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Post by dan1 on Mar 20, 2020 22:07:51 GMT
At least during the Blitz people were terrified because it seems to me we're currently in the appeasement phase.
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copacetic
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Post by copacetic on Mar 20, 2020 22:24:32 GMT
If the government covers 80% of wages for more than a couple of months our national debt is going to break 100% of GDP. It doubled in 2007/08 financial crisis and has only really levelled out at 85% in the past few years. Italy is at 130%. USA is at 80%. I can't help but think if this is going to be an ongoing crisis we'll see national borrowing increase to the point that gilt buyers lose faith in governments' ability to repay.
I suspect the sovereign debt crisis that has been simmering in the background in Europe and the USA since the financial crisis will come to the boil this year.
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Post by mrclondon on Mar 20, 2020 23:41:55 GMT
My daughter was just saying she may need to go into London, by tube bus etc for work. I said no way! The messaging from City Hall is unambiguous - unless a "critical worker" or directly involved in the emergency response, use of public transport is being discouraged.
I did use the tube twice last weekend for short hops under the river but felt uncomfortable even though I avoided touching anything and managed to find less packed carriages. The photos of packed carriages during the rush hours the last couple of days are simply frightening - far too many companies attempting to carry on a resemblence of business as normal.
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Mike
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Post by Mike on Mar 21, 2020 0:07:19 GMT
I went to the dentist yesterday for toothache which he managed to resolve. Because it was so quiet I managed to have a longish (15 minute) chat with him. He's in his mid-late forties and essentially his view was that it should be allowed to wash over us as quickly as possible. He thought the stuff about the curve was "BS" and likewise thought China was suppressing the numbers. It made me think more about that curve. If we're likely to go over the capacity line then isn't the important thing not so much keeping us from overshooting it by as little as possible but rather keeping the time period during which we overshoot as small as possible. If we spend a very long time above that capacity line, it will really take its toll - not just directly but in terms of things we're starting to see already such as food shortages etc. If its a wham bam "thank you" mam we can start to move on. Yes, in terms of raw maths you'd be looking at integrating under the curve above that line and minimizing the total area but there are other factors and time is quite an important one. The "critical care demand" line going over the "critical care capacity" line would be catastrophic in terms of the death toll. Your dentist does not know what he is talking about.
It is worth persevering and understanding why, because it is fundamental to the UK's plan. Here goes my effort; it won't be perfect, but I hope it is better than the Government's!
There are 3 types of death: - UNAVOIDABLE. Some infected people will die no matter what medical care they receive. You could give them the most timely and absolute best and most intensive care possible, and they would still die. They may be old, or unhealthy, or unlucky, or a combination. Overall it is looking like about 0.5% to 1.0% of infected people, but very heavily skewed towards the elderly.
- AVOIDABLE. If demand exceeds available resources, then some infected people will die who would not otherwise have died. - COLLATERAL. If demand exceeds available resources, then people with unrelated medical needs will die because they do not receive the treatment they normally would. While the demand line is below the capacity line, all the deaths are unavoidable. The number of deaths is proportional to the area under the demand line. Such a scenario is represented by the green line on the graph. ( Ignore the resurgence 6 months later: that's what would happen if all measures were promply removed after 5 months on an unvaccinated population, which is not going to happen. )
Whenever the demand line rises above the capacity line, then you have to consider two areas on the graph. The black line on the graph represents the unrestricted spread. Area A, bounded by the black line and below the red capacity line, contains the unavoidable deaths. Area B, beneath the black line and above the red line, contains the avoidable deaths.
When demand is above capacity: (1) The number of unavoidable deaths (area A) is higher. More people are infected, so this is obvious. You might argue that this is a red herring because ultimately everyone is going to be infected no matter what measures we take, so those whose death is unavoidable would eventually have been killed by the disease anyway. However, that's incorrect: the more time that passes, the greater the chance of a vaccine which would dramatically reduce the probability of unavoidable death.
