SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)

Kentonio said:
Sure, why would education be important..
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Not saying that it is isn't important but from talking to numerous teachers over the years I honestly think they are told they have the most important job in the world and most of them believe it.
 
balaks said:
Not saying that it is isn't important but from talking to numerous teachers over the years I honestly think they are told they have the most important job in the world and most of them believe it.
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Don't know if anyone raised this earlier in the thread, but it's been suggested that teachers could be asked to teach/look after the children of people working in essential/emergency services. That sounds like a great idea to me.
 
MDFC Manager said:
Just read the tragic news that a guy who was put in isolation and samples sent for testing, committed suicide by jumping off the hospital floor.
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A Chinese friend told me they had seen videos out of Wuhan of family members committing suicide so that they didn't infect their family members.
 
Red_Aaron said:
I'm a self employed consultant, got word from the 2 companies that make up probably 80% of my earnings that my services won't be required in the short term (which will almost inevitably be long term too right)

Wife works at a small independent nursery, if the closure goes beyond 2 weeks which there's every chance it will the business will almost certainly fold, shes been on reduced hours all week as is as the owners been shitting it (understandably)

Anyone know industries where they might be hiring people? I've heard delivery driving might be the only options right now given the demand
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Not sure if it's the same everywhere but in Sheffield they're looking for staff at Asda/Aldi/Lidl/Morrissons to start urgently. Hope everything works out well mate.
 
Why are all these celebs self isolating having such a good time?
If they’re self isolating doesn’t that mean they’re showing symptoms or are ill? And you only self isolate for 7 days so how long are you actually ‘really’ ill for?
 
Penna said:
Don't know if anyone raised this earlier in the thread, but it's been suggested that teachers could be asked to teach/look after the children of people working in essential/emergency services. That sounds like a great idea to me.
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Yeah that is exactly how they should be used. To enable the healthcare staff, etc. to keep working.
 
MikeUpNorth said:
After speaking to a close friend in food supply chain logistics, I really wouldn't bank on that. Obviously, governments would have to just abandon lockdowns come what may if food supply was on the point of collapse.
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I know feck all about food supply chain logistics but do know that the medicine supply chain is rock solid. It has to be. I would be astonished if governments don’t ensure that food supply is on a similar footing.
 
Flying high said:
Except we don't really have the luxury of time to see how it goes.

Stop the spread now or it will spread further and faster. We are wasting time with half measures, even if this is a step in the right direction.
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So how will closing schools in full stop the spread exactly?
 
sammsky1 said:
Not sure if this has already been posted but it’s essentially an exec summary of the Imperial Collage study that freaked out the entire world over the weekend.

Copied from Facebook written by Dr Joel Strehl

I am a US surgeon and critical care physician. I rarely post—and almost never post about medical related issues. This is different. I would STRONGLY recommend everyone take 5 minutes and read this. Don’t panic, but please be smart and follow the guidelines.

We can now read the report on COVID-19 that so terrified every public health manager and head of state from Boris Johnson to Donald Trump to the dictator of El Salvador that they ordered people to stay in their houses. I read it yesterday afternoon and haven't been the same since. I urge everyone to read it, but maybe have a drink first, or have your family around you. It is absolutely terrifying. The New York TImes confirms that the CDC and global leaders are treating it as factual.

Here's a brief rundown of what I'm seeing in here. Please correct me in comments if I'm wrong.

The COVID-19 response team at Imperial College in London obtained what appears to be the first accurate dataset of infection and death rates from China, Korea, and Italy. They plugged those numbers into widely available epidemic modeling software and ran a simulation: what would happen if the United States did absolutely nothing -- if we treated COVID-19 like the flu, went about business as usual, and let the virus take its course?

Here's what would happen: 80% of Americans would get the disease. 0.9% of them would die. Between 4 and 8 percent of all Americans over the age of 70 would die. 2.2 million Americans would die from the virus itself.

It gets worse. Most people who are in danger of dying from COVID-19 need to be put on ventilators. 50% of those put on ventilators still die, but the other 50% live. But in an unmitigated epidemic, the need for ventilators would be 30 times the number of ventilators in the United States. Virtually no one who needed a ventilator would get one. 100% of patients who need ventilators would die if they didn't get one. So the actual death toll from the virus would be closer to 4 million Americans -- in a span of 3 months. 8-15% of all Americans over 70 would die.

How many people is 4 million Americans? It's more Americans than have died all at once from anything, ever. It's the population of Los Angeles. It's four times the number of Americans who died in the Civil War...on both sides combined. It's two-thirds as many people as died in the Holocaust.

