We probably traded off getting some very contagious diseases but sticking together to living off by ourselves. In the long run it seemed to have been a good decision for our species.
Sick people are sort of viscerally gross, we're repulsed by wet coughs, even the sound of vomiting some people can't cope with, not even on a movie -- it's an evolutionary response, I think. Animals probably have similar feelings around sick people.
Can you explain why you think this is a modern thing?
IMO if someone in your group starts vomiting can mean the food we just ate is bad so would be safe to throw up sooner then later.
I was raised with animals in a village and I have no trouble with cleaning animal excrement but human excrement's smell instantly has an effect on my stomach(I had to get some samples for a medical test from my son poop). But sure there are daily working with such thing and they get used to it.
Why do you think so? People were not shitting in the corner of the room like animals(if they had a choice), they would go shit outside and i am not aware of any historical ritual involving shit but let me know if there is some perspective I am missing.
I think there are still many people around the world that are living in extreme poverty and I am sure they still feel disgusted by shit,bad food and putrefied bodies - so are you basing your theory on something you read or is something you think is correct , I will be happy to change my mind so please inform me.
In an article on Cholera or more it's solution in London building sewers the author reposted a letter to the news paper that castigated the upper classes. The gist of it was 'You say we don't mind living in filth and stink. Assuredly we do not like it at all'
I would ignore cities since this is a modern thing and people were forced to live into those bad conditions, let's think about tribes and villages where you had the space to shit outside, even in cold winter the people would go outside and take a dump and not shit inside.
The emotion of disgust is related to disease and how likely we are to catch something. You will likely find an open festering wound disgusting, rotten food or a filthy bathroom.
The kill rate for the disease the example animal (lobster) the article spends most of its time discussing is ~50%. It isn't surprising that avoiding it is a highly consistent and avoidable behavior since the competitive advantage is so large.
Humans kick people out far before the stakes are that high. I'm reminded of how people with Leprosy were treated before there were drugs to treat it.
Generally speaking "hanging around with the least fit members of your species" is a losing strategy if you want to not starve long enough to reproduce so it should come as no surprise that evolution selects for the trait of avoiding the least fit members of one's species to varying degrees (depending on the specifics of the species and the type of "least fitness" in question).
Being cast out from society appears with many other animal spaces according to wildlife documentaries that I have seen. Public shaming is more difficult to match to animal behaviour.
Vietnam has very few cases of Covid-19, especially given its population and proximity to China.
One of the reasons why was because they had some of the strongest containment measures in the entire world. One of the strategies they did early on was to have a very strict quarantines of villages/regions known to have infections. They would quarantine second and third degree connections to people who were infected. It may seem extreme, but given the fact that the number of total infections is fewer than 500, it's hard to argue that it wasn't effective.
I'm sure strong containment would help, but that degree strikes me as an infringement upon liberties. It is extreme, and the fact that it was effective doesn't change the legality/morality of that sort of infringement on personal sovereignty.
The American philosophy on this is "temporary quarantine," in general. Feels wrong, but when you look at American behavior through that lens, a lot of things make sense (gun policy immediately comes to mind).
America has a deeply-ingrained "rugged individualism" cultural myth that includes the notion that sometimes the pioneer in the wildneress starves to death or gets set upon by wild beasts, and that's "just a thing that happens," "just God's will," "the price of freedom," etc.
It is a slippery slope. Many diseases kill. Do we start forcing people to quarantine for those? At what threshold? Do we start controlling other aspects of people’s lifes to reduce morbidity? Unhealthy behaviors? I’m reminded of the sci-fi plot of the AI tasked with not harming humanity deciding to keep each person as safe as possible by effectively putting everyone under house arrest.
This is a false dichotomy. At-risk people can stay at home as long as they need to until it's safe. Those who aren't at risk can go about their business as normal. I'd say taking away the liberties of everyone is worse than a single-digit percentage death rate.
“Give me liberty or give me death” were founding words of our country. If you don’t believe our commitment to liberty and freedom was important, then what else made America the #1 most successful country for the last century?
