Coronavirus discussion thread

[sarkasmus]

Honestly, I think that all those measures don't solve the main problem (they make sense temporarely because it prevents or at least delays the collaps).
This is all only necessary because the "health-related-systems" in almaost every country is in a horrible condition because it is the first area where costs tend to be cut, not to mention puting the hospitals in financial competition. Even here in Germany people warned politicians about the problem for years and it's even worse for many other countries.
Unless that's solved the same issues we have now will repeat themselves every single time a new virus, bacteria or mutation appears.
Corona just happens to be the one drop that is too much for the system.

[Plk_Lesiak]

14 minutes ago, sarkasmus said:

Honestly, I think that all those measures don't solve the main problem (they make sense temporarely because it prevents or at least delays the collaps).
This is all only necessary because the "health-related-systems" in almaost every country is in a horrible condition because it is the first area where costs tend to be cut, not to mention puting the hospitals in financial competition. Even here in Germany people warned politicians about the problem for years and it's even worse for many other countries.
Unless that's solved the same issues we have now will repeat themselves every single time a new virus, bacteria or mutation appears.
Corona just happens to be the one drop that is too much for the system.

That's somewhat true, but the thing is, when the problem grows to the size of a full-on epidemic, like in Northern Italy, it's likely that no amount of money or resources would be enough to handle it. National healthcare systems are tuned towards long-term functioning and preventive care rather than crisis management and they're already incredibly expensive as they are. So, you at least need both a well-prepared healthcare system and "political" procedures for limiting the infection rate (basically keeping people from interacting with each other, particularly when it goes to a disease as contagious as the coronavirus), otherwise things will fall apart in the end.

[sarkasmus]

3 minutes ago, Plk_Lesiak said:

That's somewhat true, but the thing is, when the problem grows to the size of a full-on epidemic, like in Northern Italy, it's likely that no amount of money or resources would be enough to handle it. National healthcare systems are tuned towards long-term functioning and preventive care rather than crisis management and they're already incredibly expensive as they are. So, you at least need both a well-prepared healthcare system and "political" procedures for limiting the infection rate (basically keeping people from interacting with each other, particularly when it goes to a disease as contagious as the coronavirus), otherwise things will fall apart in the end.

It'll become worse in the future though, the diseases won't disappear and every next one will come on top of that.

I know you can't fully prevent situations like the current one but you can minimize the impact (how extreme the measures have to be, because you don't have to flatten the curve as much as it is the case now) and how often it happens not to mention that the people won't panic that easily because they have more trust in the systems we have in place, but at this point of time I haven't heard a single government official around here even acknowledging that problem which becomes increasingly frustrating and worrying.

All I want is that the governments start to give a higher priority to the healthcare system and not treat them like regular companies anymore.

[WinterfuryZX]

368 deaths today.

[Plk_Lesiak]

Worth watching, particularly the second half.

 

[WinterfuryZX]

 

Yeah, now they changed the guidelines.

Too late... What a bunch of assholes.

[Plk_Lesiak]

10 minutes ago, WinterfuryZX said:

Yeah, now they changed the guidelines.

Too late... What a bunch of assholes.

It is the first pandemic of this scale in 100 years though, and proved to be different from lesser outbreaks, even SARS which was much more deadly but less contagious. I'm not sure if I feel like defending WHO much, but fucking up when constructing recommendations for what is essentially an unprecedented threat will happen. The actually disturbing part is the governments still actively ignoring the lessons from the most affected regions...

[WinterfuryZX]

I'm worried for Japan.

If they are faking their number then RIP.

I hope their nr. is low because they managed to contain it.

Edited March 17, 2020 by WinterfuryZX

[Plk_Lesiak]

2 minutes ago, WinterfuryZX said:

I'm worried for Japan.

If they are faking their number then RIP.

I hope their nr. is low because they managed ro contain it.

Japan is honestly one of the places I'm least worried about, considering how much practice with crisis management they have and how disciplined the populace is. It's the UK and US numbers that are most suspect at this point. I don't think numbers anywhere, outside of places like Iran maybe, are straight-up "fake", but those two were really slow to implement testing on proper scale, while in US there isn't even consistent approach to this due to decentralized administration and the private healthcare system fighting all the ways it can to not suffer the costs of fighting the outbreak...

