2019-nCoV / Corona virus Pt 2

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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.
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But why would that prevent people getting tested now, the more people know their status the better it is for everyone. If your delivery driver knows she has had the virus then she can continue to deliver your Amazon parcels even if she has a cough.
 
Darat said:
Or how about us having a better understanding of actual risk these days...
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When I was a kid, I don't remember even seeing bike helmets. I certainly didn't wear one. I'm lucky that when I had my bike accident when I was around 11, I hit the ground face first and only drove my front teeth through my upper lip rather than fracturing my skull.
 
Armitage72 said:
When I was a kid, I don't remember even seeing bike helmets. I certainly didn't wear one. I'm lucky that when I had my bike accident when I was around 11, I hit the ground face first and only drove my front teeth through my upper lip rather than fracturing my skull.
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You were taught how to land properly then!? :D
 
crescent said:
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?
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My kid's school is planning to assign work to be done at home via ShowMyHomeWork and teachers will be online all day to assist. Some teachers have said they will struggle to do this as they will have young children home from school.
 
ceptimus said:
UK Chief Scientist, UK Chief Medical Officer, UK Prime Minister, ... and plenty of others.
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I need context. Do you have a link?

OK found this:

"Sir Patrick said it is hoped the government's approach will create a "herd immunity in the UK".

"Our aim is to try and reduce the peak, broaden the peak, not suppress it completely," he said.

"Also, because the vast majority of people get a mild illness, to build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune to this disease and we reduce the transmission.

"At the same time we protect those who are most vulnerable to it."

He also said the new coronavirus is likely to become "an annual seasonal infection".
 
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A few new Sub-saharan countries, and Kazakhstan are added to the list. Italy due to overtake China in terms of active cases.
 
Capsid said:
I need context. Do you have a link?

OK found this:

"Sir Patrick said it is hoped the government's approach will create a "herd immunity in the UK".

"Our aim is to try and reduce the peak, broaden the peak, not suppress it completely," he said.

"Also, because the vast majority of people get a mild illness, to build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune to this disease and we reduce the transmission.

"At the same time we protect those who are most vulnerable to it."

He also said the new coronavirus is likely to become "an annual seasonal infection".
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Apparently Professor Whitty, who is one of the scientists in charge of the new policy talked about it on BBC's Today Programme.

They are working with the Nudge* Unit, apparently...
ETA: It does seem to be talked about by a number of government spokespeople...

Up until now the government’s strategy has been simple: first try and contain the outbreak and then delay the spread, evening out the pressure on the NHS.

But now people involved in the government’s coronavirus response appear to be mooting a new strategy: herd immunity. On March 11, David Halpern – chief executive of the government-owned Behavioural Insights Team and a member of the the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies – spoke to BBC News outlining an approach that depended on shielding vulnerable people until enough of the UK population had been infected with Covid-19 that acquired immunity stopped its spread altogether.


On the ITV website, Robert Peston referred to the same idea, writing that the strategy of the British government “is to allow the virus to pass through the entire population so that we acquire herd immunity”. So how does the concept work? People can gain immunity to diseases after being exposed to them, and once enough people are immune to a disease – either through exposure or vaccines – it will stop circulating within a population. That's herd immunity.
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Link

The article is critical (or at least it raises an eyebrow) of this approach:

The problem is that embracing herd immunity could well put the NHS under immense strain – depending on how well we were able to shield vulnerable people from the disease. Jeremy Rossman, a virologist at the University of Kent, isn’t convinced that accepting herd immunity is inevitable. “I think it’s very likely that with continued containment and delay strategies we will be able to stop the virus spread well before reaching even 50 per cent,” he says. “Even spread over a period of months [widespread infection] is obviously not an acceptable plan. Nor is this a necessary or inevitable outcome, especially with good surveillance, containment, delay and social distancing measures enacted.”

The example of other countries suggests that herd immunity might not be the only ending point of the coronavirus outbreak. In South Korea, which recorded 851 new cases in a single day at its peak, the outbreak is slowing. Yesterday it recorded a total of 242 new cases, after some of the most widespread testing in the world. China – once the centre of the global outbreak – recorded only 31 new cases in the WHO’s latest situation reports. Although it’s difficult to know the precise number of people who have caught the infection in China, it does suggest it’s possible to contain the current outbreak without half of the population catching the disease.
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*Behavioural Psychology term
 
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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.
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I really doubt that is true. The number of deaths would be too high even at 1% or less. Plus they may have treatments in the fall which would save the lives of some who do not get it now.


Those that don't die will then be immune to reinfection
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Those who do die will also not be likely to be reinfected.
 
I think the UK plan is reasonable. The disease is well established around the world already and the UK population is well seeded with the virus. Unless you want the entire world to live like they have been doing in Wuhan over the past few months for the next 12-24 months until we hopefully have an effective vaccine to treat a large proportion of the world's population we have to come up with another approach, which is what the UK experts have done.

