Coronavirus - worldwide spread and control

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Watched Indie-SAGE yesterday. They have put together a 6 week plan starting with a 2 week school closure and the usual kind of other stuff. The interesting part is they have a plan of how to come out of the shutdown, something that doesn't seem to have been looked at by English government. In fact this was last week's episode. OH said he thought it seemed familiar, but I have no memory of it. Mind you, it was the day after my Day of the Dentist!

Caught up (on YouTube) with this week's episode on children and schools etc later. I admit to being convinced there is a fair amount of spread in schools, and their "bubbles" are huge, plus if you have more than 1 child that means parents are being exposed in some cases to hundreds of other families via their kids. Oh, and now the 10-17 age group are the ones where cases are rising fast, before it was the 18-24 which is university age, and we've certainly had uni outbreak in Liverpool.

The really crazy thing about schools is that they all seem to have different rules. In some if one child tests positive, it's only the children sitting each side of them that have to quarantine. Seems sheer craziness to me, but I guess there isn't the testing capability.

I really enjoy these Friday meetings, feels like having some really kind and sensible scientific friends arriving in my living room each week! :)
 
I don't know which COVID thread to post this article on. Cancer surgeons in Ontario Canada are reporting a sharp rise in the number of people coming to hospital with advanced cancers. It's an unintended consequence of the sudden shutdown of non-urgent health-care services during the spring wave of COVID-19.

In mid-March, the number of people getting routine cancer screening plummeted after the province halted its screening programs for breast, cervical and colorectal cancers.

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/20...many-more-patients-with-advanced-cancers.html
 
Mij said:
I don't know which COVID thread to post this article on. Cancer surgeons in Ontario Canada are reporting a sharp rise in the number of people coming to hospital with advanced cancers. It's an unintended consequence of the sudden shutdown of non-urgent health-care services during the spring wave of COVID-19.
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This is no surprise, or should not, and it will continue, I strongly guess. It will be compared to about 180.000 excess deaths in early spring compared to 140.000 ones in the last very severe flu season in euromomo countries (which includes all severely covid-19 affected countries in Western Europe.).
 
Now why aren't I surprised?

Coronavirus: Reopening schools causes R transmission rate to surge, study suggests
Reopening schools following coronavirus lockdowns is linked to a surge in transmissions within a month, according to the first study to look at the impact of lifting restrictions on the R rate.

Children’s return to classrooms was followed by an average 24-per-cent rise in the R transmission number, University of Edinburgh researchers found after analysing data from 131 countries.

The only other measure linked to a higher increase in the rate is lifting a ban on groups gathering, which led to a 25-per-cent rise in R. To create their models, the authors linked data on country-level R estimates from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine with information about non-pharmaceutical interventions from the Oxford Covid-19 government response tracker.
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https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...-closures-lockdown-lancet-study-b1251617.html
 
Doh!!!

UK policy would seem, assuming that those deciding on it aren't very, very stupid, to be engineered to promote the spread of not just this virus, but of all viruses.

Schools, eat out to help out, distribution of those likely to be infected through care homes, lack of PPE for both the NHS and those working in care homes (or more or less anywhere else), supplying disguised expired PPE to critical health workers, effectively forced return to work, where possible, the furlough system, it's replacement, track, trace and isolate, lack of publicly promised funds to pay for additional expenses, and losses, to LAs, completely unbalanced and inadequate food supplies 'occasionally' given to those deemed most at risk with no other source of food, those most likely to need good nutrition, discrimination against the disabled (refusal to give anyone not working but those on UC a pandemic related raise, when those not on UC are mainly long term disabled) etc.

I've probably forgotten lots, my head has limited room and there have been continued scandalous muck ups since this started.
 
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Florida is reporting 3,377 new cases and 20 deaths today. Case numbers are high for a Monday. It appears that spin control is concentrating on denying that deaths are due to COVID-19. Hospitalizations are increasing.