Slavery, abundant natural resources, a commitment to not listening to 'sound economic policy' of its times (which would have had the colonies be strictly agrarian, shipping raw cotton to the English industry - look at Egypt and India for how well that worked out), genocide of the indigenous population, many years of exerting soft and hard power to control the continent, etc.
'Liberty or death' is a nice slogan, but it is in no way a core part of what made the US the most powerful empire in history.
Where was our commitment to liberty and freedom for the Black people we made slaves? The Irish we discriminated against? The Japanese we locked up in concentration camps? The natives we killed and stole their land from?
'Liberty' has always applied to a very small culturally white subset of the population. 'Death' came to the rest.
I'm curious by what metric you perceive we've been #1. The fact that we have the largest prison population and per-capita incarceration rate comes to my mind most readily.
>If you don’t believe our commitment to liberty and freedom was important, then what else made America the #1 most successful country for the last century?
The US got through World War 2 relatively unscathed compared to the rest of the world with its manufacturing infrastructure and vast natural resources intact, profited from loans made to aid Europe's recovery, entrenched its military hegemony leveraged by being the sole nuclear power, and made the US dollar the world's reserve currency.
It is an infringement upon liberties. It's more a question of "when are such infringements, as bad as they are, warranted?" - presumably there's enough people in this case who think it's worthwhile that people cooperated.
It's this kind of thinking that has made US to be at the level they are now. The freedom of an individual has been engrained in to the heads of people so well that a huge portion does not even consider social distancing / wearing masks, because it infringes upon their liberties. Of course, it is not as extreme as locking down villages/buildings but the point stands.
Sometimes people need to understand (I know this is not a popular opinion) that for the general good they need to give up their liberties for a while.
I only wish they could see how they look from the outside. The US and the UK are laughing (crying?) stock for those of us in places where we, for the most part, take this seriously, and have it under control.
The freedom of the individual is, in most cases, more important than the greater good. If you disagree, you'll have to make a better case than just saying that it's not true. There's a very easy solution that doesn't infringe upon liberties: everyone makes his own choice according to the level of risk with which he's comfortable. A healthy twenty-something can probably go about his business and be fine; an at-risk person should stay home as long as necessary until it's safe.
> There's a very easy solution that doesn't infringe upon liberties: everyone makes his own choice according to the level of risk with which he's comfortable.
This plainly doesn't work. Social problems can't be fixed by individualist solutions. The vast number of people who are in the huge risk class (probably a quarter of Americans) can't be forced to stay in house arrest to avoid death, when much easier solutions could prevent the disease from even existing, as seen in Vietnam.
A few weeks of highly localized, tight quanatine are nothing compared to what is going to happen and be required to prevent millions from dying in the US alone. Unfortunately that ship has long sailed away..
Government force in what way? There's a big difference between telling typhoid mary that she can't work as a cook any more and telling everyone he must risk his job and livelihood for a small number of at-risk people.
There are of course also libertarians who oppose it.
As David Friedman put it:
> "There may be two libertarians somewhere who agree with each other about everything, but I am not one of them."
AFAIK, the classic "minarchist" position is that the reason to even have a government is to provide certain important Public Goods that can't be provided otherwise.
Those are (1) National defense, (2) A legal system with courts, jail, police etc, (3) Fighting epidemics. (3) is far less discussed (until 2020), but it's agreed on when mentioned.
Though in reality many such libertarians consider #3 as a sub-element of #1. For good or for bad, this has led to the debate on why if public health is to be funded, isn't it a part of the military.
In Germany there are States that are basically virus free. Still the Federal Government after asked by the States to OK lifting of the Mask duty, insist openly that lifting the duty to wear a Mask would let people loose the fear for the virus!
Is it still OK to restrict freedom to just keep people in fear?
Stronger containment measures does not always equal better. All it does is buy time at the cost of time (and human rights). The curve gets flatter, yet the volume remains the same, unless they're biding it out for a vaccine. And who knows if/when that will come.
I mean, it kind of is realistic. Many places in the world have drastically reduced cases. If every place managed to accomplish this, then through contact tracing and testing, it becomes simple to stop it in its tracks.
