I think there's going to be so much nuance around this (what does your contract say? when did you sign it? do you have insurers backstopping you? if so, what does their policy say?) that the answer is going to be, "Talk to your lawyer".
Personal opinion, not a lawyer, not your lawyer, is that the further into the global pandemic we were when executing an agreement, the less wiggle room you might have. Again, talk to your lawyer; that's what they get paid for.
I share an office with a travel agent, and I can tell you a lot of people with "cancel for any reason" travel insurance are getting screwed by force majeure clauses. Unsurprisingly, insurance companies have no interest in paying out policies that threaten the existence of their company.
It's exactly what force majeure clauses are for. If something gets cancelled or becomes unreasonable because of Covid-19, this gives a reasonable way to exit contracts without penalties, and that is a good thing because given very unusual circumstances, we want people and organizations to be able to adapt instead of being pressured financially to execute things that seemed reasonable last year but are not now.
The first area where I'm seeing widespread uses of force majeure clauses is the cancellation of large events, conferences etc with limited or compensation for the cancellations. And again, while this hurts some people a lot, this is mostly a good thing, because we do want to give the organizers the ability to break their commitments and cancel the conference with much smaller consequences (to them) than an ordinary cancellation would have; we don't want the organizers to be pressured to hold the event at all costs.
Even though I rationally know it’s the right thing to do, I’m terrified about my daughter’s school closing and her and other students severely falling behind academically. I can work from home and watch her, but my spouse and I are not AT ALL equipped to home school her for a lengthy period of time. She is not a good self-learner and already struggles in some areas.
How should we be preparing for that? How are other people doing it who have to keep their children home and away from educational resources and teachers?
Edit: I’m getting mixed reactions to this. I’m not at all saying academics are more important than slowing the spread of the virus. But I see many comments calling for a complete shutdown of schools and very few saying that for many parents this is a legitimate source of hardship and anxiety, even if it’s the right thing to do.
I'm not a parent, but I had a period of time, about a month, when my Mom had to teach me, because I couldn't attend school. What worked well for us was structuring and scheduling time. What didn't work well was her winging it with the curriculum.
I think if we went through that time again and I was in her shoes, I would take advantage of Khan Academy. Especially for Math, it's incredibly well structured and forces you to convince it that you've truly learned the content with built-in quizzes. It doesn't hold you back if you've got a handle on the lessons and makes sure that if you're having issues that you practice until you've really got it down.
I think the most work for you will be setting her up properly, making sure she's comfortable with the system, and being available if she's got questions that it's not quickly answering.
This is what I'm working on now, I'm trying to set up 'classes' for my second grader with math, reading, writing, typing, and programing. She has music and art at school and I can't really teach that but I may look into a little more. I'm not too worried about her falling behind, but I do want to make sure it's not just idle time, I assume I'll have to do some WFH though I don't really expect to hit full time with it.
I don't mean to be glib, but isn't this a good opportunity for her to learn those skills? I wasn't a good self-learner until I was in AP Bio and the teacher was very incompetent and I had to just face down the book. That groundwork helped me so much as a freshman in college where there were lots of kids who had always had awesome, attentive teachers. Especially if you are there with her!
I love Khan Academy, and the cool thing about youtube is there are so many content creators that there will be someone your daughter thinks has a nice voice or is easy to understand or funny.
> but isn't this a good opportunity for her to learn those skills?
I think that’s a fair question, and I’d love to be optimistic about her ability to hunker down and build those skills. But, she has some behavioral challenges and just getting her to do homework is a nightly struggle consisting of meltdowns and arguments, so I’m not as hopeful that she’ll be able to do it. She’s a bright kid, but definitely one who -needs- the structure of a classroom to be successful.
YouTube videos are great for some resources, but they aren't a substitute for a competent teacher.
Fun thing to think about: there are videos that measurably improve students' performance on a task, but students rate those videos as "confusing" and "not helpful". The videos that students do like? They have zero effect.
I don't have kids but there's lots of Khan academy and legit youtube stuff (3blue1brown) that can be used to learn things, even if they don't get credit for the classes.
I don't know how to turn non-self-learners into self-learners though. And admittedly if I was a kid during this, I'd be playing as much video games as possible.
Hopefully most teachers have a clue and will realize this was some pretty serious circumstances and not be as harsh and do more review.
As a parent, if you have the energy & time, a good approach can be to:
* Boast how easy school is these days.
* Wait to get told you're wrong.
* Propose a competition. Your child can pick any subject that neither of you have studied yet, and then have a race over 24 hours, 1 week, etc. to learn the material and do a multi-choice test you both agree on first.
Your child will obviously pick a subject they're good at, and you'll probably loose. But you still made them choose to study really hard.
Honestly this is the last thing I'd be worrying about. A child can skip 6 months to a year of school and have almost no negative effects on their life outcomes. If they get sick and die, or their close family members do, they will definitely have negative effects on their outcomes.
There are tons of resources and communities for homeschooling on the internet. Happy to help point you to stuff if needed, but please prioritise health over potential educational slowdown.
A proper justification, such as a closed school, would explain the delay in the child's education, and likely negate most (all?), negative reactions people might have about the resulting delay.
Citation may be needed in general, but here… that's sounds like a reasonable guess.
In most cases personal problems are the reason why children/young people skip school, not the result – that's why skipping school sounds problematic. But there are cases when it's entirely justified and it's entirely manageable then – surely an epidemic is one such case.
If you had a random six months of your education removed from your memory, how long would it take you to relearn it? If it was prior to high school, would you even bother relearning it?
How important is any particular six months of your education to your ability to do your current job?
Missing 6 months of school isn't ideal, but I think we tend to overestimate the importance of hitting every nail on the head when it comes to education.
Not to mention the fact that if most children in the US miss 6 months of school, they will have that as an excuse when they start sending out resumes in however many years.
> If you had a random six months of your education removed from your memory, how long would it take you to relearn it? If it was prior to high school, would you even bother relearning it?
Due to a mistake in the records, I skipped an entire year of math (pre-algebra, which I was supposed to take in 8th grade). My algebra teacher decided the first month was going to be review, because she didn't expect most of the students to need a refresher after summer break.
Turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me, at least for that subject - not only did I have no issues catching up, turned out that was close to my natural pace. The topic was no longer boring and became one of my favorites after that.
Everyone's shitting on this dude but I had this exact scenario and I tie a lot of my struggles as a child student to this circumstance.
Miss 6 months of school while changing schools. Come in, I don't understand the math underlying what they're learning. I fall behind because I'm playing catchup while still trying to stay on top of new material. I have no discipline or direction from home so I don't put it any extra time or anything, I just get home and ride my bike around. This makes me hate math in general, and next year I'm still not entirely caught up or even sure of what I learned the previous year, so I'm failing harder. I don't know if there were any extra resources available or not, I was like, 13, but I was also a holy terror so I bet even if the resources existed they wouldn't have been provided to me because my poor performance was chalked up to me being a problem child in general - never mind my stellar performance in literature classes.
And so on. Throughout my entire public school career. By college I "get it" and am trying to catch up but it's already so ingrained in my personality that I'm "not a math person" that I instead pursue a useless humanities degree, then fuck around in Asia for a couple years. Then finally, at 26 years old, I genuinely get my shit together, learn what I missed 13 years prior, find out that I actually am capable of all that, and now I'm an engineer.
So, sure, do what you can to not get your kids killed, obviously, but I don't agree that it's fair to shit on this parent for worrying about what missing 6 months of school might do to their kid. I mean it sounds like they at least know more about discipline and enforcing learning on their kids than my parents did, so maybe the kid will be Just Fine, but homeschooling is no joke either, and the kid might still end up having to play catch up.
Why not just re-do the year you half missed instead of trying to play a catch-up game that obviously isn't going to work? Starting to work 1 year later is really not a problem.
Your situation is very different and irrelevant because while you did miss classes your peers didn't and continued along, in a current situation everyone will stop as a group and continue studies as a group, which is very different from your experience.
> please prioritise health over potential educational slowdown
My apologies - I didn’t at all mean to make it seem like I was downplaying the public health aspect. I fully understand this is likely what’s necessary and that public health comes first. That being said, it is a source of anxiety for me as someone who values academics because, for me, it was a path to a better life.
Few weeks or even months of lost school - especially at an early age - is something that can be compensated for somewhat easily. Schools are very inefficient at teaching. You'll help her a bit, ensure she does some focused learning, and she'll be fine.
No need to apologise at all! You sound like a responsible parent - I commented mostly for other people reading. Your child is gonna do great because they have caring parents.
I would truly love an opportunity to not work for 6 months and have my child not go to school so I could spend that time with them. I'm sure you'll be able to find ways to spend that time enriching their life. Caring is the most important step.
You should not worry since it is a global event and not only your child is affected but everyone is. If it was only one child or insignificant portion of being affected and education of others continued along then your worries would be well founded. As it stands studies will continue as soon as circumstances allow it, maybe your school switches to online learning for some time, or there will be effective drug found that resolves the situation.
I hope my kids school closes, and I'm happy to make a commitment to spending a lot of extra time helping them make up the lost progress.
My plan is to let them enjoy the time off, for the most part, and then spend the next n months on reduced entertainment in favor of extra studying.
Seems a small price to pay given how many lives will be saved by closing schools.
Edit: one concern I heard is that health care workers need schools to take care of their children. Why not start by letting anyone that can take their child home, take their child home. This would reduce the risk for the children that stay in school by a lot, which will help health care workers not get sick.
Because currently I'd risk punishment for taking my child out of school "unexcused". Which seems like some seriously backwards bs.
I expect your school will have prepared materials for such an eventuality.
Your daughter should be given long youtube playlists of online lessons, homework assignments, scheduled interactive video lessons, etc.
As a parent, all you really need to do is check your daughter is actually doing what the school is providing. The threat of detention doesn't work so well at home when you can just claim the internet broke and that's why you haven't showed up to an online lesson or submitted an assignment...
"falling behind academically" makes sense only if she alone is taking a leave. If whole school is closed then she is keeping with the school. In a 70 year lifetime, taking at worse 3 months of holidays won't affect anyone in life. She'll have a more severe scar if she infects anyone who struggles for life.
With internet and access to online courses find something that helps her self study and improve upon the existing knowledge/skills. Follow the instructions from school.
> I’m terrified about my daughter’s school closing and her and other students severely falling behind academically
I wouldn't worry too much. The evidence from prior natural experiments show that unexpected interrupted school years[1] has no persistent effects into adulthood.
If she's not in high school I wouldn't worry too much. I essentially missed half of third grade, all of 4th and 5th grade and half of 6th grade, and by 8th-90th grade I was pretty much caught up completely without even a real catch up program. A lot of the stuff your learn at that age simply becomes trivial or at least much much easier just from getting older. In that case, I'd just give her some puzzles to solve or something.
If she is in high school the only answer is probably a bunch of "homework", good books on the subject, and there are also hundreds of video courses online.
"Falling behind" what? Even if she and her peers have to repeat a school year because classes don't happen for a long time, which would be quite extreme, what would be the issue with that?
It actually might not be the right thing to do for the reason you mentioned but also, for the families that can't work from home, it becomes a huge economic burden to have their kids not in school. It's obviously a necessary step to contain a deadly pandemic but I think, in this particular case, children are actually in the lowest risk pool. Kids seem to survive the virus at near the highest rate but also contract the virus near the lowest rate so closing schools might be an unnecessary burden on working parents with marginal effect on containment.
She will probably benefit more from a few weeks of being a child, and being worry-free. School was the most stressful time of my life. Tests and exams always hang over your head. Pop quizzes, mid-terms, finals. There is literally NEVER a peace of mind.
Different people experience differently. Tests were always less stressful for me than non-test days. On a non-test day, there would be a non-zero chance I forgot/didn't know to do homework that was due. But homework was never due when there was a test.
This is so culturally unhealthy IMO and it's why America and similar academic oriented countries work work work until they die. It's like 1 year of being off course people act like their lives are going to end.
We home-schooled from preschool through high-school. Today I am trying to figure out how to help (from the opposite coast) my MIT senior deal with getting kicked out of their dorm in a few days. Home-schooling can work just fine. Chill.
1. Remember that of things that can be measured, the thing most highly correlated with academic success is parental involvement. So no matter how wonky your pedagogy, you will be involved. Hopefully that factoid helps you chill.
2. My first piece of advice to all new home-schooling parents is: Don't try to do everything at once. Get one subject working well, when you have established momentum and routine on that, add another. Cook until done.
3. There are many great online resources now. But I suspect your school is going to be providing curriculum information so you may have a usable starter kit.
4. As to the "self-learner" issues, all that does is help you find your happy place on the home schooling spectrum. At one end you have "school at home" -- trying to replicate the school environment in your dining room. There is also "unschooling" -- completely self-directed learning. This may not work for you. This may be a good chance to help your child develop some self-learning instincts.
(unschooling in my definition is: "You can work on what you want, but you MUST work on something." Which is NOT what I call "raised by wolves" -- a home schooling philosophy that I have seen occasionally, but doesn't often yield a good result.)
Most school districts may start doing things like video instruction or give parents a curriculum to work on, I'm not worried about that aspect. It may become an entirely remote education for the rest of this school year across the world.
I'm considering taking leave of absence and teaching him the curriculum. The problem is I'm not a good teacher, I know this about myself.
It's impossible to WFH and take care of a child. So your productivity will suffer, hopefully your company understands this, but then again everyone will be in the same boat once the school districts start closing things down.
rather than becoming immobilized, panicked, and/or irrational, fear should be a trigger for a learn-plan-do cycle, which you've apparently started (learning what's possible to do about the situation).
however, it's important not to spread irrational fear, which words like "terrified" tend to do, particularly when overblown. the state of being "terrified" leads to immobilization, panic, and irrationality, so it should literally be avoided like the plague.
on the other hand, being concerned and worried, and acknowledging (unhelpful) anxiety, is reasonable. asking for help and information, like you did, is reasonable. discerning and acknowledging the appropriate level of risk (probably worse than a regular flu but not nearly as bad as the 1918 flu) is reasonable.
with that said, children are constantly learning whether you teach them or not. it's ok if learning is not entirely linear. the world is not linear, and our brains are not either. what's needed will get in there eventually, and we're resilient enough to compensate for nearly any kind of deficiency anyways.
(the same case can be made for overly worrying about "getting into good school districts", something worth considering a little bit, but not a lot, and a commonly-cited driver of localized real estate bubbles)
> however, it's important not to spread irrational fear, which words like "terrified" tend to do, particularly when overblown. the state of being "terrified" leads to immobilization, panic, and irrationality, so it should literally be avoided like the plague.
Very good point. Thank you for calling it out. I am not at all intending to spread irrational fear and realize I should have chosen my word there a bit more carefully. I am definitely anxious about it, but that anxiety is driving a desire to figure out a plan and not causing paralysis on my part, which I agree is what the word "terrified" implies.
This isn't unusual for schools. Last year my kid had so many days off school for bad weather that he had to go an extra week at the end of the year. Maybe your July plans will be messed up because your kid is still in school, but otherwise the school will give your kid enough school.
There is some worry if your kid is hospitalized for a month while the rest of the school goes on (presumably this means containment worked well except for your kid), but even here schools have to deal with kids who are out for months for medical reasons and they provide extra tutoring to catch those kids up. (I'm familiar with this because my cousin missed a month of school his senior year - he still graduated with his class even though he had to go back the next year to finish some classes)
Homeschooling is not rocket science. I've done it for years and I barely know what I'm doing. Just make resources available, sign up for a couple out school classes, and be willing to help them pursue stuff when they're interested in it. You can do it!
Sure. When the admins merge dupes, they consider what the best link is and reparent the comments, which has now happened. Now thread had more upvotes and comments.
This should have been done way earlier. WHO's excuse of not declaring it before was that it didn't reach Antarctica yet... which is ridiculous.
Had they raised alarm early on, more countries would have enforced proper procedures (look at South Korea). Instead, the thing spread around and starts impacting economy.
Holy hell! That site still exists? I remember going on there all the time in the early 2000's cause my parents couldn't afford a newer console and our PS2 basically died.
Credibility is the quality one has when one's statements ought to be believed. OP claims the WHO lacks this quality. OP doesn't illustrate what specific statements the WHO could make that aren't trustworthy; but in the very same comment only quotes a single one from them: the fact that Covid-19 would be a pandemic.
So the only (provided) statement we should disbelieve is that Covid-19 is a pandemic. Which is precisely what OP wanted them to say. Hence the contradiction.
Obviously, this line of reasoning is tenuous, but the initial claim isn't much better, as nothing is said of what it really means for the WHO to have credibility.
I read that comment as an additional armchair semanticist making the strong claim that (exaggeration mine) the WHO should have declared the pandemic before the virus reached their own country.
Following organized, rational procedure is exactly what is needed in times of widespread panic. If the WHO based their decisions such as this one on emotions like fear or intuition then they really would be damaging their credibility. Let's be honest, if countries hadn't been enforcing proper procedures to this point, how likely is it that a label by the WHO would make that much of an impact to governments?
They didn't base their decision on the observed growth curve. Anyone looking at the data could have called this a pandemic the moment it left Asia.
The WHO and CDC botched this. Because of their messaging a lot of people (the majority of people!) didn't take this virus seriously, and that is going to result in real human lives lost.
Now, inactive governments may be held accountable of not listening to the WHO. Also, calling it a pandemic 2 weeks ago (or more) would have been perfectly rational.
Who is your goto authority that has supplanted WHO in healthcare matters?
As in, who do people like you, who claim that WHO's maybe flawed handling of this has erased all of the work they've done in the past, consider the best source of truth in these matters?
Doesn't look like anyone is tracking "pandemics" formally. WHO.int is tracking public health emergencies of international concern, which appear to include epidemics with pandemic potential as well as outbreaks with pandemic potential and extremely egregious likelihood of permanent harm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Health_Emergency_of_Int...
But from what I could dig up, the last widely accepted pandemic declaration was the H1N1 2009.
The two current pandemics include HIV/AIDS and COVID-19.
There is a list of epidemics, but that list also includes localized or regional matters rather than just global-scale pandemics, and not all of them may amount to PHEICs.
My college just basically closed and hour ago saying everything is online now after spring break. Kinda nice for my easy classes. Sucks for my harder ones though.
Good luck - I think I would've had a lot of issues had I ever been forced to remote into classes. When I was in college I definitely didn't have the discipline for that.
Read your textbook, do homework exercises, and (above all) feel free to contact your professors and ask them for help. That is what they are paid to do!
Underrated advice. I'd get 10x as much benefit from my undergraduate studies than I did if anyone got it through my head that the academic staff will help you with the stuff that was in the class - and more importantly, they're very happy to tell you everything about their field of research.
I mean I'm a returning student and have always been good with online classes so it's honestly an actual perk for me.
The hardest part is instructors who feel like unlocking everything to let people work at their own pace is somehow egregious...I think it's so stupid that a teacher cant somehow manage grading the same stuff for everybody at the same time but just ignores the other students who are ahead until they get to that point.
The best online teachers I've ever had were the ones that unlocked it all from the start and helped you with the few questions you had along the way.
In the Boston area, Harvard, MIT, Boston University, all five UMASS campuses (including Boston and Lowell), Tufts University, Suffolk University, Emerson College, Northeastern and Olin have all moved to online classes. Plus Amherst College out in western Mass.
That seems like a lot until you realize there's still Boston College, Simmons, Berklee College of Music, Emmanuel, Brandeis, Babson, Bentley, Wellesley, a pharmacology college, two art colleges, and a bunch of community colleges -- and plenty of others I'm forgetting -- I could reach via public transit are still to announce anything, presumably because it's all still being discussed.
For Boston this is really weird and impactful. There is a massive population (somewhere between 350,000 - 400,000 students I think) in the area that is just a transient student population. Though outside of NYC and VERY specific parts of the SFBA, the Boston area is one of the most population dense parts in the US, so there's no more fooling around.
That's impossible to know. We have no idea how many cases there are in the US, because we're not doing a significant amount of testing here, because our government is incompetent and unprepared for this.
And it should be very obvious from the fact that the rate of positives relative to the number of tests is enormously higher in the US than elsewhere that the number of infected are much higher than believed. Alongside this, cost prevents many from seeking care for things like respiratory illnesses, and in the case of one that actually requires care would probably do so until it is severely progressed.
True. And we don't care about the number of cases anyway. We care about the growth. Assuming China has been ramping up its testing efforts, that gives us a clear picture of the spread in China. Especially compared to countries with slow-to-start, spotty testing.
It seems to me that the U.S. government would prefer for cases to not be tested. Whatever medical competence there is appears to be sidelined by other interests.
This. Last month all of the analysis pointed to the fact that the mortality rate was being severely misrepresented, either through intent or ignorance.
According to this dashboard, there are 40k infected outside of China vs 80k inside, and the 40k number is still growing exponentially. It’s just a matter of days until we have more cases outside of China.
Given what I know about the nature of this disease, and the american response thus far, I don’t think this is true. It is looking very likely that the health system is going to be overloaded in the US. This is what people working in hospitals are telling me and it makes sense to me given the information that’s out there.
That's what skeptics in Italy were originally saying. Now people in Lombardy are dying from strokes because hospitals can't admit them because ICU is overrun by Covid-19 patients. Sure, if you break your leg and die from bleeding out because all local hospitals are busy treating bilateral pneumonia patients you technically didn't die from Covid-19, but ....
> Now people in Lombardy are dying from strokes because hospitals can't admit them
Now wait a minute. If you have a source on that, please do provide it. Because I am from Italy and I have never heard of such things. (There were cases of people who died from a stroke and tested positive to COVID-19, but that's all I know)
Thank you, even though I am honestly not sure if I can trust a Twitter thread.
For instance, this article [1] (in Italian) says that "up until now [yesterday], no patient who could have benefited from intensive care has been excluded". BUT it also says Lombardy might be headed that way if the virus keeps spreading at this rate.
Just to be clear, I do not want to downplay what is happening in any way. But I feel it is better if we stick to verifiable info.
