Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19) (SARS-CoV-2) [2020]

Isn't that a bit like saying someone falling from a 100 Story Building is doing good if they only reached Floor 40?
:runaway: I hope it's not like that in the end!

At any rate, I don't think the confinement approach followed in other countries (such as Spain) is the best solution. I think that only people in true danger (because of age or a compromised immune system) should be the ones being confined. For the time being, we can compare what is happening in Spain vs in the UK.

Also, there's the thing about being infected and maybe even have cleared the virus without even knowing... I bet the numbers aren't quite right. How can we can account for infected people that didn't know it?
 
Also, there's the thing about being infected and maybe even have cleared the virus without even knowing... I bet the numbers aren't quite right. How can we can account for infected people that didn't know it?
In my case, I have all the early symptoms but at a very mild level. I could really do with being tested but the NHS is only testing those with more pronounced symptoms, who, let's be honest, don't need testing. If you have a temperature and cough, you have Covid19!
 
Or still more likely the Flu.

I’m disappointed that After China managed to all but stop the virus completely, we are caving so quickly and settle for controlled de elopement of herd immunity. This will mean the virus will stay with us forever and will likely kill a lot of people over the next six months or so.

And it is based on possibly a misconception of the dangerous effects - currently in the Netherlands 50% of IC patients are under 50! Sure they are more likely to survive the 2-3 weeks(!) of artificial respiration needed but fuck that’s still terrible. There’s no way we have enough capacity to have millions infected even if spread over several months.
 
Or still more likely the Flu.
Possibly, but from sore throat to listlessness to restricted breathing today while cycling, the pattern is completely typical of Covid19 and I rarely get ill. If I was expecting a strong fever, I could say, "this is just something else," and ignore it as being Covid19, but given that symptoms can range across anything including none, it's impossible to tell. Hence I could really do with a test to know one way or another. I know a fair few people who wonder if they've already had it, and that's very unrealistic at this point with the number of UK cases, but as the virus spreads, knowing who's had it is valuable information. They can go back to the normal routine or support those in isolation etc. UK's looking at isolating older folk. If you know you've gotten over the disease, you don't have to worry about seeing and supporting your parents, for example.
 
if you have cold or flu like symptoms just assume you have covid-19 and stay home if they are mild
if not seek medical assistance
 
Yes it would be great if testing was more widely available even if only to have more feedback on effectiveness of measures, if you’ve had it already if your still infectious etc.

Symptoms of the now common flu strain that started as the Mexican Flu are very similar to covid. And this winter apparently 400,000 cases of flu in our country alone means that even if there are 20,000 infected with Covid right now there is still also a good chance of having a flu.

But of course with the current situation we can only assume we have or carry covid and just avoid meeting anyone outside the people we live with.
 
Yes it would be great if testing was more widely available even if only to have more feedback on effectiveness of measures, if you’ve had it already if your still infectious etc.

Symptoms of the now common flu strain that started as the Mexican Flu are very similar to covid. And this winter apparently 400,000 cases of flu in our country alone means that even if there are 20,000 infected with Covid right now there is still also a good chance of having a flu.

But of course with the current situation we can only assume we have or carry covid and just avoid meeting anyone outside the people we live with.

As I tell most people close to me, if you have symptoms just assume it might be covid-19 even if it's just the flu or cold. Self-quarantine and keep monitoring your situation. Consult a physician if you need to. If the symptoms remain mild, just treat it like the flu or cold...don't put additional burden on medical staff that are needed to treat more serious cases. If you feel the symptoms are starting to be worrisome or alarming, definitely see if you can get tested.

This is from Twitter, so take it with appropriate flavoring... concerning the UK virus handling plans.
  • Incredible detail in this FT story: up until last week, the UK was basing its coronavirus control policy on a model based on hospitalisation rates for a different disease with lower rates of intensive care need than coronavirus

Well, duh. There is insufficient data to model it after itself. For any situation like this you're going to rely on data from a disease that is known and is the most similar to what appears to be happening.

Hence, why at the start the many people made light of restricting travel. Trump was blasted for closing the borders to incoming travel as much as he did at the start of the pandemic (especially by European leaders). Turns out, he should have locked it down even tighter and I'm guessing European leaders wish they had been more aggressive in locking down their borders.

Hindsight being 20/20, I'm sure a lot of people will be saying X should have done such and such. Even if they may have been one of the ones saying X shouldn't do such and such at the start of the whole thing.

Meanwhile in Bananistan (aka Brazil) our Moron-in-charge (aka president Bolsonaro) actually asked for nationwide marches and demonstrations in his support, going against the advice of every health organization in existence.
So, many of his dumb and fanatical followers went to the streets yesterday, since they believe that coronavirus is just part of a worldwide communist plot.

Argh, someone should point him to what happened in Philadelphia in 1918 during the outbreak of the Spanish Flu (Influenza) pandemic.

