Coronavirus - worldwide spread and control

perhaps there were less car/work accidents in 2020... due to lockdown

 

I don't think this has anything to do with scientific background. The politicians have advisors with a 'scientific background'. The problem is that they come from a breed of scientist that believes in 'good science' in a way more akin to religion than scientific thinking. They are people who cannot actually tell a good theory from a bad theory because they judge theories on the basis of whether they were thought up by a self-perpetuating group funded by the Wellcome Trust and MRC.

A scientific answer IS an answer based on interpreting all the evidence in terms of a theory that is consistent and properly understood. In this particular case you do not need to analyse any 'data' in the sense of numbers. All you need to do is read the papers and see that in China without sever lockdown the health service was overwhelmed and new hospitals had to be built. That means that if you allow the virus to spread without lockdown in other countries the health service will be overwhelmed and you will have to lockdown for much longer than if you nipped things in the bud. A child can understand that.

I was close to a key government advisor at the time of the BSE affair. I was fascinated to see how biomedical scientists whose primary aims are political (in terms of self advancement) could say things that they were intelligent enough to know were totally unjustified by evidence.

So I don't actually think 'scientific background' is the issue. Probably the majority of people with a scientific background follow fashion and eminence rather than use common sense. The issue here is using common sense. We need people in charge with common sense. That looks to be the case in New Zealand.

 

This possibility cannot be denied.

Though given that the whole world is connected the question is how likely it is that one scenario mimics the other.


You also can say that there in every place is a patient zero, and then the scenario begins. This might not be how it happens, admittedly, and other factors probably play a role (e.g. number of contacts/initial viral loads, different strains), but at a "sample size" huge enough, it would level out, wouldn´t it?

It´s probably still too early to tell, but it would be inaccurate to forget about.

 

Yesterday (or the day before) in German TV politician Lauterbach said, that he rather doesn´t agree with the loosening here. And he added that if we would endure a bit longer, we would ease the measures in the future. I was astonished as I don´t see the self suggesting logic behind this statement. But may it´s true and the virus will loose its severe impact on health when it is evolving further (as sick people may be less likely to spread their virus)??

This is already the second politician which I heard saying this, though Lauterbach even was a professor for health before he went into politics (for health economy though, I think).

I don´t quite see from where you get your optimism that such a virus can be eradicated.

Of course, if you ask an epidemiologists, he may get exited about the possibility to do some action. But other people will not behave in the manner he likes to recommend, and there are also other countries.

 

This is quite interesting.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/coronavirus-found-paris-sewage-points-early-warning-system

 

Exactly. It's more craziness. How is lockdowns on and off for 2 years+ with many times more deaths going to be better than trying to eliminate the virus now?

 

It is just straightforward dynamics based on exponential maths. If you have a factory on fire it is better to put the fire out completely than to put to half out and go and have some tea.

 

Claims of "asymptomatic" cases in Santa Clara, California, based on sloppy methodology and errors in statistics.

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia....-in-stanford-study-of-coronavirus-prevalence/
Original manuscript: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v1#comment-4881173506

 

This is the same talk in a Youtube video :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22SQVZ4CeXA

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1253272389602983936

 

Their behavioural advisors may have explained the value of having a commitment to openness and transparency as a part of the narrative being promoted, but unsurprisingly there seems to be little follow through on substance:

Continues: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...s-to-be-secret-until-after-pandemic-35fwl8rn9

 

This applies under the presumption that you need or want to eradicate the virus. But both is not self suggesting.

• You could want to contain the virus until a treatment or vaccine has been found, under the additional goal to minimize detrimental effects from lockdowns.
• You could want to achieve herd immunity, and if there is still capacity in the health care system a stronger lockdown wouldn´t make sense.
• It is not clear that an exponential growth takes place; common colds (including common corona viruses, btw) usually stop at some point (I think that up to 15% of the population are getting infected is common).

Just to say, the stronger we act now, the sooner/easier we will get away with this, will hardly be an answer to the complexity of the situation and its difficulty to be perceived.


For instance, R0 in Switzerland:

= Since 29.2 it is forbidden to organize festivals asf., Hygiene-Recommendations.

A similar curve has been shown for Germany, I couldn´t find back the tiny paper (but would try again, if anybody is interested).

 

Scotland, proposes testing, tracing, isolating, and seems very much against herd immunity:

https://twitter.com/user/status/1253298761368993793


https://twitter.com/user/status/1253302301311275009

 

I just listened to Quebec's Prime Minister Legault's daily press conference. He has just announced they will be trying the option of herd immunity. He said there won't be a vaccine for 2 years perhaps, and folks can't just wait that long. There are areas of Quebec which have no cases whatsoever. Montreal is very badly hit. He also feels that letting children go back to school gradually is a good idea as they are not in the 'victim' category. He stated that in Quebec 98 % of deaths were folks 60 yrs and over.

 

It will be interesting to see if the health care professionals walk out.

 

Editorials
Modelling the pandemic
https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1567

Devi Sridhar, professor1,
Maimuna S Majumder, junior faculty2

“Over-reliance on modelling leads to missteps and blind spots in our response

The coronavirus pandemic has revealed much about public policy, including the extent to which politicians and their advisers rely on modelling to help predict the future of virus spread and decide what actions are best to take.1 This is true of many countries such as the US, UK, France, and Germany as well as Hong Kong, Singapore, and China. Although better than relying on intuition or flying completely blind into a crisis, over-reliance on modelling might have led to several missteps.2

.....

Where does this leave us? Modelling is a necessary input to public policy decisions but should be taken as just one input among many, one piece of a large puzzle. Other equally valuable sources of information include case study analysis from other countries, talking to frontline health staff and patient groups, and policy documents and historical analyses of previous novel outbreaks.

Triangulation across all these information sources should be the principle used to ascertain the bigger picture and what direction should be taken. Germany’s approach is a good illustration of this principle—the authorities considered modelled predictions but also learnt from analyses of South Korea’s successful strategy of mass testing, tracing, and isolation.9

Humility
Another good principle is one of humility. No discipline has all the answers, and the only way to avoid “groupthink” and blind spots is to ensure representatives with diverse backgrounds and expertise are at the table when major decisions are made. Finally, mathematical models do not include value systems or morals so their outputs must be used cautiously, and with attention to ethics. A model might suggest, for example, that allowing 95% of the population to continue life as normal while 5% become critically ill is a suitable path forward. This is when leaders must consider the values, needs, and preferences of their populations when deciding whether to follow it.”

 

Oh. Well, that's okay then.

 

This is very worrying. If there are no cases in some areas of Quebec surely the best thing to do would be to protect those areas, keep it so that no cases exist there, and try to reduce the cases that exist in the rest of the population. Not just allow people to be exposed. Children may not be as badly affected but they live with adults and elderly people. Just when I thought herd immunity was maybe, maybe..going away from the UK (not sure on that though yet), it’s being picked up somewhere else

 

Oh golly gosh as they say in the USA! 9000 plus health care workers have already walked off the job, for various reasons, Legault said today. He has asked Prime Minister Trudeau to send in the army! Trudeau said he would help, but stated it is not the army's place to substitute for health care workers. Poor Legault: yesterday and the day before he asked for people to come and help in the health care system, particularly in the old age homes. He had some takers but not enough. Just overnight another 800 health care workers have 'disappeared.' The peak has not yet been reached in Quebec. Today the Minister of Health said that he is worried about violence, depression, and other mental problems if folks stay home more. I don't know how to evaluate that because I have not heard of too many incidents of violence (although Canada did have a horrid mass shooting a few days ago--the worst ever--it was in the Maritimes).