This is where I'm currently battling my south-Denver community. They're all up in arms reciting the GP's facts-in-a-vaccuum. They honestly don't give a rip about the extreme pressure it's put on healthcare systems in Italy (let alone Seattle). They're mad at the local government for "bordering on hysteria" because they're following the South Korean model for management.
Once it's fully spread through our community because the've decided they're entitled to be carriers (because, hey, you're more likely to die of the flu), they'll blame that same government for failing to provide the requisite care in the community.
For now. It's still expanding rapidly. A lot of countries, including the US, don't exactly give the impression they've got a good handle on this.
If left to expand, this is going to turn into another unavoidable seasonal flu, except more contagious, more severe, and more deadly. And for now, with no vaccine.
A couple of important reasons to try to slow this thing down are:
* Hospitals don't have the capacity to deal with the number of severe COVID-19 patients they're likely to get. There's a good reason China built a new hospital in a week. Severe cases end up on the ICU, and we could end up with hundreds of thousands severe cases.
* Slowing it down gives scientists more time to find a vaccine.
If you wait for it to get worse than the flu, it will be too late.
Just because something hasn't happened yet does not mean it's completely unpredictable. COVID-19 is coming, and if we don't put significant preventative measures in place, many more people will die from it in 2020 than the yearly flu.
I would imagine it's similar to all insurance: there are events outside the scope of your agreement with the insurance company for coverage.
For example, your home insurance would cover your house burning down but might have a clause along the lines of "if the whole town burns down, we will not cover you."
I'm guessing some health insurance plans have a similar clause of "if there is a WHO declared pandemic, we won't cover you".
The fire example from a real historical event: a German city burned to the ground and put multiple insurance firms out of business. This led to the development of "re-insurance" aka insurance firms that insure other insurance firms.
> For example, your home insurance would cover your house burning down but would have a clause along the lines of "if the whole town burns down, we will not cover you."
This isn't true. Insurance companies can and do regularly cover people in areas where massive destruction occurs within a particular area (e.g. hurricanes). This is why some companies no longer write policies in certain areas: their risk managers usually require them to "spread out risk" and so they write some stuff in some areas and then they may stop and lower rates elsewhere which are deemed "lower risk".
EDITED: Actually, some companies will even cover you in some pretty extreme circumstances, but this is stuff you have to pay for extra and isn't usually included on most policies.
At any rate, what _is_ true is that most insurance companies won't cover you based upon the cause of something: e.g. if your house is burned down due to a riot "civil unrest" or because of something like war, it will not cover you. If your house floods because a pipe bursts, then it is OK. If water comes up from the ground (i.e. a _real_ flood) then it will not cover you because it looks not only at what happened but how it happened.
We are both correct in that they can do all/some/none of the below:
1. Structure their agreements so that some things are covered and others are not e.g. suicide is sometimes NOT covered for life insurance
2. Choose not to cover certain areas e.g. there were insurance firms choosing not to cover Staten Island even pre-Sandy
3. Set their rates at high levels to discourage people e.g. this happened in my old town house where there were too many claims based around water heaters leaking
Funny side story: I remember reading a book about the British Special Forces (S.A.S.) and there was a note that said only Lloyd's of London was willing to insure them due to the high risk of injuries from their line of work.
Funny side story #2:
One of my family members had a friend who was apparently a crazy driver. He drove a delivery truck so a bunch of the driver's friend (including my family member) took out a life insurance policy on him (driver). I didn't even realize you could do this but apparently you can.
In the end, turned out that the driver outlived all of the people who were on the policy!
>One of my family members had a friend who was apparently a crazy driver. He drove a delivery truck so a bunch of the driver's friend (including my family member) took out a life insurance policy on him (driver). I didn't even realize you could do this but apparently you can.
It's generally restricted, since it can incentivize killing them to collect the money. To life-insure anybody you have to convince the insurer that you have an "insurable interest" in their life. That's easy if they're a breadwinner/caretaker in your family, and you could also show it if they were e.g. critical to your business (edit: or had lent them money). I'd be interested to know what the justification was in that case.
Insurers really try to make sure that the payout isn't so high that you want the insured event to happen ("moral hazard").
Hm, I think the "insurable interest" check is more of a standard practice to protect against being exploited by criminals and less of an "oh man, we'd love to do that but for those pesky regulations". Still, if I had to guess, I'd say it's that they don't look too closely if it's a close-enough family member that has a job.
I would assume there are many insurance plans that include force majeure clauses. "Force majeure – or vis major – meaning "superior force", also known as cas fortuit or casus fortuitus "chance occurrence, unavoidable accident", is a common clause in contracts that essentially frees both parties from liability or obligation when an extraordinary event or circumstance beyond the control of the parties, such as a war, strike, riot, crime, or an event described by the legal term act of God, prevents one or both parties from fulfilling their obligations under the contract"
TLDR: If the event affecting you gets big enough/outrageous enough the insurance companies consider it an act of god and you aren't covered.
In English law I think that this kind of clause has to be explicit and something that all parties sign up to - because the principle in English law is that parties can contract freely in any form that suits them. In other systems (and I think in the US - please correct me anyone who knows more!) you don't need an explicit clause to argue force majeure, you just need to get the court to agree that you are in extraordinary times.
I've heard the typical ICU/hospitalization course involves bilateral pneumonia, apparently requiring intubation and ventilation.
It appears to be survivable as long as equipment and personnel are available. And that's the problem: availability.
When health systems are overwhelmed, even people who could survive pneumonia with mechanical ventilation will die - because the equipment supply is exceeded and there are no ventilators left.
So yes, there are treatments for pneumonia, but they are limited in availability.
That sucks if that's true for your insurance provider. Here in the US it is not always true. For example, Blue Cross Blue Shield in MA are covering expenses for testing and waiving co-payments for medically necessary treatments. https://home.bluecrossma.com/coronavirus
That may be the case, but I would guess other insurance companies will buckle under similar pressure. Perhaps I'm being naive, but it seems like the worst kind of PR nightmare to financially cripple a group as big as those who will eventually be infected.
I suspect they have also run numbers and concluded that this is probably within parameters for a normal bad year. We know 80% of those who get it will have mild symptoms, and we also know not everybody will get it (they probably have good numbers). As such the goodwill from accepting a bad year is worth more long term than the savings from not covering it. They may have also factored in future bailouts which they expect to get if things get bad enough.
Insurance companies are all about numbers and are very good at running them. they are not always right, but they are right often enough for their purposes.
Quote: "all the insurance companies here, either today, or before today, have agreed to waive all copays on coronavirus testing, and extend coverage for coronavirus treatment in all of their benefit plans"
”Vice President Pence said Tuesday that a group of major health insurance companies”
Assuming that one is insured to begin with, and your insurance company was one of those at the White House, yeah, you could be covered. So “probably still have coverage” is a pretty wishful statement.
That's outrageous. Every living person deserves full healthcare coverage. Leaving people behind by private insurers is inhumane, and in difficult times like these it's in fact a hazard for the public at large.
Name and shame... Also, country please. I don't know if this would also be a thing in Europe or if it's a result of the USA system (for all I know you're from China).
WHO is a complete joke, from praising China's lack of a response as ground-breaking and refusing to label this thing as a Pandemic until now. Trust in institutions is at an all time low because these institutions perform so poorly that most people dismiss them entirely (even if the advice is sound). I hope the world will learn it's lessons from this outbreak, so at least we can react faster next time.
Yesterday I had the sudden realization that the US Republican Party is likely to be disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, but also seems to be avoiding taking precautions to prevent the spread.
Mortality and impacts seem to hit people over 50 the hardest, and that is where a majority of the Republican supporters come from.
It would be a curious footnote to have COVID-19 swing an election.
It's an interesting question. Urban areas, it would seem, are likely to get the spread a lot faster, but they also have way better medical infrastructure. It will spread slower in rural areas, but you have way fewer hospital beds, and less medical infrastructure in general.
Property values will fall after the next recession. It looks very likely that this set off what will become the next recession. (I mean, a recession is two quarters, so it hasn't happened yet... but it seems really unlikely to me that we won't see a recession, considering.)
The next question is, will they. I know of a town in Indiana where a surprising number of people don't get medical help. Some of it is money, but a big part is cultural. Indianapolis scares them. I dare say, for too many Indianapolis is scarier than COVID-19.
Something like a stroke requires immediate action (say, within 2 hours) to be able to use the best treatments available. Living very far away from a good hospital makes your survival chances quite lower.
For Covid-19, as far as I read, some people have gone to the hospital (already having trouble to breath) and died after a few hours. But those seem extreme cases. Normally you would have a couple days to go to the hospital from the moment you realize something is odd.
Yes, but those bounds are not binary. The faster you arrive, the higher the chance survival (specially for things like strokes, arriving in 30 minutes is way better than in 2 hours).
Then there is the issue of cost for that flight and the poor state of healthcare.
The US's rural healthcare is really bad. I was in a very rural part of Ohio recently and was listening to people talk about how they really only have an urgent care facility nearby but the closest hospital is a decent bit away. Even then they talked about how it wasn't a good hospital and recounted horror stories of friends/family and how they always go to a further/different hospital because they don't get good care at the closer one (which again, is not that close).
I live (urban/suburban) in spitting distance of 3-4+ hospitals (I don't even know for sure) with at least 2 of those being ones I would trust my life to in a heartbeat (the others I just don't know enough about). I was really unaware of the disconnect before that trip and it didn't really occur to me that hospital != hospital. So not only do some rural location have limited or no hospitals but they don't trust the ones they do have.
It also doesn't help that Trump is still keeping up his cult rallies and still has one scheduled next week.
The current White House is essentially the worst case scenario in dealing with this outbreak and is going to get people killed. There is still current exponential growth in the USA, and there is near zero testing going on due to incompetence and coverup. Things are going to get much worse.
I didn't downvote, but the politicization is unhelpful. When Trump pondered travel restrictions to/from China a month ago, the media jumped at him for being racist/isolationist. All the "experts" explained us that open borders are necessary to fight an epidemic.
Which legitimate person would ever say open borders help an epidemic? The virus spreading as it is a direct bad side-effect of globalization such as it is.
The main issue right now is the lack of testing and covering up just to try and bump the stock market, and it obviously is having the opposite effect since the problem is just getting worse the longer the problem is ignored.
The WHO's official guidance in late January was that countries should not restrict travel to fight the coronavirus. Travel restrictions "cause more harm than good by hindering info-sharing, medical supply chains and harming economies", they said.
The quality of medical infrastructure is going to play a small role in outcomes when the entire system is overwhelmed many times over in the next month or so.
Everyone will come in contact with the virus. People under 50 years old (as recent reports have stated) have a high chance of survival. The deaths from it will mostly be from those 50 years and old. Voters who are 50 years and older largely vote for the Republican party.
My mom drives 90 minutes a day to be with my dad in nursing home rehabilitation, the closest facility. The normal response time for an ambulance is 20 minutes, plus 30-45m to an ER. Their doctors are a similar distance. Note that the ambulance is volunteer, and the average member is 55. They live in NY, in a county with a decent sized city. It’s worse in the real boonies.
I live in a city, a paramedic will be at your door in 7-10m. Hospital 5-10m, etc.
If this gets bad, everyone will be familiar with tragedy. The urban stories will be about neglected patients in overcrowded wards and people who die of untreated strokes, etc. The rural tragedies will be finding grandma, drowned in her own phlegm because sick relatives and travel restrictions isolated her from support.
You mean Mexico. He wanted to shut the border with MEXICO, for no apparent practical reason, and refused at first to let Americans off a cruise ship, because he wanted to "keep the numbers low".
I think it's 33% distrust in governmental institutions, especially the liberal elite fake news CDC, 33% the fact that it's mostly hit large cities so far, and 33% the direct actions of the administration and the right wing media machine.
I think the fact that it's an election year, more people are susceptible to thinking the pandemic is overblown and thus a conspiracy to defeat Trump.
I'm curious how Fox News chose to push for denial rather than, say blaming it on international or ideological opponents.
Perhaps it's just that they can change course without any pushback from their demographic -- they're happy believing that we've always been at war with Eastasia. Still, it must cost them something to be quite so demonstrably wrong on something that's so much in people's faces. (As opposed to, say, climate change, where the effects are much slower and more easily shuffled under "the heat wave and fires are just weather".)
It's right there in their post... older voting population combined with taking fewer precautions against the virus. Both mean it might have a larger affect on the republican block.
Personally I'm not sure if it will outweigh how democrats are more likely to live in denser urban areas where spread is faster.
Parent edited his post without noting the edit. Prior to the edit it did not include any information except that republicans would be more largely effected.
Most republicans were successfully programmed to believe what Trump tells them, which as of today is a mix of underestimation of the risks and then dodging responsibilities.
On the other hand, "Parasite Prevalence Predicts Authoritarianism" [1]. Which wouldn't necessarily swing the election obviously one way or the other (left or right, Democrat or Republican -- although my gut tells me it would swing things to the right to some degree), but could definitely be a confounding factor to the above theory.
That's a bit of a stretch...there are probably dozens of other obvious correlations in places where authoritarianism pops up, because authoritarianism is much more likely to spring up where people are poor and uneducated...
That's true that the, er, "partisan mortality" difference is likely to be negligible. Bodies are bodies.
There absolutely does seem to be a difference between the partisan cohorts in preparation quality and infection likelihood though. Republicans have been told by their leaders and their media for weeks (Trump was still doing this as of yesterday) that this is no big deal, it's just like the flu, they don't need to do anything. Where democrats have been cancelling travel and buying toilet paper, republicans didn't even believe the crisis was real until the market crashed.
We'll see. But I bet before the smoke clears, we'll find there's good science showing a real partisan correlation with COVID-19 impact.
That's unclear, actually. The biggest single US cluster so far is in a retirement community in suburban Seattle. No one is safe here, novel viruses like this simply transmit too easily.
There's literally a poll elsewhere in this thread showing exactly this kind of effect.
I mean, fine, it's a partisan point. But... I mean, seriously: at what point does it become OK to point out that Fox News and the Republican leadership[1] just plain fucked up the response to COVID-19 really badly? And that they seemingly did so out of a combination of both ignorance and partisan desire to minimize the problem?
Is that not OK? Because it's a real point, and one that needs to be made (and heard by republican voters), even if it's "partisan".
[1] And specifically Fox News and the Republican leaders, and not the "MSM" or Democratic leadership, who were saying opposite things and in hindsight were clearly correct.
That article is from 2008. A lot has changed since.
The first thing that I would draw your attention to is that social shifts have moved the "silent generation" from being evenly split Democrat/Republican in 2004 to going for Trump by a 13 point margin in 2016. This is the group that will suffer the vast majority of fatalities. See https://www.people-press.org/2016/09/13/2-party-affiliation-... for verification.
Third, the upcoming generations through that 12 years are overwhelmingly Democratic and will have almost no deaths from this disease. Both previous links verify that.
The result is that, a well researched article from a dozen years ago notwithstanding, the impact of COVID-19 are likely to disproportionately hit Republicans over Democrats.
(Not necessarily. The one trend that Republicans can hope for is that diseases spread through urban areas and urban areas are overwhelmingly Democratic. I don't think that this offsets the other phenomena though.)
Yes, she is one of four ministers underneath the health secretary. Care is not in her portfolio luckily (she is responsible for mental health and patient experience).
That's highly subjective and no doubt any assessment is likely to strongly align with partisanship.
Which is why we need age limits. You can't expect people to objectively evaluate whether those inside or outside their party are still legislating or judging effectively in their 80s. Obviously most Republicans would lean towards arguing that she's senile and most Democrats would lean toward the opposite.
And then I imagine cognitive decline does not affect all faculties equally - so someone may still, say, have no trouble writing essays, but their judgement may be compromised.
Republicans may be marginally older, but they are also more rural. Presumably cities would be harder hit with a pandemic, but then again city folk might have easier access to care. It's really hard to say.
Beyond direct consequences, it seems reasonable that covid19 would affect the election by tanking the economy and giving Trump nothing to point at as his big accomplishments
Republicans are older on average, but they also live in less densely-populated places. The most dangerous thing I can think of is commuting on public transportation. That's a feature of cities, predominately Democratic strongholds.
Funnily enough, the second in charge of the Spanish far-rightwing party Vox who accused immigrants of bringing diseases like HIV (sic), has just been diagnosed positive after the party gathering on 8th March (intentionally on Women's day). Honestly, everything looks like a fun/scary/dystopic meme these days.
The problem with pandemics is that they tend to grow exponentially. What people often forget about exponential growth is that it's actually very slow around t = 0.
obviously its not going to be exponential forever, no one believes that. The more people get infected, the less people there are to infect. This is obvious. The problem is no one knows where the inflection point is yet, and it depends entirely on how countries react to the illness.
I think t is too far from 0 at this point, at least in the U.S. Our ability to test for SARS-CoV 2 has been completely kneecapped since the beginning, and there still aren't enough tests to screen people for the virus. There are documented cases in my area going back to 3 feb. But those cases were diagnosed outside of the country. As in, they had it while they were here, but they were not diagnosed until they flew back home and visited a doctor.
Quote: "all the insurance companies here, either today, or before today, have agreed to waive all copays on coronavirus testing, and extend coverage for coronavirus treatment in all of their benefit plans"
You should see the list. I've been living in the US for ~21 years now, and at no point I had coverage from a company _not_ on that list. I'm also pretty sure the rest will also get their balls stepped on, this being the election year and all.
In preparation of stopping next pandemic, maybe we should have an international agreement like Paris climate change agreement. Like climate change and nuclear weapons this is an existential risk.
Yes, outbreak of zootonic diseases is still possible through widely consumed firm animals (chickens, pigs, or cows). But we can dramatically reduce the risk of next pandemic if we stop eating exotic wild animals like bats, which is not hard to give up. We may have been able to stop outbreak of COVID-19 on the first place if we had learned our lessons from SARS outbreak and stopping eating exotics animals.
EDIT: bat was used as an example. You can replace any exotic animals in place of bats, the point still stands. This video touches on the topic of outbreak of coronavirus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPpoJGYlW54
Although MERS is more deadly than SARS-CoV-2, it looks it's less transmissible between people than SARS-CoV-2. I heard an epidemiologist theorize that it might be because people infected with SARS-CoV-2 shed the virus before they show any signs of COVID.
Maybe that's why MERS never spread widely outside of areas where camels don't exist widely.
Is there any evidence whatsoever that the current coronavirus outbreak was due to eating exotic animals.
Yes, the press has reported that a market in Wuhan sold exotic animals, but it seems this is uncorroborated, and after asking an acquaintance in Wuhan about it, I was told it's fake news, and that said market sells farmed animals as far as she's ever seen.
Well, it's linked to bats (like many such illnesses). One of the biggest exposures to these animals is at such markets, so whether or not this particular outbreak is traced to a particular market is less important than generally lowering exposure.
The Chinese government appears to be trying very hard to not be blamed for it and is spreading fake news of their own, which is what your acquaintance may be telling you.
Animals are absolutely a primary vector for infectious disease. No, there's no definitive evidence as of yet of patient 0, though the cluster of early cases in China had strong connections to the wet market in Wuhan. It's not necessarily the eating of the animals directly, but indirectly – because wild animals are kept stressed, in cages, next to other domesticated animals and people.
Even with conventional animal agriculture, things like bird flu and swine flu are a serious threat.
> Yes, the press has reported that a market in Wuhan sold exotic animals, but it seems this is uncorroborated, and after asking an acquaintance in Wuhan about it, I was told it's fake news, and that said market sells farmed animals as far as she's ever seen.
I thought that the bat soup origin was debunked. I'd suspect it's pretty rare that you come across a novel virus that's hardy enough to survive cooking at temperature and then the rigors of the human GI tract.
SARS-CoV-2 virus is zoonotic for sure, question is only what kind of animal was immediate host and what was mode of transition. It didn't have to be eating, might as well have been transmission of body fluid like mucus while hunting or cutting meat.
I don't know anything about the likelihood of the bat origin theory, but it wouldn't have to pass through the gut. It could pass from mucous, saliva, or other secretion, or internal fluids/tissues. If it got on a surface at any point during processing, either the people handling the animal or someone else could transfer it to their own noise/eyes/mouth just by accident.
You didn't use it as an example, I was recalling from the initial theories when "coronavirus" was making the news.
It would also be helpful to the discussion if "we" stopped casting broad nets and making sweeping generalizations without specifics and context.
"Eating exotic animals" has no real meaning. Bats may not be exotic in that region. Additionally, you specifically said "eating" and, so, my comment was specifically directed at the consumption of animals. In that case, cattle (not "exotic" in my region) can carry bovine spongiform encephalopathy which _can_ survive ingestion (most likely CNS tissues). So, when dealing with science-y sort of things, making generalizations in order to support an opinion, you're basically opening yourself up to people (like myself) who desire specificity and factual support.
As was mentioned in an erudite child comment, the most likely form of transmission was in the preparation of the foodstuff, so if you believe that more caution should be exercised, then you'd get no complaints from me.
> if we stop eating exotic wild animals like bats, which is not hard to give up
That seems a very first world-centric point of view.
Isn't the eating of such animals partially driven by cultural culinary preferences, and partially driven by the availability of such foods (eg. unable to afford beef or chicken, but can afford the next best thing).
Exotic animals are not something poor people eat because they can't afford. It's absolutely the other way around. Exotic meats are mostly consumed by the powerful people as delicacies.
I have no doubt that there are cases of wealthy people consuming exotic meat as a delicacy, but I would bet pound for pound it is largely people in poorer regions without much alternative.
Unfortunately I'm looking for real stats but am having trouble as most of the trade does not keep records, is illegal, etc
1. It's unlikely that this coronavirus was caused by the consumption of bats. It is more likely that it was transmitted through an intermediate host such as pangolin.
2. A very small minority of people in China consume exotic food not because they are cheap, but because they are more expensive and were considered prestigious.
3. There is now a very strong pushbacks against this culture from both the Chinese government and the vast majority of the Chinese people.
