2019-nCoV / Corona virus Pt 2

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Capsid said:
You can’t prepare for a zoonotic outbreak
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Really? Not at all?

I mean, I get that in terms of a specific pathogen I don’t suppose you can have a vaccine ready to go, but what about in terms of infrastructure, procedures, a chain of command, etc...?

It seems to me that some counties have learnt from experience and or have competent equivalents of a CDC (Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Macao), and other counties have incompetent leadership, hamstrung the experts, or simply gawped at what was going on and not made preparations when there was time (Japan, US, much of Southern Europe).

Even though China was the canary in the coal shaft, a lot of counties were wondering what was up with the canary lazing around at the bottom of the cage.
 
angrysoba said:
Disney and Universal Studios here in Japan have been closed for weeks now. Why would they not do the same in the US when it’s clearly loose all over the country?
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Probably because the underfunded CDC couldn't coordinate proper testing and our nation's leader spent over a month spreading disinformation about the disease.

Up until a week ago, many Americans still believed this was only a problem in other countries.
 
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angrysoba said:
Really? Not at all?



I mean, I get that in terms of a specific pathogen I don’t suppose you can have a vaccine ready to go, but what about in terms of infrastructure, procedures, a chain of command, etc...?



It seems to me that some counties have learnt from experience and or have competent equivalents of a CDC (Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Macao), and other counties have incompetent leadership, hamstrung the experts, or simply gawped at what was going on and not made preparations when there was time (Japan, US, much of Southern Europe).



Even though China was the canary in the coal shaft, a lot of counties were wondering what was up with the canary lazing around at the bottom of the cage.
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It's going to be a new virus that no one has immunity to. No diagnostics. Fortunately China released the sequence which helped a lot.


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Capsid said:
It's going to be a new virus that no one has immunity to. No diagnostics. Fortunately China released the sequence which helped a lot.
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Well yeah but, SARS and MERS at least showed another was possible.

I think we are disagreeing on what "prepared means".
 
Babbylonian said:
Probably because the underfunded CDC couldn't coordinate proper testing and our nation's leader spent over a month spreading disinformation about the disease.

Up until a week ago, many Americans still believed this was only a problem in other countries.
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Up until a *week* ago?! More like until yesterday, if they still don’t think it is like the flu.

Yeah, ridiculous!

Mind you, also ridiculous is that Disneyland Paris seems to still be open:

https://www.disneylandparis.com/en-us/
 
There's also the fundamental issue that Americans aren't generally guaranteed sick leave. The best case scenario for many here is that they have to spend vacation days in order to stay home sick without losing money. It makes it a lot easier to justify going to work with flulike symptoms.
 
Originally Posted by Trebuchet
Australian Grand Prix is cancelled.

Fairly unrelated question but it deals with a doomsday scenario. Didn’t the Australian Grand Prix play a part in the novel “On the Beach “
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Yes. Our protagonists knew their days were numbered, everyone in the northern hemisphere was already dead, the Australians were just waiting for the radiation to reach them. They moved back the date so it would happen before the drivers got radiation sick. It was quite a wild affair, with everyone knowing they would be dead in a few months, no one cared about the danger.
 
dudalb said:
I think the failure to see this coming, despite many signs it was is sort of Public Health Intelligence failure on the level of Pearl Harbor or 9/11.
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But it was foreseen. In the public health world / epidemiologists were well aware of the risk of a respiratory virus pandemic. This is why the Gates foundation modelled a coronavirus pandemic last year. The failure was not in the intelligence, governments all over the world were being warned of the risk, but it is the nature of governments not to deal with uncertain threats in the future.
 
novaphile said:
It took a long time before we started getting person to person infections because of the quarantine measures (as weak as they were, they're better than nothing).
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That's exactly my point - it should have been spreading out of control, but hasn't.

novaphile said:
I haven't been able to track down the source that sparked this remark, but the number of people tested was something like 5,000.

Given our population (approximately 25 million people), I'm hoping that this is not true, because it would indicate that the USA has really dropped the ball.
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Compare that to South Korea, with a population only double Aussie, but has done 200,000+ tests.

That is taking care.

JeanTate said:
Thanks.


Is that for Italy? Also Iran? The US?? Other places?
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Italy was the specific question, but Iran will as well.

Other countries? I sincerely hope hot, but it sure as hell won't surprise me if others do.

Darat said:
And I can tell you that nothing is being done in English prisons. They are not changing any routines, they do not have plans on how to quarantine individuals, faulty hand sanitizer dispensers (for instance in the processing room for new prisoners) are still not being fixed or replaced. They don't even have contingency plans to cope for 20% of the workforce being sick at the same time. That 20% figure is of course the government's own figure.

I have said that it is almost as if they are willing to lose a few percentage of prisoners, would help the over crowding.
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Our governments are all clearly in tune on it, then.

