COVID-19

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Ego
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Ego »

And the COVID-19 NIMBYism begins. Costa Mesa files injunction to block quarantining within their city limits.

https://ktla.com/2020/02/22/judge-halts ... bjections/

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One of the regular vendors had about a dozen pulse oximeters this morning for $5 a piece. Probably should have bought them. Still no oxygen concentrators.

Can't find my stethoscope so I will have to pick one up.

A good overview of various lung sounds.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... m5MLXgjyUW

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Sclass
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Sclass »

Can you us a smartphone app and the internal mic on the phone make a suitable stethoscope?

I wonder if there is an open source oxygen machine design out there? They don’t seem so complex. You need two zeolite packs, a cheap compressor, some solenoid valves and an Arduino to sequence the ping pong action between the zeolite packs. $200 on Craigslist looks better than building anything though.

I’m just not far enough down the road to buy one.

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Ego
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Ego »

Sclass wrote:
Sun Feb 23, 2020 9:16 pm
I’m just not far enough down the road to buy one.
Nor am I. At least not with real money. I'll pay up to $8 for one. And $2 for a stethoscope, preferably tangled up with a manual blood pressure cuff.

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ETA: Apparently many insurance companies slipped in pandemic exclusions to travel, life and business insurance policies after H1N1. They get triggered if the WHO declares a pandemic. I wonder if that has anything to do with the delay in declaring.

jacob
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Re: COVID-19

Post by jacob »

tonyedgecombe wrote:
Fri Feb 21, 2020 8:22 am
Car sales down 92% in China for first half of February. I'm astounded the markets haven't been hit yet.
There you go. All the virus needed to do was to make it out of China.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: COVID-19

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

Having watched all the WHO press conferences so far, I get the distinct feeling they are still waiting to call it a formal pandemic due to the sheer amount of irrational panic going on right now. COVID-19 is a serious illness, but from a global perspective, hoarding supplies and posting conspiracy theories on social media isn't helping anyone. WHO also acts from a global perspective. When you look at COVID-19 in a single global snapshot, things like malaria, heart disease, etc are still a lot worse. I mean, as of this writing, COVID-19 has only killed 2.6k people. That's still less than ebola even. And from a global perspective, at a certain point, the panic becomes worse than the disease.

Which isn't to say COVID-19 isn't serious. Obviously this virus checks all the boxes for "could be as bad as Spanish flu." It's just not there yet. And so isn't a "pandemic" yet. (Even if getting there is only a matter of time)

This is why Dr. Tedros though keeps talking about "window of opportunity." This is code for "yeah this is going to be a pandemic soon. Do something while you can."

BeyondtheWrap
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Re: COVID-19

Post by BeyondtheWrap »

Stocks were down a bit today, apparently because of the virus. Will they keep going down?

steveo73
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Re: COVID-19

Post by steveo73 »

BeyondtheWrap wrote:
Mon Feb 24, 2020 10:19 pm
Stocks were down a bit today, apparently because of the virus. Will they keep going down?
Who knows.

As for the virus I don't think it's that bad but I don't want to catch it either.

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Seppia
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Seppia »

CS wrote:
Sun Feb 23, 2020 3:32 pm
@Seppia
What is it like in Italy for you? The lockdown is to the west of you, I believe, but it sounds like they are taking it very seriously.
People lost their minds in italy.
I arrived in japan on Sunday, got an email from HR that advised ALL personnel to abort ANY travel for ANY destination.
Was supposed to continue my trip to Singapore and Thailand but will go back to Italy instead.
I’ll also have to self-quarantine for two weeks at home.
People have raided supermarkets.
I guess (hope) this is similar to what happened in the initial days in Singapore or HK, with people regaining composure after a week or so.

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jennypenny
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Re: COVID-19

Post by jennypenny »

I've stockpiled enough supplies (food, household goods, virus-specific stuff) for close family members as well as our own family. (Basically 3 households plus extras for more extended family.) That's our SOP. It occurred to me though that if they need something in the midst of a crisis, I would need to have physical contact with them to distribute the goodies, thus exposing my family unnecessarily. Consequently I've changed my thinking and I'm now putting together large care packages that I will distribute asap. If family members need something they can break into those supplies. If they don't end up using them, I can always take them back.

thedollar
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Re: COVID-19

Post by thedollar »

I'd love to self-quarantine for a couple of weeks wo/ work or w/ remote work.

IMHO the spread cannot be stopped by now. It's like trying to ban a cold in several countries. "No one can have a cold in Italy" - can't be done except maybe in China but they also have mad control over individuals and next to zero human rights.