It's also not actually sound to begin with. MERS was transmitted to humans from camels, which are not exotic at all in the middle east. Livestock frequently interacts with wild animals, and this isn't really preventable, especially against bats. Worse yet, livestock is generally kept in large groups in close proximity to each other, and once slaughtered is distributed quickly and widely. While it doesn't get the same media coverage, it is not that uncommon for diseased meat to make it into the food supply. While meat inspection practices go a long way to help, they for obvious reasons have a hard time dealing with new diseases.
> Yes, outbreak of zootonic diseases is still possible through widely consumed firm animals (chickens, pigs, or cows). But we can dramatically reduce the risk of next pandemic if we stop eating exotic wild animals like bats, which is not hard to give up.
Washing your hands is not going to stop every single disease on the earth, but it'll reduce the risk. What exactly is the unsound part here?
The idea that a policy attempting to stop the consumption of wild animals would dramatically reduce the risk of a pandemic isn't sound. Most foodborne zoonotic outbreaks come from livestock, particularly in cases of newly developed farmland encroaching on wild animals, and transmission to livestock does not present a significant barrier for a Novel Coronavirus or other pandemic disease. H5N1 for example spreads to humans predominantly via poultry. The Chinese government also already discourages the consumption of such animals, and it is unlikely that further policy would have much impact, and the political effort could be much better spent elsewhere.
It's not a harmful proposal or anything, I just don't think it would have much impact, and it fixates excessively on the particulars of two specific outbreaks.
How can you even remotely suggest this when the proximity between humans and lifestock animals in horrible conditions is a primary driver of a) transmission of disease, as well as b) increasing resistance to antibiotics due to how much of them we pump into the animals, and then consume ourselves?
It absolutely _is_ about cuisine choices and the sooner we stop eating animals and animal products, the better.
Cross posting this from the other Pandemic thread since I thought it was interesting:
> d4mi3n
> What happens when the WHO classifies a pandemic? I imagine a number of processes and procedures come into effect--anybody know what they are?
> Hongwei
> My limited understanding understanding is that it automatically releases funding (from the WHO and other bodies) to help with the crisis. It should also trigger some catastrophe and pandemic bond clauses, meaning investors who bought these bonds will lose their money as it now goes towards relief funding.
Here in Austria the government forbade any indoor gatherings of >100 people (outdoor >500), all universities and colleges are closed (except administration and research), including libraries and also museums. All schools and kindergartens will gradually close coming monday. That's more than 1.5m students/pupils against a total population of 8.8m. Nurses and doctors are being honed in from retirement. We completely locked down our borders to Italy. This is all very unprecedented.
Isn't this happening in many places? In Greece, schools are closing for two weeks, all gatherings are prohibited, and celebrations for various holidays have been canceled.
Notably, the Church of Greece has announced that "the virus cannot be spread through Communion" (where everyone drinks wine from the same cup). You can imagine how angry this self-serving move made most people.
Same in Poland. Schools, kindergartens, universities all closed starting Monday (Thursday and Friday are "if you must" to give people time to cope), but from what I hear from people, the Church considers itself to be a "hospital for the soul", and "you wouldn't close hospitals during a pandemic". smh.
> "the virus cannot be spread through Communion"
I assume Greece is Catholic, right? Because pope himself told people to take the "spiritual communion" instead of the actual one, and yet the Church in Poland doesn't seem to care.
EDIT: sorry. Somehow I thought Orthodox is mainly in Russia. But my rant against Polish Catholic Church still stands. Pope himself shows people what to do, but in Poland, we're going to do the opposite.
Greeze is probably orthodox not catholic. There is a difference, but I'm not sure what other than they don't report to the Pope, and they do recognize the pope (and vise versa)
There are dogmatic differences such as the Filioque, where one Church says that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father only, whereas the other claims that it also proceeds from the son.
It's kind of like the systemd rageforks, only for sillier (unless you're religious, I guess) reasons:
> Notably, the Church of Greece has announced that "the virus cannot be spread through Communion" (where everyone drinks wine from the same cup).
Catholics in Greece are overwhelmingly Orthodox. The Orthodox Catholic church distributes holy communion differently, with a spoon (there is a particular term for it, but I don't know it) that doesn't touch the communicant's mouth. So, they're not drinking from a communal cup.
It's entirely possible for the communicant to exhale / cough / sneeze on the spoon. I don't know what the priest would do if this were to happen.
As an aside, it's widespread right now (but maybe not universal) in Catholic dioceses to not even provide the cup to the congregation during Communion (which is perfectly fine according to Catholic theology btw). edit: additionally, I recently heard about a dispensation in at least one diocese for people who are in any of the COVID-19 risk categories that they don't need to receive Communion for now. I don't know whether this also dispenses them from attending Mass on Sundays (which is otherwise an obligation for all Catholics).
Do you mean "Christians"? There are very few Catholics here.
The spoon very much touches the communicant's mouth, and the priest dips it back in the cup afterwards. You're getting spoon-fed wine, essentially, with a whole lot of contact.
Conversely, the Catholics I know prefer (if they have a preference, many don't) the bare term "Catholic" rather than "Catholic Christian". This is likely because I live in the US.
Now that you mention it, I've only heard them called "Catholics" here as well, not "Catholic Christian", so it's "Orthodox" or "Orthodox Christian" and "Catholic", you're right.
> All of the three main branches of Christianity in the East (Eastern Orthodox Church, Oriental Orthodox Church and Church of the East) had always identified themselves as Catholic in accordance with Apostolic traditions and the Nicene Creed. Anglicans, Lutherans, and some Methodists also believe that their churches are "Catholic" in the sense that they too are in continuity with the original universal church founded by the Apostles. However, each church defines the scope of the "Catholic Church" differently. For instance, the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox churches, and Church of the East, each maintain that their own denomination is identical with the original universal church, from which all other denominations broke away.
The tree of life works better, there were many branches even earlier that died off and the ones that survive did so through evolutionary pressure. The ones that required circumcision for instance weren't great at attracting converts.
I was curious about how you would reliably spoon-feed someone without the spoon touching their mouth, so I looked it up online, and from what I've seen [1] it doesn't look like they avoid touching the mouth.
The Diocese of San Jose gave a dispensation from attending Mass to people in the various risk categories[1]. That means they don't have to attend Mass on Sunday.
> don't need to receive Communion for now
Regardless of the virus you only need to receive Communion once per year, not at every Mass[2].
Here in Austin, SXSW was cancelled but I've seen numerous "unofficial party" lists of people organizing events.
I understand people want to support the Austin economy since losing SXSW is a big hit, however it was cancelled to limit mass gatherings yet people still want to gather.
People will of course want to gather still... I've always wanted to hit SXSW so I'd be pretty heartbroken, myself.
Even still, my partner and I are keeping an eye open on flights to Europe (we've always wanted to go) and seriously considering taking the risk of buying a flight for in a couple of months time because they are quite literally at half price right now. And I'm not even talking about Italy.
edit: Haha—to clarify, the risk being flight cancellation or border closures not catching or spreading disease.
2nd edit: Wow. I'm drawing a little ire here. I'll reiterate: the risk is in not being able to go because the problem continues. Please take the charitable view (and of my whole comment, not snippets)—not the one that I'm some kind of monster :)
For the modern SXSW experience, just go to the local supermarket when it's ultra busy and the parking lot is full. Park your car among the rest and just sit in it.
You'd honestly probably have a better time, unless there was something you specifically wanted to see at SXSW. So many people come into town for it that getting anywhere in the city becomes a nightmare.
Taking this thread way off the original topic now, but yeah. Would love to visit for the music scene—SWSX probably would crowd out what I actually want to get out of the place when I think about it longer than 30 seconds.
Sounds romantic. I wonder how romantic that ancestral village will feel when local health officials have declared a mandatory quarantine and you can’t leave your hotel room.
Thankfully, the tickets are on sale now for dates throughout the year, and the village is so small and old I'd be shocked if anyone really comes or goes from there as it is. :)
Of course. The risk in purchasing tickets for later in the year while they are still cheap is that we may not be able to use them if this situation continues and doesn't improve. I thought that was pretty clear in my original comment.
Either I missed that wording or it wasn't clear to me. I also may be projecting the mentality of other people I've heard planning to get cheaper travel even if it does result in other people getting sick.
I cannot know your intentions, so if they truly are with other people in mind, I apologize.
Do also keep in mind, though, that by purchasing them now you are inevitably biasing yourself towards going.
> Even still, my partner and I are keeping an eye open on flights to Europe (we've always wanted to go) and seriously considering taking the risk of buying a flight for in a couple of months time because they are quite literally at half price right now. And I'm not even talking about Italy.
If you do this in the midst of a pandemic, it's an unethical and selfish act.
Please read the entirety of my comment before painting me so negatively...
I'm certain that just purchasing some discounted airline tickets for sometime later in the year will not in itself cause any negative global health effects. The decision to actually travel can be made entirely separately from that gamble.
Yeah, patient zero in Italy was probably just one dude who traveled. You have no effin' clue what consequences of your acts may be. Europe will be still here later.
If we're still in the height of epidemics during your travel, you will be basically locked in someplace and very hard to see anything.
To sum it up, tremendously stupid idea with utterly selfish tones.
After reading your comment including edits it's still not clear when you plan to travel so I understand the negative reactions you're getting.
Buying flight tickets might be cheap right now but the point is if when your trip starts X weeks from now and the situation is still bad and you don't cancel it, then you are indeed selfish and deserving of the negative comments and down votes.
Further, since nobody knows when this will end (it could continue into 2021 for all we know) and you didn't say you'd cancel your plans if it did (instead you expressed concerns you'd lose money if travel was banned), I feel like you're drastically misunderstanding the 2nd order dangers your actions would have and likely deserve the ire and down votes you're getting.
That is the risk I referred to, as I clarified—not being able to take the trip because the situation didn't improve. I've explained this many times over by now.
Instead of simply waiting till the pandemic is over you would rather buy a cheap ticket and risk it being canceled or you locked down somewhere or spreading the disease. People like you are who made it worse. Selfish, naive, ignorant. People are dying because selfish cheap trip ideas like yours. :/ If you would die because of this I wouldn't care but you may be a risk for others. To safe little bit of money. Unbeliebable.
I used to live in Austin and have experienced SXSW many times. It's still an amazing time and experience. Take all of the comments with a grain of salt (including mine).
If they wanna support the economy just send money to the entities that they can't go to. That restaurant you were going to dine out at, instead you're not microwaving a Lean Cuisine? Send them $10. Otherwise they are doing it for the shills.
If my facebook feed is indicative of the general US population, there are still a lot of people who think the media is just trying to scare us. Some of them are your typical nutjobs for Trump, but even my 60-something year old hippie liberal jazz musician friend is on that train. There were women replying to her that the media focuses on Covid-19 because "it's killing old men" who run the world, and the media should instead be focusing on women's issues... I think I'm finally ready to give up facebook after seeing my the thoughts of most of my 'friends'.
Overreacting? Did you miss the headline of the thread you’re commenting on? This is officially a pandemic. And instead of reading that and thinking “wow, this needs to be addressed with serious action” you instead thought that hundreds of governments across the world are working in tandem to make it easier to raise false flags in the future. Yikes.
Over 49 thousand people die from Pneumonia every year in the United States[1]. Under 5 thousand have died globally from COVID-2019[2]. Does this information change your perspective?
No, not at all. Because covid is just in the earily stages of spreading. At it's best it will kill far more than 50k this year alone and become endemic so it continues to kill at many on top of flu. At its worst it stands to kill a lot more.
The number of cases in China was been steady for around a week. If we extrapolate from Hubei that should give a decent picture. Around 0.1% of their population were diagnosed with covid and of those diagnosed around 4% died. If we apply the same rates to the United States (328 million * .001 * .04) we get 12,960 deaths. Keep in mind that is somewhat of a worse case scenario. In Henan province the fatality rate is less than half of what it was in Hubei, 1.6%.
It's not a "worse case scenario", it's successful containment through quite strict quarantine measures. Since neither USA nor Italy are taking measures remotely comparable to what Hubei or Henan did when they had a similar amount of spread, we should expect these countries to have a much larger spread than Hubei did, it's really not reasonable to assume that they would be able to limit this to "around 0.1% of their population were diagnosed with covid" - it's plausible that more than half of the population could get it, and leaders of many western countries have acknowledged that.
The population density of Hubei is over 9x that of the United States, the quality of care is better in the United States, and there was basically no action taken for the first 2 months of the outbreak.
"it's plausible that more than half of the population could get it, and leaders of many western countries have acknowledged that."
Will there ever be apologies for spreading mass hysteria?
Will there ever be apologies for downplaying justified warnings and saying "it's just the flu" with dire consequences?
E.g. in a recent turnabout Vice President Mike Pence said today that there has been “irresponsible rhetoric” from people who have downplayed the seriousness of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak.
Let's look at South Korea. The number of daily cases has been declining for a week. There are currently 7,869 cases there. Let's just say that despite the current trend the number of cases manages to increase to 20,000. That would mean around 0.04% of the population of South Korea would be affected. They currently have a death rate of 0.8% but there are still many active cases. Let's say that doubles to 1.6% which would put it in line with regions of China other than Hubei. If we apply that infection rate and mortality rate to the US population (328,000,000 * .0004 * .016) that gives a total number of deaths of 2,099.
The numbers don't need any mitigating factors but those do exist as well. I don't see South Korea doing anything more extreme than what could be done in the US so that doesn't show the US would be worse. The population density of South Korea is 15x that of the US so that would probably mean the infection rate would be lower in the US. The median age is also higher in South Korea and since this disease affects older people more that would also make the outlook for America better.
From a Penn State epidemiologist (note that the quote below speaks of the "infection fatality rate", which is different from the "case fatality rate", the difference is explained in the article)[1]:
"Scientists working at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Imperial College London and the Institute for Disease Modeling have used these approaches to estimate the infection fatality rate. Currently, these estimates range from 0.5% to 0.94% indicating that COVID-19 is about 10 to 20 times as deadly as seasonal influenza. Evidence coming in from genomics and large-scale testing of fevers is consistent with these conclusions. The only potentially good news is that the epidemic in Korea may ultimately show a lower CFR than the epidemic in China.
...
"On balance, it is reasonable to guess that COVID-19 will infect as many Americans over the next year as influenza does in a typical winter -- somewhere between 25 million and 115 million. Maybe a bit more if the virus turns out to be more contagious than we thought. Maybe a bit less if we put restrictions in place that minimize our travel and our social and professional contacts.
"The bad news is, of course, that these infection numbers translate to 350,000 to 660,000 people dying in the U.S., with an uncertainty range that goes from 50,000 deaths to 5 million deaths. The good news is that this is not a weather forecast. The size of the epidemic, i.e., the total number of infections, is something we can reduce if we decrease our contact patterns and improve our hygiene. If the total number of infections decreases, the total number of deaths will also decrease."
It's not clear that it's an overreaction; the paradox is, assuming this truly is a pandemic (seems likely), and every nation on earth had taken drastic action early enough, it could have actually been contained; in which case we wouldn't have seen the pandemic manifest, and the public would be left scratching their heads, going "why did we do all that again?", and provoking inquiries into false-flag/etc.
I lean a little tinfoil-hatty; but I get the impression that for all the bullshit self-serving narratives proffered by elites (both economic and political), this is one that they actually seem to believe themselves, privately as well as publicly. If anything, they're more spooked than they're signaling openly.
It has really been a lackadaisical response from the Austrian government - shades of Semmelweis all over again? This is a country that has monuments to Plague victims in its most valued districts ..
Going to be an interesting few weeks as we see how things proceed. To think, somewhere out there, the virus lurks and is headed our way ..
Plague monuments are hardly an Austria specific thing, you can find them almost everywhere in a large part of Europe, including here in Czech Republic:
I did just that. I couldn't concentrate on work in a big office. I'm canceling meetings (or changing them to video conferences). I think I can get away with it for a week or two. And in two weeks I expect my employer to order home office for everybody anyway.
You need to approach senior management, and press them on what their plan is.
Why aren't they already transitioning to remote work? Is there a timeline in place? What are their criteria about what would trigger WFH? What about employees with elderly family members at home? Do they have the necessary systems in place to support a fully remote staff?
It's very likely that management has simply avoided thinking about the topic entirely. If the employees press them for a concrete action plan, then that at least prompts them to start engaging in objective analysis.
It's a massive multinational company, so I'm sure they're thinking about it. Technically no barriers to working from home (I do it every Friday), tempted to just start doing it every day, but would rather they made a formal decision on it first.
Yeah “tell, don’t ask” is good advice for both OO design and office communication. If you ask, a manager will always consider whether they will need to ask someone else about it.
You can also take a softer approach and tell the manager your concern and say you would work from home for safety reasons unless they absolutely require you to be there. That way you didn't give an order to your boss and can still go home.
For all their faults my smaller company is very forward thinking on this. They have banned all non-essential visits to sites by clients or contractors, and travel between offices by staff - even within the same metro area. So you can't just pop into the other office on Friday if you feel like it.
You're also asked to work from home for a while if any travelling family member from overseas visits, and if you have no reason to be in the office they won't say no if you just want to work at home and avoid public transport.
Hoping it doesn't cause a big hit to productivity because it's the right thing to do.
Austria isn't as badly hit as Italy, despite the short distance to the most affected regions in Italy. They took quite drastic measures early which hopefully slows down the spread. It also helps that much of the traffic from Italy continues on northwards towards Germany and therefore bypasses the main population centers in Austria.
But as in all countries by now, older folks should stay home and self quarantine whenever possible.
It makes a tremendous difference, so don't downplay it. Infection due to smear (secondary droplet) is really high IIRC and washing hands is a huge countermeasure.
It's necessary but not sufficient to stop the spread. I'm currently just avoiding bringing the topic up with my sister who traveled from the UK to America last month. She repeatedly brushed off the topic because the UK government kept saying it's essentially the flu. Now she's in America with her 2 year old and I'm betting she'll probably fly back to the UK under these conditions.
It likely will. If all people washed their hands properly and avoid touching their face that would probably slow infection rates down enough. Measures are needed because realistically, no one follows these orders enough.
A lot of the initial response to Covid-19 in the US was based plainly on implicit racism against Asians. Essentially the government saw the Chinese, Korean and Japanese fighting this virus with all their forces and then just thought "this will never happen in American because somehow we are better". They had 3 months to prepare and, still, they believe that to fight the virus is just enough to wash hands and stay a few feet away from their coworkers, just as with a normal seasonal flu. That's ridiculous.
How do you know that? I'd be more willing to bet that Americans have been mostly complacent as they haven't dealt with any meaningful threat since 9/11. Most of them don't prepare like they should anyway, even when Obama told them to do so.
If there's any racism going on, it's with the people who fear Asians because they think they're all contaminated with COVID-19.
> They had 3 months to prepare and, still, they believe that to fight the virus is just enough to wash hands and stay a few feet away from their coworkers, just as with a normal seasonal flu. That's ridiculous.
That's what they've been told to do by government officials and journalists.
It’s a stupid concern. The reason the government is incompetent is that the government is incompetent. That’s not uniquely American, and there’s no evidence that race has played into any of this. We didn’t exactly change our tune when Italy freaked out. Does that mean we’re racist against Italians?
Interesting point, but the Spanish-American War was only 20 years before that. Attitudes in the US toward Spain were probably much different then than they are now.
My read from the US is different. I think over the past 20 years Americans have seen coverage of many scary diseases from afar (SARS, west nile, zika, MERS, ebola). None of these had a large impact on American society. So these experiences have led Americans, not wholly unreasonably, to not pay much attention to a new infectious disease in a faraway place.
I doubt it comes down to thinking America is somehow “better”. If anything, people seem more inclined to envy the coordinated responses of Asian countries, especially South Korea.
By delaying the "pandemic" designation, the WHO has inadvertently cost more lives. They will strongly need to reevaluate their role and policies going forward, because this was a monumental process and leadership failure.
The messaging from the media (who are laypersons) and the politicians (who are economically motivated laypersons) has been that this is "just the flu". Weak messaging from both the WHO and the CDC has only reinforced this in the public's perception.
The WHO should have taken the decisive move to encourage greater caution by employing the "pandemic" label. That label comes with real power. While there is danger in crying wolf, it was evident months ago from the growth rate of the virus and the lack of quarantine procedures being put in place that this virus would reach the pandemic stage.
If the role of the WHO is to stave off pandemics and not just to monitor them, then elevating the risk profile of the virus should have been a top priority. Since people look to the WHO for guidance, their actions have direct impact to sequestration and bringing the outbreak under control.
Both the WHO and the CDC were too afraid to take early action. Their wait and see approach will ultimately result in more human deaths and suffering.
oh my god I sincerely hope you catch the virus. you are annoying as hell. the WHO isn’t responsible for any of this shit. have some self reliance. you’re like a fucking turtle stuck upside down on its shell.
I don’t know what “media” you’re referring to, put the idea that it’s being dismissed as “just the flu” by anyone except the US government and their alt-right propaganda channels strikes me as blatantly wrong.
There's also the political backlash if the WHO accurately says, "this is a pandemic," early enough to flatten the curve and save lots of lives.
Do you expect politicians to actually think? Especially when they can point at the "fakenews WHO." (I don't know how Trump would actually say it but you get the picture.)
If the WHO declares a pandemic early, they _do_ save lives. But they take the political beating because "nothing happened."
If the WHO declares a pandemic late, they don't save lives. They take a mild wrist slap because "they were late to declare it," which will not be remembered in about a month.
And, as leader of the Executive Branch of the government, what exactly will he do to change the private media so that it's not serving private interests?
It's about what we're saying, it's about sending a message. That we won't be bullied by the corporations and special interest groups, and we'll divert our aid to those who are in need and struggling. There is nothing radical about that.
Well, if 30 years of public service Bernie has performed are any indicator, absolutely nothing. Bernie's full of these big, revolutionary, expensive ideas, but he's really accomplished very little in his career. Look at Vermont... second thought, don't look at Vermont (hint: business abandoned the high taxes of Vermont decades ago). Economically, VT is a basket case, do you want Bernie to work his magic on a national level?
Every mainstream news outlet in Canada. Followed by National, local polical leaders of all groups. On the advise from health official. Who get directives from the WHO.