(2) The number of avoidable deaths (area B) is huge. The black trajectory stays high for almost as long as the green trajectory, i.e., it is a sharp shock, but certainly not a short one. And the black trajectory goes extremely high, way above the zoomed section of the graph shown, up to about 280 on the vertical axis. Area B is enormous. (3) Furthermore, although the unavoidable deaths are proportional to area A, and the avoidable deaths are proportional to area B, the constants of proportionality are not the same -- area B has a higher multiplier. So it's not just a matter of the area under the black line; it's more like the area under the black line, but with the bit above the red line (most of it) counting double, or triple. The reason is that in area A, if a patient needs intensive care they receive it and have a positive probability of survival, whereas in area B if they need intensive care they do not receive it and they definitely die.
(4) Many more younger people will die. When demand is below capacity, mainly older people die. When demand massively exceeds capacity, virtually anyone who needs critical care will die. Although the probability of younger people needing critical care is lower, the sheer number of them infected means that it will be a lot of people.
(5) Additionally, there will be collateral deaths -- extremely difficult to quantify.
All these points apply whenever demand exceeds supply. Even for the much milder orange trajectory, whenever it passes above the red line there are avoidable deaths, with a higher multiplier on the area, plus more younger deaths, plus collateral deaths. There is only one type of death: inevitable. If you can choose, this is one of the better ways to go We may not be able to choose how we die - but we do all die. That clock started ticking down the second we were born. Second by second, tick by tock - you and I are both heading to death with every word we read on this forum. Get a life! An unavoidable death of a 82 year old means nothing if they die from something else tomorrow.
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Mike
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Post by Mike on Mar 21, 2020 0:17:31 GMT
Also - closing gyms? Asking people to order takeaway?
Sounds like kicking the can on the NHS workload. Diabetes and obesity aren't cheap - and they often don't kill either; it's a major cost to consider for all these armchair experts
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Godanubis
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Anubis is known as the god of death and is the oldest and most popular of ancient Egyptian deities.
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Post by Godanubis on Mar 21, 2020 0:41:06 GMT
Also - closing gyms? Asking people to order takeaway? Sounds like kicking the can on the NHS workload. Diabetes and obesity aren't cheap - and they often don't kill either; it's a major cost to consider for all these armchair experts Well as Covid 19 has a preference for fat diabetics, group ABO A and male the NHS will have less to to cope with at the end of this. Being in that group and over 60 with OSA some here may have less people to challenge their snowflake views if the grim reaper beats me at my own game and wins my soul  Now is the time to face your own mortality. Unfortunately with the restrictions on travel etc. your bucket list would need to be greatly curtailed.
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Post by bernythedolt on Mar 21, 2020 3:03:56 GMT
[/philosophy mode on]
I find it staggering that with all the fantastic medical, technological and scientific advances of the past 100 years, here we are being forced to step back a whole century, effectively to the era of Spanish Flu, and find ourselves just as powerless to beat this Covid-19 as they were back then to beat their nemesis. Truly staggering when you think about it. We can split the atom, tunnel under the sea, fly to the moon, transplant bodily organs, converse face-to-face with people on the other side of the world, but along comes a soppy little ball of molecules and we're screwed!
You have to take your hat off to Mother Nature. She really has cut us down to size. She's found a way to repair her planet by reducing emissions in every way conceivable. I'm no bearded, lentil munching, sandal wearing hippie, but it's undeniable that the planet is today much greener than it was three months ago. Nor am I a biologist, but isn't this exactly how nature operates? Culling ruthlessly if necessary to promote the optimal survival of life?
Mankind will continue to thrive, but nature will certainly give it pause for thought this time.
And all because somebody supposedly did something "strange" in a small food market in China? That's the most remarkable and intriguing part of it all. Wish I understood that a bit better.