Americans make up 4.4% of the world's population. So if we simply extrapolate these numbers to the rest of the world -- now we're getting into really fuzzy estimates, so the margin of error is pretty great here -- this gives us 90 million deaths globally from COVID-19. That's 15 Holocausts. That's 1.5 times as many people as died in World War II, over 12 years. This would take 3-6 months.

Now, it's unrealistic to assume that countries wouldn't do ANYTHING to fight the virus once people started dying. So the Imperial College team ran the numbers again, this time assuming a "mitigation" strategy. A mitigation strategy is pretty much what common sense would tell us to do: America places all symptomatic cases of the disease in isolation. It quarantines their families for 14 days. It orders all Americans over 70 to practice social distancing. This is what you've seen a lot of people talking about when they say we should "flatten the curve": try to slow the spread of the disease to the people most likely to die from it, to avoid overwhelming hospitals.

And it does flatten the curve -- but not nearly enough. The death rate from the disease is cut in half, but it still kills 1.1 million Americans all by itself. The peak need for ventilators falls by two-thirds, but it still exceeds the number of ventilators in the US by eight times, meaning most people who need ventilators still don't get them. That leaves the actual death toll in the US at right around 2 million deaths. The population of Houston. Two civil wars. One-third of the Holocaust. Globally, 45 million people die: 7.5 Holocausts, 3/4 of World War II. That's what happens if we use common sense: the worst death toll from a single cause since the Middle Ages.

Finally, the Imperial College team ran the numbers a third time, this time assuming a "suppression" strategy. In addition to isolating symptomatic cases and quarantining their family members, they also simulated social distancing for the entire population. All public gatherings and most workplaces shut down. Schools and universities close. (Note that these simulations assumed a realistic rate of adherence to these requirements, around 70-75% adherence, not that everyone follows them perfectly.) This is basically what we are seeing happen in the United States today.

This time it works! The death rate in the US peaks three weeks from now at a few thousand deaths, then goes down. We hit, but don't exceed (at least not by very much), the number of available ventilators. The nightmarish death tolls from the rest of the study disappear; COVID-19 goes down in the books as a bad flu instead of the Black Death.

But here's the catch: if we EVER relax these requirements before a vaccine is administered to the entire population, COVID-19 comes right back and kills millions of Americans in a few months, the same as before. The simulation does indicate that, after the first suppression period (lasting from now until July), we could probably lift restrictions for a month, followed by two more months of suppression, in a repeating pattern without triggering an outbreak or overwhelming the ventilator supply. If we staggered these suppression breaks based on local conditions, we might be able to do a bit better. But we simply cannot ever allow the virus to spread throughout the entire population in the way other viruses do, because it is just too deadly. If lots of people we know end up getting COVID-19, it means millions of Americans are dying. It simply can't be allowed to happen.

How quickly will a vaccine be here? Already, medical ethics have been pushed to the limit to deliver one. COVID-19 was first discovered a few months ago. Last week, three separate research teams announced they had developed vaccines. Yesterday, one of them (with FDA approval) injected its vaccine into a live person, without waiting for animal testing. Now, though, they have to monitor the test subject for fourteen months to make sure the vaccine is safe. This is the part of the testing that can't be rushed: the plan is to inoculate the entire human population, so if the vaccine itself turned out to be lethal for some reason, it could potentially kill all humans, which is a lot worse than 90 million deaths. Assuming the vaccine is safe and effective, it will still take several months to produce enough to inoculate the global population. For this reason, the Imperial College team estimated it will be about 18 months until the vaccine is available.

During those 18 months, things are going to be very difficult and very scary. Our economy and our society will be disrupted in profound ways. Worst of all, if the suppression policies actually work, it will feel like we are doing all this for nothing, because the infection and death rates will be very low. It's easy to get people to come together in common sacrifice in the middle of a war. It's very hard to get them to do so in a pandemic that looks invisible precisely because suppression methods are working. But that's exactly what we're going to have to do.
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This is Bill Gates' comment on the Imperial study:
thisisbillgates
1h
Fortunately it appears the parameters used in that model were too negative. The experience in China is the most critical data we have. They did their "shut down" and were able to reduce the number of cases. They are testing widely so they see rebounds immediately and so far there have not been a lot. They avoided widespread infection. The Imperial model does not match this experience. Models are only as good as the assumptions put into them. People are working on models that match what we are seeing more closely and they will become a key tool. A group called Institute for Disease Modeling that I fund is one of the groups working with others on this.
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Zlatan 7 said:
Why are all these celebs self isolating having such a good time?
If they’re self isolating doesn’t that mean they’re showing symptoms or are ill? And you only self isolate for 7 days so how long are you actually ‘really’ ill for?
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They’re being tested with mild symptoms as precaution and found out to have the virus. Regular folk with much worse symptoms are told to self-isolate without testing.
 