[WinterfuryZX]

11 minutes ago, Plk_Lesiak said:

Japan is honestly one of the places I'm least worried about, considering how much practice with crisis management they have and how disciplined the populace is. 

I don't think they are doing enough testing, I hope they have put in place some genious mitigation protocol or something, otherwise their nr makes no sense. 

[Plk_Lesiak]

2 minutes ago, WinterfuryZX said:

I don't think they are doing enough testing, I hope they have put in place some genious mitigation protocol or something, otherwise their nr makes no sense. 

We'll only know for sure when it's over, but considering the number of fatalities combined with how early the outbreak started there (first spike in registered cases full two weeks before the ones in Europe), they must have it relatively under control. Otherwise, the situation would already be much worse.

[WinterfuryZX]

6 minutes ago, Plk_Lesiak said:

We'll only know for sure when it's over, but considering the number of fatalities combined with how early the outbreak started there (first spike in registered cases full two weeks before the ones in Europe), they must have it relatively under control. Otherwise, the situation would already be much worse.

Well, the situation will only explode when you reach a certain amount of infected people in an high density area, and it can happen any time. Then you can't fake the nr anymore because the hospitals will start to get full.

Edited March 17, 2020 by WinterfuryZX

[Plk_Lesiak]

18 minutes ago, WinterfuryZX said:

Well, the situation will only explode when you reach a certain amount of infected people in an high density area, and it can happed any time.

True, but it seems that in most cases where the situation became really dangerous the virus spread quietly before any serious safety measures were implemented. While Japan's response doesn't seem as strict as those in South Korea or Taiwan, it looks like it came early enough that it at least very heavily slowed down the spread of the virus. And I think they'd be willing to implement even stronger measures if the situation deteriorated. So, at least they have a much better chance of succeeding than governments that don't have the political will (UK) or proper, country-wide tools (US) to deal with this properly...

[sanahtlig]

2 hours ago, Plk_Lesiak said:

It's the UK and US numbers that are most suspect at this point. I don't think numbers anywhere, outside of places like Iran maybe, are straight-up "fake", but those two were really slow to implement testing on proper scale, while in US there isn't even consistent approach to this due to decentralized administration and the private healthcare system fighting all the ways it can to not suffer the costs of fighting the outbreak...

Where I'm living we're entering lockdown.  My employer told me to stay home (with pay), my complex closed all the common areas and the office isn't conducting face-to-face meetings anymore.  All this and the number of reported cases in my area is still in the single digits.

[Dergonu]

7 hours ago, WinterfuryZX said:

I'm worried for Japan.

If they are faking their number then RIP.

I hope their nr. is low because they managed to contain it.

I live here, and things are extremely quiet. There are almost no new cases here daily now. Things are basically back to normal at this point. A friend of mine is a nurse, and she says she's basically just working normal hours now. They don't get many new cases at all, and don't seem to be struggling with space or anything like that. (She works at a big hospital in the middle of Tokyo.) 

So yeah, no need to be worried about us at all. The rest of the world has it much, much worse. Japan has been able to handle the situation very well. 

[WinterfuryZX]

13 hours ago, Dergonu said:

I live here, and things are extremely quiet. There are almost no new cases here daily now. Things are basically back to normal at this point. A friend of mine is a nurse, and she says she's basically just working normal hours now. They don't get many new cases at all, and don't seem to be struggling with space or anything like that. (She works at a big hospital in the middle of Tokyo.) 

So yeah, no need to be worried about us at all. The rest of the world has it much, much worse. Japan has been able to handle the situation very well. 

How? What's their secret?

[alpacaman]

Quote

How? What's their secret?

Aggressive containment measures from the moment there was a chance Covid would reach Japan (or other East Asian countries for that matter), like testing anyone entering the country from a place with known cases and quarantining them until the results come back. That way they can more or less effectively isolate any source of spreading. This only works as long as you can identify every chain of infections. As soon as you reach a certain threshold of unidentified infected people that strategy is not viable anymore as tracing these chains would require hundreds of thousands of tests each day, among other problems. If Western countries wanted to contain Covid, they would have to start aggressively testing some time back in January. Now all that is left is mitigation, which means trying to slow the spread over a long enough time window that healthcare systems don't become overwhelmed. Which many countries were late for anyway.

