Mega-Thread: Coronavirus Pandemic

[Gaidax]

Healthcare and science funding will be boosted massively, i hope

Not the "stience", I hear this "stience" says weird things like earth being round and rotating around sun and its axis. How could axis rotation of Earth be true? Planes would never reach other countries then! Dumb "stience".

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The stranger the hat a person wears the more important he has to be, yes? Why would a person wear a strange hat otherwise? Is this thinking correct?

His hat is very big, must be hiding a lot of brain.

[cuafpr]

anyone else think after this we will see massive hospital building and maybe a requirement that a region needs a ratio of X beds per X population? Me and some friends realized that around here they have added around 100,00 living units (houses and apartments) not a single new hospital or expansion.. another town over has had to add 4-5 schools in less than 10 years due to the influx of people but not a single new hospital or expansion to one...

[Daedra82]

UK Numbers are in +260 deaths +2546 positives
total positive cases 17089
total deaths 1019

[Poopymonster]

His hat is very big, must be hiding a lot of brain.

It's like Invader Zim, the Tallest are in charge.

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anyone else think after this we will see massive hospital building and maybe a requirement that a region needs a ratio of X beds per X population? Me and some friends realized that around here they have added around 100,00 living units (houses and apartments) not a single new hospital or expansion.. another town over has had to add 4-5 schools in less than 10 years due to the influx of people but not a single new hospital or expansion to one...

Shower thought. Since a bunch of hospitals in the US are owned by churches. They restrict procedures they will do based on their beliefs, especially ones regarding End of Life and to do everything they can to save the person.

How will they handle taking someone off a ventilator for someone younger?

[PhaelixWW]

This right here in your very post is fearmongering:

Your estimate is slightly off: so far death rate for closed cases is 17%, so 7.77 billion times .17 is 1.32 billion potential victims.

This doesn't even make sense. Saying a potential 40 million is fear-mongering because you think it should be 1.32 billion? That's literally the opposite.

Also, IMHO, while my "Covid-19 will probably exceed 200k of swine flu's victims" is realistic, your "This virus will cause far, far more deaths than the H1N1" is too panicky.

"Fear-mongering" and "panicky" are horrible words. Nobody's encouraging panic. Panic and fear are incredibly counter-productive. But it's not wrong to fight back against downplaying the threat, to attempt to impart a sense of concern, of gravitas. Because this is not an "it will happen or it won't" kind of thing. The impact that this virus has will be directly and impactfully lessened by the amount to which people take it seriously.

And the words I chose are not designed to induce panic, they're designed to be as accurate as I can be, under the circumstances. I mean, these are the words of scientists on the subject; not conspiracy theory sites, not buried on page 87, but front-page results:

And, in general, your posts in this topic are on the panicky side; you seem to argue against anyone who doesn't express significant concern.

That's because significant concern is warranted. Again, this is not a case where "there's nothing we can do about it". I'm a firm believer in not stressing about situations outside of your control. But that's not this. People and their response to this crisis, which will dictated by their level of concern, will have a very meaningful effect on the outcome. In this kind of situation, encouraging people to have and exhibit "significant concern" is absolutely warranted.

I am sufficiently concerned to warn people close to me to be careful, but I don't think the sky is falling for the human race.

And how exactly do you think that I'm saying that "the sky is falling for the human race"?

Edit: in other words, what's the opposite of callous? Oversensitive? I think both extremes don't help.

Meh. I'd just say that you're oversensitive to what you consider to be other people being oversensitive.

[Grapemask]

As a followup rant to my earlier rant that America's cultural refusal to actually socially distance is a large part of why our infection rate is skyrocketing:

A couple days ago, we had a company meeting to address the current status (teleconferencing, of course). No one's getting laid off, we're all just going to take a 10-15% pay cut, skip merit raises, and eliminate bonuses. I could rant for days about this subject given that we're a multinational, multibillion dollar organization that spent hundreds of millions buying back stock last year, but whatever.

All of us software people are working from home, but the production team has to work on site. Can't put together embedded systems and server racks from the comfort of home, obviously. So at one point in the meeting, someone from production asked, "What do we do if we're driving in from a county with a shelter in place order?"

Now, there are a lot of human responses to this. Corporations may be people, but they are not human.

The corporate response was, "Don't worry, we got everyone an essential personnel order so you can all come into work." And he had such pride when he said it.

