Apologies for a very long post, but C_A raises a lot of important points.
Curious Aardvark wrote on Mar 19
th, 2020 at 8:53am:
What i find 'interesting' is all the daft charts online claiming how much worse all the other pandemics have been in recent years.
None of them take into account how fast this thing has moved.
It's probably the single most contagious disease we've ever encountered.
Then there's all the crap about 'well it hasn't killed that many people.'
YET !
If it wioes out JUST 3% od the global population that's over 50million people.
This thing has the potential to kill more people than all of humanity's wars - combined.
One can't legislate against these opinions, alas.
The most obscene thing is the better that the efforts pay off, and the fewer that die, the more these same people will be saying that "It wasn't worth all the disruption". One absolutely can't win in these circumstances.
Quote:There's a good chance my cousin has got it - she works in customs at heathrow airport and has recently come down with fever and breathing issues.
Apart from being told to stay at home - there's been no offer of a test.
She could very well have it. She deals with large numbers of people every day coming from everywhere. I hope she does well.
There are nowhere near enough tests to process all the people that might 'need' them. They are difficult to administer, and there appears (not surprising) to be a log jam in U.K. at the moment at about 5000 tests per day. The U.K. claims, last I heard, to be ramping up to 40000 or so a day I think However they did a lot better there than some other places. The samples have to go through a machine to amplify the viral genetic material, and most times there is going to be a team of technicians pipetting stuff into wells, so it can be pretty error prone. They obviously have to keep track of which sample is which - not too much of a problem in normal circumstances but when you have a lot of samples a lot harder.
Quote:Even at this early stage in the disease's progress, the health services seem to be floundering around in the dark.
They are dealing with something no one in power cared to imagine. At the best of times they would have been stretched, but over the past decade or so many public or partially public health systems have had their surge capacity optimized out of them in order to save money.
The reason for serious concern in this particular case is the potential demand not just for a bog-standard hospital bed, but as I think we all know by now, the massive demand for supplementary oxygen and mechanical ventilation.
Without access to these facilities, the death rate is expected to approximately quadruple.
It’s not just equipment. You need competent staff to handle ventilation, and there is a limited number of those people. They also need heavy protection because putting someone carrying this disease onto a ventilator is a good way of spreading droplets everywhere.
We’ve seen these problems in Italy and everyone else is terrified they will experience the same.
Quote:If she's got it, then her husband and three sons will also have it and most likely the rest of my london based family as well.
At least two of whom are in the danger age group.
You’ve got to assume that everybody that your cousin has been in regular contact with, certainly touching, and indirectly through common surfaces like table tops, door handles etc. has a strong chance of having it. The business about handwashing is good advice. Particularly for the kids she can’t assume that if they don’t develop symptoms they don’t have it.
Quote:People keep looking at the steps that have been taken in italian and spain and saying they're overkill.
They are not.
One of the reasons this thing hasn't killed that many people yet, is because of how fast countries have responded.
It's not some weird conspiracy, those measures are sensible.
I don't agree. They did not take action early enough - reasonable alas because the population as a whole saw no need for it. They could have tried to impose the restrictions two weeks earlier when they might have worked, but I don't think there was a hope in hell that people would have followed it. At least not with something very close to martial law, which might yet come.
The U.K. tried to account for this in their modelling, but the public found out about it and went berserk - or the chattering classes did.
In terms of the way things were handled, some kind of conclusion about this being even more serious than thought seems to have been reached over last weekend. There are rumors about what it was.
What was very obvious in the U.S. on Monday was that suddenly Trump turned into a real statesman.
Quote:Touch wood it doesn't seem to have hit the midlands in the uk yet - so I'm still working.
But honestly - not sure for how much longer.
For certain it is already there. Not a chance there aren't cases in Birmingham and satellite cities and towns.
This virus has some very undesirable properties from the point of view of stopping it.
1. It is now well established that people can spread this for several days before they have any idea they are ill.
2. It is now becoming more obvious that people can carry ans spread this virus without ever developing symptoms that they were ill. Add to that there is no real way of telling this from the usual things going around at this time of year if it is mild. That all seems to be highly correlated with age.
3. It appears that kissing and transmission of saliva is a spectacularly good way of passing it on in high doses. This can be between people, or it can be kissing a common surface as in many religious practices. Sharing a communion cup, a Torah, or various similar practices is utterly crazy in the present circumstances. This is believed to be a major factor in the Westchester cluster north of New York (associated with a synagogue congregation), also in the catastrophic spread in Iran and likely a significant contributor in Italy. If they have not adjusted their practices expect the same among the many communities in Brimingham, Leeds, etc. although I might have expected them to have appeared already.
Point 1. has been known for months. In this way it differs from SARS.
Point 2. was, I believe, not recognised as a significant factor until Italy. Because of the way the Chinese and Koreans acted, I think this wasn’t really obvious during the first month or so.
Point 3. may not have been given the importance it needed. As Kick mentioned and many of us are aware, the Italians are probably the most touchy-feely people in Europe.
Quote:And as a self employed person - I don't get sick pay.
Both in the U.S. and U.K. the politicians are all scrambling to try and sort that out. They damn well need to do so, because they absolutely need that population among whom are one heck of a lot of young and less vulnerable (what’s in it for me?) people (which includes me as well) to ‘do the right thing'.
Quote:The sole ray of light is the promise of a vaccine in the near future.
No. A vaccine is at least 12-18 months, if everything works in the best possible way. The U.S. have just started phase 1 trials on a candidate, that is absolutely stunningly fast progress.
Those trials check only whether you can actually give it to people without harming them. Once they are sure of that, the phase 2 trials will test whether it actually works.
Vaccines are given to healthy people, so you have to be very careful. Development in normal circumstances certainly has bureacratic obstacles, which are being sliced away in this case, but it amounts to experimenting with humans, and you can’t make humans speed up their responses to the trial vaccine.
There are many treatments being investigated. Some are patentable and therefore of interest to pharma, others - less so. Quinine and its derivatives was reported by the Chinese to have some effect. There is also a drug the Japanese have been stockpiling for ‘flu which apparently helps.
Quote:Without that our soceity and economy is going to start falling apart.
And with that cheery thought I wish you a very healthy and happy thursday
I think there will be many surprising consequences.
Keep healthy, everyone.