2019-nCoV / Corona virus Pt 2

Status
Not open for further replies.
Oh yes, and just to confirm what Skeptic Ginger said:

Our flu season in Australia is a couple of months away...

We don't usually get vaccinated until around Easter. (or later)
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Not glue, just a tight fit.

In health care we do fit testing to make sure air is not leaking around the mask.

As for where the air goes, think it through. Blow through the mask that is close to your mouth. You exhale with a certain amount of force. You are pushing the air through the mask or it is forced out sideways, but not toward the person in front of you.

Now take the mask that is close to your face but the contagious person is breathing out at some distance from the mask. Nothing is forcing that air through the mask. By the time it reaches you there is little pressure behind it.

You are inhaling, that is the force moving the air. Now the air is following the path of least resistance which is around the filter if there isn't a tight fit.
Click to expand...

To say the same thing another way: you might think that breathing in and out would give the same pattern of flow just with the direction reversed, but it's not at all true. You can easily feel the difference by holding your hand a bit in front of your face and breathing in and out. Or trying to extinguish a candle by breathing in rather than out.
 
Reports online that the English Football League are suspending all matches until at least 4th April.
 
angrysoba said:
This pandemic may end up being something of a blessing in disguise.
Click to expand...

It's a very good disguise.



But I take your point. In reality, if the death rate were just a little bit lower, it wouldn't be worth all this fuss, but it's not hard to imagine a virus that was just as contagious, but had a slightly higher death rate. If it were slightly higher, then really bad things would happen. This does give us sort of a "warning shot", or perhaps a "You think that was bad? You ain't seen nothing yet."

Conceivably, it might result in better preparations being made for the future.
 
Planigale said:
One thing I am not sure about and maybe someone here has better info is school closures. We know that if this was pandemic flu this would be an important response, children are very important in flu transmission and schools are important sites for flu transmission. SARS CoV 2 is not influenza. Whilst flu infects children who shed a lot of virus, covid 19 seems only to cause mild illness in children and this may mean that they do not shed much virus, therefore school closures are not important in the chain of transmission. In the last flu pandemic some of the early cases centred around schools, but this does not seem to be the case for covid 19. I have seen no stories of school centred outbreaks.
Click to expand...

One thing is that people are more cautious about children.


Another thing is that schools tend to be a nexus of activity in the community. Shutting them down helps with "social distancing", even for parents and other adults involved.
 
EHocking said:
Not in Australia.

A suspect at my wife’s work was tested and had the results within 24hrs.
Click to expand...
Well I'm sure you can be the one to tell your wife she is not a very important person! :)

Seriously was she a direct contact with a confirmed case?
 
Meadmaker said:
One thing is that people are more cautious about children.


Another thing is that schools tend to be a nexus of activity in the community. Shutting them down helps with "social distancing", even for parents and other adults involved.
Click to expand...


Schools also have to worry about lawsuits from large numbers of parents if something goes wrong. The school I attended was notorious in the area for delaying opening or closing for the day if three snowflakes fell or somebody said the word "snow" really loud. It may have been an anecdote, but I was once told that, years earlier, the school chose not to close and a bus full of kids slid off the road and into a ditch, injuring students. The school became very cautious about snow after that.
 
Meadmaker said:
It's a very good disguise.



But I take your point. In reality, if the death rate were just a little bit lower, it wouldn't be worth all this fuss, but it's not hard to imagine a virus that was just as contagious, but had a slightly higher death rate. If it were slightly higher, then really bad things would happen. This does give us sort of a "warning shot", or perhaps a "You think that was bad? You ain't seen nothing yet."

Conceivably, it might result in better preparations being made for the future.
Click to expand...

Luckily? it seems as if the most fatal of diseases have lower transmission rates. There may be a scientific reason for that but I do not know.

If you had a disease with fatality rates like ebola and transmission rates like
this virus the result would be more than disastrous.
 
eeyore1954 said:
Luckily? it seems as if the most fatal of diseases have lower transmission rates. There may be a scientific reason for that but I do not know.
If you had a disease with fatality rates like ebola and transmission rates like
this virus the result would be more than disastrous.
Click to expand...

