Covid-19

[Hashi Lebwohl]

We don't even know if the Chinese numbers are accurate at all, given the CPC's propensity to lie.

You were the one using China's numbers:

Well, we have to start somewhere.

Let's check updated numbers from the Johns Hopkins site and use everyone's numbers except China.

Confirmed cases: 190,694 - 81058 (from China) = 109,636
Total deaths: 7,519 - 3,111 (from China) = 4,408

Current best estimate for the world's population: 7,771,533,304 - 1,437,736,973 (from China) = 6,333,796,331

Infection rate: 1 person in 57,771 or 0.001731%.

This strain isn't traveling as quickly as Spanish Flu and it is nowhere near as lethal. Should we be concerned? Yes--people are getting sick and people are dying. We aren't in "bring out your dead" territory, though, but that is how people are reacting.

Work from home if you can, keep things washed, keep your house clean, sequester your relatives who are elderly, have chronic conditions, or are immune-compromised, and get your kids enrolled in a distance learning/virtual school.

Most Americans are peacefully complying with all the self-isolation and the forced shutdown of virtually all public activity; this is a good thing. How long will they remain content?

edit/add: restauranteurs in NYC can be arrested if they don't comply with the shutdown orders. We have to call them "orders" now that police are willing to enforce them with arrest--they are no longer "good ideas" or "wise suggestions".

[Ur Dead]

Watching the John Hopkins web site(posted earlier) In just a few minutes
between reloads. I see the numbers going up. The deaths increasing across
the planet. I cry.

[TheFallen]

Hashi, I don't get why you're fixated on irrelevant maths which merely deal with the here and now, when the experts are urging that relevant projections are looked at instead?

Looking at things your way, at the moment, COVID-19 is trivial. Currently only 0.0026% of the global population has tested as positive. That's as infinitesimal as it is irrelevant.

But whyever are you looking at current rarity, when you should be looking at predicted spread? That's pretty much the same as looking at one male and one female rabbit and presuming there'll always only be two rabbits.

For reference, the number of UK and US identified cases both increased by around the 19% mark over the last 24 hours. If that rate persists, that'll mean a doubling of identified cases every four days - hence the measures (whether advisory or mandatory) to slow that rate of infection.

I'll remind you again that naturally the virus is showing a reproduction rate (R factor) of between 2.0 and 2.6 new infections caused by each active case. And I'll remind you that current best guess from the experts is for an eventual 80%+ global population infection level.

Governments' job is to manage the journey to that eventual endpoint to make it as slow as possible.

[Zarathustra]

Confirmed cases: 190,694 - 81058 (from China) = 109,636
Total deaths: 7,519 - 3,111 (from China) = 4,408

Current best estimate for the world's population: 7,771,533,304 - 1,437,736,973 (from China) = 6,333,796,331

Infection rate: 1 person in 57,771 or 0.001731%.

This is a worthless calculation. The number of infected is going up every day, so it changes every day. And the numbers aren't increasing linearly. So this "infection rate" can increase dramatically in a short while.

According to your numbers, this is a mortality rate of 4%. This year's flu season has led to 34 million illnesses, with 20,000 deaths. That is a mortality rate of 0.06 %. So COVID 19 is roughly 67 times more deadly. If the same number of people get COVID vs the number who got the flu, this is 1.4 million deaths. But remember, we have flu vaccines. There are no COVID vaccines. So there's no reason why the numbers of people who get COVID-19 couldn't be much higher.

But even more concerning is that this year's flu season led to 350,000 hospitalizations. That's roughly 1% of the total sick from flu. But given the MUCH higher fatality rate of COVID-19, 4 times as high as the hospitalization rate of the flu (1% vs 4%), we could expect hospitalizations to be at least 4 times as high--or 1.4 million. And that's only setting hospitalizations equal to the fatality rate. We can assume that the number of people who need to be hospitalized is much higher than the number of people who die. Using the flu numbers again, this could be 18 times higher, or 25 million people who need a hospital bed!