Regards,
SB
 
Possibly, but from sore throat to listlessness to restricted breathing today while cycling, the pattern is completely typical of Covid19 and I rarely get ill. If I was expecting a strong fever, I could say, "this is just something else," and ignore it as being Covid19, but given that symptoms can range across anything including none, it's impossible to tell. Hence I could really do with a test to know one way or another. I know a fair few people who wonder if they've already had it, and that's very unrealistic at this point with the number of UK cases, but as the virus spreads, knowing who's had it is valuable information. They can go back to the normal routine or support those in isolation etc. UK's looking at isolating older folk. If you know you've gotten over the disease, you don't have to worry about seeing and supporting your parents, for example.
Best of luck, I'm fully resigned to getting it within the next month as well. You being a cyclist means I assume you're fit and have good lungs

Some good news based on the Italy data (up to the 12th march) if you're under 50 (I assume you are) you're very unlikely to die (*)

first number cases, second deaths
Above 80 2,533 430
70–79 2,849 274
60–69 2,421 65
50–59 2,480 14
40–49 1,523 1
30–39 819 1
20–29 511 0
10–19 118 0
0–9 63 0
n/d 565 4.1 18 2.2 3.2

(*) unless you're like that young Chinese doctor, dam what are the odds being one of the "only ~3000" to die, ala I wonder if we will ever find the true death number or have they gone full tiananmen on the data
 
Yes but still half of people in IC right now is under 50 mostly due to lung failure and generally you need 2 weeks or more of artificial air, and it can take long to fully recover and you may have permanent lung damage ...

I am not happy with the herd immunity approach. If 5% ends up in IC, on a population of just 10 million that is 500,000 people who will be severely affected, and say that you would have 2000 IC beds (most countries currently have much less than that! We are at 1100 currently I believe for 17,5 million!) you would be able to treat 4000 people per month! That means you need to perfectly flatten the curve for over 10 years! It doesn’t add up!

Rather I would take the Chinese approach and stay in lockdown until numbers stop rising, and if that ends up not working hope that you’ve at least bought enough time that promising treatments with HIV inhibitors and chloroquine have been proven to work so that IC treatment with respirators can be reduced significantly.
 
Hence, why at the start the many people made light of restricting travel. Trump was blasted for closing the borders to incoming travel as much as he did at the start of the pandemic (especially by European leaders). Turns out, he should have locked it down even tighter and I'm guessing European leaders wish they had been more aggressive in locking down their borders.
o_OYou realize that ban came into force after the USA had 2000+ confirmed cases, and the true number likely in the 10s of thousands. It was already well established in the USA
Lock it down tighter! Mate have you heard the phrase 'locking the barn door after the horse has bolted'
Up until that time Trump had been downplaying covid19 as totally under control, just go back and read his own words

No offense but if you seriously think trump has dealt with the situation well, that is a serious reality distortion effect :LOL:

@Arwin, lockdown in the west aint gonna happen, here we are in lockdown now, sure theres less ppl outside, but theres still quite a bit of movement outside and its only just started give it 2 weeks and ppl will be very restless.
PS I think when all is said and done we will find out in years hence, the herd immunity approach is what Wuhan actually done
 
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o_OYou realize that ban came into force after the USA had 2000+ confirmed cases, and the true number likely in the 10s of thousands. It was already well established in the USA
Lock it down tighter! Mate have you heard the phrase 'locking the barn door after the horse has bolted'
Up until that time Trump had been downplaying covid19 as totally under control, just go back and read his own words

No offense but if you seriously think trump has dealt with the situation well, that is a serious reality distortion effect :LOL:

@Arwin, lockdown in the west aint gonna happen, here we are in lockdown now, sure theres less ppl outside, but theres still quite a bit of movement outside and its only just started give it 2 weeks and ppl will be very restless.
PS I think when all is said and done we will find out in years hence, the herd immunity approach is what Wuhan actually done

You do know that Trump started restricting travel to the US in January depending on which countries were hardest hit at the time? China in January (before there were any known US infections), Iran and other countries starting in Feb. European leaders at the time objected to Trump restricting travel into the US, especially when he started to restrict travel from some EU nations.

Trump is an idiot on many things but he's not an idiot about everything. I don't like him personally, but that doesn't mean I'm going to ignore whenever he does anything good. Likewise I'm not going to ignore whenever he does anything stupid.

Regards,
SB
 
o_OYou realize that ban came into force after the USA had 2000+ confirmed cases, and the true number likely in the 10s of thousands. It was already well established in the USA
Lock it down tighter! Mate have you heard the phrase 'locking the barn door after the horse has bolted'
Up until that time Trump had been downplaying covid19 as totally under control, just go back and read his own words

No offense but if you seriously think trump has dealt with the situation well, that is a serious reality distortion effect :LOL:

@Arwin, lockdown in the west aint gonna happen, here we are in lockdown now, sure theres less ppl outside, but theres still quite a bit of movement outside and its only just started give it 2 weeks and ppl will be very restless.
PS I think when all is said and done we will find out in years hence, the herd immunity approach is what Wuhan actually done

I’m not so sure. Not only does Wuhan/Hubei have 15 million inhabitants but the rest of China’s 1.4 billion or so people hardly had any cases by comparison.

