- 4 Lincoln (Newport)
- 52 Linn (Albany)
- 4 Malheur (Vale)
- 276 Marion (Salem)
- 5 Morrow (Heppner)
- 374 Multnomah (Portland)
- 30 Polk (Dallas)
- 1 Sherman (Moro)
- 4 Tillamook (Tillamook)
- 16 Umatilla (Pendleton)
- 4 Union (La Grande)
- 1 Wallowa (Enterprise)
- 10 Wasco (The Dalles)
- 348 Washington (Hillsboro)
- 30 Yamhill (McMinnville)

Cases by Age Group
- 36 19 or younger
- 167 20-29
- 236 30-39
- 284 40-49
- 268 50-59
- 266 60- 69
- 166 70-79
- 104 80 and over
- 0 Not available

Hospitalized by Age Group
- 3 19 or younger
- 15 20-29
- 21 30-39
- 53 40-49
- 52 50-59
- 94 60- 69
- 71 70-79
- 50 80 and over
- 0 Not available

Hospitalized
- 359 Yes
- 1039 No
- 129 Not provided

Sex
- 835 Female
- 683 Male
- 9 Not available

Hospital Capacity
- 325 Available adult ICU beds
- 20355 Available adult non-ICU beds
- 86 Available pediatric NICU/PICU beds
- 148 Available pediatric beds
- 760 Available ventilators
- 295 COVID-19 admissions
- 81 COVID-19 patients in ICU beds
- 52 COVID-19 patients on ventilators