@MedEwok, this might have worked, but I doubt it. Just look at New Zealand, arguably one of the easiest places in the world to shut down. They thought they had it under control and now the cases are increasing again.
IMHO the only thing that could have prevented this mess would have been the CCP coming clean immediately after they detected it.
I think the problem is that there is an “undercurrent” of constant infections due to people (not just young people but specific communities involving religious and similar practices) mixing out of sight. House parties have always gone on… Delivery drivers, etc.
All the time the virus is present at all, it will start spreading, and fast, because it is so infectious. 1 person on a bus and half the bus gets it.
The only way to suppress it properly will be to somehow get most people immune.
172driver wrote:
IMHO the only thing that could have prevented this mess would have been the CCP coming clean immediately after they detected it.
Yes, you are probably right. The way the pandemic spread to New Zealand does indeed show that any plan to “keep the disease out” is unrealistic, certainly at this point. If China had warned the international community immediately, the disease might have been contained within its borders.
Peter wrote:
The only way to suppress it properly will be to somehow get most people immune
Indeed. The challenge is now to find a golden path that allows for the minimum disruption of daily life, while also keeping infections to a minimum, until widespread immunity can be achieved via vaccination.
The recent trend of rising infections well before autumn (and thus the respiratory iris season) is worrying and leads me to believe that the current measures might already be too lax, and that it is really time to acknowledge that restarting intra-european travel was a bad idea at this point.
MedEwok wrote:
The recent trend of rising infections
Do you not think this is linked to an increase in the amount of testing? The death tolls seem to be staying pretty low at the moment.
Off_Field wrote:
Do you not think this is linked to an increase in the amount of testing? The death tolls seem to be staying pretty low at the moment.
Yes and no. The amount of testing has certainly increased, but the percentage of positive tests has not fallen significantly – which it would have if the amount of testing were solely responsible for the increased numbers.
Keep in mind that the death toll lags behind new infections by several weeks, and that hospitals may have gotten better at treatment, reducing the death rate.
Der Spiegel reported that a German hospital chain (Helios) reported a 29% death rate among their ventilated Covid-19 patients so far. This compares with 10% for my own hospital and over 50% in some earlier reports from April, especially from Italy.
Off_Field wrote:
The death tolls seem to be staying pretty low at the moment.
I think that there are two reasons for that.
1. Initially most of those who died were in nursing homes (at least here that was the majority of our deaths). Those people are much better protected now. Now it’s largely younger people (under 40 years) who are getting it, and they are much less likely to die, even if they do have long term health issues as a result.
2. As our doctors learn more about it, the treatments are much more successful. Initially it was all about ventilation. Now there seems to be a much bigger emphasis on anti inflammation.
So we have a larger percentage of people getting it who are less likely to die, and better treatments for those who are at risk.
Yes, I think we seem to have gotten much better at keeping people alive as we’ve understood things a bit more. The original idea of the lockdown to stop hospitals from geting totally overwhelmed seems a distant memory.
I do get the death toll lag, it’s one of the interesting things that I was waiting for following all the protests and packed beaches in the UK. Yet it didn’t really appear as I had expected.
Do you think in a couple of months we will be seeing a big death increase again?
Off_Field wrote:
Do you think in a couple of months we will be seeing a big death increase again?
A very hard question. Extrapolating the current trends, I’d say: yes, the number of deaths will increase significantly. In the winter, people will inevitably meet indoors much more than now, and resistance to or non-compliance with possible lockdown measures will be much stronger than in spring. Thus more people will get infected and more of them will die.
Despite improvements in treatment, the mortality seems to be at about 1%, which is quite a lot if you still have many millions at risk in each European country.
What do you think of this @MedEwok? Looks very promising to me. If we have good treatment options, this could finally lose its scariness even before vaccines may or may not be available.
The obvious question is about the other long term negative effects and how common they are, and whether they justify a lockdown.
Paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665228
Summary blog post: https://medium.com/@alexschroeti/a-promising-anti-covid-drug-you-have-probably-never-heard-of-d6cae8072da6
There is a suggestion that we actually havent got that much better at handling mortality, and the death rate hasnt change all that significantly.
What has changed, is we are passing through a phase when many more young people are infected.
There is also a suggestion that the social measures taken mean those infected receive a much lower initial amount of the virus, resulting in milder disease than in the earlier days when infections started with high viral loads.
There seems to me to be logical sense,