Sigma said:
Our exams have been put online. My year is graduating so I think my graduation ceremony will be online. Crazy
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The second years on our course have had their exams cancelled altogether and are averaging their grades. We graduate this year too so they are trying to find a way to assess us online but have no idea how yet. I’ll be pissed off if we don’t get a graduation ceremony at some point, I understand it’s not going to be this summer though.
 
Drawfull said:
I would guess that if food supply looks even remotely compromised, there'll be rationing. Hyperbole would be Deliveroo or equiv bringing you a food box each week.
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Could be the perfect time to dig up that part of my garden I'd hoped to turn into a vegetable patch. Will be my plan for the next month.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
I know feck all about food supply chain logistics but do know that the medicine supply chain is rock solid. It has to be. I would be astonished if governments don’t ensure that food supply is on a similar footing.
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You'd be surprised.

Supermarkets operate on a just-in-time production model.

A lot of things would need to change, if they haven't already.
 
Pexbo said:
The second years on our course have had their exams cancelled altogether and are averaging their grades. We graduate this year too so they are trying to find a way to assess us online but have no idea how yet. I’ll be pissed off if we don’t get a graduation ceremony at some point, I understand it’s not going to be this summer though.
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Some of my friends in Italy have had their graduation ceremony online as March is a common time to graduate there. Yeah for us 1st and 2nd years have had exams cancelled and 3rd years and above all have exams online. I don't know how that works too because my subject is engineering and so theres lots of maths. We could just end up checking our notes or sitting exams in groups haha.
 
JP77 said:
I just want them to finally offer a proper answer on how they can expect somebody to survive alone or support a family on 95 quid a week if they have to come out of work to either self isolate or to now look after their children now the schools are closed.
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Get a life
 
Penna said:
Don't know if anyone raised this earlier in the thread, but it's been suggested that teachers could be asked to teach/look after the children of people working in essential/emergency services. That sounds like a great idea to me.
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Agreed. Even if they are teaching 1 on 1 to every student who can't be at home. That's still better than doing nothing at home. No public servant should be sitting at home on full pay when the country is in a major crisis. Its just not going to wash with me that.

I know a few teachers and they aren't like that. They will be rallying around for sure doing their bit.
 
Zlatan 7 said:
Why are all these celebs self isolating having such a good time?
If they’re self isolating doesn’t that mean they’re showing symptoms or are ill? And you only self isolate for 7 days so how long are you actually ‘really’ ill for?
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Because they have shedloads of money. Everything's more comfortable if you're rich.
 
How safe is it to be in outdoors areas that are empty, but have been busy throughout the day? Carparks, parks etc?

My 7 year old son is autistic and a keen skateboarder and needs exercise every day in order to stay calm etc, but I'm getting increasingly worried about taking him out at all - although he really needs it.

Again - Outdoor spaces that are empty but have been busy throughout the day. Yay or Nay?
 
Sigma said:
Some of my friends in Italy have had their graduation ceremony online as March is a common time to graduate there. Yeah for us 1st and 2nd years have had exams cancelled and 3rd years and above all have exams online. I don't know how that works too because my subject is engineering and so theres lots of maths. We could just end up checking our notes or sitting exams in groups haha.
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Im doing computer science so in a very similar position.

The only way I could see it working is if they devise an exam with a set of timed questions where you get 5/10 minutes per question and everyone’s questions are delivered in a different order so it’s incredibly difficult to confer with each other.
 
sammsky1 said:
Not sure if this has already been posted but it’s essentially an exec summary of the Imperial Collage study that freaked out the entire world over the weekend.

Copied from Facebook written by Dr Joel Strehl

I am a US surgeon and critical care physician. I rarely post—and almost never post about medical related issues. This is different. I would STRONGLY recommend everyone take 5 minutes and read this. Don’t panic, but please be smart and follow the guidelines.

We can now read the report on COVID-19 that so terrified every public health manager and head of state from Boris Johnson to Donald Trump to the dictator of El Salvador that they ordered people to stay in their houses. I read it yesterday afternoon and haven't been the same since. I urge everyone to read it, but maybe have a drink first, or have your family around you. It is absolutely terrifying. The New York TImes confirms that the CDC and global leaders are treating it as factual.

