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The P&R Plague Thread (Covid-19)


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2 hours ago, ColoradoHusk said:

Trump sounded kinda Presidential today and applauded both parties to come up with the stimulus package.  It’s easy to sound good when you are talking about handing out money to millions of American. He was doing ok in my opinion until he started berating that reporter.  He just can’t leave well enough alone.  Between that interaction, his comments about big, beautiful buildings, and the big, beautiful wall, he reverted back to “old Trump” by the end of the news conference. 

 

He display the demeanor to try to lead during crisis for short periods of time when he can rein in his impulses to attack his critics...

 

And then he follows up with something like this which just makes you shake your head.

 

At the end of the day, the guy is too erratic and unable to control his impulses to say "meh, another four years won't be that bad."

 

 

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7 hours ago, BigRedN said:

Swine Flu - 60 million Americans were infected, 300,000 hospitalized and 4,000 died [anyone remember this back in 2012?]

Flu - Between 12,000 - 61,000 die each year [yawn ...].

Digestive Disease - 25,000 a year on average [um, never heard of this].

Abortion - 500,000 - 600,000 a year, roughly 50,000 each month [it's a Mom's choice and right ya know].

 

Thus, amidst whatever "pandemic" or "political" viewpoint one wants to look at the Corona Virus at ... in relation to what happens day in and day out ... 728 lives in one month is certainly no "pandemic" or anything worth getting fearful over or losing sleep over.

Let's keep it real with some math. The problem is you don't appreciate how quickly an exponential increase happens. As I posted previously, the number of deaths from covid-19 in the US doubles about every 3 days. If the current doubling time continues, then here's a rough estimate of how long to surpass each of the numbers you've listed:

swine flu: 3*log2(4000/728) = 7.4 days to reach 4,000 deaths

flu: 3*log2(61000/728) = 19.2 days to reach 61,000 deaths

digestive disease: 3*log2(25000/728) = 15.3 days to reach 25,000 deaths

abortion: 3*log2(600000/728) = 29.1 days to reach 600,000 deaths

 

6 hours ago, BigRedBuster said:

Here's what I don't get.  Supposedly, China's daily new cases and deaths has really dropped off. So, the country is starting to lift social limitations.  

 

Well....if the daily new cases has dropped off because people aren't socializing, won't they now increase if people start socializing again?

 

Wouldn't they have had to literally test everyone in society to see who needs to remain under quarantine and who can leave?

There's a way to contain a virus using test and trace. If you know who has it (test) and can figure out who they have exposed (trace), then you can just quarantine those people. That's what China and South Korea are doing, which allows them to let people work and go out.

 

3 hours ago, GSG said:

We just got a Stay-at-home order here in Larimer County, CO. Doesn't effect me though since my job is considered "essential" 

Now Colorado stay-at-home order for whole state:

 

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31 minutes ago, Danny Bateman said:

 

He display the demeanor to try to lead during crisis for short periods of time when he can rein in his impulses to attack his critics...

 

And then he follows up with something like this which just makes you shake your head.

 

At the end of the day, the guy is too erratic and unable to control his impulses to say "meh, another four years won't be that bad."

 

 

The Trumpster is ok when he is working off a script, as soon as he ad-libs or tries to answer a question he goes off the rails. 

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19 minutes ago, RedDenver said:

There's a way to contain a virus using test and trace. If you know who has it (test) and can figure out who they have exposed (trace), then you can just quarantine those people. That's what China and South Korea are doing, which allows them to let people work and go out.

Yeah...trace who a college kid comes in contact with on spring break in South Padre. 
 

what about a couple that decided to experience South By Southwest?

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7 minutes ago, BigRedBuster said:

Yeah...trace who a college kid comes in contact with on spring break in South Padre. 
 

what about a couple that decided to experience South By Southwest?