Sanitisers are banned in NZ prisons, because they kept getting drunk on it.

I can see some serious problems in prisons, all of which are crippled by low staff levels at the best of times.

Under NZ's protocols, one guard testing positive would mean all that person's shift goes into quarantine, so could be a lot more than -29%.
 
novaphile said:
Yes, but only because Australia was the last country standing, so the locals held a 'Grand Prix'.

It's been a long time since I read it, but I recall one of the lead characters taking steps to preserve his racing car (Filling the cylinders with oil IIRC) before he committed suicide, with his government - issued suicide pill.

(It was a very bleak book).
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He won the race first. When time was up, he was getting symptoms, he took steps to preserve his Ferrari for the future, even though he knew it would be a long time before humans were again around, if ever.
 
Trebuchet said:
The USA has indeed really dropped the ball.
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yeah, lots of issues here. We declined the use of WHO tests, and initial tests from the CDC turned out to have problems. Then regulations slowed/halted things. A group in Washington state discovered some positive samples in a group of swabs they had taken for other purposes and were not able to even report it to the CDC. They could only keep it to themselves due to privacy regs. And then there is the FDA which must approve anything used by the private labs.

A real mess. And it would be worse had it not been for the early work in China that created enough urgency to get some action. WE have lots of laws and regulations which are beneficial in normal times but are impediments when unpredicted situations occur.

NTY had a great story on this.
 
The question is starting to be asked here:

Should NZ pull the drawbridge.

I vote yes.

We're going to lose a fortune anyway and tourism is screwed. If we banned the virus entirely, Kiwis would take up a lot of the tourism slack, because we'd be happy to take cheap travel at home.

I suggested this option 3 weeks ago.

Not going to happen, but I'd like it to.
 
Thanks.

Originally Posted by Marcus
Discussing science is good, but when trying to predict the future some speculation is necessarily involved.

Agreed.

But, to turn the contrast waaaaay up .... we all hope a civilization ending comet or asteroid will not impact the Earth in our, or our children’s or grandchildren’s, lifetimes. Here in this part of the ISF, we can - and have had - discussions on this. And most of those discussions include relevant science and/or the scientific method.

So, re what havoc this coronavirus may - or may not - wreck on us, personally/individually or collectively, we should strive to stick to (or at least start with) objective evidence, the relevant science, the scientific method, etc, right?
 
Thought this was fun, and makes a little more clear the very real problem of air pollution, if nothing else:

http://www.g-feed.com/2020/03/covid-19-reduces-economic-activity.html
Putting these numbers together [see table below for details] yields some very large reductions in premature mortality. Using the He et al 2016 estimates of the impact of changes in PM on mortality, I calculate that having 2 months of 10ug/m3 reductions in PM2.5 likely has saved the lives of 4,000 kids under 5 and 73,000 adults over 70 in China. Using even more conservative estimates of 10% reduction in mortality per 10ug change, I estimate 1400 under-5 lives saved and 51700 over-70 lives saved. Even under these more conservative assumptions, the lives saved due to the pollution reductions are roughly 20x the number of lives that have been directly lost to the virus (based on March 8 estimates of 3100 Chinese COVID-19 deaths, taken from here).
What's the lesson here? It seems clearly incorrect and foolhardy to conclude that pandemics are good for health. Again I emphasize that the effects calculated above are just the health benefits of the air pollution changes, and do not account for the many other short- or long-term negative consequences of social and economic disruption on health or other outcomes; these harms could exceed any health benefits from reduced air pollution. But the calculation is perhaps a useful reminder of the often-hidden health consequences of the status quo, i.e. the substantial costs that our current way of doing things exacts on our health and livelihoods.
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Well damn, sometimes this board is screwy, not allowing me to quote posts.


Agreed, these discussions should include relevant science. Right now there are a wide variety of possible interpretations. We have China, which seems to have escaped with only a few thousand casualties, then thera is what seems to be the worst case scenario, Italy, with a rapidly growing casualty list. More time is need to accurately predict the final outcome.
 
marting said:
yeah, lots of issues here. We declined the use of WHO tests, and initial tests from the CDC turned out to have problems. Then regulations slowed/halted things. A group in Washington state discovered some positive samples in a group of swabs they had taken for other purposes and were not able to even report it to the CDC. They could only keep it to themselves due to privacy regs. And then there is the FDA which must approve anything used by the private labs.



A real mess. And it would be worse had it not been for the early work in China that created enough urgency to get some action. WE have lots of laws and regulations which are beneficial in normal times but are impediments when unpredicted situations occur.



NTY had a great story on this.
Click to expand...



I’m confused by the privacy regulation thing. We can report to the State any positive results for matters of public health. I don’t understand why they couldn’t report...
 
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