Guess how many hospital beds are in America? 924,000. We can assume that the majority of those are already in use.

I was one of those people thinking that everyone is overreacting. But the numbers don't lie. The number of people who need to be hospitalized could exceed the total number of hospital beds by a factor of 25. And guess what happens once the overworked health care professionals start getting sick? Breakdown of society, that's what. Riots. Fear. Violence.

It could get to a point where you WISH the police would impose martial law . . . except they're too sick to protect us.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Because I must be the lone voice in the wilderness cautioning against the panic and overreactions which are currently occurring.

I guess we will just have to see how the numbers play out at this point. No one is going to follow my advice so there is no point in me wasting my breath about it.

In the meantime, I will note the following:
Democrats, who were impeaching Trump only two months ago for "abuse of power" and now happy to give him more power to deal with the situation
Democrats are supporting TARP-like bailouts of businesses
Republicans are supporing the abrogation of small business rights, allowing the government to tell them when--or if--they can open
Republicans are supporting wide restrictions on the First Amendment--you may peacefully assemble, but only in groups of 10
Republicans are supporting what amounts to a basic monthly income for people

We already have de facto martial law--police in NYC will enforce bans and closings by arrest. Apparently, one does not need to roll tanks down Main Street when fear will suffice.

[Zarathustra]

Hashi, if 10s of millions of people are out of work because their businesses have shut down due to a global pandemic, don't you think the government should do something to help them financially? This is an extreme circumstance. It's disaster relief, except for the whole country.

My favorite bar closed last night. It sucks for me, because I can't go get a beer and relax (out), but I guarantee it sucks more for the bartenders who rely upon my tips to pay their rent.

This is an emergency. I'm surprised that rational people are having trouble seeing it, even with the numbers right in front of them.

I don't care about Republican/Democrat right now.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

The government ordered all those businesses to close--no more small business rights--and now the government will pay the bills for all those people they put out of work--mass welfare. I know--this is the new reality in which we live. What is it I always say? "We must deal with the world as it exists, not as we would like it to exist." That harsh advice applies even to me.

If you buy a beer at a bar it has an expiration date on it (which is really the "sell-by" date). The government order closing the bar does not have an expiration date on it.

How long before an increasing number of our fellow citizens start to get antsy with all the staying at home they have to do?

[TheFallen]

I'm of exact like mind, Zee. This should have nothing to do with party politics, or ideology of any kind.

Hashi, I'm not counselling panic or over-reaction in any way, shape or form. I'm simply saying, take a rational and informed view based on the evidence and where it leads.

Yours is absolutely not the only rational position. In fact, it's not rational, because it's not supported by the data.

Zee, as to economic impact and governmental alleviation of the same, today the UK announced unprecedented - but very sensible IMV - measures totaling 330 billion pounds in business rates relief, business grants, government backed low interest loans and more. The leisure and retail sectors have been specifically targeted for extra assistance. That amounts to a staggering 15% of total UK Gross Domestic Product!

Plus there's been concluded negotiations between the UK government and mortgage lenders to allow private individuals a three month mortgage repayment holiday if needed.

And it was made categorically clear by the chancellor that these measures were just the start and that the treasury would do literally "whatever it takes" to safeguard businesses of all sizes, jobs and individuals' incomes.

These are unprecedented times - and the economic actions now also being taken - at least here in the UK - are the most significant from both a monetary and a fiscal point of view outside of wartime.

[SoulBiter]

I hope we dont find that Hashi was right on the govt front and 10 years from now we are saying I remember when a pandemic triggered the move to socialism.

[TheFallen]

Latest figures on number of confirmed COVID-19 cases for the US and the UK.

Percentage rise in US confirmed cases in the last 24 hours = 34.2%

Percentage rise in UK confirmed cases in the last 24 hours = 26.7%

Source: Worldometer

Obviously it should continue to be be stated that increasing levels of testing will play a role in the number and rise of identified cases.