That's why we are too late and need lockdown type restrictions until we can get new cases down then you can find a way back to the testing and tracing phase

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1 hour ago, BigRedBuster said:

Yeah...trace who a college kid comes in contact with on spring break in South Padre. 
 

what about a couple that decided to experience South By Southwest?

Other nations are doing it and it's been done before for SARS, MERS, and the recent ebola outbreak. China is lifting it's lockdowns now, even for Wuhan where the virus started. It's certainly not easy though, especially with a virus that spreads as fast as this one.

 

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This article in The Atlantic is worth reading:

How the Pandemic Will End: The U.S. may end up with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the industrialized world. This is how it’s going to play out.

Quote

Rudderless, blindsided, lethargic, and uncoordinated, America has mishandled the COVID-19 crisis to a substantially worse degree than what every health expert I’ve spoken with had feared. “Much worse,” said Ron Klain, who coordinated the U.S. response to the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014. “Beyond any expectations we had,” said Lauren Sauer, who works on disaster preparedness at Johns Hopkins Medicine. “As an American, I’m horrified,” said Seth Berkley, who heads Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. “The U.S. may end up with the worst outbreak in the industrialized world.”

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A recent analysis from the University of Pennsylvania estimated that even if social-distancing measures can reduce infection rates by 95 percent, 960,000 Americans will still need intensive care. There are only about 180,000 ventilators in the U.S. and, more pertinently, only enough respiratory therapists and critical-care staff to safely look after 100,000 ventilated patients. Abandoning social distancing would be foolish. Abandoning it now, when tests and protective equipment are still scarce, would be catastrophic.

 

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Trump's entire political career is based on spreading false, deceptive and misleading information about his opponents.  This is a hoot!

 

And the threat of "consequences."  Like... what?  A lawsuit that will never see the inside of a courtroom?

 

If I were a TV station that received this letter, I'd play that ad once per hour, on the house.

 

 

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Given the foregoing, should you fail to immediately cease broadcasting PUSA’s ad “Exponential Threat”, Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. will have no choice but to pursue all legal remedies available to it in law and in equity; we will not stand idly by and allow you to broadcast false, deceptive, and misleading information concerning President’s Trump’s healthcare positions without consequence. This letter is without prejudice to Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.’s rights, remedies, and defenses, all of which are hereby expressly reserved.

 

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Harvard researchers note that we will need several periods of social distancing.  That their needs to be a mix of 'herd' immunization and periods of distance. 

 

https://www.zdnet.com/article/harvard-researchers-social-distancing-during-covid-19-may-have-to-be-turned-on-and-off-like-a-spigot/


 

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Work posted on the medRxive pre-print server Tuesday by a group of researchers at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston suggests that multiple targeted periods of "social distancing" of various kinds will likely be necessary for the US before any vaccine is found for the disease.

There's a tension in fighting COVID-19: So-called herd immunity needs to be built up, which requires that the disease be allowed to spread to some extent, for without exposure, that immunity will never be built. But the disease must not spread so much that it overwhelms the US's medical resources.

In "Social distancing strategies for curbing the COVID-19 epidemic," authors Stephen Iissler, Christine Tedijanto, Marc Lipsitch, and Yonatan Grad of the Chan School write that "a single period of social distancing will not be sufficient." 

Paradoxically, going into an intense quarantine with nothing to follow it can actually be counter-productive.

 

Without repeated intervals of distancing, "there was a resurgence of infection when the simulated social distancing measures were lifted" in the model scenarios they ran.

The authors found that a resurgence could happen even after especially arduous periods of distancing, such as a 20-week period of social distancing. "The social distancing is so effective that virtually no population immunity is built."

 

Also: We need a Big Data effort to find a COVID-19 cure, says pioneering geneticist

Instead, the authors argue interventions need to be made multiple times over a period of time, called "intermittent distancing," at intervals that depend upon the state of the health care infrastructure at any moment in time, meaning, how much load it can absorb of critical care cases of the disease.