In the White House, it now appears that nobody is talking about controlling the pandemic. The President's Chief of Staff is infected, as are several vice presidential aides.

If you check the site Rt-live, you can see that in only one state, Mississippi, is the pandemic slightly decreasing. This is a remarkable result.

Corrected: name of state. So much for a reputation for infallibility.
 
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anciendaze said:
It appears that spin control is concentrating on denying that deaths are due to COVID-19.
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That is weird. In the UK the government was blaming almost every death on Covid-19 for several months. Since I don't keep up with Covid news I'm not sure if this is still true.
 
As I see the situation:

The virus is here, and it will never ever vanish. Even when there is a vaccine, it will hardly be eradicated.

For now the virus might be thrice as deadly than the flu, and this is asking for some attention.

The Gompertz curve describes the (genuine) spread, so we will see waves over the season (anyway).

If the mortality over the year significantly changes remains to be seen, may be even not, and may be over the years the lifetime which is lost is not huge.


I absolutely don´t agree with the kind of media reports. It gives a wrong picture and induces bad thinking.
 
spinoza577 said:
As I see the situation: The virus is here, and it will never ever vanish.
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In New Zealand, basically the only cases we have are those travellers coming from overseas, who become sick while in quarantine for two weeks in managed isolation facilities. Life is pretty much normal, except for any international travel requiring two weeks in quarantine upon return, and for people needing to record where they have been so contract tracing can be fast in the event of an outbreak.

In a number of the states in Australia, I think the situation is similar. There is news today that Melbourne in the state of Victoria is now lifting lockdown restrictions, having brought their outbreak under control :party:.

There are other parts of the world that have achieved similar control that I know less about. It is possible to bring virus spread under control and essentially eliminate it locally. It is very possible in those places where the government can get the confidence of the public.

As I see the situation, throwing in the towel when it comes to trying to control the virus, in wealthy countries at least, seems to reflect a lack of will, rather than any real barriers.
 
Hutan said:
As I see the situation, throwing in the towel when it comes to trying to control the virus, in wealthy countries at least, seems to reflect a lack of will, rather than any real barriers.
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I agree. Moreover, for all those other diseases that we cannot quite eradicate, like TB and measles, the policy is to keep trying our best to eradicate. Only that way do you have a tolerable situation. In the UK the effort to control TB has got so stretched that in our area it is much more prevalent than for fifty years. My daughter caught it at her workplace and partly as a result has left teaching. The idea that you just let these illnesses rumble on is plain daft. Even flu we try to control, although the rapidity of mutation makes that a less productive exercise than for most infections.
 
Hutan said:
As I see the situation, throwing in the towel when it comes to trying to control the virus, in wealthy countries at least, seems to reflect a lack of will, rather than any real barriers.
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Depends on whose will you are referring to. In the United States we have too many people who will not cooperate with even the smallest measures. It doesn't matter who is President. Different jurisdictions will do meaningfully better than others, of course, but nationally there is no chance.
 
Mij said:
@anciendaze

Just a few hours ago on CNN they stated that The Trump administration signaled on Sunday that it had given up on controlling the spread of the coronavirus.
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I saw that, and several more reports, what I expect now is some kind of spin control to say they are not actually giving up and writing off hundreds of thousands more of U.S. citizens. We'll see what is in the news tomorrow. There are already Republicans willing to vote for the confirmation of a new Supreme Court Justice who are not willing to attend a WH ceremony to celebrate because they don't trust the White House to keep them safe, after the super-spreader debacle that resulted from the last WH gathering.

This is already a weird week politically, even for the tail end of an election campaign. Watching the Dow fall in response to news about the pandemic will have some effect on politicians, but I can't predict what. This kind of pandemic and financial news is really bad for a struggling incumbent. Dr. Fauci is only one senior expert who has predicted worse to come.

A change to civil-service job protections made last week could put him and others, at the CDC, FDA and NIH, at risk of losing their jobs if they disagree publicly with the president.

