minten

Dying isn't the only thing that can happen with the virus. It's not that binary. Many young people can still get severe pneumonia, which can leave long-term damage on the lungs. The virus can also in certain case apparently attack the heart and leave it weakened. And some pneumonia cases that wouldn't be a big deal in a normally functioning health system may turn bad if the system is overloaded. Not to mention that all the other things that can happen to younger people (car crash, whatever) may also become a lot more dangerous if hospitals are overloaded and doctors and nurses and burnt out and/or sick, ambulances aren't available, etc. OK sure, that's fair. But do you really think the odd chance of this happening will convince the under 50's to forego summer?

This is such a useless stat. What percentage of the population has no pre-existing conditions? 40% of Americans ages 20-39 are obese according to a quick Google search. In the US, 33% of adults have high blood pressure. I agree. But that wasn't really my point; stats show this is so overwhelmingly an old sick mans disease, the young who actually still work and need to make a paycheck but now can't, will eventually look at these stats as well when they run out of money to feed themselves.

Some stats from Italy you don't want the kids to know. Average age deceased: 80 Average nr of pre-existing conditions per deceased: 2.7 Total deaths among people with no pre-existing conditions: 3 out of 3000 (as of yesterday) I can appreciate why policy makers would like to spin this as something that also affects young people, as you need them to comply and can't count on them to do it on solidarity alone. But the stats on who dies just don't seem to support it, except on an anecdotal, outlier level. And millions of young people will willingly spend their summer indoors over this? I just don't buy it. Maybe a month, if we're lucky.

But does anyone on this board seriously think any Western society is able to remain in lockdown for more than a month before the entire support base under such measures will quickly fall away? No sports, no entertainment, no parties, nothing to look forward to... and people growing bored and getting immune to the corona news really fast. I get how in theory it could take many months to kill the virus, and how in theory it's a good exercise to think how disastrous this would be to the economy, but this isn't a theoretical society, but a real one that consists of actual people. With mortality rates that low even before mass testing will take it down much lower, people will revolt. In a month we should have better treatment, much better testing etc, but even if we don't and the virus is even bigger than it is now, I'm 100% convinced life will resume for the young, as you won't be able to hold them down anymore. And we'll just live with the virus until a vaccine pops up.

Impressive. But let's be realistic here: we would never ever be able to implement anything remotely like this in our countries.

This seems like a strange model to me to be honest. The total infection rate (as I keep reading) when you do nothing would be 40-60%, spread out over a number of months. Why would everybody be sick at once? Well, in a lockdown nobody would be working at all, even worse. Plus apparently large percentages of patients don't have any symptoms at all (which seems to be the problem with this virus), so will be able to work just fine. At some point it'll come to this, especially once we have treatment options. The elderly will be asked to isolate until there's a vaccine next year. If thet do get sick, they can be treated better, while the rest of us go on with our lives. Nothing else makes sense, definitely not an extended lockdown.

some random dude on twitter wrote some interesting (and very bullish) comments on the French study I linked here yesterday: https://twitter.com/boriquagato/status/1240630279301033986 and posts below that. It's just one person's thoughts so who cares, but I found them interesting, and I'd like to be an optimist these days and tweets like these help. what I and others had missed yesterday in this study was that it might have been remarkably succesful because of the combo of two seperate drugs working together, not just the hydroxychlorquine. SMH at people who think azithromycin, an antibiotic that works against bacteria and hydroxychlorquine, an agent that works against a parasite, is likely to fight a virus. Same as anti-HIV drugs for this which are anti-retrovirals (hint: COVID-19 is not a retrovirus). It took me more time to look up what "SMH" means in your post than to find what you write just isn't accurate (or at least, a gross over-simplification)..

some random dude on twitter wrote some interesting (and very bullish) comments on the French study I linked here yesterday: https://twitter.com/boriquagato/status/1240630279301033986 and posts below that. It's just one person's thoughts so who cares, but I found them interesting, and I'd like to be an optimist these days and tweets like these help. what I and others had missed yesterday in this study was that it might have been remarkably succesful because of the combo of two seperate drugs working together, not just the hydroxychlorquine.

Perhaps interesting to add (and surprising to me): in my country it turns out 75%(!) of deaths reported so far didn't die in the ICU, because they were never there. Not because ICU's were over-run (they're not, they still have space), but because the patients were in such bad health even before the virus hit them it was decided not to put them through extensive treatment and let them pass in, for example, their nursing home.

Several drugs (incl this one) being trialed. https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/18/who-to-launch-multinational-trial-to-jumpstart-search-for-coronavirus-drugs/ Also, an analyst put out a report saying the Gilead-drug should be FDA approved very soon. Regardless of outcome, compare this to a week ago (feels like a year ago) and a lot seems to be happening in a lot of different areas.

