Coronavirus - worldwide spread and control

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anciendaze said:
There seems to be a global competition for stupidity in response to COVID-19. I've mentioned a number of stupid actions and questionable statistics in Florida, and I'm sure there will be more, but the U.K. has just acknowledged a slight error in reporting thousands of cases due to an overloaded spreadsheet! :jawdrop:

Does the scientific establishment guiding the U.K.'s pandemic response come down to one person working with an Excel spreadsheet on a desktop computer? How long did it take to notice this minor error?

For those not computer savvy, I'll point out that case numbers are integers, and modern hand-held devices like mobile phones support 64-bit integers in hardware.

(I come from a prehistoric past when we used 8-bit integers in hardware arithmetic, and still connected them together to handle big numbers in software. One of my first programs computed 99 factorial or 99! on a machine now only seen in museums. )

This would allow you to count (2^64) - 1 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 cases, or if you allow negative cases, using twos-complement representation, you might only have (2^63) - 1 = 9,223,372,036,854,775,807. I suspect this is larger than the number of cases in the entire Universe.
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On a scale of 10 for stupid, this ranks an 11. It even made the ProgrammingHorror sub-reddit. This is major league facepalm.
 
In Germany, many labs send positive results to local health departments (that do the contact tracing) per fax..Hence, lots of delay in Corona hotspots.

Not so much due to stupidity but due to data security laws.

Still, you'd think there would be better preparation for a pandemic.
 
Covid-19 updates: One in 10 worldwide may have had virus, WHO says
One in 10 people around the world may have contracted Covid-19, the World Health Organization said, at a special meeting of WHO leaders.

A top official said the estimate meant "the vast majority of the world remains at risk".

Just over 35m people have been confirmed as being infected with coronavirus - the WHO's estimate puts the true figure at closer to 800m.

Experts have long said the real number of cases would exceed those confirmed.
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-54422023
 
The Great Barrington Declaration for herd immunity.

Edit to add:

"An international group of scientists has called on governments to overturn their coronavirus strategies and allow young and healthy people to return to normal life while protecting the most vulnerable.

The proposal, drawn up by three researchers but signed by many more, argues for letting the virus spread in low-risk groups in the hope of achieving “herd immunity”, where enough of the population is resistant to the virus to quell the pandemic."

I'm wondering, doesn't such a strategy necessarily lead to "underprivileged" people (jobs with no homeoffice -> more exposure) being the ones "sacrificed" first for the greater good of herd immunity?
 
Behind herd immunity is the thinking that the people dying are sick and old while the young and productive have mild disease. This completely ignores the threat of longcovid to the economy.

Looking at the cold equations of their economics, the old are are drain on the system using resources and needing care so if they are gone there is more money to go round everyone else so if they are sacrificed to keep commerce going there si no loss.

But if a mass of people in there 20s, 30s and 40s become sick and need care for decades that is a major threat. Not only is their expertise lost to society they will need support, yet that is being ignored or they do not even know about it.

The neglect and misinformation around ME may push a worse recession on us.

And, of course, compassion and morality demand another approach.
 
Top German scientists: 1. Herd immunity not possible bc immunity too short. 2. Not feasible to go 'shield vulnerable' approach bc impossible to fully identify & isolate them. 3. Potential serious, long-term damage to young/healthy also from this virus. mpg.de/15426163/stell…
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Code: 
https://twitter.com/devisridhar/status/1313733782235680768



Rest of thread in quotes.
They suggest that what works is: 1. Test/trace/isolate 2. Mask-wearing 3. Distancing 4. Travel restrictions 5. Identifying & stopping super-spreading events. 5. Good guidance to public on what is risky & not.
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Receiving notes from those w/ risk factors (asthma, overweight, hypertension, cancer survivors, diabetes) or elderly who are saddened by their lives being portrayed as worthless (ie acceptable loss, would die anyways). Please remember this is not the view of the silent majority.
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Massive distraction -> Instead of figuring out how to build a robust test/trace/isolate system and how to incentivise compliance with guidance, we are stuck debating whether we should all be infected with SARS-CoV-2 (*unless you’re wealthy & can easily shield*).
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I disagree on the "immunity too short" bit - immunity will last years. But people seem to forget that herd immunity literally requires a large majority of the population to be infected - herd immunity is the worst case scenario for mortality and morbidity.
 
Herd immunity can last for years ... to prior strains of the virus. It may or may not offer partial immunity to new strains.

Severe morbidity can have greater economic impact than mortality. While good epidemiology on long term outcomes seems to be still lacking, largely because this virus is still too new even now, this will take years, its looking increasingly like there is risk of huge long term morbidity, at enormous cost. Herd immunity strategies will maximize that cost. If it turns out that nearly all long Covid cases resolve in a year or two, then this cost will not be as great as some of us are concerned about. However if what we are seeing is a very high percentage of disability then the costs might be beyond what the world can handle.

Not locking down, not doing the responsible things, also has costs, both direct and indirect financial costs, and potential long term costs.

I really hope that future accountants and economists will look very deeply at all the costs and be better prepared for future epidemics ... and there will be future epidemics.

When assessing long term strategies its important to look at all risks and costs, not just the immediate financial costs.
 
Coronavirus could act like a painkiller to mask illness, study finds

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/health/med...tudy-finds/ar-BB19QcOy?li=BBoPWjQ&ocid=ASUDHP

Sneaky little blighter, if true, but it would certainly help explain its ability to spread so fast:

The novel coronavirus may be able to block pain and mask the illness in its early stages as it spreads throughout the body, a new study suggests.

In research conducted in mice, scientists found that the spike protein the virus uses to enter cells attaches to a receptor and completely reverses the pain signaling pathway of neurons.
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Hmmm....2 days ago I asked my local council (via it's coronavirus web info service) how many people in my area were infected, per 100,000.

The answer was 19.4.

However the page, which is supposed to be updated weekly, hasn't been updated in nearly 3 weeks.

Things have moved on a little in the last 3 weeks, and tonight the page still hadn't been updated, so I dug a little further.

I found the official gov.uk page, which breaks down various things, by local authority area, down to individual wards/towns.

This says that, as of yesterdays figures, the rate per 100,000 in my town is 1047.

A 5394% increase in under 3 weeks.

My maths isn't good (well...not my maths persay, my ability to work out what maths would give me the answer I seek...is unresponsive), but this might suggest that total viral saturation of the free range local population could occur within weeks.

There can't be all that many 5000% increases needed to get from 1% to 100%

We have no 'local' restrictions, all that's in place is the national rule of 6.
 
@Wonko, that sounds dramatic. Is there a university in your town with an outbreak? Or a factory? The other thing that occurs to me might be the figures referring to different things, like one figure being daily new cases and the other total number currently infected.
 
Wonko said:
A 5394% increase in under 3 weeks.
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But until now there doesn´t seem to occur a comparable rise in new covid-19 disease in any area which experienced a significant rise of infections.

I would find it plausible tough that in the autumn excess mortality may be a bit higher. Ironically, this may be due to too much protection from low level spread of any viruses due to measures.
 
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