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Re:The Contrarian Coronavirus Theory That Informed the Trump... by redis_mlc on Sunday March 29, 2020 @10:58PM (#22724832)
I skimmed through the interview.

He's a lawyer, not an epidemiologist, but actually there's some interesting non-scientific points made based on his HIV epidemic experience that might spur somebody to creatively look at today's available stats, etc.

- another thread mentioned corona virus being temperature-sensitive. Can that be correlated with deaths by city?

- are there different strains of covid-19 with different strengths?

- what stats do we have that are reliable?

- H5N1 and H1N1 were also corona viruses. what can we learn from them?

- The reason we shut down the economy is because there's not enough ventilators, so it's worthwhile to look at the numbers, while making more ventilators.

- has anybody survived corona virus and being on a respirator? If not, the lockdown may not be helping since we aren't developing herd immunity to it.

Re:The Contrarian Coronavirus Theory That Informed the Trump... by madhadron on Monday March 30, 2020 @12:49AM (#22725335)
His HIV experience is nonsense.

> - another thread mentioned corona virus being temperature-sensitive. Can that be correlated with deaths by city?

Nope.

> - are there different strains of covid-19 with different strengths?

Nope.

> - what stats do we have that are reliable?

Very few, but we've got lower bounds.

> - H5N1 and H1N1 were also corona viruses. what can we learn from them?

Those are influenza strains, not corona viruses. Did he actually say that? If so I missed that bit of stupidity. We use the same epidemiological models for flu. I don't know where he got the idea that we don't.

> - The reason we shut down the economy is because there's not enough ventilators, so it's worthwhile to look at the numbers, while making more ventilators.

Uh...no.

> - has anybody survived corona virus and being on a respirator? If not, the lockdown may not be helping since we aren't developing herd immunity to it.

Yes. And herd immunity is not the goal here. Herd immunity involves a nontrivial percentage of the population dead and 20% of the population in intensive care for weeks. That will destroy the economy much more than any lockdown measure we could take.

Re:The Contrarian Coronavirus Theory That Informed the Trump... by temp20160423 on Monday March 30, 2020 @02:22AM (#22725686)
There is some evidence that humidity and temperature do influence the transmission rate: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3551767
Re:The Contrarian Coronavirus Theory That Informed the Trump... by chrisco255 on Monday March 30, 2020 @07:15AM (#22726989)
Which is an argument for people getting outdoors as we head into summer and not holding people in room temperature controlled buildings for months on end. Not to mention the benefits of vitamin D for health.