[/philosophy off]
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scc
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Post by scc on Mar 21, 2020 3:48:03 GMT
[/philosophy mode on] I find it staggering that with all the fantastic medical, technological and scientific advances of the past 100 years, here we are being forced to step back a whole century, effectively to the era of Spanish Flu, and find ourselves just as powerless to beat this Covid-19 as they were back then to beat their nemesis. Truly staggering when you think about it. We can split the atom, tunnel under the sea, fly to the moon, transplant bodily organs, converse face-to-face with people on the other side of the world, but along comes a soppy little ball of molecules and we're screwed! You have to take your hat off to Mother Nature. She really has cut us down to size. She's found a way to repair her planet by reducing emissions in every way conceivable. I'm no bearded, lentil munching, sandal wearing hippie, but it's undeniable that the planet is today much greener than it was three months ago. Nor am I a biologist, but isn't this exactly how nature operates? Culling ruthlessly if necessary to promote the optimal survival of life? Mankind will continue to thrive, but nature will certainly give it pause for thought this time. And all because somebody supposedly did something "strange" in a small food market in China? That's the most remarkable and intriguing part of it all. Wish I understood that a bit better. [/philosophy off] Your first point is the result of a lack of investment in the inevitable pandemic. Most humans, even those in leadership, don't seem to be able to think about big bad things on more than a 2 week horizon. For all of the talk about declaring a climate emergency here and there, here's what a response to an actual emergency looks like. Denial and inaction until it's shoved in your face. We even had notice on this one. When I was pulling out of P2P and stocking up on a fortnight's worth of food a few weeks ago, I was looking around and thinking "Am I blooming mad?" My missus certainly thought so. She doesn't anymore. Your second point is essentially the Gaia hypothesis. A bad name for an interesting idea - the planet is capable of self-regulating. This is clearly the case, but whether this pandemic counts I'll leave up to others more qualified. Personally, I doubt it. Also, it does not do so in a conscious way. Lastly, complexity and fragility, eh? What a bad combination.
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09dolphin
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Post by 09dolphin on Mar 21, 2020 8:35:26 GMT
My grandparents told me about the Spanish Flu (I am now quite elderly) when some of their siblings, I parent and all surviving grandparents died many many years ago. The situation was out of control and even at the start of the 20th century it was known that self isolation was the way to go. Not their fault they didn't have a real understanding of how viruses worked.
3 Weeks ago I decided that I needed to self isolate for at least 2 months to enable this to happen and bought products/foodstuff etc to enable this to happen although I think it may have been more prudent to have had enough for 3 months.
I advised my close family to do whatever they could to mitigate their risk of contacting the virus and transferred enough money to enable them buy extra food (they usually only have enough for 4-5 days). They are quite distressed at the moment because they didn't take my advice and are finding it difficult to source fresh food so I'll be making my small stock available to them.
My feeling is that food for sale now needs to be managed by limiting what is available to shoppers. I am very worried about how people with a limited income will now be able to feed their families in the coming month and I believe voluntary and governmental action is necessary. Sorry but I'm not wise enough that I know what this action could be. Perhaps lessons from the 2nd world war could be applied but I don't have the knowledge or expertise to offer an opinion.
In all honesty I think we should review the experiences of the Spanish flu virus of 1918 and learn lessons if we as individuals hope to survive.
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cb25
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Post by cb25 on Mar 21, 2020 9:33:35 GMT
I wonder if the idea of accepting limitations on personal freedoms for the common good will be used after this virus is down to an acceptable background threat. E.g. I've already seen diagrams suggesting that air pollution is down a lot in areas of lock-down. In the near future, will we have people saying "during the lock-down we had fewer deaths due to road traffic accidents (I'm guessing this will be true), plus much better air quality in towns which is good for the lungs of our kids, therefore - for the common good - most people should look to reduce the use of personal vehicular transport (car etc.) to an absolute minimum". To paraphrase pepperpot "are you willing to kill/damage the lungs of the young to drive to golf?".
I could see those that argue for carbon neutral by 2025 (or back to the stone-age by 2025 depending on your POV) trying this sort of argument for cars, flights and - maybe - others trying it on smoking/drinking alcohol/overeating ... all things where one could argue that restrictions on personal liberty might be for the common good.
Little comment on mathematical modelling - article in the Telegraph reports "The number of Britons who have already been infected by the virus may be anywhere up to 23 million, new modelling suggests. Calculations by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) estimate that, for every single death, many more cases are likely to be present in the population. ... The team at LSHTM ran 25,000 epidemic simulations for different death and infection rate scenarios ... For a scenario with a death rate of 1 per cent, ... the team at LSHTM found that one death points to a minimum of 37 cases, a maximum of 138,624 and a median average of 1,733".
That's the problem with model, vary some parameters a little bit and get a massive difference in outcome (37 vs 138,624). Just shows how critical it is to keep bench-marking the model against reality.