You must not be watching a lot of TV. I constantly hear and see "experts" and talk show hosts claiming "don't panic, it's just a bad flu", or "nobody speaks about the dead of flu, why do you care now" and some such nonsense. The "wash your hands" meme is also spreading around.
To be honest, it is a bad flu, as what we call as flu is also most commonly caused by coronavirus. Though its death rate is 200% worse than a common flu with proper hospitalization.
No; what we call the flu is caused by the influenza virus. What we call the common cold is sometimes caused by a coronavirus (about 25% of cases). And while actual mortality rates are unclear, even the most optimistic figures (South Korea, for instance), are far more than 200% normal seasonal flu rates.
This may be a regional thing. I haven't seen anything like that in Ireland except from true crackpots (the actual insane people seem divided on whether COVID19 is imaginary or a bioweapon). Certainly not on any respectable news source.
Hygiene is important, of course, but I've seen several people say that if you wash your hands, the likelihood of being infected is zero. That is absolute nonsense, bordering on irresponsible. Coronavirus spreads through air particles. For this virus, washing your hands has no particular benefit.
Not sure if it makes sense worldwide given that there are a lot of 3rd world countries, but in US the flu has a mortality rate 2 orders of magnitude less than covid-19.
Mortality rate for COVID-19 is about 2-3% with medical care, and maybe 10% without. For common flu it's roughly 0.1% depends on when and where of the outbreak.
Most mild cases are reported as they perform temperature check for everyone who enters and exit most if not all enclosures, so unless those people self-quarantined and never go out, they are likely be included in the statistics.
Asymptomatic cases are extremely rare, if they infects multiple others, they will likely be identified through retrospection. Overall, I'd say those cases are unlikely to result in significant difference in the estimate.
According to the CDC, "between 291,000 and 646,000 people worldwide die from seasonal influenza-related respiratory illnesses each year" [1].
This is likely exacerbated by many countries not having ready access to flu vaccines and/or proper hospitalization for those that need it.
Compare this to America-specific numbers, where 34,000,000 – 49,000,000 Americans catch a flu-related illness each year, yet only 20,000 – 52,000 result in death [2].
I misread parent comment but this was exactly my point. A lot of people die from flu although there is vaccine and mortality rate is at least one magnitude lower than Covid-19 and hospitals are not overwhelmed.
I don't follow. Per the CDC link, seasonal flu hospitalizations result from 1.0% to 1.5% of flu infections. COVID-19 is currently at about 20%. That's a significantly higher hospital load for COVID-18 than for seasonal flu.
> I don’t know what “media” you’re referring to, put the idea that it’s being dismissed as “just the flu” by anyone except the US government and their alt-right propaganda channels strikes me as blatantly wrong.
Are you sure you've been paying attention longer than a week or two? The virus was being downplayed all of January and February by the media and other people not named Trump as "not a big deal" because "the common flu kills way more people."
America is so polarized politically it depends on which side you're on. If you're a fan of the current administration then they're doing their best and handling things in a realistic pragmatic fashion. If you're not, then the admin is doing everything wrong at every turn. Also, the media is everyone's bogey man because some media sides with the administration and some doesn't.
Genuine question: What do the alt-right have to gain by dismissing the potency of COVID?
I know the South Korean government took that exact position because of their pro-China stance. They tried really hard to downplay the dangers of the virus simply because of its Wuhan origins. knowing that the Trump administration is on the other side of the fence regarding China, what do they have to gain by dismissing the situation?
They get to excuse their government’s new Katrina. They also tend to be distrustful of science, and of our ability to change anything through centralized action.
What country are you in? Both the media and government in my country (US) have been sending the exact opposite message of "just the flu". As with anywhere, there are a few local outlets and politicians trying to downplay it, likely for economic reasons, but I haven't seen it downplayed on the Federal level at all. In fact, there's been an overabundance of information and caution.
The president himself severely downplayed it and gave the opposite advice as his own health officials (including [paraphrasing] "it's just the flu" and "go to work.")
You are correct. However, the point the previous commenter was making was that it wasn't being downplayed at the federal level.
The president has been visibly out-of-step with the rest of the federal government messaging on this. One voice, no matter the position, doesn't evaporate what the hundreds of others have been saying.
I disagree - the role of president in the USA is quickly marching towards "only voice of the government." This has been clear from many politicians acquiescing to the whims of that One Voice, sometimes to their own detriment, oftentimes to their benefit.
I really don’t understand why the guy can’t keep quiet and let people who obviously know more about the topic do their job. I don’t understand what he is trying to achieve constantly contradicting experts. He should support them.
I really don’t understand why the guy can’t keep quiet and let people who obviously know more about the topic do their job.
What, and let someone else “hog” the attention and the spotlight? I’ve been reading about 45 since the 80s (most of the time, not by choice). “All eyes on me” seems to be far more important to the sitting president than “do the right thing”. I’m not saying “do <what he thinks is> the right thing” isn’t on the list, it’s just way down that list.
I don’t understand how even the people who might agree with you aren’t bored of seeing formulaic offtopic Trump bashing that could be produced by a script polluting every discussion they view on the web.
Assuming you were honestly looking for an explanation: not bored because they don't participate in the same discussions as you might, where the conversations turn to being "formulaic". In my world, and I assume in the world in which the OP lives, it's not immediately obvious why someone would run their mouth about things they know little about when an expert is standing right next to them.
”It's not unique to the current administration. Most presidents have done this. ”
I couldn’t imagine any of the presidents of the last decades to stand up and openly contradict his experts on something like this. Maybe behind the scenes but not in the open. He doesn’t seem to understand that he can only lose doing this.
He's a narcissist. This approach gets him far more press (very, very bad press, of course, but he seems broadly okay with that), so it's the obvious route, from that point of view.
> The president has been visibly out-of-step with the rest of the federal government messaging on this. One voice, no matter the position, doesn't evaporate what the hundreds of others have been saying.
The President has been accusing the "Bureaucrats" of not caring about average Americans, fear-mongering the virus, and claims the Deep State is after him.
The President's followers do NOT believe the government experts. As per the sitting President's plan. The sitting President has cultivated an "Us lay people vs Them bureaucrats" atmosphere.
Case in point: My own Mother believes that the Coronavirus is a Chinese conspiracy to attack the President. And nothing I say could sway her opinion. Unfortunately, the voters of the President support, and believe in him more than even family.
If you're paying attention you know he's wrong. But there are large swaths of people who when it comes to believing the CDC or the president choose to believe the president. Just this weekend a group of relatives was making fun of the coronavirus as a hoax.
Even scarier, a lot of the people who believe him have been paying close attention the whole time. Trump sounds more like what they expect the truth to sound like than any competent person who is trying to do their job possibly could.
His surgeon general has echoed his sentiment although not so tersely. Yes, they are only two people, but if you can't believe either of these two people, who can you trust, particularly when they are making exclusive claims? Besides, he has made a cult of personality around himself and many people do listen to him.
I think the right way to model 45's behavior is an evolutionary feedback loop, where the success condition is pushing the buttons (positive and negative) of the public, for narcissistic attention. He's a paperclip maximizer for outrage and fervor, a Facebook engagement algorithm made flesh.
Because this "skill" has been honed from a lifetime of obsession with media, he's exceptionally good at bypassing anything resembling rational thought, and hitting emotional triggers, resulting in otherwise intelligent people engaging with Frankfurtian Bullshit even when they should know better (opponents and supporters alike).
Correct; but the WHO is an international organization, and could easily have made this declaration sooner. The fact that the Trump administration was so clearly downplaying it for PR, only makes it that much more vital for health professionals to read the numbers and set appropriate expectations.
What? The Federal Government has been saying exactly that -- that the flu is far worse, it kills more, and that Covid19 is no big deal. They've said it repeatedly from Day 1 - Up through two days ago when Trump tweeted:
> So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!
Basically the entire GOP leadership structure has decided that people are only worrying as much as they are to damage Trump politically. Essentially the only top level official giving the straight story is Dr. Fauci and he's immediately contradicted by others in the cabinet who seemed to be completely preoccupied with the stock market and the election.
I've heard that from my direct manager. I'm sure that's influenced by who he reports to. He was potentially exposed last week but still comes into the office, and we're discouraged from working from home. We're told to use our "best judgement" but the subtext is pretty clear...
I'm very worried (and in Texas) but when people hear me talk they somehow walk away with "just the flu" anyway. My theory is that people feel cognitive dissonance between the seriousness of the situation and the mild-seeming precautions that are recommended. Cancel nonessential international travel, wash your hands. For most people (talking about the U.S. here) international travel seems extraordinary and optional, if not downright weird, so it's really just wash your hands. It's hard for people to understand that there's a crisis and all they're supposed to do about it is wash their hands, no matter that I say things like "unprecedented mortality and disruption in our lifetime."
Other obstacles to perceiving it as a big deal:
- Not grasping that a fraction of a percent mortality can be a big deal. Numbers under one percent make it sound indistinguishable from flu, even if it's 10x as deadly as flu.
- Having AIDS and Ebola as your mental prototypes for dangerous infectious diseases and feeling relieved when you hear COVID-19 is nothing like either one.
Are you serious? At the Feb. 26 press conference [0], President Trump literally said: "This is a flu. This is like a flu."
The president tweeted this 2 days ago [1]:
> So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!
This is what the Surgeon General said on Sunday [2]:
> "If we had massive numbers of cases we would be seeing more deaths. And so we actually feel pretty good that some parts of the country have contained it just like when you look at the flu," Adams said on CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday. "When we look at the flu tracker, some parts of the country are having much more severe flu seasons. Some are having very mild flu seasons. The same thing for coronavirus."
Once again HN Civility disease strikes, if you blame anyone specific in politics for anything, expect heavy down voting because somehow that's not "civil", no matter how true it is.
I'm in WA state, where until last week testing wasn't being conducted on anyone that wasn't traveling from a level 3 country or in contact with a known infected person, EVEN IF THE WOULD-BE TESTEE WAS SHOWING SYMPTOMS. We keep talking about the count of infected (and relying on it to decide who to test) but it's unarguably low if we've not been testing, particularly as we apparently have introductions via Europe as well as China, plus community transmission.
Trump just a few days ago said that everyone who wants to be tested can get tested. According to the doctor's offices, that's still false.
Trump himself has a NUMBER of downplaying statements. So many I won't bother to list them. But lots of statements along the lines of "just the flu", among others.
> there's been an overabundance of information and caution
Hard to judge "overabundance" (see other article about how everything with a pandemic is premature until it is too late)
Today's headlines: "The White House has ordered federal health officials to treat top-level coronavirus meetings as classified, an unusual step that has restricted information and hampered the U.S. government’s response to the contagion, according to four Trump administration officials."
Note this prevents any expert who doesn't have clearance from attending.
A few days ago: "US health officials wanted to recommend that elderly Americans avoid flying amid the coronavirus crisis. The White House overruled them"
I suppose that depends on your local feeds; if you are in NA you probably have a hard time getting correct information/governance/leadership at this time. (hence your question) It used to be 'good enough' or even 'fine' over there, i.e. with HIV or malaria issues or even H1N1.
But even with the research on pandemic readiness showing that neither capacity nor governance has been up to the task people are still pretending it's just a political choice and the results will be fine. If I remember correctly it as CSIS thing: https://healthsecurity.csis.org/final-report/
It is remarkable, it's just not civilization destroying. Lots of old and vulnerable people will die. The healthcare system will be taxed for many months to come.
Also the economy will get beaten up, with lots of people finding themselves suddenly in financial distress, and generally almost everyone will have it worse than it would be if the virus never happened.
It's collapsing health care systems every where it breaks out. It doesn't take a high hospitalization rate before the CFR jumps way up. Italy's is 4% because they're just letting older people die because they don't have the resources to treat them.
I am an Italian and live in Bergamo, the Italian town that is so far the most affected. The impression that Italy is letting older people die is false, at least at the moment [1]; however, there are people that suggest this might be a guideline to be followed, should the virus continue spreading. I believe that the somewhat higher mortality rate in Italy could partly be due to the fact that our mean age is higher than in other European countries [2].
80-something percent of the time yes. The remainder is divided between "you need hospital, but will be fine" and "serious intensive care needed".
The trouble is that (1) the people who need hospital to be fine need hospital. They won't be fine if it isn't there, and (2) by being a selfish ass and treating it like just the flu, when it's a disease that grows exponentially in a no-immunity population, people are amplifying the speed and height of the peak, which means not enough hospital places.
If you get a situation where effectively nobody who needs hospital can get it - then those 20-ish percent just drop dead. And then there's your godly death rate.
It's not selfish to treat something like the flu. This means I wash my hands, get vaccinated yearly, and take other common-sense precautions. That's not "being an ass", it's being rational.
Common sense precautions here are much more stringent than the flu. Nobody is immune. There is no vaccination. Herd immunity is nil. And it's very infectious.
This is a new thing and you should treat it as a new thing. There has not in living memory been one this bad, against which we had no defense except to avoid catching it and spreading it.
And which vaccine were you considering getting for this, precisely?
That's part of the problem; even if it was "just like the flu" (it is not; in particular the percentage of cases requiring advanced medical treatment is much higher, which will lead to a rise in mortality as that treatment is oversubscribed), the flu would be pretty scary if the annual vaccine didn't exist.
Except the statistics have been so wildly different across sources it'd be very unwise to follow any of them, and instead check the stories where possible. Only yesterday someone posted the accounts of people in Italy being overwhelmed. Last time I checked, a regular flu doesn't smash through a hospital's capacity so hard they have to ask doctors to change focus.
The thing is, that infrastructure already prepared yearly for the flu. They have capacity designed around it. It is "normal" for thousands to die from the flu yearly, and nobody says anything. (Except that you should obviously be vaccinated.)
There were an estimated 44,000,000 flu cases in the US in 2017-2018. Assuming a worst-case-with-current-data death rate of 3.5%, that's about 1,500,000 deaths. Not millions.
I think you're referring to a Twitter thread where a doctor relayed descriptions of hospital conditions from another doctor in Lombardy. It was a horrifying story (and scared me, I admit), but I would suggest caution.
Unless there's information that's not making it out of Italy, the death statistics reported today don't seem to align with the picture painted by those tweets.
“Earlier in the epidemic, there was hope that 3.5 percent was grossly overestimated, however as evidence continues to emerge, there is dwindling support for that hope.”
I think it is too early to say much about the mortality rate. 4% is an upper bound, since that is how many lab confirmed cases have resulted in death, but that doesn't account for all of the minor cases where people didn't even know they had it.
4% might be an upper bound under normal situation when there is sufficient availability of intensive care places. When these places become saturated then % of mortality will approach % of people needing intensive care.
Please also note that many people who require intensive care but survive are left with huge chronic damage to their lungs that will affect their quality of life for the rest of their lives.
Something doesn't have to have 25% death rates to be dangerous. Your way of thinking is quite frankly not only flawed but also incredibly harmful to the actual dangers of the coronavirus.
Which is that entire communities can be infected in a very short amount of time, overwhelming local medical infrastructure and resulting in deaths and harm because the doctors simply can't keep up. What was originally something that could be treated then becomes life threatening.
I was under the impression that the Pandemic label was a response to objective criteria, not subjective decision of leadership.
In particular, one of those factors was sustained duration of the outbreak. My understanding is we finally crossed the time threshold for declaring this a Pandemic.
I've heard they were counting off countries with cases. My wife told me the other day that she read that "4 more countries with coronavirus and WHO will call it pandemic".
For H1N1 as far as I remember the pandemic designation happened far earlier and that was a joke of virus compared to covid-19 comparing the mortality rates.
Was it? Maybe my perception is skewed from being in one of the earliest countries hit, but my memory of H1N1 is that we pretty much gave up everything but vaccine development once we realized it was uncontainable.
H1N1 was declared a pandemic but was not handled at at all and a huge amount of people got it, but luckily it was a joke of virus with 2 orders of magnitude less deaths than covid-19.
This is exactly right. Disease response can be very paradoxical.
An extreme and early response, can turn a disease into a trivial event. Which raises questions about whether such an aggressive response is necessary.
It can be, in many ways, like using an umbrella in a rainstorm. You get to the destination, and you're totally dry, so what was the point of the umbrella?
With these disease outbreaks, there's no counterfactual we can run to see what would have happened if we didn't respond early.
H1N1 was not successfully contained at all, it infected 15-20% of the world's population and ended up just being a bad flu strain, not a world ending pandemic as only 575k people died (for a mortality rate of around .05%)
>H1N1 was serious and compared to this, well handled.
The current COVID-19 epidemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 is many times more fatal than the 2009 H1N1 epidemic. The current epidemic has similar a fatality rate to the 1918 Spanish Flu.
The table in the "comparisons to other pandemics and epidemics" section gives a point estimate for the case fatality rate of 0.03%. If we assume that the final rate for covid-19 is somewhere in the 1-2% range that's what I last heard, that would mean that "10X as fatal" is an understatement - more like 30-70x as fatal.
You've claimed this three times already. Do you have a substantiating link? Furthermore, saying "six point oh one percent" instead of just "approximately six percent" gives a false air of precision that could not possibly hold -- even you admit the estimate is still in flux.
But this is in the middle of the pandemic and is likely to be revised downward as many cases are undiagnosed.
The 2009 H1N1 outbreak had a inital case fatality ratio of 0.4%, but revised downwards to 0.026% afterwards due to new evidence of more spread than thought -
In S. Korea the mortality rate is 0.77%. In China outside of the Hubei provence where things have gotten out of control the mortality rate is 0.88%.
People in Italy are only admitted in hospitals if they have difficulty breathing by themselves. People that only have a fever or other mild symptoms are sent home, with no test administered. When the outbreak started they were testing asymptomatic cases, trying to be proactive in identifying infected people, but they stopped doing that once things have gotten out of control. And we will see this pattern repeating.
What's dangerous is spreading nonsense like a 6% death rate, which is factually not true.
South Korea have a lot of early stage cases in those numbers (haven’t died, haven’t recovered), and a very young population on the whole. An undetermined number of those cases will die rather than recover.
Multiple sources have looked for these large majorities of asymptomatic cases and did not find them. There is no evidence other than our collective hunches that these cases exist in significant numbers.
Taking Johns Hopkins numbers (at time of me writing this):
Not sure what the demographics of S. Korea is, whether they have a younger population or not, but it's irrelevant.
At least 80%-85% of all Covid-2019 cases have mild symptoms. We are not talking about completely asymptomatic cases, we are talking about a majority of cases that could pass for a mere cold or flu.
Many of those will not go to a hospital or be tested, especially if the system is overwhelmed.
Italy could easily have more than 10 times the number of reported cases because they stopped testing proactively. Only people with difficulty breathing are now tested and these represent a small minority of cases.
I gave S.Korea as an example because AFAIK they are the only ones doing large scale testing of the population and they aren't China (whom we may or may not trust to be transparent).
The data we have points to a mortality rate that's less than 1%.
When you see a mortally greater than that it is because people aren't tested unless they reach the ICU.
A couple of things I’m not sure are correct there though.
The 80-85% mild cases comes from confirmed cases that we know about. They’re included in the current 6.45% death rate from the JH data.
China may or may not be transparent, but if they have an incentive to hide anything, it would be a higher death rate rather than a lower one.
The data is the data. In any case it’s now global and the 6.45% is actually higher than it was before the virus started growing exponentially outside of China (it was 5.7% from this dataset then).
> COVID-19 currently has a 3.4% case fatality ratio according to the WHO last week -
This number will likely go down to below 1% because:
- S. Korea have implemented large scale tests on asymptomatic cases and their death rate is 0.77%
- the "Princess Diamond" cruise, which can be considered a closed experiment, has had a 1% death rate for people that were not ventilated
- in China if you exclude the Hubei province, the mortality rate is 0.88%
In Italy the mortality rate is 6% but the explanation is quite simple — they stopped testing asymptomatic cases, even people with fever are sent home without a test and instructed to return in case the fever doesn't go away in a few days and they are overwhelmed. At this point they are only admitting people that have trouble breathing.
And northern Italy has really good hospitals, so the only reasonable explanation for the huge disparity is that they have more than 10 times the reported total cases.
In other words, the virus has infected many more people than official numbers.
Remember that those "total cases" are cases that have been discovered via tests, it does not include people that stayed at home and weren't tested, either because the symptoms were too mild or because they were sent home.
“Princess Diamond” deaths are excluding people who died in their home countries that where infected on the cruse ship. They had 6 deaths as of February 28th and then excluded all future deaths and cases “cases found after disembarkation” from the total.
Edit: A Hong Kong national from the ship died on 6 March which is being included as the 7th death. So, this may simply be fragmented rather than explicit exclusions.
I don’t know about the cruse ship, but it seems like it’s double counting a death in Australia on both the cruse ship and an Australian death. I would double check the totals.
I really wish everyone was doing the random-sampling-of-general-population thing. Even if they could only do it on a fairly small scale, I suspect it'd give a much better picture of where we're really at than the "confirmed cases" floor.
Those numbers aren't terribly useful since so many cases are mild or even asymptomatic. Most organizations are estimating 2-3% mortality, and are quick to point out that this is probably an overestimation due to the lack of testing in asymptomatic individuals.
Basically we are counting every case severe enough to cause death, but only some of the cases that aren't very severe, and that latter group is already a much bigger piece of the pie even among confirmed cases.
Is there some guarantee that containment measures which are actually too early or too aggressive are "much, much better than the alternative?" It seems to me that such a claim is ignoring that there are actual costs to containment measures instead of actually comparing the costs of containment measures with the costs of delaying them.
And thus it begins: Mother Nature cleansing the world of the human virus. All we do is rape the planet—what did people expect? COVID19 is just the beginning.
I was telling someone the other day that H1N1 is seen as being not that big of a deal, and if another one or two pan out that way, then the next one after that will kill a lot of people because they start thinking that it was a 'cry wolf' sort of situation.
Look at the situation with vaccines. Your grandparents getting vaccines was a no-brainer. They heard stories of people getting polio or the measles and it was serious shit. Three generations later we have conspiracy theories about vaccines, I think because so few iminently deadly diseases have gotten a vaccine lately. We are down to the tricky ones, and cultural memory of the others is starting to crack.