Believe it's much more serious in Iran than reported. Seems a lot of people coming from Iran to other countries are infected. Spread in Europe has gone from Italy to now Austria, Germany and Canary Islands.

I predict that the spread will ramp up until reaching some kind of tipping point where most are immune/already had it. 10s to 100s of millions are gonna get infected and 100,000s will likely die (mostly elderly and people with other disease).

Markets will 'recover' quickly when containment efforts are given up.

CS
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Re: COVID-19

Post by CS »

@seppia
Thanks for sharing.
It seems like it would have been better to stay in Japan, then get in another airplane and go back to Italy. I hope you get a direct flight - it sounds like there are some blockages of Italians traveling else where.

They are not even testing in the US, except known travelers to China, and there is something wrong with the test kits to boot ("not sharing" why, says the CDC. Thanks.) I have a hard time believing there are no cases on the west coast other than the cruise ship passengers. Just like Vancouver in Canada, it is close and convenient to Asian. People are going back and forth.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: COVID-19

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

It would not surprise me if we have community spread going on already in some places in the US. The only think that makes me feel somewhat better is the influenza monitoring network already in place from the CDC. Most hospitals are hooked up to this and report severe "influenza" cases in nearly real time back to the CDC. If a single community got hit by a spike in "influenza" cases, the CDC would see it almost immediately. So if there is a sudden spike in people admitted for viral pneumonia to hospitals, the CDC would go on red alert.

COVID-19 is pretty bad, but you can imagine worse things, like if SARS had truly gone pandemic. I hope that global leaders can learn from this experience to prepare us even better for the next pandemic. Because the single saving grace of COVID-19 is that is spares younger people. You can imagine a cytokine storm version of COVID-19 that killed people in their 20s and 30s in addition to the elderly. That would truly be a disaster.

CS
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Re: COVID-19

Post by CS »

China's rulers will not learn from this, I'd wager. That regime is a danger to the world community. Replacing it would have the nice side effect of removing some serious human rights violations.

George the original one
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Re: COVID-19

Post by George the original one »

BeyondtheWrap wrote:
Mon Feb 24, 2020 10:19 pm
Stocks were down a bit today, apparently because of the virus. Will they keep going down?
Stock market is forward-looking, so as each dribble of information comes in, it will yo-yo badly. The seemingly bad news of yesterday is forgotten while a few bright spots appear today.

black_son_of_gray
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Re: COVID-19

Post by black_son_of_gray »

AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Tue Feb 25, 2020 9:47 am
If a single community got hit by a spike in "influenza" cases, the CDC would see it almost immediately. So if there is a sudden spike in people admitted for viral pneumonia to hospitals, the CDC would go on red alert.
I'm not sure that would ultimately be that helpful, unfortunately. Let's run some numbers. Assuming 85% mild, 15% turning into severe (and only the severe cases going to the hospital*), a sudden spike in viral pneumonia cases at a single hospital would be, what, 4 or 5 cases? Which would mean in reality that 4/0.15 or 5/0.15 or 27-33 people in the community already have a milder version. Throw in a lag time between testing (2-3 days because lack of test kits mean a flight to CDC), assuming patients are even tested as they might not meet CDC criteria including travel or contacts with someone from China (isn't that still the case?), and a conservative doubling time of a week (although initial numbers in Italy and S. Korea suggest it could be much faster), and you're looking at maybe 40-50 cases before you even start to do the contact tracing! Unless I'm super wrong about how these numbers stack up (maybe!), it would seem that the game is already lost at that point.

*The combination of the health insurance quagmire in the US, combined with it's inconsistent and generally more expensive cost of health care vs. other countries, and the fact that about half of the population couldn't afford a couple-hundred-dollar doctors visit, there is a huge incentive structure in place to avoid seeking medical care that is counter to best practice for tamping down outbreaks, i.e. precautionary principle, aggressive testing, early intervention. :roll:

TL;DR: By the time you detect a death (~2%, implying around 50 mild, and for at least a week or two) or a small cluster of seriously ill (~15%, implying at least 7 mild per seriously ill), it is already pretty bad. This is exactly why Iran's numbers are simply unbelievable, unless the virus has changed to become considerably more deadly...

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: COVID-19

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

@bsog - I agree with you that by that point, it would be too late for containment. However, that might not really matter because I believe we're already look at when the virus gets here, and not so much if.

If you take extreme sanitary precautions now (wash hands, assume everything you touch is contaminated), you're probably not going to be caught in the undetected first wave. Then once you know that community spread is happening, you enact stage 2 of the plan, which is to lock yourself in your house until the virus goes away.