It should also be pointed out that it's undoubtedly too early to see any suppressing effect from measures that have now been implemented by the US and UK governments.

[TheFallen]

...and it looks like the US administration has followed suit and is taking every bit as dramatic action to avert economic damage by itself making a trillion dollars of emergency financial aid available to American businesses and citizens.

An equally good and necessary move - and I'd lay money, a coordinated strategy following behind the scenes discussions with other members of the G7 or G20.

The major Western governments aren't messing around any more with either their healthcare, social or economic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic - and nor should they.

Anyone want to still maintain that this situation really isn't a big deal, globally speaking?

[Obi-Wan Nihilo]

It is absolutely the government's job to protect the public in times of crisis. However this virus isn't the crisis it's being made out to be. Had a certain party and their compliant media not been so fixated in blaming the president for everything and in spinning up the public, this could have been handled very differently.

The his virus can be deadly to the elderly and to those who have other health issues. For the vast majority of the world's population, this is a non-event.

The enemy now isn't the virus, it's us. It's elections getting suspended, it's the government mandating the closing of churches. It's the outlawing of gatherings of more than 10 people....So no protesting now. And it's the economic wreckage.

Next week, the first wave of people will start missing paychecks. Then things will start to get real. They're going to look at 18 months of forced quarantine and wonder how they're going to make it. How long until they start turning on people who are still employed?

And there's no plan for that.

[TheFallen]

As I've said, it's the unprecedented challenge of an extremely tricky balancing act for Western governments.

Should they aim for saving the maximum number of their citizens' lives?

Or should their objective be the one that costs the least in terms of overall economic damage?

Or should their priority be to least infringe existing civil rights and liberties?

Or should their goal instead be to see the quickest burn-out of the COVID-19 virus? The fastest achievement of herd immunity?

There's a whole heap of mutual exclusivity in those varying objectives - all of which are defensible on one set of grounds or another. However, if you plump rightly or wrongly, but wholeheartedly for objective one, then objectives two, three and four are inevitably taken off the table.

[Obi-Wan Nihilo]

There's no good answer, but the principled choice is the third. anything else is giving up essential liberties to purchase a little temporary safety.

"Saving lives" sounds great, but at what cost?

[Hashi Lebwohl]

You are wasting your breath, Obi-Wan Nihilo. We are heretics and blasphemers and if we do not socially distance ourselves right now then the authorities will socially distance us against our wills but for our own good.

Didn't you read that scientific paper? They proved that this virus has an R of 2.4 because that is what the rate of infection was in the early days in Wuhan and, as we all know, every city and country in the world is just as dirty and overcrowded as Wuhan.

Remember, never let a crisis go to waste. These are the perfect circumstances for conducting large-scale social experimentation because everyone is readily complying with the experiment. Now be quiet before you get marked as a statistical outlier and wind up getting xed out of the results. I mean, you do want to be a good, model citizen, don't you? These politicians who, only two or three months ago, were trying to cripple the nation now suddenly have only the saintliest of motives and they are just doing it all for your own good. Why can't you just trust them?

Dana Perino over at "The Five" stated that any college student who goes on spring break right now and mentions it on social media should be marked as "unhireable" by future employers. That seems perfectly logical and reasonable; it is certainly in sync with the rest of the responses occuring at this time.

All those people who went to vote in Arizona, Florida, and Illinois should not only be ashamed of themselves, they should all be doxxed so we know who they are and thus be able to shame them properly. How dare they go vote when they should have been socially distancing themselves from everyone! They must want their elderly relatives to die.