One of the reasons many Asian countries are semmingly dealing way better with this than those in the west is that they already had to deal with SARS a couple of years ago and learned a few lessons about how to effectively fight infectious diseases.

Edited March 18, 2020 by alpacaman

[WinterfuryZX]

5 minutes ago, alpacaman said:

Aggressive containment measures from the moment there was a chance Covid would reach Japan (or other East Asian countries for that matter), like testing anyone entering the country from a place with known cases and quarantining them until the results come back. That way they can more or less effectively isolate any source of spreading. This only works as long as you can identify every chain of infections. As soon as you reach a certain threshold of unidentified infected people that strategy is not viable anymore as tracing these chains would require hundreds of thousands of tests each day, among other problems. If Western countries wanted to contain Covid, they would have to start aggressively testing some time back in January. Now all that is left is mitigation, which means trying to slow the spread over a long enough time window that healthcare systems don't become overwhelmed. Which many countries were late for anyway.

One of the reasons many Asian countries are semmingly dealing way better with this than those in the west is that they already had to deal with SARS a couple of years ago and learned a few lessons about how to effectively fight infectious diseases.

Sk did that, as you can see from their nr of testing.

Japanese nrs. doesn't match, though.

 

Edited March 18, 2020 by WinterfuryZX

[Plk_Lesiak]

13 minutes ago, WinterfuryZX said:

Sk did that, as you can see from their nr of testing.

Japanese nrs. doesn't match, though.

My research into this was half-assed, but what I understood from it is that the early response meant they were able to avoid larger outbreaks and didn't have to do mass testing, the way South Korea did for example. At least, that was the case until recently. Now there are discussions about whether the government approach is proactive enough and whether an outbreak might be happening below the radar. We'll find out in the coming weeks, but once more, Japan has more experience with managing natural disasters than most countries on Earth. It'll be surprising if they really fuck up.

[WinterfuryZX]

+475 deaths today.

[alpacaman]

Yeah, after reading Japan's numbers a little closer I have become a little cautious calling their response better than that of western countries, as they test very little compared to other countries and the development of their death toll can mean anything from having enforced effective measures to their containment measures being effective only for a certain amount of time and the virus now silently spreading. I think Japan is one of the countries where we really have to wait two more weeks to see how things turn out.

 

Another thing worth mentioning: Even comparing death tolls between countries can be misleading, as not all countries test everyone who died from pneumonia-like diseases for Covid retroactively. For example Germany doesn't, yet they apparently test more asymptomatic young people than other countries seem to do, which explains their low deaths to confirmed cases ratio.

Edited March 18, 2020 by alpacaman

[WinterfuryZX]

Bergamo:

https://www.repubblica.it/cronaca/2020/03/18/foto/bergamo_non_c_e_piu_posto_70_mezzi_militari_portano_le_salme_fuori_dalla_regione-251650969/1/?ref=fbpr#7

No room to cremate the corpses anymore.

 

[nihilloligasan]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/03/science/coronavirus-genome-bad-news-wrapped-in-protein.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab

might be worth checking out some of the original studies to get a more in-depth understanding

[SabrinaF]

Second wave of Covid is spreading over a number of countries. It's a disaster. Does anybody know reliable reference about covid vaccine under development? There is no news about vaccine except death and victims. Daily news reporting victims and deaths.

[Plk_Lesiak]

8 hours ago, SabrinaF said:

Second wave of Covid is spreading over a number of countries. It's a disaster. Does anybody know reliable reference about covid vaccine under development? There is no news about vaccine except death and victims. Daily news reporting victims and deaths.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker.html

You can find info about all of them under this link. Honestly, things are advancing at a very good pace and I heard rumours that in the EU the vaccine might start appearing around late December/early January. Of course, it will be a while before it reaches wide availability – it will be used for medical personnel and high-risk groups first. And if that's indeed how things will go in the EU, India won't be far behind with its massive pharma industry.

Still, this means there might be many, many months before you'll have the opportunity to get the vaccine yourself. Stay safe everyone!