My apologies for mentioning politics, but this is a case where it seems impossible to avoid politics. Some policies amount to writing off another 200,000 citizens.
 
Hutan said:
As I see the situation, throwing in the towel when it comes to trying to control the virus, in wealthy countries at least, seems to reflect a lack of will, rather than any real barriers.
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New Zealand is an island where borders can be controlled not to ineffective, and even then it will take huge effort. I even doubt that you will manage to keep the status in the future, or you will need to isolate yourselves.

In a world thousands years later from now, it might be possible, I would agree.


In a number of the states in Australia, I think the situation is similar. There is news today that Melbourne in the state of Victoria is now lifting lockdown restrictions, having brought their outbreak under control :party:.
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If a sequence of behaviour like this needs to go on, we may well need to implement new organisations in our societies.

Jonathan Edwards said:
I agree. Moreover, for all those other diseases that we cannot quite eradicate, like TB and measles, the policy is to keep trying our best to eradicate. Only that way do you have a tolerable situation. In the UK the effort to control TB has got so stretched that in our area it is much more prevalent than for fifty years. My daughter caught it at her workplace and partly as a result has left teaching. The idea that you just let these illnesses rumble on is plain daft. Even flu we try to control, although the rapidity of mutation makes that a less productive exercise than for most infections.
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But with the mentioned diseases you don´t see such an impact on our societies (affecting its form of organization as well). Medically you may say that even much more would be necessary already in common diseases, but a medical view is not the only determinant, and this is clearly in charge in all days medicine as well. In my view, it´s naiv to think that we can stick to a lowest level spread and then eventually eradicate the virus.

Also the hope that we "may have" a vaccine in six months, and we only need to endure six more months, is not justified by any experience from the past. It´s a completely open question if a vaccine will be developed. (The best try might actually be to spread common corona viruses for T-cell immunity?)

The same sort of hope was seen here in Germany in spring, when people said, we only would now need to do restrictions pretty well for some weeks, and then we will be resolved from the virus soon. This hope should be completely in vain, at least as long as you have a population chaotic enough and borders not completely shut down (and this goes for almost all European countries, reasonably not for Iceland though).
 
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Not sure if this has alredy been posted.



Code: 
https://twitter.com/yaneerbaryam/status/1299446669394747392

Call to action
COVID-19 is a rapidly transmitting disease that evolves in 20% of confirmed cases to require extended hospitalizations and roughly 2-4% of confirmed cases result in death, with risks increasing rapidly for those over 50 years old. It can transmit even with mild symptoms (coughing, sneezing, or elevated temperature) and perhaps before symptoms appear. Reducing the likelihood of transmission requires everyone to reduce their likelihood of contact not only so they aren’t infected but also so that they don’t transmit the disease to others.

If everyone got tested for COVID-19, we could temporarily separate the infected from the uninfected. This would help reduce the spread of the virus and allow for societies to function normally. For these reasons, universal testing is our highest priority.

Aggressive and bold actions are required to reduce transmission by minimizing close-contact interaction in order to reduce vulnerability and risk for individuals, but also to “get ahead” of the outbreak so that it is stopped.

Everyone can help. Here are some steps you can take today:

  • Stay informed. Read our guidelines for minimizing spread at all levels, and share them widely.

  • Sign up to receive our newsletter with updates on our latest projects and opportunities for volunteers.

  • Call your local leaders and use our script to encourage them to implement public safety measures.

  • Check out our complete list of projects and join one that interests you!
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https://www.endcoronavirus.org/about

https://www.endcoronavirus.org/countries

Edit: The 20% figure of confirmed cases needing hospitalization I think needs to be updated, but to it seems to me even a considerably smaller figure won't diminish the plausibility of the proposed causalities and counter-measures.

Edit 2: Some of the quoted links don't work -- so here are the links to the guidelines:

https://www.endcoronavirus.org/all-guidelines
https://www.endcoronavirus.org/how-win
 
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