Edit: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/coronavirus-can-herd-immunity-really-protect-us

Shows just how successful China’s policy has been ...
 
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Where did coronavirus come from, and where will it take us?
An interview with Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Make Big Flu

You have been researching epidemics and their causes for several years. In your book Big Farms Make Big Flu you attempt to draw these connections between industrial farming practices, organic farming and viral epidemiology. What are your insights?

The real danger of each new outbreak is the failure or—better put—the expedient refusal to grasp that each new Covid-19 is no isolated incident. The increased occurrence of viruses is closely linked to food production and the profitability of multinational corporations. Anyone who aims to understand why viruses are becoming more dangerous must investigate the industrial model of agriculture and, more specifically, livestock production. At present, few governments, and few scientists, are prepared to do so. Quite the contrary.

When the new outbreaks spring up, governments, the media, and even most of the medical establishment are so focused on each separate emergency that they dismiss the structural causes that are driving multiple marginalized pathogens into sudden global celebrity, one after the other.

Who is to blame?

I said industrial agriculture, but there’s a larger scope to it. Capital is spearheading land grabs into the last of primary forest and smallholder-held farmland worldwide. These investments drive the deforestation and development leading to disease emergence. The functional diversity and complexity these huge tracts of land represent are being streamlined in such a way that previously boxed-in pathogens are spilling over into local livestock and human communities. In short, capital centers, places such as London, New York, and Hong Kong, should be considered our primary disease hotspots.

For which diseases is this the case?

There are no capital-free pathogens at this point. Even the most remote are affected, if distally. Ebola, Zika, the coronaviruses, yellow fever again, a variety of avian influenzas, and African swine fever in hog are among the many pathogens making their way out of the most remote hinterlands into peri-urban loops, regional capitals, and ultimately onto the global travel network. From fruit bats in the Congo to killing Miami sunbathers in a few weeks‘ time.

What is the role of multinational companies in this process?

Planet Earth is largely Planet Farm at this point, in both biomass and land used. Agribusiness is aiming to corner the food market. The near-entirety of the neoliberal project is organized around supporting efforts by companies based in the more advanced industrialised countries to steal the land and resources of weaker countries. As a result, many of those new pathogens previously held in check by long-evolved forest ecologies are being sprung free, threatening the whole world.

What effects do the production methods of agribusinesses have on this?

The capital-led agriculture that replaces more natural ecologies offers the exact means by which pathogens can evolve the most virulent and infectious phenotypes. You couldn’t design a better system to breed deadly diseases.

How so?

Growing genetic monocultures of domestic animals removes whatever immune firebreaks may be available to slow down transmission. Larger population sizes and densities facilitate greater rates of transmission. Such crowded conditions depress immune response. High throughput, a part of any industrial production, provides a continually renewed supply of susceptibles, the fuel for the evolution of virulence. In other words, agribusiness is so focused on profits that selecting for a virus that might kill a billion people is treated as a worthy risk.

What!?

These companies can just externalize the costs of their epidemiologically dangerous operations on everyone else. From the animals themselves to consumers, farmworkers, local environments, and governments across jurisdictions. The damages are so extensive that if we were to return those costs onto company balance sheets, agribusiness as we know it would be ended forever. No company could support the costs of the damage it imposes.

In many media it is claimed that the starting point of the coronavirus was an “exotic food market”« in Wuhan. Is this description true?

Yes and no. There are spatial clues in favor of the notion. Contact tracing linked infections back to the Hunan Wholesale Sea Food Market in Wuhan, where wild animals were sold. Environmental sampling does appear to pinpoint the west end of the market where wild animals were held.

But how far back and how widely should we investigate? When exactly did the emergency really begin? The focus on the market misses the origins of wild agriculture out in the hinterlands and its increasing capitalization. Globally, and in China, wild food is becoming more formalized as an economic sector. But its relationship with industrial agriculture extends beyond merely sharing the same moneybags. As industrial production–hog, poultry, and the like–expand into primary forest, it places pressure on wild food operators to dredge further into the forest for source populations, increasing the interface with, and spillover of, new pathogens, including Covid-19.

Covid-19 is not the first virus to develop in China that the government tried to cover it up.

Yes, but this is no Chinese exceptionalism, however. The U.S. and Europe have served as ground zeros for new influenzas as well, recently H5N2 and H5Nx, and their multinationals and neocolonial proxies drove the emergence of Ebola in West Africa and Zika in Brazil. U.S. public health officials covered for agribusiness during the H1N1 (2009) and H5N2 outbreaks.

...
 
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It certainly rings true to some extent. Even in the Netherlands this happens with Q-fever caused by an airborne virus from sheep and goats particularly when they give birth the virus could spread through air for miles! Because farmers interests were so aggressively protected it took years before effective measures were taken and the problem was even properly acknowledged causing thousands to be infected unnecessarily ...
 
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