There is a coronavirus bill being debated by Congress right now which will--hey, wait a minute. They are still in session? *gasp* But there are more than 10 people in that room! They are violating the CDC protocols! We need to send Federal Marshals into Congress and make them disperse back to their homes before they kill someone by infecting them with cornoavirus, especially since a lot of them are in high-risk groups due to age. Unless...the rules and protocols don't apply to them? So...they are more valuable than we are? I thought no one was above the law, though--that is what impeachment was about. This doesn't make sense.....

[Avatar]

During a viral outbreak, the total number of infections follows what is known as a logistic function, an S-shaped curve characterised initially by exponential growth and then flattening out as either the outbreak is brought under control through external interventions such as quarantine, or the virus spreads through so much of the population that there are no new host possibilities. China's Hubei province - in which the city of Wuhan was the initial source of the viral outbreak - illustrates an almost perfect logistic function. The virus runs rampant through the population (the exponential element of the function) before severe quarantine measures bring it under control.

Unlike pure exponential functions where the number of infected could continue to grow forever, logistic functions have a changing slope, calculated by dividing the total number of cases today by the total number of cases yesterday. This rate of change (let's call it the _-value) is absolutely vital in understanding how outbreaks evolve and how severe they become. A _-value of exactly 1 means no new cases are being identified, i.e. the curve of total new cases flattens out, but anything above 1 means you are entering the dangerously exponential part of the function. A _-value of 1.5 implies a doubling of new cases roughly every two days.

As an example, using data from the World Health Organisation, in the last two weeks of January, Hubei had an average _-value of 1.421, pushing them solidly into an exponential outbreak. February brought an average _-value of 1.085 and the first two weeks of March have seen this _-value fall to around 1.002 - the outbreak is brought under control. These may seem like small changes, but they have massive real-world effects. Hubei currently sits with a total of around 67,786 confirmed cases. Had the _-value remained at 1.421 for just five more days before the virus was brought under control, Hubei would now sit with around 210,000 cases. This is why getting ahead of the virus is so absolutely vital. Bringing the _-value down should be an absolute imperative - hours literally count here.

Took China 60 days to get control of it, and that was with relatively draconian measures.

Of course, the only feedback you can get is negative...if we follow protective measures and it's controlled, you don't know whether it was because of them, or that it would have been fine anyway.

Only if we follow them and it still gets bad will you know you were wrong.

According to this guy, worst case scenario here is 75,000 dead, if it takes us a week longer than Italy to get ahead of the infection curve. (Poor health services, limited resources and immuno-compromised population.) Hopefully he's wrong, (there are best case scenarios), but if he is, everybody will still go on about how they were right and it was nothing.

The question about the responsibility of the government is much more interesting. However, the answer will depend on the different world views of each person answering it.

(Oh, and our Parliament has suspended sitting because it would breach the limits on gatherings. )

--A

[TheFallen]

You are wasting your breath, Obi-Wan Nihilo. We are heretics and blasphemers and if we do not socially distance ourselves right now then the authorities will socially distance us against our wills but for our own good.

Didn't you read that scientific paper? They proved that this virus has an R of 2.4 because that is what the rate of infection was in the early days in Wuhan and, as we all know, every city and country in the world is just as dirty and overcrowded as Wuhan.

Geez Hashi, that's genuinely surprisingly childish of you. Trite and inaccurate sarcasm? Setting up such a blatant straw man?

Nobody's claimed that anything at all has been proven. Quite and categorically the reverse. This is currently all about scientific modelling collaboratively by experts in the field around the world, based - as it obviously should be - on the available hard data at the time. As with any valid extrapolation, modelling will be updated as more hard data becomes available. Nevertheless, this inevitably involves freely admitted best guess, assumption and margin of error.

And to correct the just plain fabricated claims you use in the construction of your straw man...

1. The current best guess R range for COVID-19 is somewhere between 2.0 and 2.6, if no mitigating or suppressive actions are taken.

2. The collaborative report from ICL, WHO and others was primarily informed by the more recent experiences within Italy, not China. Had the Chinese supplied data been solely relied upon as typical,the report would have come to very different predictions and recommendations.