The reason people are trying to downplay H1N1 is because they hate the flu comparison. People understand the risks and accepted deaths, from the flu. That bothers the doom and gloom folks.
Also, what's hard to remember is that we already had (or were very close) to a vaccine candidate for H1N1 by the time it was declared a pandemic in April 2009. Even before the U.S. declared a national state of emergency, more than 11M+ vaccine doses had been produced for the U.S alone: https://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/vaccination/updates/101609.htm
AFAIK, scientists are still trying to develop a covid-19 vaccine candidate. And after they have one, there will be many months before millions of doses can be produced and distributed.
> Pandemic label was a response to objective criteria
Modeling the causal impact of their criteria in light of data from the COVID-19 pandemic could reveal how different messaging strategies applied at different thresholds impact the spread of the virus.
The leadership could have done this months ago and estimated how proactive versus inactive quarantine efforts would impact morbidity. They have to know their role in persuading the public and government officials.
You don't have to stick to a rigid and inflexible criteria when thousands of human lives are at stake. When you define the criteria, you can also change them.
I don't understand what you think is to be saved by inciting panic. There's plenty of coverage, all this classification does is open up money from the IMF I believe. A Pandemic classification doesn't change most people's behaviors, but it does cause toilet paper/hand sanitizer shortages.
At least in the US, companies and other organizations are hesitant to be the first ones to stick their necks out and cancel events/encourage remote work. Our federal government's incompetent/evasive/opaque response to the crisis has let the burden fall on local governments in the hardest-hit areas.
Labeling this a pandemic would have given cover to organizations that wanted to be more cautious but were afraid of "looking stupid".
Months ago? The first cases were identified in Hubei on 29 December. The first cases of COVID-19 outside of China were identified on January 13 in Thailand and on January 16 in Japan.
From the definition: A pandemic is an epidemic of disease that has spread across a large region; for instance multiple continents, or worldwide. We knew and saw that weeks ago.
Declaration of official pandemic means world bank pandemic
relief fund program gets activated as long as many other clauses in different contracts and agreements. There is an influence on WHO and the people behind it didn't want pandemic to be declared too soon. If it was declared 3-4 weeks earlier there could be many lives saved in countries like Iran, what is happening in Africa is not known at all due to no testing but situation is probably bad.
This definition has too much room for subjectivity. It needs objective criteria. Or maybe WHO might need to have a numerical metric that says high large the impact of a virus or its associated disease is, just like the earthquake magnitude.
This really highlights the critical design flaw of the World Bank's Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (funded by the pandemic bonds). By the time the conditions are triggered and funds distributed, it's already way too late into the pandemic. These fund should be made much earlier and more should be diverted into proactive measures to maximise effectiveness.
That's kind of the purpose, if its standards were too low, it would be triggerred too many times that we won't have any of it left to do anything honestly. The World Bank's Program is always suppose to be an emergency backup we hope never to use instead of substitute for a proper government planning in times of pandemic.
In Africa there is still natural selection. That means any adult is most likely much more stronger with better immune system than those in Western world without such process. It could possibly actually mean that for the majority of population in the underdeveloped African countries Coronavirus is not as bad as it is for the weak populace in for example Europe.
Edit: not sure what's with the down votes. This isn't to disparage African people but it's common knowledge many states are underdeveloped. People don't have access to health care or sanitation or clean drinking water. Dysentery diarrhea and malaise are normal. Any person who reached adulthood in such conditions is obviously a survivor. Don't you agree?
First of all "there is still natural selection" in literally all life, so I think you're meaning something else. But to what your point actually is, do you have any source on that?
I know several people that would have not been able to reach adulthood 100 years ago but have now reproduced and have passed on their diseases to their offspring. There is no doubt that natural selection in humans is much weaker now then in the past.
That's not what natural selection means... medical innovations are still natural selection factors. It doesn't stop, we just naturally figure out how to get better at it.
Wow, what is the source of this outrageous claim??
If anything, African states are going to be hit the hardest. South Africa for example, a country I am in, has the world's highest HIV cases. Pneumonia is a death sentence for HIV patients. Also, our infrastructure to manage a spike in infected arriving at state hospitals is abysmal. Right now, we sit with 7 infected (officially) but these are all index based with vectors from recent visits to Italy. If this changes to non-index based vectors, and this disease spreads to the townships, we are done for. If anything, COVID-19 is likely going to hammer Africa the hardest.
To take you at your intent, all humans will be exposed to this virus with more or less the same chances of suffering. I imagine there may be pockets of resistance within certain gene pools, but it's a crap-shoot who and where.
By and large improved health care won't affect population resistance all that much, it just improves survival rate. In an earlier time you would have been right, European germs caused more Native American deaths than Europeans themselves when they first colonized, but nowadays with global trade we all end up sharing the same diseases for the most part.
Sedentary lifestyles enabled by modern lifestyles as opposed to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle can contribute to decreased overall health but thats not the issue here since almost nobody is a hunter-gatherer anymore.
When it comes to new viruses, all of us are in the same boat immunity-wise.
Yes, it is. Parent never asked for WHO definition in the first place, I wonder if there is any at all, probably a commercial secret. Pandemic in WHO definition is when Director General of WHO declares it a pandemic, probably after confirming with member states who contribute, they were criticized in 2009 for declaring too early too, so criteria might have changed.
As I said there is probably no official WHO definition or criteria due to big economic impact of such declaration and it is decided on a case by case basis.
Phase 6, the pandemic phase, is characterized by community level outbreaks in at least one other country [Italy|Iran] in a different WHO region [Europe|Eastern Mediterranean] in addition to Phase 5 that is characterized by human-to-human spread of the virus into at least two countries [China & South Korea] in one WHO region [Western Pacific]. No threshold of cases or deaths triggers the community level definition and is left to discretion of the WHO.
So the WHO has done everything right. It is the hallmark of professionalism to follow rules even under pressure. And the WHo is under a tremendous amount of pressure right now.
But months ago they really couldn’t have known. We still don’t know how many will be infected. All we can do is take precautionary measures. The WHO messaging should have been stronger and earlier, but it isn’t their fault for not labeling a pandemic months ago. Granted, there was enough data and research done to squarely label this as a pandemic, and that’s really where I assign blame on them.
in Germany in January people talked about:
- well, it's China, you know, they don't have nice hospitals there
- the flu is killing people too and you're not vaccinated!
- our democratic society will be much better at containing that, people are mord open
- the methods in China are soooo stoneage, we are good at contact tracing.
So: no, there was no objective reason to think it would not go global, but it was faaaar away...
To be fair, China already delcared state of emergency months ago, but for the WHO to declare pandemic and recognize it as a international problem, it has to be that other countries has also done that. WHO cannot predict things, and they can't declare Pandemic when what they have is mere suspicion, it has to be an actual pandemic to declare. I'm pretty sure numerous experts have warned about the pandemic thing.
I'm pretty sure WHO is involved early on along with the Chinese authories when they first spotted it. They are already helping.
WHO is merely declaring matter of fact about the virus's spreading. Which is kind of it's primary function, to declare things and publish reports so the governments can act on them. They can't really do much beyond that.
Wuhan was probably a lot further up the curve of exponential spreading before China took any action than a superficial reading of the stats would suggest. Their reported cases were basically rate-limited by how fast they could test people with the most obvious and serious symptoms at the point they locked down Wuhan. It's not clear exactly how bad it was - I don't think there's much data out there - but there's a couple of alarming numbers quietly tucked away in the WHO joint mission's report. Apparently they went back and tested samples taken from people in Wuhan with influenza-like symptoms at the start of January. 1 out of 20 samples from the first week of January tested positive and 3 out of 20 samples from the second week. That's... not good. (No numbers are given for subsequent weeks.)
There's no particular reason to assume it would take the same path in other countries took some sort of action, even if the actions weren't nearly as forceful as a complete lockdown. Especially since that lockdown was basically a blind and desperate shot in the dark based on incomplete and dubious information.
They also have to be careful about credibility. It wasn't clear how well the global containment efforts were going to work until very recently. Let's say a week or two ago there's a 33% probability of global pandemic: that means if they call it such then, 2 times out of 3 they're crying wolf and causing people to listen less carefully to the WHO. You already see people claiming all manner of conspiracy theory nonsense and not taking it as seriously as they should; they have to be careful not to amplify that, and balance that against acting too late when it's clear there is a high probability of global community spread.
Other than their censorship in China (they give different advice on their website served to China, even on English-language pages, involving the effectiveness of traditional Chinese medicine against the virus), I think they're doing a mostly okay job so far, from what I can see in the current reporting.
What are you are dismissing as "conspiracy theory nonsense" includes calls to calm from infectious diseases experts and health authorities. When we will look back with hindsight, the conspirary theory nonsense may end up being the unecessary panicking, armchair epidemiologists, "the numbers are worse than we are told", etc.
I believe it was declared a PHEIC - Public Health Emergency of International Concern - and this should be the signal that governments need to take measures for containment to prevent it from spreading.
I believe the pandemic label is when containment has failed and governments need to go into mitigation mode. Seeing as it had been relatively contained in China, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc., it seemed reasonable that taking measures would be sufficient to prevent further escalation.
I think it's easy to criticize their leadership from the outside, but I would assume that they make their decisions with great care, and aren't going to throw around "pandemic" or other words easily. If they do that, people stop listening.
It's akin to people not caring about a major hurricane barreling towards them because they've heard the doomsday scenarios before and nothing has happened.
The delayed message of the WHO was really more like a very slow reaction at the cost of potentially millions infected with several thousands dead. By the time it spread to Europe and the US, it was essentially game over.
Perhaps the 'doomsday clock' was right all along but didn't see this one coming.
> Their wait and see approach will ultimately result in more human deaths and suffering.
I'm not sure sure that's true.
One way to "flatten the curve" is to make sure that some people catch it sooner rather than later, and thus you're able to provide care for them where you otherwise wouldn't be able.
The more you're pushing people to "later" the more you're trying to push "containment" and if you already know "containment" isn't going to work, you're just risking that the spread gets out of control at some later time... when you're less prepared.
Control means both preventing spread and causing spread.
As a layperson, I'm not sure I agree with your layperson perception analysis. To me, calling it an epidemic meant that efforts should be focused on containment in order to slow it down or stop its progression. That signaled just how dangerous it was. Calling it a pandemic essentially means that we've given up on that and just like the common flu, most people will catch it. Basically, it's time to just "deal with" it instead of attempting to contain. I'd rather they had kept the epidemic label a bit longer.
Declaring pandemic requires data which the WHO simply can't have if its member states do not submit or further, do not test for it. People like to think that international organizations like the UN, WTO, WHO is somewhat superior, or above the states, but they are not.
If it is a political and subjective decision as you say, then they have to balance the benefits of the declaration against the risk of the counter-narrative overwhelming it. Too early and even more people would dismiss the problem than are doing so now. And there's no "we said 'pandemic' before, well, it's 'really a pandemic' now" label that can be used.
And leaving aside the immediate difficulties...let's save this kind of retrospective criticism for after, when we're closer to being out of the woods.
If you have prospective criticism -- what should be done now and going forwards -- that would be worthwhile.
The WHO's entire purpose is to act as health diplomats and coordinators. They have been ringing the alarm bell for weeks now, saying that countries need to take things seriously.
Whether the WHO uses the term "pandemic" is honestly just semantics. You should direct the majority of your criticism at short-sighted governments who have prioritized the economy (or, even worse, markets) over health.
It was incumbent on local authorities to take the WHO's message seriously, especially after their expedition to China released its report.
> By delaying the "pandemic" designation, the WHO has inadvertently cost more lives.
... why?
I mean, it's not like the word of the WHO is a binding thing, where anyone is mandated to take action on any level because of a binary designation in a taxonomy. This whole this is just bureaucratic wheels turning; everyone who needs to take action has all the information they need to do so.
This is just the WHO doing what it does best -- having committees meeting endlessly to decide whether to apply a certain meaningless designation and then announcing the conclusion of that exercise.
Their actual job, of collating and disseminating information and trying to coordinate any large-scale responses, is actually hard, so nobody wants to do it, but having a meeting to decide IS IT A PANDEMIC is an easy bikeshedding meeting that all the MBAs and ex-McKinsey people can attend and offer their stupid opinion on what the definition of a word is.
EDIT: I said "everyone who needs to take action has all the information they need to do so", and that could be interpreted as saying that we know enough to determine what actions to take. But what I mean is that we have enough data to start to make a range of predictions and bound the uncertainty to some degree; having a more precise metric for any aspect of COVID-19 should not affect the response since those metrics are essentially made up and not comparable even on a per-hospital level, much less a per-country level or even a per-test-kit-type level. Uncertainty is part of the game here, and understanding the risk profiles is how people and organizations and governments have to tune their response.
They were asked about this in their briefing a few days ago and made a multi-point response:
1) There are no objective criteria for calling something a pandemic.
2) They did not feel they knew enough about the propagation pattern to make the subjective call.
3) They were deeply worried that calling it a pandemic would switch government strategies from containment to mitigation, resulting in higher contagion and loss of life.
They especially emphasized the last point. The only question in my mind is whether (1) they decided containment was no longer viable or (2) they decided not calling it pandemic would be seen as unserious, even if containment could still potentially have benefits.
The WHO defines a pandemic as the worldwide spread of a disease[1]. So the disease only becomes a pandemic after it has spread everywhere; it wouldn't make sense to call a disease a pandemic before it becomes one.
Parents from every school districts in the Bay Area have collected thousands of signatures to close, but the politicians are not doing their job.
I was on call with Santa Clara county hotline and the school district and the standard answer I got was: Oh, the kids are at low risk and the numbers are low so we're not closing yet.
What they don't realize is that the kids can still be carriers and many teachers and parents are in the danger zone (age or underlying conditions)
I understand that. In which case at least they should make school optional.
Several Universities are closed, several schools are closed and we need to worry more about the spread because if we don't we'll have the problems you mentioned in addition to a massive spread.
Those are actually the least solvable problems. A disproportionate amount of poor people are going to lose their jobs during the next 3-6 months because of a recession. A lot of people especially in the US are going to suffer because of the vast income inequality that has arisen. So there is no good solution, just like quarantine isn't a good solution but at some point we have to do it.
I listened to Joe Rogan's podcast with Michael Osterholm and he gave an interesting perspective. He said that most nurses who have children will suffer if kids have to be sent home. They most likely don't have people that can help take care of their children while they are supporting the influx of patients. Moreover, many children rely on school provided meals so sending them home will be very tough on the families.
Don't remember where I read, but some district or something has proposed (or implemented) an option where kids are able to get lunch/breakfast and take it with them without needing to attend school.
It does not solve the nurse issue, which perhaps as a community we need to solve. Perhaps limited opening of school monitored by younger healthier teachers/PTA reps.
Only vaguely relevant, but the school district I grew up in had a policy of never closing for weather. The rationale was that if the school were closed and some children showed up anyway (didn't get the message or whatever), they would literally freeze to death. So, no matter how bad things were, there would be someone there to unlock the doors.
We're that many days behind in raw case numbers. We have a lot more capacity than Italy overall, and our larger hospitals are prepped for mass shootings which means they have procedures in place for a sudden influx of patients who need ventilators.
> What he came up with was that if you have two people who are roughly the same size and tidal volume, you can just double the tidal volume and stick them on Y tubing on one ventilator.
Would this help increase the number of covid-19 patients that could be treated? Or do they not require ventilators? I wonder if the study they mentioned about it was ever completed?
Anyone following the social media and the news would’ve called the pandemic weeks ago.
I hope this will make people realize that we need to abolish centralized institutions in our highly complex world. They are single points of failure which introduce significant systemic risks.
CDC also dropped the ball on this one. In Washington state local authorities discovered the outbreak only because they defied federal regulators.
We need better organization at the local level, and we need it now.
The WHO knew (and told people) that this disease had the potential for a pandemic and/or widespread harm a long time ago. Here’s a two-months old article with the title “Narrowing window to contain outbreak, WHO says”: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-51591091
There is a difference between a potential, or even a certain, pandemic and an actual one. You and the WHO knew what it meant when you looked at that egg. But only now has it become an actual chicken.
>I hope this will make people realize that we need to abolish centralized institutions in our highly complex world.
While I too favor decentralization, what we really need to do is return merit to our institutions. We need a social climate that encourages Pattons and Churchills and the like. Unfortunately to return to such a time of competent leadership (not just in government, but society at large) would require undoing decades of propaganda that convinced some two generations of children that we all have equal ability and any of us can do anything. The dangerous downside of giving everyone a trophy across society is that now people have grown up less able to judge competence and merit in others.
Yeah, now world environment goona change. All people need to care about COVID-9. In some country can't find surgical masks but suddenly I can find it from a website. They sale at a cheap rate, if you need then you can buy your mask from here https://cutt.ly/StsiWK8
I'm fairly sure the quality of institutions in this day and age has almost nothing to do with participation trophies/equal ability propaganda, as this kind of thing rapidly gets torn to shreds as soon as one enters the job market.
I suspect it has a great deal to do with decades of people blaming government for their problems and increasingly less faith in government institutions, to the point of some politicians running on the idea that government doesn't work. It strikes me as difficult to get competent people for your organizations when the term "unelected bureaucrats" is used as an epithet, the pay is below equivalent work in the private sector, and the people at the top are selected for idealogical reasons instead of anything related to effectiveness, expertise or capability.
It's funny how in those political discussions, comments often say more about the commenter.
For example, I would argue that the "propaganda" that anybody can do anything isn't that old yet. On the other hand, certain political groups have been sabotaging government leadership for so long - by claiming that government is always incapable - that there's just no good leadership left in many places and it's become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Why is this evidence that “we need to abolish centralized institutions”? It’s not like every local organization can marshal expertise on every issue. Perhaps the WHO misjudged the coronavirus, but I’m confused about how this is suddenly a referendum on large institutions and the superiority of local ones.
Running the WHO seems hard. Alarm people too often and they will tune you out. Miss an alarm once and they will call you incompetent (“you had one job!”).
There's nothing wrong with having large-scale institutions. The problem is when local organizations can't act without a single centralized institution giving the OK. National health departments listen to the WHO but can take action as needed without WHO signoff; local health departments in the US often literally could not test for the coronavirus, even though they had the tools and the capacity and the desire to make tests, because they didn't have federal approval.
> local health departments in the US often literally could not test for the coronavirus, even though they had the tools and the capacity and the desire to make tests, because they didn't have federal approval
But that’s a judgement against the United States’ federal government, not the WHO. The WHO does not actively constrain governments, they just offer guidance (as far as I know!).
In principle, that's true, and certainly a point in the WHO's favor. In practice, it sounds like a lot of things are happening only conditional on the WHO's statement that it's a pandemic, which if true reflects a lack of local adaptability. I don't think it's the WHO's fault, necessarily, but local authorities need to have the capacity and skills to feel they don't have to rely on the WHO's judgment of such things.
> It’s not like every local organization can marshal expertise on every issue.
In order to be efficient decision makers, local organizations should be concerned with acquiring expertise related to local issues, and then, through cooperation, global expertise becomes an emergent property. It's not like every central institution can marshal expertise on every local issue.
One reason you want to avoid centralization is due to the fact that decision making occurs under imperfect and incomplete knowledge, or bounded-rationality as Herbert Simon called it.
By decentralizing the process of decision making, you mitigate the risks, since you are allowing entities to tackle a problem in parallel, and if one of them turns out to be wrong, the fallout is localized. Whereas in a centralized system, one bad decision can spell trouble for everyone.
> It's not like every central institution can marshal expertise on every local issue.
True, but maybe we disagree on how easy it is for every locality to acquire expertise. Plenty of local governments in the United States are already stretched thin fulfilling the simpler functions of policing, schooling, and basic infrastructure. Adding a staff epidemiologist seems very hard for such places. The same proviso applies to many poorer states and nations. That is why I think it makes most sense to direct effort toward having a competent central authority.
> By decentralizing the process of decision making, you mitigate the risks, since you are allowing entities to tackle a problem in parallel, and if one of them turns out to be wrong, the fallout is localized. Whereas in a centralized system, one bad decision can spell trouble for everyone.
On the flip side, decentralizing makes coordination harder. In coarse terms, there are game-theoretic considerations in an epidemic. For example, if localities are purely self-interested, an unaffected region may attempt to quarantine and keep all of its medical infrastructure ready for itself rather than lend it to nearby affected regions. In such cases a coordinating mechanism can be extremely helpful.
I'm not arguing that one kind of organization is always better or worse. To me it just seems complicated.
> On the flip side, decentralizing makes coordination harder.
Perhaps technology could help in this regard, at least to some degree. Bitcoin has proven coordination in a low trust environment is possible. Imagine if we could make coordination easier in other industries too.
> I'm not arguing that one kind of organization is always better or worse. To me it just seems complicated.
I agree, it is indeed complicated. But we need to start seriously considering concepts such as scale, systems thinking with its centralization/decentralization paradigms, and incomplete knowledge/risks if we want to design better institutions. Then we can thinker with turning the knobs one way or the other.
> For example, if localities are purely self-interested, an unaffected region may attempt to quarantine and keep all of its medical infrastructure ready for itself rather than lend it to nearby affected regions. In such cases a coordinating mechanism can be extremely helpful.
Reality is already ahead of you. [1] Switzerland is currently having trouble receiving masks and other medical supplies that were commissioned out of state:
Being landlocked, goods bound for Switzerland necessarily have to pass through a different country first, in this case Germany. Germany has a decree by which Corona-related medical supplies must not leave the country - and right now, this even applies to goods destined to Switzerland that are just arriving at a german port.
A fully "decentralised" world full of self-interested microstates would see a lot more of this stuff.
If anything, this is evidence that we need to empower centralized institutions. China started late and fucked up early, but they dealt with it (at least for now). And we'd all be in a much different place now if WHO had actual power and could start bossing countries around a month or two ago.
Similar to how the number 1 problem with the UN is that it has absolutely zero power to do anything.
sorry but 3 months ago WHO was complaining that China is taking too strong measures that are hurting the local population and are not proven to work. WHO never recommended shutting down cities or regions, which as we can see is the only thing that works.