"Intermittent social distancing can maintain critical care demand within current thresholds," they advise.

harvard-covid19-intermittant-distancing-march-2020.jpg

Two possible futures according to Harvard medical researchers. In one instance, low healthcare resources mean intermittent social distancing needs to be extended out into 2022, top, while in a scenario with higher healthcare resources, distancing can end midway through 2021.

Kissler et al.

The authors suggest a threshold to be maintained is no more than 37.5 cases of the disease per 10,000 adult people in the population. That should be the "on" switch to re-commence social distancing, they argue. That threshold, they estimate, would keep the number of patients needing critical care at 0.89 persons for every 10,000 people in the population, which should be adequate to not overwhelm the health care system. 

The predictions made by the researchers are constructed via a familiar, long-standing epidemiological model known as "SEIR," an acronym that stands for the "susceptible," "exposed," "infectious," and "recovered" individuals in a community. The approach uses differential equations to compute how fast a disease may spread based on how many people are in a community and how many are already sick or who have gotten better or died. It's a statistical technique, and so it's important to remember that it's not a guarantee of future trends, it's a way to model what might happen. Bear in mind, the paper is not yet peer-reviewed, and so fellow researchers have not yet vetted the work.

 

 

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4 minutes ago, TGHusker said:

Harvard researchers note that we will need several periods of social distancing.  That their needs to be a mix of 'herd' immunization and periods of distance. 

 

https://www.zdnet.com/article/harvard-researchers-social-distancing-during-covid-19-may-have-to-be-turned-on-and-off-like-a-spigot/


 

 

These guys seem like experts and ultimately I think they are right but I wonder how the 'on' switch would be activated. It says no more than 37.5 cases per 10,000, that's around 1.2 million cases. First of all, that seems like alot considering we are barely handling 50,000 cases. Secondly, when would you activate the distancing? When we reach this number? Because at that point alot more are actually infected than that number and they won't show for up to 14 days. Is that taken into account? 

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Indications that the virus is more active in cooler weather/climates suggest that we will get another round of this in the fall/winter and that this will be the cycle until we get the vaccination.  This may be the new normal for a period of time.  For sports fans, perhaps no football or basketball and other winter sports as well (which is low priority considering the consequences).

https://news.yahoo.com/coronavirus-could-become-seasonal-top-us-scientist-001146451.html

Quote

 

Washington (AFP) - There is a strong chance the new coronavirus could return in seasonal cycles, a senior US scientist said Wednesday, underscoring the urgent need to find a vaccine and effective treatments.

Anthony Fauci, who leads research into infectious diseases at the National Institutes of Health, told a briefing the virus was beginning to take root in the southern hemisphere, where winter is on its way.

"What we're starting to see now... in southern Africa and in the southern hemisphere countries, is that we're having cases that are appearing as they go into their winter season," he said.

"And if, in fact, they have a substantial outbreak, it will be inevitable that we need to be prepared that we'll get a cycle around the second time.

"It totally emphasizes the need to do what we're doing in developing a vaccine, testing it quickly and trying to get it ready so that we'll have a vaccine available for that next cycle."

There are currently two vaccines that have entered human trials -- one in the US and one in China -- and they could be a year to a year-and-a-half away from deployment.

Treatments are also being investigated -- some new drugs and others that have been repurposed, including the antimalarials chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine.

"I know we'll be successful in putting this down now, but we really need to be prepared for another cycle," Fauci concluded.

Fauci's comments suggesting the virus does better in colder weather than it does in hot and humid conditions follows a recent Chinese research paper -- still preliminary and awaiting peer-review -- that reached the same conclusion.

The reasons are thought to include that respiratory droplets remain airborne for longer in colder weather, and that cold weather weakens immunity.

Another potential reason is that viruses degrade more quickly on hotter surfaces, possibly because a protective layer of fat that envelops them dries out quicker.

But reduced infection rate does not mean the virus gets eliminated -- Australia has had almost 2,500 confirmed cases and 8 deaths, for example.

 

 

 
 
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