If someone is showing mild Corona virus symptoms and can safely quarantine themselves, then there isn't a lot of value in testing. The result isn't going to change what you do.
Where it's useful is controlling transmission. When you identify a patient, find out who they came in contact with and confirm whether or not they have it.
Why?
Because it no longer matters, the containment effort for individual cases is now over. Now we move on to more mass actions to delay and slow the peak of the epidemic - anyone with symptoms to self isolate for a week, regardless of positive test.
Most countries didn't even attempt containment, as far as I can tell. Leaders seem to have surrendered to mass infection at the opening of the battle.
It seems pathetic and criminally negligent. It's an intentional trade of hundreds of thousands of lives (potentially millions) in exchange for some unpredictable economic gain. This could conceivably make sense if an uncontained financial crisis would lead to even more human suffering than an uncontained infection.
But it seems that we're likely to end up paying in a massive number of lives and a massive amount of money. When an aggressive containment strategy might have cost us primarily in terms of money.
https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1238102765081186306...
It kinda hit me immediately why this whole containment thing wasn't really working out. And this was March 12! How on earth do we tell people to not go outside, but months after it all started there are still thousands of airplanes flying.
Honorary mention for the countries that sent military transport airplanes to rescue 100 citizens from China like an asteroid was about to hit it and kept them in barracks for weeks, but have this kind of air traffic streaming in.
There's no point. Better to just let people come to the hospital if they absolutely need to, rather than risk people coming to the ER just because they tested positive.
It is possible that Italy has made a mistake in doing as many tests as they have. I'm not sure what the numbers are but it could be that the addition of infected-but-not-seriously-ill patients is a major problem.
So maybe this anti-surveillance testing approach does make sense once you've conceded the battle to contain the infection.
That will help flatten the curve.
In concert, universal healthcare at point of service is a must.
As is propping up the people via direct material aid. Food. Rent money. Paid sick leave.
I thought I heard Trump say that interest on federal student loans would be “waived”. Did he mean forgive or defer? I don’t know if it’s at all true because he is a compulsive liar.
If it is true, great. But insufficient.
What we also need is a debt jubilee and infra & public investments that are truly net-positive for the neediest.
This will lead to inflation. Which by the way will be sorely needed. And by every affected country. I’m curious about the MMT community‘s point of view on this.
Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/10/coronavirus-some-airlines-ar...
In an ideal world we would already be doing this. I know that some people have to show up to work even if they're sick, but even at my job where we have unlimited sick leave, and are encouraged to use it, people still show up coughing and sniffling.
I don't get it.
If your employer encourages you to work from home when you're sick, and you're actually sick, please work from home! No one wants to catch your disease, whether it's Coronavirus or "just" the common cold.
However when it comes to the common cold that is something that will be going of for weeks and return several times for some people, just the light symptoms. No fever but some coughing and sneezing.
For some job roles and in some companies with good culture it works great to work home but for a lot you cannot really be home for like 6 weeks every winter because you are missing out too much or are not effective enough.
According to the CDC, the average adult gets the common cold 2-3 times per year with symptoms lasting 7-10 days[1]. So it's more like 2-4 weeks per year, but I would imagine that number would decrease if you didn't have people coming into work sick in the first place (again, I recognize not every job will allow for this). Hong Kong's flu season apparently ended early this year due to the self isolation of sick people[2].
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/features/rhinoviruses/index.html
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/ad7ae6b4-5eab-11ea-b0ab-339c2307b...
yes, the 'overzealous hero employee' archetype is very real. The Coronavirus aside I just wish this would generally become socially unacceptable. Not just during a pandemic but in general sacrificing health or sleep or some reasonable balance of life for work should not be celebrated.
I mean, the Johns Hopkins map shows 13 infections in Ohio, and you have the director of the Ohio Department of Health saying it's 100,000. How do we know if either are anywhere close to right?
Presumably when things get bad it'll be impossible to hide it, as the hospitals will be over capacity. That's already happened in Wuhan and China, and probably Iran and some other places as well.
It would be nice if we had some sort of indication of where a particular region is on the scale from "hardly anyone has this yet" to "we're experiencing rampant community spread" that's more trustworthy/accurate than the official numbers.
Here is data where “Total” is meant to represent the number tested. Ideally we would see this also represented as a percentage of the local population.
We as nation put on extreme measures but there is no visibility.
What is the true number of infected in Denmark? There is no sampling or systematic measurement going on.