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IFISAcava
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Post by IFISAcava on Mar 21, 2020 9:40:10 GMT
Interesting a propos bernythedolt that they come to estimate a case fatality rate of under 1% - which was what I was suggesting was likely (though by no means certain) back when we were discussing the figures from China. There are also suggestions of different strains having different CFRs. As we know, however, the fatalities also come from an overwhelmed health service that can't treat other eminently treatable conditions when it is dealing with tens of thousands of SARS-CoV-2 cases 1) Now that the known recorded cases in China are largely resolved, we can see their fatality rate was pretty close to 4%. [3226 deaths from 80881 recorded cases]. www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/china/2) The WHO Director General recently stated, "Globally, about 3.4% of reported Covid-19 cases have died". 3) The Lancet published a figure of 5.6% just five days ago: "We re-estimated mortality rates by dividing the number of deaths on a given day by the number of patients with confirmed COVID-19 infection 14 days before. On this basis, using WHO data on the cumulative number of deaths to March 1, 2020, mortality rates would be 5·6% (95% CI 5·4–5·8) for China and 15·2% (12·5–17·9) outside of China". www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30195-X/fulltextI haven't seen any mention of a rate below 1% (and find it hard to believe, given the figures being reported). Do you have a reference please? Worth bearing in mind that Case Fatality Rate is defined as number of deaths over known, recorded cases. Anything that involves guessing the possible number infected is not a CFR. That is necessary in order to provide a scientific basis for disease comparison (eg. CFR for SARS is recorded in history as 9.6%). A very respected statistician and epidemiologist Ioannidis writes: "Reported case fatality rates, like the official 3.4% rate from the World Health Organization, cause horror — and are meaningless." "The one situation where an entire, closed population was tested was the Diamond Princess cruise ship and its quarantine passengers. The case fatality rate there was 1.0%, but this was a largely elderly population, in which the death rate from Covid-19 is much higher. Projecting the Diamond Princess mortality rate onto the age structure of the U.S. population, the death rate among people infected with Covid-19 would be 0.125%. But since this estimate is based on extremely thin data — there were just seven deaths among the 700 infected passengers and crew — the real death rate could stretch from five times lower (0.025%) to five times higher (0.625%). It is also possible that some of the passengers who were infected might die later, and that tourists may have different frequencies of chronic diseases — a risk factor for worse outcomes with SARS-CoV-2 infection — than the general population. Adding these extra sources of uncertainty, reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population vary from 0.05% to 1%. "If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths. This sounds like a huge number, but it is buried within the noise of the estimate of deaths from “influenza-like illness.” If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to “influenza-like illness” would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average." The main point of the article is that because we haven't done enough testing, we don't know, and we are making huge decisions on very little data. Of course, where we do have the best data (South Korea), his estimates are not so far off (so far). Read the whole article here: www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/
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Stonk
Stonking
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Post by Stonk on Mar 21, 2020 9:45:09 GMT
[/philosophy mode on] I find it staggering that with all the fantastic medical, technological and scientific advances of the past 100 years, here we are being forced to step back a whole century, effectively to the era of Spanish Flu, and find ourselves just as powerless to beat this Covid-19 as they were back then to beat their nemesis. Truly staggering when you think about it. We can split the atom, tunnel under the sea, fly to the moon, transplant bodily organs, converse face-to-face with people on the other side of the world, but along comes a soppy little ball of molecules and we're screwed! You have to take your hat off to Mother Nature. She really has cut us down to size. She's found a way to repair her planet by reducing emissions in every way conceivable. I'm no bearded, lentil munching, sandal wearing hippie, but it's undeniable that the planet is today much greener than it was three months ago. Nor am I a biologist, but isn't this exactly how nature operates? Culling ruthlessly if necessary to promote the optimal survival of life? Mankind will continue to thrive, but nature will certainly give it pause for thought this time. And all because somebody supposedly did something "strange" in a small food market in China? That's the most remarkable and intriguing part of it all. Wish I understood that a bit better. [/philosophy off]
I'll stand up for the human species. In the last century, we have not learned what we need to stop this kind of pandemic from starting and taking hold. It does not help that there are so many of us living closely together. We've set ourselves up to be hit particularly badly when a freak event like this occurs -- which they will continue to do from time to time. So it all looks pretty gloomy right now, as if it is going to mirror Spanish Flu.
But it is not. We have learned a lot since 1918.
What we have learned a lot about how viruses spread, and how to model them. We can tell what's coming, and take steps to mitigate it.
