COVID-19 — Coronavirus

[vmsuhail]

Spike in Covid-19 cases in Malaysia in the last 2 days (250+). PM announces restriction on movement and closure of offices and business till end of March.

 

[BosnianBlue]

Spike in Covid-19 cases in Malaysia in the last 2 days (250+). PM announces restriction on movement and closure of offices and business till end of March.

yeah. they were doing pretty good in last two weeks but I noticed yesterday they had a big spike.

 

[WNRH]

A great informative video

 

[BosnianBlue]

UK has one of the worst death percentage. Only China, italy and iran have more. Spain is about leveled. And deaths trend is not great at all, if it continues like this, it might leave only italy in front.

 

[SebastianBlue]

Precisely when you are aware that you have an underfunded NHS, especially weak in intensive care,
it's even more logical to act quick and strict to flatten the curve. What's the point?
The strategy discussion shouldn't even exist.

The strategical idea should be to not overwhelm the NHS in the near future
and to win time to:

- ramp up capacities for equipment of all sorts
- aquire more prepared medical staff
- change daily routines of the entire nation to permannetly practice hygiene and necessary social distance (not isolation)

in order to be better prepared for the next wave that will inevitably arrive come December.
In the meantime we will go on developing a vaccine.

We have to go on/off with suppression as we need some relief inbetween, summer should at least help a bit.

Returning to lockdown later could work well, as humans adapt to situations, the learning curve will go up,
creative solutions arise and we will have seen ugly results of the first wave.

There is another aspect:

Those 250,000 or whatever deaths is the assessment for the whole pandemic (that means over let's say 3 years)
is derived from cases and mortality rate.
I have the impression some on here think those figures could be reached til summer.

As I said in an earlier post: we have to change anyway, as we have many more other fundamental problems on this planet
covering the question "how shall we live". We will find solutions - as we have to.

Just for clarity, here is likely the most relevant passage to your post from the 16 March Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team Modelling Report.

“Perhaps our most significant conclusion is that mitigation is unlikely to be feasible without emergency surge capacity limits of the UK and US healthcare systems being exceeded many times over. In the most effective mitigation strategy examined, which leads to a single, relatively short epidemic (case isolation, household quarantine and social distancing of the elderly), the surge limits for both general ward and ICU beds would be exceeded by at least 8-fold under the more optimistic scenario for critical care requirements that we examined. In addition, even if all patients were able to be treated, we predict there would still be in the order of 250,000 deaths in GB, and 1.1-1.2 million in the US.”

It’s important to note that the report generally uses a 2 year timescale for all projections and that the 250,000 deaths referenced is based on the “most effective mitigation strategy examined, which leads to a single, relatively short epidemic (case isolation, household quarantine and social distancing of the elderly)” in which “all patients were able to be treated”, so it is actually a very optimistic prediction for a mitigation strategy, rather than the suppression strategy we are shifting toward.

I also thought this bit of hedging in the report was relevant to your post. Speaking as a professional in the field, this is a data scientist’s way of saying “it’s our best guess but no one has ever ****ing done this before so don’t blame us if this goes tits up.”

“Our analysis informs the evaluation of both the nature of the measures required to suppress COVID- 19 and the likely duration that these measures will need to be in place. Results in this paper have informed policymaking in the UK and other countries in the last weeks. However, we emphasise that is not at all certain that suppression will succeed long term; no public health intervention with such disruptive effects on society has been previously attempted for such a long duration of time. How populations and societies will respond remains unclear.”

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/im...-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf

 

[SWP's back]

@SWP's back

We have that data for hospitalisations by age now.

Going off last year's population figures I posted earlier, over 70's would account for 43.4% of hospitalisations without isolation.

Meanwhile Children represent 0.05% of hospitalisations despite being almost 1/4 of the population.

Looking at that and the modelling that was released yesterday and their own comments regarding ICU beds. I can’t see any scenario that doesn’t involve tens of thousands dying in the next year for want of ICU beds not being available.

I’ve already had my mother quarantined for the past 5 weeks and I’ve told her to expect that to continue well into the summer. Her Alexa arrived yesterday though so on top of the usual FaceTime, she can now “drop in” on me and my sister at any time and she’s still going for a little walk every morning. The hardest thing is going to be combatting loneliness for a large part of the population.

It’s all very very strange isn’t it.

 

[MCFC1993]

Wonder how many people will be off work today, thousands were off yesterday, it'll probably triple that today given the advice yesterday.

There must be so many households with 1 person under the weather meaning the whole family has to stay in.

This is why testing kits are so important, people who aren't well need access to a test kit.

 

[SWP's back]

Those 250,000 or whatever deaths is the assessment for the whole pandemic (that means over let's say 3 years)
is derived from cases and mortality rate.
I have the impression some on here think those figures could be reached til summer.

They were based on a two year period AND having 8x the ICU capacity we currently have.

As such, it’s very much a low balled number.

 

[blue b4 the moon]

Time to go on a vod binge sir :-)

Couldn't agree more Vodka all the way....ah err right ;)

 

[cibaman]

Stupid question alert:

Why can't we as a society decide to bypass the Phase II, III and IV parts of the live trial and just trial the vaccine in life and death cases with agreement of the families. Is that unethical?

Apparently there have been cases eg dengue fever where they have produced a vaccine which seemed would be effective in that they caused the body to produce antibodies. But when they were fully tested it was found that the vaccine made the disease worse.