For starters, nothing we do is essential to US infrastructure. We use image processing to find physical defects in rolling stock; that's the line that was probably used to get the order. But in full context, everyone who manages that end can work from home. Production is just about putting together more systems that will ship 3 months from now, to come online 6-12 months from now, and all of the systems currently in queue are for France and Australia. Our US systems are all remote management. Our US maintenance team that goes to fix hardware issues could be arguably essential, but they're not the production team.

Second, these people are all paid salary, and they were already told they're not being laid off, so clearly the question is about their personal well-being. And now it's clear that the profit margin comes first.

And this isn't just my company finding these outs to keep everyone working. Damn near every business out there is doing what they can to weasel out of distancing. In other countries, you see images of cities with millions of inhabitants that look utterly dead. No movement. I live in a little town in the Atlanta suburbs, population just under 30k, and people are everywhere all hours of the day, while under a county shelter in place order.

[Easo]

I will start worrying if within 2 weeks there is no slowdown of infection rates in Europe or at least parts of it. Lockdowns have to start having some effect soon... no?

The stranger the hat a person wears the more important he has to be, yes? Why would a person wear a strange hat otherwise? Is this thinking correct?

Warhammer logic at it's finest.

[Forogil]

It's almost as if lockdowns ensure physical distancing.

But that's only one part of handling the problem, and if the time isn't used to step up testing etc it's likely to resurface again - at least that's what WHO says.

And similarly as a lower speed limit doesn't guarantee reduced speed for vehicles the lockdowns aren't necessarily effective in achieving the stated goals. Especially since several of the lockdowns have also been implemented in bad ways - N. Italy and Russia announcing the lockdowns so far in advance that lots of people traveled to other places.

[xenogear3]

Healthcare and science funding will be boosted massively, i hope

HealthCare was massive, but not the way you think.
It is a broken system, and very inefficient.

[MCMLXXXII]

I will start worrying if within 2 weeks there is no slowdown of infection rates in Europe or at least parts of it. Lockdowns have to start having some effect soon... no?



Warhammer logic at it's finest.

2 to 3 weeks.

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As a followup rant to my earlier rant that America's cultural refusal to actually socially distance is a large part of why our infection rate is skyrocketing:

A couple days ago, we had a company meeting to address the current status (teleconferencing, of course). No one's getting laid off, we're all just going to take a 10-15% pay cut, skip merit raises, and eliminate bonuses. I could rant for days about this subject given that we're a multinational, multibillion dollar organization that spent hundreds of millions buying back stock last year, but whatever.

All of us software people are working from home, but the production team has to work on site. Can't put together embedded systems and server racks from the comfort of home, obviously. So at one point in the meeting, someone from production asked, "What do we do if we're driving in from a county with a shelter in place order?"

Now, there are a lot of human responses to this. Corporations may be people, but they are not human.

The corporate response was, "Don't worry, we got everyone an essential personnel order so you can all come into work." And he had such pride when he said it.

For starters, nothing we do is essential to US infrastructure. We use image processing to find physical defects in rolling stock; that's the line that was probably used to get the order. But in full context, everyone who manages that end can work from home. Production is just about putting together more systems that will ship 3 months from now, to come online 6-12 months from now, and all of the systems currently in queue are for France and Australia. Our US systems are all remote management. Our US maintenance team that goes to fix hardware issues could be arguably essential, but they're not the production team.

Second, these people are all paid salary, and they were already told they're not being laid off, so clearly the question is about their personal well-being. And now it's clear that the profit margin comes first.

And this isn't just my company finding these outs to keep everyone working. Damn near every business out there is doing what they can to weasel out of distancing. In other countries, you see images of cities with millions of inhabitants that look utterly dead. No movement. I live in a little town in the Atlanta suburbs, population just under 30k, and people are everywhere all hours of the day, while under a county shelter in place order.

Pay cuts is a non-existent word over here.

[Granyala]

kekw, here's one meme we have running here - the translation:

Minster of Health: "I'm sure messiah will come until Easter and will lead us out of this, just as god has led us out of Egypt. The messiah will come and save us from all the troubles in the world."



The guy literally said that during one of the addresses to the nation. Yeahhhhhh.

*chuckles* the guy on the left is all like "What he said!"

[Gorsameth]

I think this is a harsh wake up. Depending where you are and how well prepared the area is, this virus has death rate of about 0.5% - 10% (as far I can remember numbers). If this is enough to cause all these problems we are experiencing... what would have it been, if this virus had higher death rate?

I wonder, if anything will change afterwards?