WHO fucked up big time IMO. thousands of employees there, most probably appointed politically by country of origin and who have nothing to do with science.
> Anyone following the social media and the news would’ve called the pandemic weeks ago.
I would not trust the unstoppable gushing torrent of dubious information that is Twitter over whoever may be giving the World Health Organization its information.
That's true. You also need to be sensitive about echo chambers, and that's something humans also routinely fail at. I trust credible experts, not the self-selection of Twitter accounts telling me what I already believe.
Even if you 100% trust everyone you follow, and also believe them to be entirely impartial, the nature of Twitter makes it so easy to spread misinformation (mixed in with real stuff.) Twitter is optimized for viral content, not true content.
You're not wrong, but to be fair, the CDC has to fight for funding all the time. If Trump gets his way with his budget proposals, it'll only get worse.
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[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 344 ms ] threadPersonal opinion, not a lawyer, not your lawyer, is that the further into the global pandemic we were when executing an agreement, the less wiggle room you might have. Again, talk to your lawyer; that's what they get paid for.
Matt Levine does some analysis here: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-02-19/the-fi...
The first area where I'm seeing widespread uses of force majeure clauses is the cancellation of large events, conferences etc with limited or compensation for the cancellations. And again, while this hurts some people a lot, this is mostly a good thing, because we do want to give the organizers the ability to break their commitments and cancel the conference with much smaller consequences (to them) than an ordinary cancellation would have; we don't want the organizers to be pressured to hold the event at all costs.
How should we be preparing for that? How are other people doing it who have to keep their children home and away from educational resources and teachers?
Edit: I’m getting mixed reactions to this. I’m not at all saying academics are more important than slowing the spread of the virus. But I see many comments calling for a complete shutdown of schools and very few saying that for many parents this is a legitimate source of hardship and anxiety, even if it’s the right thing to do.
I think if we went through that time again and I was in her shoes, I would take advantage of Khan Academy. Especially for Math, it's incredibly well structured and forces you to convince it that you've truly learned the content with built-in quizzes. It doesn't hold you back if you've got a handle on the lessons and makes sure that if you're having issues that you practice until you've really got it down.
I think the most work for you will be setting her up properly, making sure she's comfortable with the system, and being available if she's got questions that it's not quickly answering.
I love Khan Academy, and the cool thing about youtube is there are so many content creators that there will be someone your daughter thinks has a nice voice or is easy to understand or funny.
I think that’s a fair question, and I’d love to be optimistic about her ability to hunker down and build those skills. But, she has some behavioral challenges and just getting her to do homework is a nightly struggle consisting of meltdowns and arguments, so I’m not as hopeful that she’ll be able to do it. She’s a bright kid, but definitely one who -needs- the structure of a classroom to be successful.
Fun thing to think about: there are videos that measurably improve students' performance on a task, but students rate those videos as "confusing" and "not helpful". The videos that students do like? They have zero effect.
https://teachingcommons.stanford.edu/teaching-talk/when-conf...
I don't know how to turn non-self-learners into self-learners though. And admittedly if I was a kid during this, I'd be playing as much video games as possible.
Hopefully most teachers have a clue and will realize this was some pretty serious circumstances and not be as harsh and do more review.
* Boast how easy school is these days.
* Wait to get told you're wrong.
* Propose a competition. Your child can pick any subject that neither of you have studied yet, and then have a race over 24 hours, 1 week, etc. to learn the material and do a multi-choice test you both agree on first.
Your child will obviously pick a subject they're good at, and you'll probably loose. But you still made them choose to study really hard.
There are tons of resources and communities for homeschooling on the internet. Happy to help point you to stuff if needed, but please prioritise health over potential educational slowdown.
Citation needed.
Citation may be needed in general, but here… that's sounds like a reasonable guess.
How important is any particular six months of your education to your ability to do your current job?
Missing 6 months of school isn't ideal, but I think we tend to overestimate the importance of hitting every nail on the head when it comes to education.
Not to mention the fact that if most children in the US miss 6 months of school, they will have that as an excuse when they start sending out resumes in however many years.
Due to a mistake in the records, I skipped an entire year of math (pre-algebra, which I was supposed to take in 8th grade). My algebra teacher decided the first month was going to be review, because she didn't expect most of the students to need a refresher after summer break.
Turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me, at least for that subject - not only did I have no issues catching up, turned out that was close to my natural pace. The topic was no longer boring and became one of my favorites after that.
Since that assertion is important to a larger argument, it's reasonable to ask why we should believe it.
Miss 6 months of school while changing schools. Come in, I don't understand the math underlying what they're learning. I fall behind because I'm playing catchup while still trying to stay on top of new material. I have no discipline or direction from home so I don't put it any extra time or anything, I just get home and ride my bike around. This makes me hate math in general, and next year I'm still not entirely caught up or even sure of what I learned the previous year, so I'm failing harder. I don't know if there were any extra resources available or not, I was like, 13, but I was also a holy terror so I bet even if the resources existed they wouldn't have been provided to me because my poor performance was chalked up to me being a problem child in general - never mind my stellar performance in literature classes.
And so on. Throughout my entire public school career. By college I "get it" and am trying to catch up but it's already so ingrained in my personality that I'm "not a math person" that I instead pursue a useless humanities degree, then fuck around in Asia for a couple years. Then finally, at 26 years old, I genuinely get my shit together, learn what I missed 13 years prior, find out that I actually am capable of all that, and now I'm an engineer.
So, sure, do what you can to not get your kids killed, obviously, but I don't agree that it's fair to shit on this parent for worrying about what missing 6 months of school might do to their kid. I mean it sounds like they at least know more about discipline and enforcing learning on their kids than my parents did, so maybe the kid will be Just Fine, but homeschooling is no joke either, and the kid might still end up having to play catch up.
My apologies - I didn’t at all mean to make it seem like I was downplaying the public health aspect. I fully understand this is likely what’s necessary and that public health comes first. That being said, it is a source of anxiety for me as someone who values academics because, for me, it was a path to a better life.
Think of some ways you can help kids who won't have a steady source of meals if they're missing school.
I would truly love an opportunity to not work for 6 months and have my child not go to school so I could spend that time with them. I'm sure you'll be able to find ways to spend that time enriching their life. Caring is the most important step.
My plan is to let them enjoy the time off, for the most part, and then spend the next n months on reduced entertainment in favor of extra studying.
Seems a small price to pay given how many lives will be saved by closing schools.
Edit: one concern I heard is that health care workers need schools to take care of their children. Why not start by letting anyone that can take their child home, take their child home. This would reduce the risk for the children that stay in school by a lot, which will help health care workers not get sick.
Because currently I'd risk punishment for taking my child out of school "unexcused". Which seems like some seriously backwards bs.
Your daughter should be given long youtube playlists of online lessons, homework assignments, scheduled interactive video lessons, etc.
As a parent, all you really need to do is check your daughter is actually doing what the school is providing. The threat of detention doesn't work so well at home when you can just claim the internet broke and that's why you haven't showed up to an online lesson or submitted an assignment...
With internet and access to online courses find something that helps her self study and improve upon the existing knowledge/skills. Follow the instructions from school.
I wouldn't worry too much. The evidence from prior natural experiments show that unexpected interrupted school years[1] has no persistent effects into adulthood.
[1]http://econ.lse.ac.uk/staff/spischke/ksj_EJ_final.pdf
"This paper investigates how changing the length of the school year, leaving the basic curriculum unchanged, affects learning and subsequent earnings"
In-person curriculum != online curriculum (social interactions, lab classes, PE...)
Short school year != Interrupted school year
If she is in high school the only answer is probably a bunch of "homework", good books on the subject, and there are also hundreds of video courses online.
So it only took you about 80 years to catch up? ;)
Step 1: Chill.
We home-schooled from preschool through high-school. Today I am trying to figure out how to help (from the opposite coast) my MIT senior deal with getting kicked out of their dorm in a few days. Home-schooling can work just fine. Chill.
1. Remember that of things that can be measured, the thing most highly correlated with academic success is parental involvement. So no matter how wonky your pedagogy, you will be involved. Hopefully that factoid helps you chill.
2. My first piece of advice to all new home-schooling parents is: Don't try to do everything at once. Get one subject working well, when you have established momentum and routine on that, add another. Cook until done.
3. There are many great online resources now. But I suspect your school is going to be providing curriculum information so you may have a usable starter kit.
4. As to the "self-learner" issues, all that does is help you find your happy place on the home schooling spectrum. At one end you have "school at home" -- trying to replicate the school environment in your dining room. There is also "unschooling" -- completely self-directed learning. This may not work for you. This may be a good chance to help your child develop some self-learning instincts.
(unschooling in my definition is: "You can work on what you want, but you MUST work on something." Which is NOT what I call "raised by wolves" -- a home schooling philosophy that I have seen occasionally, but doesn't often yield a good result.)
Most school districts may start doing things like video instruction or give parents a curriculum to work on, I'm not worried about that aspect. It may become an entirely remote education for the rest of this school year across the world.
I'm considering taking leave of absence and teaching him the curriculum. The problem is I'm not a good teacher, I know this about myself.
It's impossible to WFH and take care of a child. So your productivity will suffer, hopefully your company understands this, but then again everyone will be in the same boat once the school districts start closing things down.
however, it's important not to spread irrational fear, which words like "terrified" tend to do, particularly when overblown. the state of being "terrified" leads to immobilization, panic, and irrationality, so it should literally be avoided like the plague.
on the other hand, being concerned and worried, and acknowledging (unhelpful) anxiety, is reasonable. asking for help and information, like you did, is reasonable. discerning and acknowledging the appropriate level of risk (probably worse than a regular flu but not nearly as bad as the 1918 flu) is reasonable.
with that said, children are constantly learning whether you teach them or not. it's ok if learning is not entirely linear. the world is not linear, and our brains are not either. what's needed will get in there eventually, and we're resilient enough to compensate for nearly any kind of deficiency anyways.
(the same case can be made for overly worrying about "getting into good school districts", something worth considering a little bit, but not a lot, and a commonly-cited driver of localized real estate bubbles)
Very good point. Thank you for calling it out. I am not at all intending to spread irrational fear and realize I should have chosen my word there a bit more carefully. I am definitely anxious about it, but that anxiety is driving a desire to figure out a plan and not causing paralysis on my part, which I agree is what the word "terrified" implies.
There is some worry if your kid is hospitalized for a month while the rest of the school goes on (presumably this means containment worked well except for your kid), but even here schools have to deal with kids who are out for months for medical reasons and they provide extra tutoring to catch those kids up. (I'm familiar with this because my cousin missed a month of school his senior year - he still graduated with his class even though he had to go back the next year to finish some classes)
https://www.khanacademy.org <- requires a bit more self-direction but quite good.
Homeschooling is not rocket science. I've done it for years and I barely know what I'm doing. Just make resources available, sign up for a couple out school classes, and be willing to help them pursue stuff when they're interested in it. You can do it!
Had they raised alarm early on, more countries would have enforced proper procedures (look at South Korea). Instead, the thing spread around and starts impacting economy.
To me, WHO lost all credibility.
Too soon?
Are you saying Covid-19 isn't a pandemic anymore?
> This should have been done way earlier
Not what you're sayin.
So I read OP's comment as self-contradictory and am still not quite sure what to make of it.
So the only (provided) statement we should disbelieve is that Covid-19 is a pandemic. Which is precisely what OP wanted them to say. Hence the contradiction.
Obviously, this line of reasoning is tenuous, but the initial claim isn't much better, as nothing is said of what it really means for the WHO to have credibility.
I read that comment as an additional armchair semanticist making the strong claim that (exaggeration mine) the WHO should have declared the pandemic before the virus reached their own country.
You're going to need to cite a source because there's no chance anyone remotely educated would make that statement.
The WHO and CDC botched this. Because of their messaging a lot of people (the majority of people!) didn't take this virus seriously, and that is going to result in real human lives lost.
Not even 1 second of TV in the 12 months they are alive.
I was curious why, and after researching they had 0 Data. This decision was made by a panel.
Ahhh good old tradition and mysticism.
As in, who do people like you, who claim that WHO's maybe flawed handling of this has erased all of the work they've done in the past, consider the best source of truth in these matters?
But from what I could dig up, the last widely accepted pandemic declaration was the H1N1 2009.
The two current pandemics include HIV/AIDS and COVID-19.
There is a list of epidemics, but that list also includes localized or regional matters rather than just global-scale pandemics, and not all of them may amount to PHEICs.
Read your textbook, do homework exercises, and (above all) feel free to contact your professors and ask them for help. That is what they are paid to do!
The hardest part is instructors who feel like unlocking everything to let people work at their own pace is somehow egregious...I think it's so stupid that a teacher cant somehow manage grading the same stuff for everybody at the same time but just ignores the other students who are ahead until they get to that point.
The best online teachers I've ever had were the ones that unlocked it all from the start and helped you with the few questions you had along the way.
That seems like a lot until you realize there's still Boston College, Simmons, Berklee College of Music, Emmanuel, Brandeis, Babson, Bentley, Wellesley, a pharmacology college, two art colleges, and a bunch of community colleges -- and plenty of others I'm forgetting -- I could reach via public transit are still to announce anything, presumably because it's all still being discussed.
For Boston this is really weird and impactful. There is a massive population (somewhere between 350,000 - 400,000 students I think) in the area that is just a transient student population. Though outside of NYC and VERY specific parts of the SFBA, the Boston area is one of the most population dense parts in the US, so there's no more fooling around.
WHO 10 March report: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...
Today, but the thing about time is that before long next month will be today.
That's impossible to know. We have no idea how many cases there are in the US, because we're not doing a significant amount of testing here, because our government is incompetent and unprepared for this.
It seems to me that the U.S. government would prefer for cases to not be tested. Whatever medical competence there is appears to be sidelined by other interests.
That will depend quite a bit on how overwhelmed the hospitals become.
In the instantaneous moment, yes.
But there's a reason one measures derivatives, and that's why people are concerned.
"Turns out, disaster can be 11 days out on a smooth graph, and idiots will still say "But it's killed fewer people than the flu!"
https://twitter.com/MarkJHandley/status/1237119688578138112
https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...
Now wait a minute. If you have a source on that, please do provide it. Because I am from Italy and I have never heard of such things. (There were cases of people who died from a stroke and tested positive to COVID-19, but that's all I know)
Perhaps it's an issue with translation, but then I'm entirely unsure what he means by "Arrest".
Just to be clear, I do not want to downplay what is happening in any way. But I feel it is better if we stick to verifiable info.
[1] https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2020/03/10/coronavirus-il-c...
Once it's fully spread through our community because the've decided they're entitled to be carriers (because, hey, you're more likely to die of the flu), they'll blame that same government for failing to provide the requisite care in the community.
"It's mostly in China" = I don't understand exponential growth.
"the flu" = I don't understand that there's a 10-30x higher mortality rate and hospital bed availability is vital to lowering it.
https://www.flattenthecurve.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth
This. Plus, any disease that has very good chances of putting a young, healthy person in some ICU is not "the flu".
If left to expand, this is going to turn into another unavoidable seasonal flu, except more contagious, more severe, and more deadly. And for now, with no vaccine.
A couple of important reasons to try to slow this thing down are:
* Hospitals don't have the capacity to deal with the number of severe COVID-19 patients they're likely to get. There's a good reason China built a new hospital in a week. Severe cases end up on the ICU, and we could end up with hundreds of thousands severe cases.
* Slowing it down gives scientists more time to find a vaccine.
If you wait for it to get worse than the flu, it will be too late.
Just because something hasn't happened yet does not mean it's completely unpredictable. COVID-19 is coming, and if we don't put significant preventative measures in place, many more people will die from it in 2020 than the yearly flu.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22547223
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22547345
I'm not familiar with how the US system works but that seems... strange. Why would the WHO declaring it a pandemic affect your coverage?
For example, your home insurance would cover your house burning down but might have a clause along the lines of "if the whole town burns down, we will not cover you."
I'm guessing some health insurance plans have a similar clause of "if there is a WHO declared pandemic, we won't cover you".
The fire example from a real historical event: a German city burned to the ground and put multiple insurance firms out of business. This led to the development of "re-insurance" aka insurance firms that insure other insurance firms.
For an interesting take on the above plus catastrophe bonds in general (mentioned in another comment) I highly recommend this article by Michael Lewis: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/magazine/26neworleans-t.h...
EDIT: changed "would have" to "might have a clause"
This isn't true. Insurance companies can and do regularly cover people in areas where massive destruction occurs within a particular area (e.g. hurricanes). This is why some companies no longer write policies in certain areas: their risk managers usually require them to "spread out risk" and so they write some stuff in some areas and then they may stop and lower rates elsewhere which are deemed "lower risk".
EDITED: Actually, some companies will even cover you in some pretty extreme circumstances, but this is stuff you have to pay for extra and isn't usually included on most policies.
At any rate, what _is_ true is that most insurance companies won't cover you based upon the cause of something: e.g. if your house is burned down due to a riot "civil unrest" or because of something like war, it will not cover you. If your house floods because a pipe bursts, then it is OK. If water comes up from the ground (i.e. a _real_ flood) then it will not cover you because it looks not only at what happened but how it happened.
1. Structure their agreements so that some things are covered and others are not e.g. suicide is sometimes NOT covered for life insurance
2. Choose not to cover certain areas e.g. there were insurance firms choosing not to cover Staten Island even pre-Sandy
3. Set their rates at high levels to discourage people e.g. this happened in my old town house where there were too many claims based around water heaters leaking
Funny side story: I remember reading a book about the British Special Forces (S.A.S.) and there was a note that said only Lloyd's of London was willing to insure them due to the high risk of injuries from their line of work.
Funny side story #2:
One of my family members had a friend who was apparently a crazy driver. He drove a delivery truck so a bunch of the driver's friend (including my family member) took out a life insurance policy on him (driver). I didn't even realize you could do this but apparently you can.
In the end, turned out that the driver outlived all of the people who were on the policy!
It's generally restricted, since it can incentivize killing them to collect the money. To life-insure anybody you have to convince the insurer that you have an "insurable interest" in their life. That's easy if they're a breadwinner/caretaker in your family, and you could also show it if they were e.g. critical to your business (edit: or had lent them money). I'd be interested to know what the justification was in that case.
Insurers really try to make sure that the payout isn't so high that you want the insured event to happen ("moral hazard").
I should have pointed out that this was back in the mid-1950s when regulations were probably a lot more lax than they are today.
TLDR: If the event affecting you gets big enough/outrageous enough the insurance companies consider it an act of god and you aren't covered.
It appears to be survivable as long as equipment and personnel are available. And that's the problem: availability.
When health systems are overwhelmed, even people who could survive pneumonia with mechanical ventilation will die - because the equipment supply is exceeded and there are no ventilators left.
So yes, there are treatments for pneumonia, but they are limited in availability.
Edit: I do not remember posting this. I certainly did not intend to. Sorry folks for the spammy, uselss comment.
Welcome to the free market. Please take a survival fitness brochure on your way out.
No brochures for them.
This is not a long standing policy as far as I know.
Insurance companies are all about numbers and are very good at running them. they are not always right, but they are right often enough for their purposes.
Quote: "all the insurance companies here, either today, or before today, have agreed to waive all copays on coronavirus testing, and extend coverage for coronavirus treatment in all of their benefit plans"
Assuming that one is insured to begin with, and your insurance company was one of those at the White House, yeah, you could be covered. So “probably still have coverage” is a pretty wishful statement.
Mortality and impacts seem to hit people over 50 the hardest, and that is where a majority of the Republican supporters come from.
It would be a curious footnote to have COVID-19 swing an election.
Something like a stroke requires immediate action (say, within 2 hours) to be able to use the best treatments available. Living very far away from a good hospital makes your survival chances quite lower.
For Covid-19, as far as I read, some people have gone to the hospital (already having trouble to breath) and died after a few hours. But those seem extreme cases. Normally you would have a couple days to go to the hospital from the moment you realize something is odd.
Then there is the issue of cost for that flight and the poor state of healthcare.
I live (urban/suburban) in spitting distance of 3-4+ hospitals (I don't even know for sure) with at least 2 of those being ones I would trust my life to in a heartbeat (the others I just don't know enough about). I was really unaware of the disconnect before that trip and it didn't really occur to me that hospital != hospital. So not only do some rural location have limited or no hospitals but they don't trust the ones they do have.
The current White House is essentially the worst case scenario in dealing with this outbreak and is going to get people killed. There is still current exponential growth in the USA, and there is near zero testing going on due to incompetence and coverup. Things are going to get much worse.
Downvote all you want, but these are facts.
The main issue right now is the lack of testing and covering up just to try and bump the stock market, and it obviously is having the opposite effect since the problem is just getting worse the longer the problem is ignored.
Everyone will come in contact with the virus. People under 50 years old (as recent reports have stated) have a high chance of survival. The deaths from it will mostly be from those 50 years and old. Voters who are 50 years and older largely vote for the Republican party.
My mom drives 90 minutes a day to be with my dad in nursing home rehabilitation, the closest facility. The normal response time for an ambulance is 20 minutes, plus 30-45m to an ER. Their doctors are a similar distance. Note that the ambulance is volunteer, and the average member is 55. They live in NY, in a county with a decent sized city. It’s worse in the real boonies.
I live in a city, a paramedic will be at your door in 7-10m. Hospital 5-10m, etc.
If this gets bad, everyone will be familiar with tragedy. The urban stories will be about neglected patients in overcrowded wards and people who die of untreated strokes, etc. The rural tragedies will be finding grandma, drowned in her own phlegm because sick relatives and travel restrictions isolated her from support.
I'm pretty sure I'd rather be homesteading off-grid in a remote wilderness or on a sailboat than in an average American suburb through all this.
I myself am not worried, but I AM worried about my Fox News watching elderly parents. They are in danger the most. Also, mis-informed.
This is how years of denial, spin, propaganda, lying, and gaslighting end up being. In fact - deadly.
This is really not the time for petty partisan politics. Both parties are propaganda machines. It is the nature of the two party system.
>https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/chuck_schumer_q...