The main problem is that advising people to frequently and thoroughly wash their hands and staying at home if unwell doesn't satisfy the human desire for big dramatic actions and to be seen to be DOING SOMETHING.
 
Ivor the Engineer said:
I think the UK plan is reasonable. The disease is well established around the world already and the UK population is well seeded with the virus. Unless you want the entire world to live like they have been doing in Wuhan over the past few months for the next 12-24 months until we hopefully have an effective vaccine to treat a large proportion of the world's population we have to come up with another approach, which is what the UK experts have done.

The main problem is that advising people to frequently and thoroughly wash their hands and staying at home if unwell doesn't satisfy the human desire for big dramatic actions and to be seen to be DOING SOMETHING.
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I do have a question about this though.

Do we know what kind of immunity is conferred from having this virus?

I know there are some such as measles, where if you have had the virus as a child you are very unlikely to get it again (and of course, now we have a vaccine so nobody expect the children of idiots and some unfortunate others gets it), but then there are other viruses such as norovirus which seems to only give partial immunity for as little as six months.

Isn't it a bit experimental to see if you can immunize the entire population by getting a large proportion of it infected?
 
American come to grips with grim reality of Covid-19:

https://twitter.com/Wienermobile/status/1238232995624030215

We’ve made the difficult decision to cancel currently scheduled Wienermobile events for the near future. The health & safety of our fans, the Hotdoggers & the public is top priority. We look forward to getting back on the hot dog highway as soon as we can. Stay safe everyone Yellow heart
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angrysoba said:
This pandemic may end up being something of a blessing in disguise.

It is the kind of thing that can expose all the errors of planning and implementation of plans, leadership or the lack of it, and how the public can be educated to follow basic procedures for keeping themselves well.

We will have a lot of chances to see which countries did well in this situation and which did very badly. Hopefully, each country can set up strong, competent institutions for disease control that borrows ideas that worked, and leaders can defer to them in these kinds of situations and not defund them to save a few pennies.

<snip>
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Sad to say, this won't happen because it will require the very people who screwed up to admit that they did, and say that they will change their ways.

Our politicians don't work like that anymore. Conceding that there might have been a better way would mean that they hadn't been the best.

And the idea that it would spur a change in preparedness rather than cost cutting has no historical precedent. Just as soon as the public's short term memory fades a bit the "cost-cutting" measures will fire right back up. Can't waste money on things like preparedness when there are taxes on the rich to be cut.

I'm old enough to remember when we had rivers so polluted that they actually caught fire. I have lived long enough to see clean water strategies make those same rivers almost potable.

Now I have also lived long enough to see politicians claim those measures aren't necessary because our water is fine, and try to cripple the very things which made it that way, because they are bad for business.

Full circle, almost.
 
Ivor the Engineer said:
I think the UK plan is reasonable. The disease is well established around the world already and the UK population is well seeded with the virus. Unless you want the entire world to live like they have been doing in Wuhan over the past few months for the next 12-24 months until we hopefully have an effective vaccine to treat a large proportion of the world's population we have to come up with another approach, which is what the UK experts have done.



The main problem is that advising people to frequently and thoroughly wash their hands and staying at home if unwell doesn't satisfy the human desire for big dramatic actions and to be seen to be DOING SOMETHING.
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The biggest problem is that the self imposed quarantine is effectively useless unless those people can be tested.
 
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.
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It isn't just a matter of how much snow. Multiple conditions come into play.

One of the worst "snow days" in the decades I've lived here in central NC involved about 1/4" of snow.

No one had expected any precipitation, and so the brine trucks hadn't gone out the night before to pre-treat the roads. The daily temps had been cold enough for long enough that surface temps were below freezing.

Around lunch-time on that day "a few flakes" started falling. This was when lots of people thought it might be a good idea to go home early just in case.

The roads got busy.

Heat from traffic melted that little bit of snow that was falling ... and then it re-froze. Every single street and highway turned into a skating rink. School buses were having so much trouble staying on the road that some of them pulled over on the side of the Interstates, Accidents had blocked traffic everywhere and the DOT trucks couldn't get out to treat the roads. Some school kids ended up overnighting in shopping malls and area churches because they couldn't get home. It took all day through the next day to get everything sorted out, all the kids home, and all the roads cleared.

I can't describe how fast this happened, but this might give an idea. I was working on a job site that was close enough to my house that I could go home for lunch. I drove the three miles or so home with no problem.

Half an hour later when I headed back I almost didn't get there because the roads were so slick.

I don't blame schools for an abundance of caution.

Just as a side note, I grew up in WV and was quite used to snow. I lived within walking distance of school and never had to bus, but there were a few days I was able to ski to my high school, which was about six blocks from my house ... straight down hill. This is to say, my experience has made me very familiar with, even accustomed to snowy weather. That's just taught me to respect it.
 
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