I am curious/afraid of how woefully unprepared the citizens of America are for this. Between the bizarre insurance landscape, the "work while you're sick" culture, and paycheck to paycheck lifestyle of Americans, the virus may be able to wreck more havoc here than other developed nations. America is a weird place where we have pretty sophisticated quarantine and hospital systems based of previous fears of bioterrorism/ebola, and yet the average citizen is probably more individually vulnerable than someone in Europe would be due to the glitches in American culture.

chenda
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Re: COVID-19

Post by chenda »

@analyticalengine - would though the lower population density (on average) than Europe be an advantage in slowing down infection spread ? More isolated towns and cabins and the like...

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: COVID-19

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

@chenda - That's an instance where averages can be misleading. It doesn't matter what the average density across the country so much as what the density is in a given town or community. There's a huge number of cities that are just as densely populated as Europe.

Plus even rural areas have supply trucks and such coming in from bigger areas. So spread is still very much possible.

Another concern is that rural areas often have poorer medical facilities, and so they could be hit even harder from a surge in cases.

That being said, living somewhere like the suburbs does seem to be a boon for once. Since taking cars instead of public transit, not being jammed in, etc, does help your personal efforts of social distancing.

black_son_of_gray
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Re: COVID-19

Post by black_son_of_gray »

@AnalyticalEngine: Yup, sentiment shared.

While I'm at it, here are some more thoughts I'll throw out.

1. Quite a few stories have popped up in financial media pointing out the non-linearity of business supply chains, i.e. that if 5% of the parts to make your widget come from China, you don't simply make 5% less widgets, you could be stuck making no widgets at all because you are waiting for specific parts to complete the product. Most of this discussion has been tied to China, which has (according to their extremely-some might say questionably-smooth official numbers) started to make progress beating back their epidemic. But it's even more fragile than that, because pandemics roll around the globe in choppy waves. So just as the 5% comes back online from China, another supplier in some other place starts to flare up and consequently shut down. And on and on. So you could have a rolling small hit to supply chains that effectively shuts down 100% of production almost continually until structural workarounds are achieved. Of course, only certain businesses are affected by these kinds of issues, but the ones that are might be walloped.

2. A somewhat related issue that I haven't seen get much press is the overall productivity hit to businesses simply by the long timeline of the infection. Consider: most infections are mild, but that still means something like 0.5-1 week of illness, plus potentially a another week or two longer if you don't want them shedding virus at the workplace (at least, that's what they've discovered in China). For the approximate 1 in 7 that will have a serious case, that can mean 3-6 weeks before recovery (plus add the extra safety week). That is a long time for an employee to be absent from work. This is a rock-and-a-hard-place issue for everyone. If businesses want to maximize butts-in-seats for productivity reasons, they risk further spread among their employees. Do they just overtime the healthy employees to make up for it? That could be a lot of slack to take up. For employees, they better hope they have good insurance or an emergency fund or that they aren't paid hourly, because potentially 6 weeks of no pay = eventual bankruptcy for many, on top of just coming out of being really sick for a month (how much $$ is a couple weeks in the hospital?). Some businesses will be able to solve this through lots of telework... but not all businesses. At the national level, GDP can be broadly calculated as (# workers) * (productivity/worker). You can run some ballpark numbers of realistic assumptions of how many workers might be affected and how much of their yearly productivity might be reduced and easily come up with GDP hits that ding the economy down towards recession, and that's before considering the additional supply chain disruptions and the lateness of the business cycle.

3. In both 1 and 2, debt comes into play. For those that can still utilize debt, it will be increased to bridge funding gaps. For those that can't pile on more debt, you end up with the potential for cascading defaults. Central banks will do what they can with the hammer of liquidity that they have, but considering that this virus causes both supply and demand problems (leading to both deflation and inflation in different areas), they can't solve all the economic problems that come up. The longer this continues to roll around the world in waves, the worst the debt situation becomes (on top of it already being bad globally to begin with).

4. When it crops up in the US, Americans are going to freak out, largely because they are under/unprepared and because it is just human nature. Have you seen how Texans react when the weather forecast says they'll get a dusting of snow? (Nothing against Texans, I used to be one.) This over-reaction is predictable. There will also be the "I'm going to ride out the hurricane in my trailer" types too, who will act idiotically just to show everyone how not-scared they are. This under-reaction is also predictable. Neither are helpful, but the predictability of these behaviors is useful.

Thought-purge done for now.

Dream of Freedom
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Dream of Freedom »

@AnalyticalEngine

Locking yourself up until it goes away may or may not work. Viruses can become endemic meaning it's just always present in a population and it's just too soon to tell if that will happen with this virus.

@black_son_of_gray
As for the American medical system, you can have fast, good, or cheap. Choose any two. We have fast and good. Other countries chose differently.

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