I think the main reason that diseases which are more fatal have lower transmission rates is that they often kill the hosts before they can spread it.

The problem with this one seems to be the long incubation time and the apparently high numbers of asymptomatic or mild cases, so people are mobile and passing it to a lot of others instead of sick at home, in hospital or dead.
 
Also, diseases with more dramatic symptoms usually cause the host to socially distance automatically: if you are too sick to leave your home, you can't infect anyone.
 
Armitage72 said:
Schools also have to worry about lawsuits from large numbers of parents if something goes wrong. The school I attended was notorious in the area for delaying opening or closing for the day if three snowflakes fell or somebody said the word "snow" really loud. It may have been an anecdote, but I was once told that, years earlier, the school chose not to close and a bus full of kids slid off the road and into a ditch, injuring students. The school became very cautious about snow after that.
Click to expand...

Yeah when I was a kid we never had a snow day. Even when I had to walk barefoot. We were tough back then. (Or it could be because I grew up around Los Angeles).

Where I live now it really does seem to be snow days happen much easier than they did 30-40 years ago and I always assumed concern about lawsuits was the cause.
 
I've been using the Johns Hopkins/ArcGIS dashboard to kind of follow the big picture:

Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU)

That site was previously linked to in this forum by another forum member. Maps, graphs in different formats, it was pretty good. Unfortunately, it does not seem to be working very well anymore, it updated only twice yesterday and is now showing even fewer nation's numbers (yesterday it had data from 121 nations/provinces, today only 87).

Lots of school districts cancelling for weeks at a time now, I wonder how they are going to keep up with educational requirements. I mean, sometimes when they have too many snow days, they add on a few days to the end of the school year. Are they going to add two weeks onto this school year? If the situation is still unstable and they need to extend the closure even longer?
 
Read report about how other countries are dealing with this, this is from South Korea

.....

. “There are signs everywhere reminding us to wear masks, wash our hands and use sanitisers,” she said. “There are even some places, like pharmacies, where you cannot enter without wearing a mask. Buying them is also limited to two per person to ensure there’s enough for everyone.”
Amanda stays across new developments through*government alerts on her phone. “They update me on the number of confirmed cases, which regions they’re in, which hospitals patients are in as well as hygiene prevention measures we should follow,” she said. “They also tell us the public transport routes patients have taken so we know which ones to avoid. I personally feel the authorities are really taking this seriously.


“Schools are closed and the return date has been consistently pushed back – it was 2 March and now it’s the 23rd. I think it will get a bit better but we’re not out of the woods yet.”

....

Later in the report it talks about drive thru testing, you drive up they take the sample, give you a snack you drive and park and they let you know your status.


UK, USA, Australia, most EU countries could have been doing all that now. Instead we sit on our hands waiting for... does anyone know what we are waiting for before we take any actual action?
 
eeyore1954 said:
Yeah when I was a kid we never had a snow day. Even when I had to walk barefoot. We were tough back then. (Or it could be because I grew up around Los Angeles).

Where I live now it really does seem to be snow days happen much easier than they did 30-40 years ago and I always assumed concern about lawsuits was the cause.
Click to expand...
Or how about us having a better understanding of actual risk these days...
 
The UK scientists have stated that they don't want to delay it so much that it's still around next winter - they want 60% to 80% of us to have been infected over the next six months or so. Those that don't die will then be immune to reinfection and provide some herd immunity to those who have avoided infection. So right now they want more of us to catch it to ramp up to a level where the NHS can still just about cope, but we start making more rapid progress towards the 60% to 80% goal.

This assumes that the virus doesn't mutate into two or more distinct strains - if it does then this plan won't work.
 
ceptimus said:
The UK scientists have stated that they don't want to delay it so much that it's still around next winter - they want 60% to 80% of us to have been infected over the next six months or so. Those that don't die will then be immune to reinfection and provide some herd immunity to those who have avoided infection. So right now they want more of us to catch it to ramp up to a level where the NHS can still just about cope, but we start making more rapid progress towards the 60% to 80% goal.

This assumes that the virus doesn't mutate into two or more distinct strains - if it does then this plan won't work.
Click to expand...

Who's saying that?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Back
Top Bottom