Here's a brief rundown of what I'm seeing in here. Please correct me in comments if I'm wrong.

The COVID-19 response team at Imperial College in London obtained what appears to be the first accurate dataset of infection and death rates from China, Korea, and Italy. They plugged those numbers into widely available epidemic modeling software and ran a simulation: what would happen if the United States did absolutely nothing -- if we treated COVID-19 like the flu, went about business as usual, and let the virus take its course?

Here's what would happen: 80% of Americans would get the disease. 0.9% of them would die. Between 4 and 8 percent of all Americans over the age of 70 would die. 2.2 million Americans would die from the virus itself.

It gets worse. Most people who are in danger of dying from COVID-19 need to be put on ventilators. 50% of those put on ventilators still die, but the other 50% live. But in an unmitigated epidemic, the need for ventilators would be 30 times the number of ventilators in the United States. Virtually no one who needed a ventilator would get one. 100% of patients who need ventilators would die if they didn't get one. So the actual death toll from the virus would be closer to 4 million Americans -- in a span of 3 months. 8-15% of all Americans over 70 would die.

How many people is 4 million Americans? It's more Americans than have died all at once from anything, ever. It's the population of Los Angeles. It's four times the number of Americans who died in the Civil War...on both sides combined. It's two-thirds as many people as died in the Holocaust.

Americans make up 4.4% of the world's population. So if we simply extrapolate these numbers to the rest of the world -- now we're getting into really fuzzy estimates, so the margin of error is pretty great here -- this gives us 90 million deaths globally from COVID-19. That's 15 Holocausts. That's 1.5 times as many people as died in World War II, over 12 years. This would take 3-6 months.

Now, it's unrealistic to assume that countries wouldn't do ANYTHING to fight the virus once people started dying. So the Imperial College team ran the numbers again, this time assuming a "mitigation" strategy. A mitigation strategy is pretty much what common sense would tell us to do: America places all symptomatic cases of the disease in isolation. It quarantines their families for 14 days. It orders all Americans over 70 to practice social distancing. This is what you've seen a lot of people talking about when they say we should "flatten the curve": try to slow the spread of the disease to the people most likely to die from it, to avoid overwhelming hospitals.

And it does flatten the curve -- but not nearly enough. The death rate from the disease is cut in half, but it still kills 1.1 million Americans all by itself. The peak need for ventilators falls by two-thirds, but it still exceeds the number of ventilators in the US by eight times, meaning most people who need ventilators still don't get them. That leaves the actual death toll in the US at right around 2 million deaths. The population of Houston. Two civil wars. One-third of the Holocaust. Globally, 45 million people die: 7.5 Holocausts, 3/4 of World War II. That's what happens if we use common sense: the worst death toll from a single cause since the Middle Ages.

Finally, the Imperial College team ran the numbers a third time, this time assuming a "suppression" strategy. In addition to isolating symptomatic cases and quarantining their family members, they also simulated social distancing for the entire population. All public gatherings and most workplaces shut down. Schools and universities close. (Note that these simulations assumed a realistic rate of adherence to these requirements, around 70-75% adherence, not that everyone follows them perfectly.) This is basically what we are seeing happen in the United States today.

This time it works! The death rate in the US peaks three weeks from now at a few thousand deaths, then goes down. We hit, but don't exceed (at least not by very much), the number of available ventilators. The nightmarish death tolls from the rest of the study disappear; COVID-19 goes down in the books as a bad flu instead of the Black Death.

But here's the catch: if we EVER relax these requirements before a vaccine is administered to the entire population, COVID-19 comes right back and kills millions of Americans in a few months, the same as before. The simulation does indicate that, after the first suppression period (lasting from now until July), we could probably lift restrictions for a month, followed by two more months of suppression, in a repeating pattern without triggering an outbreak or overwhelming the ventilator supply. If we staggered these suppression breaks based on local conditions, we might be able to do a bit better. But we simply cannot ever allow the virus to spread throughout the entire population in the way other viruses do, because it is just too deadly. If lots of people we know end up getting COVID-19, it means millions of Americans are dying. It simply can't be allowed to happen.