But although based on latest data available, still, it's a prediction, as has been very firmly stated from the off. However, I'd claim that, given its authors and sources, it's liable to have more credibility than the counter forecasts of one single Libertarian in Texas who's rapidly becoming ever more embittered.

Hashi, ironically it seems that on this occasion, your ideological convictions seem to have interfered with your ability to take a dispassionate view - something you have frequently (and with every justification, may I add) accused those on both extremes of the political spectrum of.

What is it I always say? "We must deal with the world as it exists, not as we would like it to exist." That harsh advice applies even to me.

So, given that you know this, perhaps you should abide by it then?

Anyhow...

As I've said, it's the unprecedented challenge of an extremely tricky balancing act for Western governments.

Should they aim for saving the maximum number of their citizens' lives?

Or should their objective be the one that costs the least in terms of overall economic damage?

Or should their priority be to least infringe existing civil rights and liberties?

Or should their goal instead be to see the quickest burn-out of the COVID-19 virus? The fastest achievement of herd immunity?

There's a whole heap of mutual exclusivity in those varying objectives - all of which are defensible on one set of grounds or another...

There's no good answer, but the principled choice is the third. anything else is giving up essential liberties to purchase a little temporary safety.

"Saving lives" sounds great, but at what cost?

Obi, I can completely respect that position and it's undoubtedly defensible - though to be fair, option 1 can also be seen as another "principled" choice (with options 2 and 4 both being brutally pragmatic - but still defensible).

Selecting either principled option will, as you clearly point out, inevitably result in a clash of conflicting principles. So we're kinda in a "damned if they do, damned if they don't" scenario....

[Zarathustra]

There's no good answer, but the principled choice is the third. anything else is giving up essential liberties to purchase a little temporary safety.

So what's your position on vaccines? Isn't forcing kids to be vaccinated in order to attend public schools "giving up essential liberties to purchase a little temporary safety"? This logic leads to anti-vaxers.

Millions of people get the flu every year and it's never used as an excuse to shut down our society. If the government wanted an excuse to clamp down on our rights, millions of sick people would be enough. Clearly, this is something orders of magnitude greater. We've never seen something that could completely overwhelm our health care system. It's easy to say "for the vast majority, this is a nonissue," as long as you don't wreck your motorcycle and need a hospital bed when there are 25 people waiting for each bed.

If this is as insignificant as you and Hashi say, then the social distancing will stomp it out in no time and we can all go back to business as usual in a couple weeks. [Just in time: I'm supposed to be vacationing in Florida for a week in mid-April!]

[Avatar]

I wonder if the anti-vaxxers will refuse the Covid vaccine (now in trials) when it's available?

--A

[peter]

The assistance that is being announced on both sides of the pond to assist business through the body-blow that this is going to give to it will be of absolutely no use if the same is not applied to the millions of individual people who will be affcted by the same. In the Scandinavian countries workers being sent home or told to self isolate are being guarenteed eighty percent of their normal income while they do so. In other countries rent holidays and other supportive measures are being put into place in recognition of the severity of the financial straits that households are going to find themselves in.

In the UK (and in the US no doubt as well) people who have been encouraged to live right up to the edge of their incomes, who are only a matter of two or three wage cheques away from homelessness at all times, are suddenly to find themselves with either zero income or statutory sick-pay at levels that do not begin to scratch the surface of their weekly/monthly outgoings. Yet I hear very little being said about how these people are to survive through this period. If we are going to get out of this the other side without huge societal breakdown resulting, this represents an equally important aspect as the protection of business - yet precious little is being said about it. These people who find themselves in this now precarious situation have never forseen a situation where their own Governments would be the one preventing them from working, and their own belief that they would always be willing to be doing the work to support their lifestyle now turns out to be the Achilles heel upon which they will be brought down. If society is to hold together through this, it is their needs which must be met, or all of the help to business in the world will be meaningless.