Do you have a source on this being used on anyone but the very sick (in hospital)? The presumption seems to be you give this to people far before they are at this stage as they recover quicker and are contagious for a much shorter period of time. The subjects in the study were volunteers and not critical.

as we always have been, nothing new here. we could have put our economy in lockdown every winter to contain the spread of the flu. only imagine how many lives of the elderly we would have saved. we never did though. car speed limits vs pedestrians air polution vs the sick and i can go on and on and on. if we would prioritize lives over everything else, nothing would still get done. and people would still die (because that's what people eventually do).

https://www.en24.news/a/2020/03/hydroxychloroquine-would-be-effective-according-to-professor-raoult-of-the-ihu-in-marseille-after-a-first-limited-test.html Bayer and Sanofi seem to have huge supplies of this stuff and seem to have offered donations to whatever country wants it. Too early to tell obviously, but if approved, existing and widely available (combo of) medicines turn out to decrease the severity of the virus (at least for a large number of patients) obviously that would be a quick and complete game-changer.

It's a good idea, and it seems likely after a few weeks of semi-lockdown and more data about how dangerous this virus really is (or isn't), it'll come to something like that. I believe the idea of a society going in lockdown for monts and months over this is absurd and will never happen; at some point the cure really does become a bigger threat than the disease itself.

https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2020/03/16/coronavirus-lo-studio-su-vo-euganeo-tra-il-50-e-il-75-dei-casi-sono-completamente-asintomatici-formidabile-fonte-di-contagio/5738910/ Not as fancy looking, but small italian case study that caught my eye: 50-75% of patients get the virus but are completely without symptoms(!), yet still infecting others. Exactly the same findings as that Chinese study that came out yesterday.

I agree as well. I'm perfectly OK with measures that are currently being taken, because we don't have enough data yet not to take them. But when data does become available (which is happening more and more) it must be judged fairly, and not ignored by those who are too pot committed to their own train of thought or too hypocritical to look at what's real and what is hype. We mustn't be biased into thinking any life taken by this virus is somehow more important than a life taken by whatever else. At some point, we can't keep closing our eyes to all the death that's being caused by economic damage caused by excessive containment (Germany's two years of control? what?), because simply we are too busy in tunnelvision looking only at the death caused by this virus. There's literally death everywhere on this planet, all the time, and we ignore almost all of it without losing a day's sleep. This cannot be any different because this time we happen to see it on our Twitter timeline all day.

Daily Italy update: New cases: 11-03: 2313 12-03: 2651 13-03: 2547 14-03: 3497 15-03: 3590 16-03: 3233 17-03: 3526 New deaths: 11-03: 196 12-03: 189 13-03: 250 14-03: 175 15-03: 368 16-03: 349 17-03: 345 Anybody left that wants to argue exponential growth into the millions? We're still a few days away from the lockdown effects kicking stats down though.

interesting well-argumented contrarian opinion piece from an epidemiology professor on why fatality ratio of this virus might be much lower than we think: https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/?utm_content=buffere08f7&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=twitter_organic

maybe you're right, but don't you think the number of false positives would be greatly exceeded by people that were never even tested at all? i'm personally starting to come around to the exact opposite conclusion: much more people have it than we think, but don't know it. which as i think i said before, isn't necessarily bad news either.

just some further thoughts: altough this study doesn't state it explicitly, it does suggest there were way more undocumented cases out there in China at the time. It also explains why the "just stay at home when you're sick"-policy didn't work at all; as apparently many had it but never were sick. Policy only starts having effect when you limit the movements of * everybody *, as the tricky thing about this virus is apparently having no symptoms tells us nothing. This also kind of confirms the train of thought others are having on this board. The bad news of this it could be more widespread than we think it is, and it will be almost impossible to eradicate. The good news being the number of people that get infected but never notice should be vastly understated, very much pushing down the percentage of people that ends up in the hospital/death. Anyway, one study like this is not enough to draw conclusions but it does add to the evidence.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/03/13/science.abb3221 Interesting study about the outbreak in China. Estimates (among others) a high infection rate from people walking around with no to little symptoms.

if that's not too personal, what exactly are you so terified of? catching the disease? a society in temporary lock-down? something else?

Seasonality was definitely overstated by the likes of Trump who suggested previously to just do nothing and let the weather fix it. But if by then the numbers are down (which seems very likely), it definitely won't hurt. Anyway, daily update on Italy: New cases: 11-03: 2313 12-03: 2651 13-03: 2547 14-03: 3497 15-03: 3590 16-03: 3233 Nope, no endless compounding here.

Assuming spring will take the numbers down, and assuming fall would cause an upflare, it seems reasonable to me to practice social distancing (or lockdown, if need be) for everybody to keep the numbers down until spring, which shouldn't be more than a couple of weeks. And then use spring and summer to develop better treatment options, produce more of what we are currently short on, and much, much better and more testing. So when it does come back, everybody will be better prepared and informed, cases on average will be much less severe, this thing won't have such an enormous impact and, most of all, won't create such a ridiculous panic in the economy. So herd immunity, yes, but only when we're ready. But what do I know.

Good post. Just wanted to add a vaccine or no vaccine is not a binary situation. we might develop a vaccine that offers * some * protection (like the flu vaccine), but not a watertight solution. Also, even if we don't develop a vaccine in a year, we will likely find better ways to treat patients (with antibodies for examples) as we learn more, causing less of them to go critical and save much needed hospital resources. Time is clearly on our side here. Also just in, Lombardy reports lowest new case number in a week. Don't want to repeat myself over and over, but remember, Lombardy went in lock-down a couple of days before Italy as a whole. Could still be a one-time fluke, but if confirmed over the next few days, would be a very positive sign for what's still to come in Italy first, and the rest of Europe later.