How quickly will a vaccine be here? Already, medical ethics have been pushed to the limit to deliver one. COVID-19 was first discovered a few months ago. Last week, three separate research teams announced they had developed vaccines. Yesterday, one of them (with FDA approval) injected its vaccine into a live person, without waiting for animal testing. Now, though, they have to monitor the test subject for fourteen months to make sure the vaccine is safe. This is the part of the testing that can't be rushed: the plan is to inoculate the entire human population, so if the vaccine itself turned out to be lethal for some reason, it could potentially kill all humans, which is a lot worse than 90 million deaths. Assuming the vaccine is safe and effective, it will still take several months to produce enough to inoculate the global population. For this reason, the Imperial College team estimated it will be about 18 months until the vaccine is available.

During those 18 months, things are going to be very difficult and very scary. Our economy and our society will be disrupted in profound ways. Worst of all, if the suppression policies actually work, it will feel like we are doing all this for nothing, because the infection and death rates will be very low. It's easy to get people to come together in common sacrifice in the middle of a war. It's very hard to get them to do so in a pandemic that looks invisible precisely because suppression methods are working. But that's exactly what we're going to have to do.
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Christ....
 
941 deaths today most so far and some countries haven’t released there numbers yet and others still updating. First day it passes 1000? With more cases everyday 1000 a day will be nothing in a week or twos time, sad reality
 
Nou_Camp99 said:
Agreed. Even if they are teaching 1 on 1 to every student who can't be at home. That's still better than doing nothing at home. No public servant should be sitting at home on full pay when the country is in a major crisis. Its just not going to wash with me that.

I know a few teachers and they aren't like that. They will be rallying around for sure doing their bit.
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Again, you're making it sound like the majority of teachers are going to be sitting with their feet up. Fecking quit it because it's just plain insulting.
 
Rhyme Animal said:
How safe is it to be in outdoors areas that are empty, but have been busy throughout the day? Carparks, parks etc?

My 7 year old son is autistic and a keen skateboarder and needs exercise every day in order to stay calm etc, but I'm getting increasingly worried about taking him out at all - although he really needs it.

Again - Outdoor spaces that are empty but have been busy throughout the day. Yay or Nay?
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I personally wouldn't worry, it's better for him to get the fresh air and exercise. Just sanitise his hands regularly whilst he's playing.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
I get the production model. Still don’t see how this would shut it down. Certainly not any time soon.
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Yep. I can see lots of products becoming unavailable, but no way a population-wide caloric deficit in a modern country, that would be ridiculous.

I always question the logic of average-earning people living in wealthy country like Portugal being concerned about food. If that were to ever happen, 90% of the world would have starved by then.
 
Penna said:
I personally wouldn't worry, it's better for him to get the fresh air and exercise. Just sanitise his hands regularly whilst he's playing.
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I just worry about he virus still being present in the air where loads (hundreds) of people have been coughing throughout the day etc.

The main place we go to skate is a massive business park car-park after it's closed - there's a Costa coffee, Homebase, Poundland etc there and hundreds of people essentially come and go from there throughout the day, the area is completely outdoors and completely open but with the unknowns with this virus it just worries me that it could be blowing around there from all the passers though during the day.

It's a great place for him to be able to go and ride and he loves it, but I just don't wanna endanger the family, him and / or myself obviously.
 
Red_Aaron said:
I'm a self employed consultant, got word from the 2 companies that make up probably 80% of my earnings that my services won't be required in the short term (which will almost inevitably be long term too right)

Wife works at a small independent nursery, if the closure goes beyond 2 weeks which there's every chance it will the business will almost certainly fold, shes been on reduced hours all week as is as the owners been shitting it (understandably)

Anyone know industries where they might be hiring people? I've heard delivery driving might be the only options right now given the demand
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Not sure if it's out there yet but Tesco are gearing up for a big recruitment drive for most job roles. Pretty much will take anyone who can prove their right to work. Albeit temp roles for most.
 
Rhyme Animal said:
I just worry about he virus still being present in the air where loads (hundreds) of people have been coughing throughout the day etc.

The main place we go to skate is a massive business park car-park after it's closed - there's a Costa coffee, Homebase, Poundland etc there and hundreds of people essentially come and go from there throughout the day, the area is completely outdoors and completely open but with the unknowns with this virus it just worries me that it could be blowing around there from all the passers though during the day.

It's a great place for him to be able to go and ride and he loves it, but I just don't wanna endanger the family, him and / or myself obviously.
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Checked some advice from official german government sources:
If it is empty, there is practically no chance to get infected just through the air.
So just make sure, that every time he has to touch the ground or something else, to sanitize his hands before he has a chance to touch his own face.
Same for you.
 
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