I think the fact that it's an election year, more people are susceptible to thinking the pandemic is overblown and thus a conspiracy to defeat Trump.
Perhaps it's just that they can change course without any pushback from their demographic -- they're happy believing that we've always been at war with Eastasia. Still, it must cost them something to be quite so demonstrably wrong on something that's so much in people's faces. (As opposed to, say, climate change, where the effects are much slower and more easily shuffled under "the heat wave and fires are just weather".)
Personally I'm not sure if it will outweigh how democrats are more likely to live in denser urban areas where spread is faster.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-po...
Irony.
"Initially the left was saying flu was a bigger threat. Now they are taking it seriously, shutting down events.
Initially the right was taking it seriously, banning travel. Now they are calling it the flu."
https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1237241527035928576
That's not really what GP's poll indicates:
> About four of every 10 Democrats said they thought the new coronavirus poses an imminent threat, compared to about two of every 10 Republicans.
Both less than half.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/fact-checking-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/us/politics/coronavirus-t...
1 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3641067/
Source: https://www.debt.org/faqs/americans-in-debt/economic-demogra...
There absolutely does seem to be a difference between the partisan cohorts in preparation quality and infection likelihood though. Republicans have been told by their leaders and their media for weeks (Trump was still doing this as of yesterday) that this is no big deal, it's just like the flu, they don't need to do anything. Where democrats have been cancelling travel and buying toilet paper, republicans didn't even believe the crisis was real until the market crashed.
We'll see. But I bet before the smoke clears, we'll find there's good science showing a real partisan correlation with COVID-19 impact.
Don’t spread partisan bullshit.
I mean, fine, it's a partisan point. But... I mean, seriously: at what point does it become OK to point out that Fox News and the Republican leadership[1] just plain fucked up the response to COVID-19 really badly? And that they seemingly did so out of a combination of both ignorance and partisan desire to minimize the problem?
Is that not OK? Because it's a real point, and one that needs to be made (and heard by republican voters), even if it's "partisan".
[1] And specifically Fox News and the Republican leaders, and not the "MSM" or Democratic leadership, who were saying opposite things and in hindsight were clearly correct.
- old people vote in far larger proportion compared to young folks
- they tend to vote conservative
- this virus is likely to kill old people disproportionately
- red states tend to do less well in terms of all kinds of infrastructure, including medical
...then would you expect to see a change in the results of future elections?
The first thing that I would draw your attention to is that social shifts have moved the "silent generation" from being evenly split Democrat/Republican in 2004 to going for Trump by a 13 point margin in 2016. This is the group that will suffer the vast majority of fatalities. See https://www.people-press.org/2016/09/13/2-party-affiliation-... for verification.
Secondly, women lean Democratic, men Republican. (The same link verifies that.) Most casualties will be men. See https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se... for verification.
Third, the upcoming generations through that 12 years are overwhelmingly Democratic and will have almost no deaths from this disease. Both previous links verify that.
The result is that, a well researched article from a dozen years ago notwithstanding, the impact of COVID-19 are likely to disproportionately hit Republicans over Democrats.
(Not necessarily. The one trend that Republicans can hope for is that diseases spread through urban areas and urban areas are overwhelmingly Democratic. I don't think that this offsets the other phenomena though.)
Parliament has sat today, without her, so it's still quite possible that others will catch it.
ruth bader ginsburg is 86 years old, and still seems sharp as a tack.
That's highly subjective and no doubt any assessment is likely to strongly align with partisanship.
Which is why we need age limits. You can't expect people to objectively evaluate whether those inside or outside their party are still legislating or judging effectively in their 80s. Obviously most Republicans would lean towards arguing that she's senile and most Democrats would lean toward the opposite.
And then I imagine cognitive decline does not affect all faculties equally - so someone may still, say, have no trouble writing essays, but their judgement may be compromised.
Beyond direct consequences, it seems reasonable that covid19 would affect the election by tanking the economy and giving Trump nothing to point at as his big accomplishments
it's nearly always a sigmoid in disguise.
What we are trying our damndest to control is the carrying capacity.
Quote: "all the insurance companies here, either today, or before today, have agreed to waive all copays on coronavirus testing, and extend coverage for coronavirus treatment in all of their benefit plans"
As far as I can tell, there was a lot of room for caveats in that statement. In particular, it was scoped to companies they met with.
It will create so much value for our shareholders!
Yes, outbreak of zootonic diseases is still possible through widely consumed firm animals (chickens, pigs, or cows). But we can dramatically reduce the risk of next pandemic if we stop eating exotic wild animals like bats, which is not hard to give up. We may have been able to stop outbreak of COVID-19 on the first place if we had learned our lessons from SARS outbreak and stopping eating exotics animals.
EDIT: bat was used as an example. You can replace any exotic animals in place of bats, the point still stands. This video touches on the topic of outbreak of coronavirus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPpoJGYlW54
Maybe that's why MERS never spread widely outside of areas where camels don't exist widely.
Yes, the press has reported that a market in Wuhan sold exotic animals, but it seems this is uncorroborated, and after asking an acquaintance in Wuhan about it, I was told it's fake news, and that said market sells farmed animals as far as she's ever seen.
Even with conventional animal agriculture, things like bird flu and swine flu are a serious threat.
Fake news, seriously? There's an entire wikipedia article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huanan_Seafood_Wholesale_Marke.... Please verify your own news source before spreading more fake news/
Bat soup was used as an example. It would help the discussion if we stop taking everything in the most literal way possible.
It would also be helpful to the discussion if "we" stopped casting broad nets and making sweeping generalizations without specifics and context.
"Eating exotic animals" has no real meaning. Bats may not be exotic in that region. Additionally, you specifically said "eating" and, so, my comment was specifically directed at the consumption of animals. In that case, cattle (not "exotic" in my region) can carry bovine spongiform encephalopathy which _can_ survive ingestion (most likely CNS tissues). So, when dealing with science-y sort of things, making generalizations in order to support an opinion, you're basically opening yourself up to people (like myself) who desire specificity and factual support.
As was mentioned in an erudite child comment, the most likely form of transmission was in the preparation of the foodstuff, so if you believe that more caution should be exercised, then you'd get no complaints from me.
That seems a very first world-centric point of view.
Isn't the eating of such animals partially driven by cultural culinary preferences, and partially driven by the availability of such foods (eg. unable to afford beef or chicken, but can afford the next best thing).
I have no doubt that there are cases of wealthy people consuming exotic meat as a delicacy, but I would bet pound for pound it is largely people in poorer regions without much alternative.
Unfortunately I'm looking for real stats but am having trouble as most of the trade does not keep records, is illegal, etc
2. A very small minority of people in China consume exotic food not because they are cheap, but because they are more expensive and were considered prestigious.
3. There is now a very strong pushbacks against this culture from both the Chinese government and the vast majority of the Chinese people.
> Yes, outbreak of zootonic diseases is still possible through widely consumed firm animals (chickens, pigs, or cows). But we can dramatically reduce the risk of next pandemic if we stop eating exotic wild animals like bats, which is not hard to give up.
Washing your hands is not going to stop every single disease on the earth, but it'll reduce the risk. What exactly is the unsound part here?
It's not a harmful proposal or anything, I just don't think it would have much impact, and it fixates excessively on the particulars of two specific outbreaks.
You're probably referring to the youtube disinformation that has been trotted around by right-wing media outlets as "the cause".
It may very well have come from bats. But bats can infect other animals, in various ways, including ones that are traded in live-animal markets.
This is not about cuisine.
How can you even remotely suggest this when the proximity between humans and lifestock animals in horrible conditions is a primary driver of a) transmission of disease, as well as b) increasing resistance to antibiotics due to how much of them we pump into the animals, and then consume ourselves?
It absolutely _is_ about cuisine choices and the sooner we stop eating animals and animal products, the better.
Might be useful in case you or loved ones get infected.
> d4mi3n
> What happens when the WHO classifies a pandemic? I imagine a number of processes and procedures come into effect--anybody know what they are?
> Hongwei
> My limited understanding understanding is that it automatically releases funding (from the WHO and other bodies) to help with the crisis. It should also trigger some catastrophe and pandemic bond clauses, meaning investors who bought these bonds will lose their money as it now goes towards relief funding.
Full thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22547349
I was listening it live and they said its just a classification, they are already doing what they should be doing, the classification changes nothing.
Notably, the Church of Greece has announced that "the virus cannot be spread through Communion" (where everyone drinks wine from the same cup). You can imagine how angry this self-serving move made most people.
> "the virus cannot be spread through Communion"
I assume Greece is Catholic, right? Because pope himself told people to take the "spiritual communion" instead of the actual one, and yet the Church in Poland doesn't seem to care.
EDIT: sorry. Somehow I thought Orthodox is mainly in Russia. But my rant against Polish Catholic Church still stands. Pope himself shows people what to do, but in Poland, we're going to do the opposite.
It's kind of like the systemd rageforks, only for sillier (unless you're religious, I guess) reasons:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East%E2%80%93West_Schism
Catholics in Greece are overwhelmingly Orthodox. The Orthodox Catholic church distributes holy communion differently, with a spoon (there is a particular term for it, but I don't know it) that doesn't touch the communicant's mouth. So, they're not drinking from a communal cup.
It's entirely possible for the communicant to exhale / cough / sneeze on the spoon. I don't know what the priest would do if this were to happen.
As an aside, it's widespread right now (but maybe not universal) in Catholic dioceses to not even provide the cup to the congregation during Communion (which is perfectly fine according to Catholic theology btw). edit: additionally, I recently heard about a dispensation in at least one diocese for people who are in any of the COVID-19 risk categories that they don't need to receive Communion for now. I don't know whether this also dispenses them from attending Mass on Sundays (which is otherwise an obligation for all Catholics).
The spoon very much touches the communicant's mouth, and the priest dips it back in the cup afterwards. You're getting spoon-fed wine, essentially, with a whole lot of contact.
Do Orthodox folks not use the term "Catholic" for themselves? I just don't know very many.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_(term)
Greek Orthodox are "Catholic" but they are not "Roman Catholic".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Catholic_Church
[1] https://youtu.be/WPj7z72VgT0?t=130
> don't need to receive Communion for now
Regardless of the virus you only need to receive Communion once per year, not at every Mass[2].
[1] https://www.dsj.org/decree-of-special-dispensation-coronavir...
[2] https://forums.catholic.com/t/receive-holy-communion-at-leas...
I understand people want to support the Austin economy since losing SXSW is a big hit, however it was cancelled to limit mass gatherings yet people still want to gather.
Even still, my partner and I are keeping an eye open on flights to Europe (we've always wanted to go) and seriously considering taking the risk of buying a flight for in a couple of months time because they are quite literally at half price right now. And I'm not even talking about Italy.
edit: Haha—to clarify, the risk being flight cancellation or border closures not catching or spreading disease.
2nd edit: Wow. I'm drawing a little ire here. I'll reiterate: the risk is in not being able to go because the problem continues. Please take the charitable view (and of my whole comment, not snippets)—not the one that I'm some kind of monster :)
Save your heartache. SXSW lost its "soul" many years ago.
Too many pints in Dublin and then wine in her ancestral village in Portugal and then we're talking.
Even if you're not in the groups with high mortality rates, you can still be a carrier.
I cannot know your intentions, so if they truly are with other people in mind, I apologize.
Do also keep in mind, though, that by purchasing them now you are inevitably biasing yourself towards going.
If you do this in the midst of a pandemic, it's an unethical and selfish act.
I'm certain that just purchasing some discounted airline tickets for sometime later in the year will not in itself cause any negative global health effects. The decision to actually travel can be made entirely separately from that gamble.
If we're still in the height of epidemics during your travel, you will be basically locked in someplace and very hard to see anything.
To sum it up, tremendously stupid idea with utterly selfish tones.
To travel after the trouble with the virus has subsided on tickets purchased during a period of discounted rates?
Or do you mean not traveling because the virus hasn't subsided and tossing the hundreds of dollars down the drain in a gamble?
If neither of these were your conclusions, then respectfully—I think you misunderstood my comments.
Buying flight tickets might be cheap right now but the point is if when your trip starts X weeks from now and the situation is still bad and you don't cancel it, then you are indeed selfish and deserving of the negative comments and down votes.
Further, since nobody knows when this will end (it could continue into 2021 for all we know) and you didn't say you'd cancel your plans if it did (instead you expressed concerns you'd lose money if travel was banned), I feel like you're drastically misunderstanding the 2nd order dangers your actions would have and likely deserve the ire and down votes you're getting.
That is the risk I referred to, as I clarified—not being able to take the trip because the situation didn't improve. I've explained this many times over by now.
I think it's pretty normal. Surreal would be adapting more easily and unconsciously to the new constraints.
Thankfully, continuing to dream doesn't cost us anything, and it doesn't hurt anyone.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/pneumonia.htm
[2] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...
"it's plausible that more than half of the population could get it, and leaders of many western countries have acknowledged that."
Will there ever be apologies for spreading mass hysteria?
E.g. in a recent turnabout Vice President Mike Pence said today that there has been “irresponsible rhetoric” from people who have downplayed the seriousness of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak.
Edit: also pneumonia is caused by a large number of causes. If covid-19 killed as much as all respiratory diseases it would already be scary.
The numbers don't need any mitigating factors but those do exist as well. I don't see South Korea doing anything more extreme than what could be done in the US so that doesn't show the US would be worse. The population density of South Korea is 15x that of the US so that would probably mean the infection rate would be lower in the US. The median age is also higher in South Korea and since this disease affects older people more that would also make the outlook for America better.
"Scientists working at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Imperial College London and the Institute for Disease Modeling have used these approaches to estimate the infection fatality rate. Currently, these estimates range from 0.5% to 0.94% indicating that COVID-19 is about 10 to 20 times as deadly as seasonal influenza. Evidence coming in from genomics and large-scale testing of fevers is consistent with these conclusions. The only potentially good news is that the epidemic in Korea may ultimately show a lower CFR than the epidemic in China.
...
"On balance, it is reasonable to guess that COVID-19 will infect as many Americans over the next year as influenza does in a typical winter -- somewhere between 25 million and 115 million. Maybe a bit more if the virus turns out to be more contagious than we thought. Maybe a bit less if we put restrictions in place that minimize our travel and our social and professional contacts.
"The bad news is, of course, that these infection numbers translate to 350,000 to 660,000 people dying in the U.S., with an uncertainty range that goes from 50,000 deaths to 5 million deaths. The good news is that this is not a weather forecast. The size of the epidemic, i.e., the total number of infections, is something we can reduce if we decrease our contact patterns and improve our hygiene. If the total number of infections decreases, the total number of deaths will also decrease."
[1] - https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-this-epidemiologist-is...
I lean a little tinfoil-hatty; but I get the impression that for all the bullshit self-serving narratives proffered by elites (both economic and political), this is one that they actually seem to believe themselves, privately as well as publicly. If anything, they're more spooked than they're signaling openly.
Going to be an interesting few weeks as we see how things proceed. To think, somewhere out there, the virus lurks and is headed our way ..
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pests%C3%A4ule
(in German)
Why aren't they already transitioning to remote work? Is there a timeline in place? What are their criteria about what would trigger WFH? What about employees with elderly family members at home? Do they have the necessary systems in place to support a fully remote staff?
It's very likely that management has simply avoided thinking about the topic entirely. If the employees press them for a concrete action plan, then that at least prompts them to start engaging in objective analysis.
It's a massive multinational company, so I'm sure they're thinking about it. Technically no barriers to working from home (I do it every Friday), tempted to just start doing it every day, but would rather they made a formal decision on it first.
You're also asked to work from home for a while if any travelling family member from overseas visits, and if you have no reason to be in the office they won't say no if you just want to work at home and avoid public transport.
Hoping it doesn't cause a big hit to productivity because it's the right thing to do.
But as in all countries by now, older folks should stay home and self quarantine whenever possible.
If there's any racism going on, it's with the people who fear Asians because they think they're all contaminated with COVID-19.
> They had 3 months to prepare and, still, they believe that to fight the virus is just enough to wash hands and stay a few feet away from their coworkers, just as with a normal seasonal flu. That's ridiculous.
That's what they've been told to do by government officials and journalists.
Especially to downplay a possibly valid concern of an individual of your supposed group
I doubt it comes down to thinking America is somehow “better”. If anything, people seem more inclined to envy the coordinated responses of Asian countries, especially South Korea.
The messaging from the media (who are laypersons) and the politicians (who are economically motivated laypersons) has been that this is "just the flu". Weak messaging from both the WHO and the CDC has only reinforced this in the public's perception.
The WHO should have taken the decisive move to encourage greater caution by employing the "pandemic" label. That label comes with real power. While there is danger in crying wolf, it was evident months ago from the growth rate of the virus and the lack of quarantine procedures being put in place that this virus would reach the pandemic stage.
If the role of the WHO is to stave off pandemics and not just to monitor them, then elevating the risk profile of the virus should have been a top priority. Since people look to the WHO for guidance, their actions have direct impact to sequestration and bringing the outbreak under control.
Both the WHO and the CDC were too afraid to take early action. Their wait and see approach will ultimately result in more human deaths and suffering.
Sure, those classic alt-right propaganda outlets like the Today show.
Do you expect politicians to actually think? Especially when they can point at the "fakenews WHO." (I don't know how Trump would actually say it but you get the picture.)
If the WHO declares a pandemic early, they _do_ save lives. But they take the political beating because "nothing happened."
If the WHO declares a pandemic late, they don't save lives. They take a mild wrist slap because "they were late to declare it," which will not be remembered in about a month.
No; what we call the flu is caused by the influenza virus. What we call the common cold is sometimes caused by a coronavirus (about 25% of cases). And while actual mortality rates are unclear, even the most optimistic figures (South Korea, for instance), are far more than 200% normal seasonal flu rates.
Asymptomatic cases are extremely rare, if they infects multiple others, they will likely be identified through retrospection. Overall, I'd say those cases are unlikely to result in significant difference in the estimate.
This is likely exacerbated by many countries not having ready access to flu vaccines and/or proper hospitalization for those that need it.
Compare this to America-specific numbers, where 34,000,000 – 49,000,000 Americans catch a flu-related illness each year, yet only 20,000 – 52,000 result in death [2].
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p1213-flu-death-esti...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...
So, 1.3-1.9 million US deaths.
Are you sure you've been paying attention longer than a week or two? The virus was being downplayed all of January and February by the media and other people not named Trump as "not a big deal" because "the common flu kills way more people."
That's not been my impression at all. But then, I don't live in the US. Maybe it's an American media thing?
I know the South Korean government took that exact position because of their pro-China stance. They tried really hard to downplay the dangers of the virus simply because of its Wuhan origins. knowing that the Trump administration is on the other side of the fence regarding China, what do they have to gain by dismissing the situation?
They genuinely believe that it's a non-issue. That it will go away and that it's simply a trivial virus that isn't worth worrying about.
The president has been visibly out-of-step with the rest of the federal government messaging on this. One voice, no matter the position, doesn't evaporate what the hundreds of others have been saying.
What, and let someone else “hog” the attention and the spotlight? I’ve been reading about 45 since the 80s (most of the time, not by choice). “All eyes on me” seems to be far more important to the sitting president than “do the right thing”. I’m not saying “do <what he thinks is> the right thing” isn’t on the list, it’s just way down that list.
Because he judges how well he does his job on the performance of the stock market. He speaks to sooth the jitters of Wall Street.
It's not unique to the current administration. Most presidents have done this. It was even a recurring theme in the TV series West Wing.
I couldn’t imagine any of the presidents of the last decades to stand up and openly contradict his experts on something like this. Maybe behind the scenes but not in the open. He doesn’t seem to understand that he can only lose doing this.
Read my comment again. I didn't say that being contradictory was common. I said judging performance by the stock market is common.
The President has been accusing the "Bureaucrats" of not caring about average Americans, fear-mongering the virus, and claims the Deep State is after him.
The President's followers do NOT believe the government experts. As per the sitting President's plan. The sitting President has cultivated an "Us lay people vs Them bureaucrats" atmosphere.
Case in point: My own Mother believes that the Coronavirus is a Chinese conspiracy to attack the President. And nothing I say could sway her opinion. Unfortunately, the voters of the President support, and believe in him more than even family.
Because this "skill" has been honed from a lifetime of obsession with media, he's exceptionally good at bypassing anything resembling rational thought, and hitting emotional triggers, resulting in otherwise intelligent people engaging with Frankfurtian Bullshit even when they should know better (opponents and supporters alike).
Many people in this country still absolutely listen to him, and trust him more than the media when the messaging conflicts.
Sadly, in this case it puts the people who put the most faith in him at even more risk.
We truly must be living in different universes.
> So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12370273563148697...
The top performing story on Facebook right now is a Fox News piece highlighting the President downplaying it:
https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1237092136958545923
Basically the entire GOP leadership structure has decided that people are only worrying as much as they are to damage Trump politically. Essentially the only top level official giving the straight story is Dr. Fauci and he's immediately contradicted by others in the cabinet who seemed to be completely preoccupied with the stock market and the election.
I've heard "just the flu bro" a bunch and people still operating business as usual in spite of large events being cancelled.
Other obstacles to perceiving it as a big deal:
- Not grasping that a fraction of a percent mortality can be a big deal. Numbers under one percent make it sound indistinguishable from flu, even if it's 10x as deadly as flu.
- Having AIDS and Ebola as your mental prototypes for dangerous infectious diseases and feeling relieved when you hear COVID-19 is nothing like either one.
The president tweeted this 2 days ago [1]:
> So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!
This is what the Surgeon General said on Sunday [2]:
> "If we had massive numbers of cases we would be seeing more deaths. And so we actually feel pretty good that some parts of the country have contained it just like when you look at the flu," Adams said on CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday. "When we look at the flu tracker, some parts of the country are having much more severe flu seasons. Some are having very mild flu seasons. The same thing for coronavirus."
[0] https://www.c-span.org/video/?469747-1/president-trump-annou...
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/stocks-dive-coronavirus-spre...
[2] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/stocks-dive-coronavirus-spre...