Everything has a cost-benefit analysis.
The reason the west has been relatively lax in its responsive is because the cost is relatively low. Yes that is a terrible thing to say but welcome to reality.

If something more deadly brakes out the potential cost is higher and therefor its more warranted to use stricter measures sooner.

anyone else think after this we will see massive hospital building and maybe a requirement that a region needs a ratio of X beds per X population? Me and some friends realized that around here they have added around 100,00 living units (houses and apartments) not a single new hospital or expansion.. another town over has had to add 4-5 schools in less than 10 years due to the influx of people but not a single new hospital or expansion to one...

Nope, because that capacity is expensive and does nothing 99.999999999999% of the time.
Hospitals have capacity for what they usually require and a little bit on top for safety. Going beyond that is simply not worth the money, not unless governments step in to fund it and carry long term maintenance costs.

[Thepersona]

I will start worrying if within 2 weeks there is no slowdown of infection rates in Europe or at least parts of it. Lockdowns have to start having some effect soon... no?



Warhammer logic at it's finest.

Guilliman has no hat though. He has a giant flaming sword to compensate.

[Poopymonster]

Guilliman has no hat though. He has a giant flaming sword to compensate.

No hat but the size of those pauldrons!

[Shadowferal]

What if the 'sky-is-falling' coronavirus models are wrong?

It was a world-is-ending projection two weeks ago of as many as 500,000 dead in the United Kingdom and as many as 2.2 million dead in the United States, offered up by Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at the Imperial College London, that fired up the media’s panic-machine. However, overlooked in the hyper-reaction was that this was an unlikely worst-case scenario, based on nothing being done to stop the virus’s spread. And Ferguson (who reportedly contracted the virus himself) subsequently cut the projected number of British deaths in half as the government there ramped up its response — and has since drastically scaled it back yet again, to less than 20,000 deaths in Britain. As the National Review correctly pointed out, “Models like this will always turn out to be wrong in some way or other, because they rely on very strong assumptions about aspects of the disease we haven’t thoroughly studied yet. If nothing else, the original Imperial model will be obsolete soon … ."

Let’s hope and pray that these three and the other pragmatic analysts now joining them are indeed correct about the outcome of all this, particularly because the draconian measures now in place could create another health catastrophe, if lost jobs and bankruptcies lead to poverty, hopelessness and increased suicides.

Whatever the correct projections turn out to be, tens of thousands of people are likely to die and millions more are paying an unimaginable price. Politics and partisanship should play no role in this— only truth and indisputable, real evidence.

[Not A Cat]

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-polit...al-wont-comply

So I'll admit I'm not the most politically literate person. Can someone explain to me why someone would choose to ignore that part of the bill if he wasn't doing something shady?

Regardless I'm glad Americans will get some form of relief.

[cuafpr]

Everything has a cost-benefit analysis.
The reason the west has been relatively lax in its responsive is because the cost is relatively low. Yes that is a terrible thing to say but welcome to reality.

If something more deadly brakes out the potential cost is higher and therefor its more warranted to use stricter measures sooner.

Nope, because that capacity is expensive and does nothing 99.999999999999% of the time.
Hospitals have capacity for what they usually require and a little bit on top for safety. Going beyond that is simply not worth the money, not unless governments step in to fund it and carry long term maintenance costs.

well if this leads to a single payer system (something that wouldn't shock me) it would be easy to tie it in.. If it doesn't the cost of procedures go up to cover the added space. and someone better with math can work out the ratios needed to handle a surge long enough to stand up emergency places. cause obviously imo it would be less than 1 bed for 2 people or even 4. I have no idea what the numbers are now, but in places like NY they seem vastly out of wack.

[MCMLXXXII]

What if the 'sky-is-falling' coronavirus models are wrong?

Let’s hope and pray that these three and the other pragmatic analysts now joining them are indeed correct about the outcome of all this, particularly because the draconian measures now in place could create another health catastrophe, if lost jobs and bankruptcies lead to poverty, hopelessness and increased

Hope and pray sounds scientific

[Daedra82]

after aiming for heard immunity and losing precious time the UK gov now wants to sell the idea that any number below 20k deaths is something worth celebrating

[Shadowferal]

Hope and pray sounds scientific

Fsr better to have faith and hope than the ever present despair and hopelessness that kills a person halfway.
Gotta give people something to keep going.

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after aiming for heard immunity and losing precious time the UK gov now wants to sell the idea that any number below 20k deaths is something worth celebrating

Consider that their initial model had over half a million people dead.