We can communicate plans widely within minutes. Occasionally we even manage to communicate the science well enough for the population to take notice.
But most of all, we can and will produce, manufacture and distribute a vaccine. Mass vaccination is the only way to end the isolation, particularly of the over-70s, without having mass deaths. There is no doubt that it will happen. People say 18 months. I am optimistic it will be sooner. A sizeable chunk of that time is regulatory hurdles, and scientific bullet-proofing. Regulatory hurdles can be swept aside by a stroke of a president or prime minister's pen. And society will settle for an interim 85%-effective vaccine while a better one is polished.
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agent69
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Post by agent69 on Mar 21, 2020 10:11:04 GMT
I wonder if the idea of accepting limitations on personal freedoms for the common good will be used after this virus is down to an acceptable background threat. E.g. I've already seen diagrams suggesting that air pollution is down a lot in areas of lock-down. In the near future, will we have people saying "during the lock-down we had fewer deaths due to road traffic accidents (I'm guessing this will be true), plus much better air quality in towns which is good for the lungs of our kids, therefore - for the common good - most people should look to reduce the use of personal vehicular transport (car etc.) to an absolute minimum". To paraphrase pepperpot "are you willing to kill/damage the lungs of the young to drive to golf?".
I could see those that argue for carbon neutral by 2025 (or back to the stone-age by 2025 depending on your POV) trying this sort of argument for cars, flights and - maybe - others trying it on smoking/drinking alcohol/overeating ... all things where one could argue that restrictions on personal liberty might be for the common good.
Little comment on mathematical modelling - article in the Telegraph reports "The number of Britons who have already been infected by the virus may be anywhere up to 23 million, new modelling suggests. Calculations by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) estimate that, for every single death, many more cases are likely to be present in the population. ... The team at LSHTM ran 25,000 epidemic simulations for different death and infection rate scenarios ... For a scenario with a death rate of 1 per cent, ... the team at LSHTM found that one death points to a minimum of 37 cases, a maximum of 138,624 and a median average of 1,733".
That's the problem with model, vary some parameters a little bit and get a massive difference in outcome (37 vs 138,624). Just shows how critical it is to keep bench-marking the model against reality.
Coronavirus has done more in a week to stop global warming than Greta Thunberg will achieve in a lifetime.
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agent69
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Post by agent69 on Mar 21, 2020 10:18:50 GMT
[/philosophy mode on] I find it staggering that with all the fantastic medical, technological and scientific advances of the past 100 years, here we are being forced to step back a whole century, effectively to the era of Spanish Flu, and find ourselves just as powerless to beat this Covid-19 as they were back then to beat their nemesis. Truly staggering when you think about it. We can split the atom, tunnel under the sea, fly to the moon, transplant bodily organs, converse face-to-face with people on the other side of the world, but along comes a soppy little ball of molecules and we're screwed! You have to take your hat off to Mother Nature. She really has cut us down to size. She's found a way to repair her planet by reducing emissions in every way conceivable. I'm no bearded, lentil munching, sandal wearing hippie, but it's undeniable that the planet is today much greener than it was three months ago. Nor am I a biologist, but isn't this exactly how nature operates? Culling ruthlessly if necessary to promote the optimal survival of life? Mankind will continue to thrive, but nature will certainly give it pause for thought this time. And all because somebody supposedly did something "strange" in a small food market in China? That's the most remarkable and intriguing part of it all. Wish I understood that a bit better. [/philosophy off] I thought that recently when I had a wisdom tooth removed. All the wonders of modern technology, and the dentists pulls it out with a pair of pliers.
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Stonk
Stonking
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Post by Stonk on Mar 21, 2020 10:34:38 GMT
I thought that recently when I had a wisdom tooth removed. All the wonders of modern technology, and the dentists pulls it out with a pair of pliers.
Sterile ones, though. So not quite the same as a couple of hundred years ago.
In the future, maybe your dentist will point a powerful precision laser into your mouth to instantaneously vaporise a bad tooth, but they'll still keep a pair of pliers in the drawer for when there's a power cut.
Sometimes the simple ways are best. Need to amputate a limb? Basically still the same procedure as a millennium ago. The progress of science has given us ways to make it less painful and more survivable, but they still hack it off with a saw.
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