I'm in WA state, where until last week testing wasn't being conducted on anyone that wasn't traveling from a level 3 country or in contact with a known infected person, EVEN IF THE WOULD-BE TESTEE WAS SHOWING SYMPTOMS. We keep talking about the count of infected (and relying on it to decide who to test) but it's unarguably low if we've not been testing, particularly as we apparently have introductions via Europe as well as China, plus community transmission.
Trump just a few days ago said that everyone who wants to be tested can get tested. According to the doctor's offices, that's still false.
Trump himself has a NUMBER of downplaying statements. So many I won't bother to list them. But lots of statements along the lines of "just the flu", among others.
> there's been an overabundance of information and caution
Hard to judge "overabundance" (see other article about how everything with a pandemic is premature until it is too late)
Today's headlines: "The White House has ordered federal health officials to treat top-level coronavirus meetings as classified, an unusual step that has restricted information and hampered the U.S. government’s response to the contagion, according to four Trump administration officials."
Note this prevents any expert who doesn't have clearance from attending.
A few days ago: "US health officials wanted to recommend that elderly Americans avoid flying amid the coronavirus crisis. The White House overruled them"
But even with the research on pandemic readiness showing that neither capacity nor governance has been up to the task people are still pretending it's just a political choice and the results will be fine. If I remember correctly it as CSIS thing: https://healthsecurity.csis.org/final-report/
If you are otherwise healthy, this is like getting a cold with a fever for a week, then feeling better.
Sure, call it a pandemic, because it is worldwide. But honestly it's just not that remarkable. This isn't some godly virus with 25% death rates!
It is remarkable in that it is novel, but that's mostly it.
[1] https://www.ecodibergamo.it/stories/bergamo-citta/evitiamo-i... (Italian)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_median_ag...
> "It may become necessary to establish an age limit for access to intensive care." [Emphasis mine]
Please educate yourself: https://www.flattenthecurve.com/
The trouble is that (1) the people who need hospital to be fine need hospital. They won't be fine if it isn't there, and (2) by being a selfish ass and treating it like just the flu, when it's a disease that grows exponentially in a no-immunity population, people are amplifying the speed and height of the peak, which means not enough hospital places.
If you get a situation where effectively nobody who needs hospital can get it - then those 20-ish percent just drop dead. And then there's your godly death rate.
This is a new thing and you should treat it as a new thing. There has not in living memory been one this bad, against which we had no defense except to avoid catching it and spreading it.
That's part of the problem; even if it was "just like the flu" (it is not; in particular the percentage of cases requiring advanced medical treatment is much higher, which will lead to a rise in mortality as that treatment is oversubscribed), the flu would be pretty scary if the annual vaccine didn't exist.
The flu is actually quite scary - they are the frog in hot water.
2% of those infected with influenza (estimated, 4% of those who sought medical intervention) in 2017-2018 required hospitalization.
Unless there's information that's not making it out of Italy, the death statistics reported today don't seem to align with the picture painted by those tweets.
https://www.flattenthecurve.com/
“Earlier in the epidemic, there was hope that 3.5 percent was grossly overestimated, however as evidence continues to emerge, there is dwindling support for that hope.”
Please also note that many people who require intensive care but survive are left with huge chronic damage to their lungs that will affect their quality of life for the rest of their lives.
Which is that entire communities can be infected in a very short amount of time, overwhelming local medical infrastructure and resulting in deaths and harm because the doctors simply can't keep up. What was originally something that could be treated then becomes life threatening.
In particular, one of those factors was sustained duration of the outbreak. My understanding is we finally crossed the time threshold for declaring this a Pandemic.
Much, much better than the alternative.
H1N1 was serious and compared to this, well handled.
An extreme and early response, can turn a disease into a trivial event. Which raises questions about whether such an aggressive response is necessary.
It can be, in many ways, like using an umbrella in a rainstorm. You get to the destination, and you're totally dry, so what was the point of the umbrella?
With these disease outbreaks, there's no counterfactual we can run to see what would have happened if we didn't respond early.
The current COVID-19 epidemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 is many times more fatal than the 2009 H1N1 epidemic. The current epidemic has similar a fatality rate to the 1918 Spanish Flu.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic
The table in the "comparisons to other pandemics and epidemics" section gives a point estimate for the case fatality rate of 0.03%. If we assume that the final rate for covid-19 is somewhere in the 1-2% range that's what I last heard, that would mean that "10X as fatal" is an understatement - more like 30-70x as fatal.
The mortality rate is presently 6.01% and fluctuating, making this virus about twice as deadly as the Spanish Flu.
Taking Johns Hopkins numbers (at time of me writing this):
125,108 confirmed cases 4594 deaths 66,682 recoveries 71,276 outcomes 4,594 / 71,276 = 6.45% have died (deaths / outcomes)
COVID-19 currently has a 3.4% case fatality ratio according to the WHO last week -
https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-...
But this is in the middle of the pandemic and is likely to be revised downward as many cases are undiagnosed.
The 2009 H1N1 outbreak had a inital case fatality ratio of 0.4%, but revised downwards to 0.026% afterwards due to new evidence of more spread than thought -
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8406723.stm
This is the most dangerous misinformation I’ve heard spread about this disease, and it’s getting repeated everywhere.
There is no mountain of undiagnosed asymptomatic cases. It doesn’t exist.
WHO has looked. China has looked. South Korea has looked.
It’s not there. The mortality rate is presently 6.01% and fluctuating, making this virus about twice as deadly as the Spanish Flu
People in Italy are only admitted in hospitals if they have difficulty breathing by themselves. People that only have a fever or other mild symptoms are sent home, with no test administered. When the outbreak started they were testing asymptomatic cases, trying to be proactive in identifying infected people, but they stopped doing that once things have gotten out of control. And we will see this pattern repeating.
What's dangerous is spreading nonsense like a 6% death rate, which is factually not true.
South Korea have a lot of early stage cases in those numbers (haven’t died, haven’t recovered), and a very young population on the whole. An undetermined number of those cases will die rather than recover.
Multiple sources have looked for these large majorities of asymptomatic cases and did not find them. There is no evidence other than our collective hunches that these cases exist in significant numbers.
Taking Johns Hopkins numbers (at time of me writing this):
125,108 confirmed cases 4594 deaths 66,682 recoveries 71,276 outcomes
4,594 / 71,276 = 6.45% have died (deaths / outcomes)
At least 80%-85% of all Covid-2019 cases have mild symptoms. We are not talking about completely asymptomatic cases, we are talking about a majority of cases that could pass for a mere cold or flu.
Many of those will not go to a hospital or be tested, especially if the system is overwhelmed.
Italy could easily have more than 10 times the number of reported cases because they stopped testing proactively. Only people with difficulty breathing are now tested and these represent a small minority of cases.
I gave S.Korea as an example because AFAIK they are the only ones doing large scale testing of the population and they aren't China (whom we may or may not trust to be transparent).
The data we have points to a mortality rate that's less than 1%.
When you see a mortally greater than that it is because people aren't tested unless they reach the ICU.
The 80-85% mild cases comes from confirmed cases that we know about. They’re included in the current 6.45% death rate from the JH data.
China may or may not be transparent, but if they have an incentive to hide anything, it would be a higher death rate rather than a lower one.
The data is the data. In any case it’s now global and the 6.45% is actually higher than it was before the virus started growing exponentially outside of China (it was 5.7% from this dataset then).
This number will likely go down to below 1% because:
- S. Korea have implemented large scale tests on asymptomatic cases and their death rate is 0.77%
- the "Princess Diamond" cruise, which can be considered a closed experiment, has had a 1% death rate for people that were not ventilated
- in China if you exclude the Hubei province, the mortality rate is 0.88%
In Italy the mortality rate is 6% but the explanation is quite simple — they stopped testing asymptomatic cases, even people with fever are sent home without a test and instructed to return in case the fever doesn't go away in a few days and they are overwhelmed. At this point they are only admitting people that have trouble breathing.
And northern Italy has really good hospitals, so the only reasonable explanation for the huge disparity is that they have more than 10 times the reported total cases.
In other words, the virus has infected many more people than official numbers.
Remember that those "total cases" are cases that have been discovered via tests, it does not include people that stayed at home and weren't tested, either because the symptoms were too mild or because they were sent home.
Edit: A Hong Kong national from the ship died on 6 March which is being included as the 7th death. So, this may simply be fragmented rather than explicit exclusions.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
They are saying 7 deaths and 32 critical.
As far as I can tell Australia has 3 deaths including 1 from the cruse ship. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-08/coronavirus-related-d...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019#Epide...
Taking Johns Hopkins numbers (at time of me writing this): 125,108 confirmed cases 4594 deaths 66,682 recoveries 71,276 outcomes 4,594 / 71,276 = 6.45% have died (deaths / outcomes)
Basically we are counting every case severe enough to cause death, but only some of the cases that aren't very severe, and that latter group is already a much bigger piece of the pie even among confirmed cases.
Data from the China CDC suggests 20x as fatal: https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-compared-to-flu-...
I for one lean towards nipping things in the bud and have been experiencing ever-increasing anxiety since I started watching Covid-19 in late January.
Look at the situation with vaccines. Your grandparents getting vaccines was a no-brainer. They heard stories of people getting polio or the measles and it was serious shit. Three generations later we have conspiracy theories about vaccines, I think because so few iminently deadly diseases have gotten a vaccine lately. We are down to the tricky ones, and cultural memory of the others is starting to crack.
AFAIK, scientists are still trying to develop a covid-19 vaccine candidate. And after they have one, there will be many months before millions of doses can be produced and distributed.
Modeling the causal impact of their criteria in light of data from the COVID-19 pandemic could reveal how different messaging strategies applied at different thresholds impact the spread of the virus.
The leadership could have done this months ago and estimated how proactive versus inactive quarantine efforts would impact morbidity. They have to know their role in persuading the public and government officials.
You don't have to stick to a rigid and inflexible criteria when thousands of human lives are at stake. When you define the criteria, you can also change them.
Labeling this a pandemic would have given cover to organizations that wanted to be more cautious but were afraid of "looking stupid".
Declaration of official pandemic means world bank pandemic relief fund program gets activated as long as many other clauses in different contracts and agreements. There is an influence on WHO and the people behind it didn't want pandemic to be declared too soon. If it was declared 3-4 weeks earlier there could be many lives saved in countries like Iran, what is happening in Africa is not known at all due to no testing but situation is probably bad.
Edit: not sure what's with the down votes. This isn't to disparage African people but it's common knowledge many states are underdeveloped. People don't have access to health care or sanitation or clean drinking water. Dysentery diarrhea and malaise are normal. Any person who reached adulthood in such conditions is obviously a survivor. Don't you agree?
If anything, African states are going to be hit the hardest. South Africa for example, a country I am in, has the world's highest HIV cases. Pneumonia is a death sentence for HIV patients. Also, our infrastructure to manage a spike in infected arriving at state hospitals is abysmal. Right now, we sit with 7 infected (officially) but these are all index based with vectors from recent visits to Italy. If this changes to non-index based vectors, and this disease spreads to the townships, we are done for. If anything, COVID-19 is likely going to hammer Africa the hardest.
those liking scifi: Asimov explored the idea in one of his novels. "Spacers" vs "Earthers" in the novel "The Caves of Steel"
To take you at your intent, all humans will be exposed to this virus with more or less the same chances of suffering. I imagine there may be pockets of resistance within certain gene pools, but it's a crap-shoot who and where.
Why isn't Africa innately resistant to HIV then?
Sedentary lifestyles enabled by modern lifestyles as opposed to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle can contribute to decreased overall health but thats not the issue here since almost nobody is a hunter-gatherer anymore.
When it comes to new viruses, all of us are in the same boat immunity-wise.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/11/21156325/coronavirus-pand...
I suspect The WHO declared this a pandemic, based upon the article, out of concern for what they perceive to be insufficient government activity.
EDIT: I was wrong, here is the chart: https://www.who.int/influenza/resources/documents/pandemic_p...
that is, sustained community outbreaks in multiple WHO regions.
For someone like the WHO, you'll either be criticized for sounding the alarm for no reason or not sounding it fast enough.
My reaction to this push alert today was "wait, they hadn't called it a pandemic yet??"
https://canoe.com/news/world/who-no-longer-uses-pandemic-cat...
Here is a neat video that helps put things in perspective for most any viewer. https://youtu.be/Kas0tIxDvrg
It already looked pretty bad mid/late January when China started construction of hospitals. Were there any reasons to think it would no go global?
So: no, there was no objective reason to think it would not go global, but it was faaaar away...
Wouldn't it be better if the WHO actually helped prevent the pandemic in the first place?
WHO is merely declaring matter of fact about the virus's spreading. Which is kind of it's primary function, to declare things and publish reports so the governments can act on them. They can't really do much beyond that.
Thanks for clarifying, I thought the WHO was more like a global CDC.
There's no particular reason to assume it would take the same path in other countries took some sort of action, even if the actions weren't nearly as forceful as a complete lockdown. Especially since that lockdown was basically a blind and desperate shot in the dark based on incomplete and dubious information.
The only mass media where I've seen that was in a BBC television report from a soccer stadium, and that was only last night.
Other than their censorship in China (they give different advice on their website served to China, even on English-language pages, involving the effectiveness of traditional Chinese medicine against the virus), I think they're doing a mostly okay job so far, from what I can see in the current reporting.
I believe the pandemic label is when containment has failed and governments need to go into mitigation mode. Seeing as it had been relatively contained in China, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc., it seemed reasonable that taking measures would be sufficient to prevent further escalation.
It's akin to people not caring about a major hurricane barreling towards them because they've heard the doomsday scenarios before and nothing has happened.
They have to be careful, and that they were.
Perhaps the 'doomsday clock' was right all along but didn't see this one coming.
I'm not sure sure that's true.
One way to "flatten the curve" is to make sure that some people catch it sooner rather than later, and thus you're able to provide care for them where you otherwise wouldn't be able.
The more you're pushing people to "later" the more you're trying to push "containment" and if you already know "containment" isn't going to work, you're just risking that the spread gets out of control at some later time... when you're less prepared.
Control means both preventing spread and causing spread.
And leaving aside the immediate difficulties...let's save this kind of retrospective criticism for after, when we're closer to being out of the woods.
If you have prospective criticism -- what should be done now and going forwards -- that would be worthwhile.
Whether the WHO uses the term "pandemic" is honestly just semantics. You should direct the majority of your criticism at short-sighted governments who have prioritized the economy (or, even worse, markets) over health.
It was incumbent on local authorities to take the WHO's message seriously, especially after their expedition to China released its report.
... why?
I mean, it's not like the word of the WHO is a binding thing, where anyone is mandated to take action on any level because of a binary designation in a taxonomy. This whole this is just bureaucratic wheels turning; everyone who needs to take action has all the information they need to do so.
This is just the WHO doing what it does best -- having committees meeting endlessly to decide whether to apply a certain meaningless designation and then announcing the conclusion of that exercise.
Their actual job, of collating and disseminating information and trying to coordinate any large-scale responses, is actually hard, so nobody wants to do it, but having a meeting to decide IS IT A PANDEMIC is an easy bikeshedding meeting that all the MBAs and ex-McKinsey people can attend and offer their stupid opinion on what the definition of a word is.
EDIT: I said "everyone who needs to take action has all the information they need to do so", and that could be interpreted as saying that we know enough to determine what actions to take. But what I mean is that we have enough data to start to make a range of predictions and bound the uncertainty to some degree; having a more precise metric for any aspect of COVID-19 should not affect the response since those metrics are essentially made up and not comparable even on a per-hospital level, much less a per-country level or even a per-test-kit-type level. Uncertainty is part of the game here, and understanding the risk profiles is how people and organizations and governments have to tune their response.
1) There are no objective criteria for calling something a pandemic.
2) They did not feel they knew enough about the propagation pattern to make the subjective call.
3) They were deeply worried that calling it a pandemic would switch government strategies from containment to mitigation, resulting in higher contagion and loss of life.
They especially emphasized the last point. The only question in my mind is whether (1) they decided containment was no longer viable or (2) they decided not calling it pandemic would be seen as unserious, even if containment could still potentially have benefits.
Source: https://youtu.be/OJQTM4QbTsg
[1]https://www.who.int/csr/disease/swineflu/frequently_asked_qu...
Parents from every school districts in the Bay Area have collected thousands of signatures to close, but the politicians are not doing their job.
I was on call with Santa Clara county hotline and the school district and the standard answer I got was: Oh, the kids are at low risk and the numbers are low so we're not closing yet.
What they don't realize is that the kids can still be carriers and many teachers and parents are in the danger zone (age or underlying conditions)
Who is supposed to watch these kids if the parents can't stay home with them?
What about the thousands of low income kids that rely on school for most of their meals?
I'm sure these are solvable problems, but I think there are good reasons that it's taking longer than most people want.
Several Universities are closed, several schools are closed and we need to worry more about the spread because if we don't we'll have the problems you mentioned in addition to a massive spread.
It does not solve the nurse issue, which perhaps as a community we need to solve. Perhaps limited opening of school monitored by younger healthier teachers/PTA reps.
Story from a couple years back about that last point: https://epmonthly.com/article/not-heroes-wear-capes-one-las-...
Would this help increase the number of covid-19 patients that could be treated? Or do they not require ventilators? I wonder if the study they mentioned about it was ever completed?
I hope this will make people realize that we need to abolish centralized institutions in our highly complex world. They are single points of failure which introduce significant systemic risks.
CDC also dropped the ball on this one. In Washington state local authorities discovered the outbreak only because they defied federal regulators.
We need better organization at the local level, and we need it now.
There is a difference between a potential, or even a certain, pandemic and an actual one. You and the WHO knew what it meant when you looked at that egg. But only now has it become an actual chicken.
While I too favor decentralization, what we really need to do is return merit to our institutions. We need a social climate that encourages Pattons and Churchills and the like. Unfortunately to return to such a time of competent leadership (not just in government, but society at large) would require undoing decades of propaganda that convinced some two generations of children that we all have equal ability and any of us can do anything. The dangerous downside of giving everyone a trophy across society is that now people have grown up less able to judge competence and merit in others.
I suspect it has a great deal to do with decades of people blaming government for their problems and increasingly less faith in government institutions, to the point of some politicians running on the idea that government doesn't work. It strikes me as difficult to get competent people for your organizations when the term "unelected bureaucrats" is used as an epithet, the pay is below equivalent work in the private sector, and the people at the top are selected for idealogical reasons instead of anything related to effectiveness, expertise or capability.
For example, I would argue that the "propaganda" that anybody can do anything isn't that old yet. On the other hand, certain political groups have been sabotaging government leadership for so long - by claiming that government is always incapable - that there's just no good leadership left in many places and it's become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Running the WHO seems hard. Alarm people too often and they will tune you out. Miss an alarm once and they will call you incompetent (“you had one job!”).
But that’s a judgement against the United States’ federal government, not the WHO. The WHO does not actively constrain governments, they just offer guidance (as far as I know!).
In order to be efficient decision makers, local organizations should be concerned with acquiring expertise related to local issues, and then, through cooperation, global expertise becomes an emergent property. It's not like every central institution can marshal expertise on every local issue.
One reason you want to avoid centralization is due to the fact that decision making occurs under imperfect and incomplete knowledge, or bounded-rationality as Herbert Simon called it.
By decentralizing the process of decision making, you mitigate the risks, since you are allowing entities to tackle a problem in parallel, and if one of them turns out to be wrong, the fallout is localized. Whereas in a centralized system, one bad decision can spell trouble for everyone.
True, but maybe we disagree on how easy it is for every locality to acquire expertise. Plenty of local governments in the United States are already stretched thin fulfilling the simpler functions of policing, schooling, and basic infrastructure. Adding a staff epidemiologist seems very hard for such places. The same proviso applies to many poorer states and nations. That is why I think it makes most sense to direct effort toward having a competent central authority.
> By decentralizing the process of decision making, you mitigate the risks, since you are allowing entities to tackle a problem in parallel, and if one of them turns out to be wrong, the fallout is localized. Whereas in a centralized system, one bad decision can spell trouble for everyone.
On the flip side, decentralizing makes coordination harder. In coarse terms, there are game-theoretic considerations in an epidemic. For example, if localities are purely self-interested, an unaffected region may attempt to quarantine and keep all of its medical infrastructure ready for itself rather than lend it to nearby affected regions. In such cases a coordinating mechanism can be extremely helpful.
I'm not arguing that one kind of organization is always better or worse. To me it just seems complicated.
Perhaps technology could help in this regard, at least to some degree. Bitcoin has proven coordination in a low trust environment is possible. Imagine if we could make coordination easier in other industries too.
> I'm not arguing that one kind of organization is always better or worse. To me it just seems complicated.
I agree, it is indeed complicated. But we need to start seriously considering concepts such as scale, systems thinking with its centralization/decentralization paradigms, and incomplete knowledge/risks if we want to design better institutions. Then we can thinker with turning the knobs one way or the other.
Reality is already ahead of you. [1] Switzerland is currently having trouble receiving masks and other medical supplies that were commissioned out of state:
Being landlocked, goods bound for Switzerland necessarily have to pass through a different country first, in this case Germany. Germany has a decree by which Corona-related medical supplies must not leave the country - and right now, this even applies to goods destined to Switzerland that are just arriving at a german port.
A fully "decentralised" world full of self-interested microstates would see a lot more of this stuff.
[1] https://www.thelocal.de/20200312/mask-hysteria
Similar to how the number 1 problem with the UN is that it has absolutely zero power to do anything.
> He urged the public to remain calm, saying WHO wasn’t recommending “measures that unnecessarily interfere with international trade or travel. (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/30/who-declares-china-coronavir...)
WHO fucked up big time IMO. thousands of employees there, most probably appointed politically by country of origin and who have nothing to do with science.
I would not trust the unstoppable gushing torrent of dubious information that is Twitter over whoever may be giving the World Health Organization its information.
Even if you 100% trust everyone you follow, and also believe them to be entirely impartial, the nature of Twitter makes it so easy to spread misinformation (mixed in with real stuff.) Twitter is optimized for viral content, not true content.
Oh, I thought you were going to say this teaches us why international trade and travel is bad, and relationships between countries should be minimal.