We probably know less than you guys in Sweden yet we choose the most extreme actions.
We just had our PM go on national TV and call on all Danes to return to Denmark as she shut down the border.
There are not many medical systems on the planet that could handle that per capita case load increase in such a short amount of time (specifically the intensive care patients that will go with it in the coming days and weeks).
There are 10 people in hospitals in Denmark for COVID19. None dead.
By the publicised numbers Sweden is hit about the same as Denmark; yet they choose a much more moderate approach.
As if China can be explained that way.
I have no opinion on whether this is blown out of proportion.
I can just see that my own country is choosing the most extreme measures (packaged in nationalistic rhetorics) where as our neighbours are not.
The idea that the population should be sampled so the exact extent of the spread can be measured (and so can the effect of the various policies) is not mine. Here is a Danish doctor calling for the same:
https://www.altinget.dk/artikel/overlaege-regeringens-corona...
In Danish. Headline: The Government's Corona-strategy misses focus on the engine of the epidemic
So far the people infected skews fairly young
And the pandemic took hold around Tuesday and it takes about a week for hospitalization to be required in the severe cases
At least next time around we should all be prepared like Taiwan was this time.
It's not just the inefficiency of central governments. The main problem, at least here, is that people seem reluctant to follow guidelines, and thus the state had to enforce stricter rules. The same happened in Italy and it's the reason incidents skyrocketed. Everyone was fucking around thinking that it's just another variant of the flu. And then reality hit them like a ton of bricks.
sarcasm? or heard on TV to calm the population?
This is how extreme measures look like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXpHD9bjGe0
Denmark is negligent, as is rest of Europe.
Three weeks ago our PM was busy playing petty political games with the opposition, today she is shutting down our borders preventing all foreigners entering the country.
They said the symptoms sound like coronavirus, but it's not being tested anymore (it was still being tested at drive-throughs 2 days ago) as the government has moved from "contain" phase to "delay" phase - advised to stay at home for 7 days and call back if it gets worse.
I asked if his brother can continue going to school, given he is probably exposed - the advise was yes, as long as he isn't showing any symptoms.
They have given up trying to contain this and it's difficult to see how you can trust reported case numbers going forward since testing has stopped.
Otherwise healthy people should not go to hospital if they feel symptoms. For most people it's just a flu.
All events with more than 500 people are forbidden.
I read thats more labs than can do the same in the US.
Cockups like this really should lay to rest the idea some people have that the federal government is a panacea for everything.
This is very similar to one of Warren Buffett's quote about investing in companies: “I try to invest in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will.”
The truth is that federal government is far from being able to be wonderful when run by idiots. The best thing to do is try things out at the state level and if it proves to be so wonderful, only then do you try to scale it to two states, then three until it is so wonderful that it can be done at the federal level.
IMHO, a major reason South Korea improved so much in recent decades is, when we had idiotic/evil leaders, we didn't say "What did you expect from the government? The government can and will be run by idiots, so you should not depend on it."
Instead, we said "How come our government is run by these murders and idiots? This is unacceptable! We demand a government we can depend on!"
You keep saying the government is run by idiots, you get your government run by idiots. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
All these things about idiots being in charge is, as Buffet said, true of companies as well. Nothing is a panacea.
I'm not every talking about government funding. I'm talking about government having too much power and control. That said, just throwing more money at the government gives zero guarantee that it will run any better. It usually will run just as poorly, but wasting more money than before.
A transparent hose, add UV-LEDS to sterilize the flowing air. Dry the air at the start with silica gel. All that is needed then is a battery.
The silica gel can be heated every once in a while to loose any moisture bound it and sterilize virus particles attached to it.
At a glance they sell LEDs around 400nm which from my cursory reading wouldn't be effective for what you're imagining.
Not to say this would never work. Just that you would need special parts that are less common and more expensive by orders of magnitude.
I've also read that sterilizing very fast moving air doesn't work well. It seems HVAC systems use extremely intense light order to be effective in these conditions, which a small LED (or a few) wouldn't accomplish.
While the length of UV exposure time required to kill viruses is probably impractical for a mask, certain UV bands could be instrumental for sanitizing public areas and hospitals. [0]
[0] https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/news/20180212/can-uv-ligh...
“You who have symptoms similar to coronavirus will not be tested in the future. This applies regardless of whether you have been in the areas that were previously exposed to infection or had close contact with someone you know is ill in covid-19.”
There are no test kits. Hospitals have run out of face masks. And it’s only just getting started here.