Unfortunately some people want to ruin things for everyone.
The worst are those who prioritize politics above fighting the disease or those who consider mitigation solutions (such as masks) as a political statement.
Yes, it is very realistic to lock poor people in the slums in their metal barracks to let them be cooked to death, before they starve to death, because they lost every income being locked in and their government is not competent or rich enough, to provide with basic supply.
But yes, Covid19 could be erridicated this way.
Seriously,
"More than 820 million people are hungry globally"
820 million people on this earth were hungry in 2019.
When you are hungry, really hungry, which is not something most people in the western world know about, and also have only limited dirty water supply, then you have other problems, than a new disease, all the rich, old people are scared about.
So no, it is not at all realistic, to have the world in its current state, in effective lock-down, without causing more harm, than good. Unless you don't care about the poor in the first place.
They also did a very strict quarantine of a city block right in the capital. My friend's business was shut down as it was located in that area. It had guards to keep the 100 residents in place and food was distributed. It was a very happy time when they went long enough with everyone testing negative enough times.
> Southeast Asia, where bats/pangolins are originally from,
Bats been all over the world much longer than humans have [1]. Pangolins are widespread across Asia and Africa, and have been for 10s of millions of years [2]
> also might have been exposed to milder coronaviruses in the past (common cold, etc).
The whole planet has been exposed to milder coronaviruses in the past and present - that's the "common" part. They are so common that they are a confounding factor in the current COVID19 antibody tests, thus reducing the confidence of a positive test result in areas that don't have a known outbreak.
I think “hanging around” is a little too loose of a term to have a truly meaningful discussion, but I generally disagree with your assertion.
If you are in a herd and can be near another other herd member, it would not be beneficial to be near the one that predators are likely to target. If you are near that member, any mistake you make while running away might be your last. Less so the further away from that member (and the predators) you place yourself.
Predators do not always catch their prey. A fit herd can escape without any of its members being eaten. A herd benefits from having its weakest members culled, not by having weak members. No herd animal I can think of would slow down a trek for its weakest members.
Young animals are often the weakest members, and plenty of adults will stay close to protect them from predators (I am thinking of Wolves where an adult bison is too large to take on, but a child is what they target). That seems like part of a winning strategy to me. There are tons of strategies employed in nature, I don't think its correct to say one is winning and one is not.
The young generally aren’t considered unfit. In the cases where they actually unfit (say a lame leg) they certainly aren’t kept around as a sacrificial offering to predators as in your example.
There are people with vitiligo that are stoned to death. Aside from cosmetic effects it is completely harmless. And that is even though we have a social aspect compared to lobsters.
Don’t forget about albinos. They’re hunted because some believe they’re witches. Others will dismember them because they believe their bones have magical powers.
Here’s a story about albinos in Africa but harmful superstitions and brutal people are rampant throughout the world, western or otherwise.
> There are people with vitiligo that are stoned to death.
Citation? I can't find any sources, even non-credible ones, on Google. In fact, your comment is the top result for me when I search 'vitiligo "stoned to death"'.
No citation, doctors I worked with told me. It's symptoms can be mistaken for leprosy and there is an immense stigma attached that escalated to violence. I doubt they were exaggerating.
Not surprising. Fitness (or lack thereof) in general is discriminated against by social animals because unfit animals attract predators and are a burden for the herd or the pack. Certainly diseased animals would fall into the 'unfit' category. Humans are no different and have been segregating or quarantining sick individuals for all of history. The similarity doesn't quite fit with COVID polices however. The slight discrepancy is that we are practicing social distancing with healthy or asymptomatic individuals.
that pre-print says median of 0.04% infection fatality rate for people < 70, based on other pre-prints they analyzed. That is a 1 in 2500 probability of dying if you are infected.
0.25% is what the preprint says for overall infection fatality rate -- 1 in 400 probability of dying if you are infected.
even assuming the preprint is near accurate (which I do not) the numbers were based on infection fatality rate, defined in the preprint as probability of death if infected, not overall.
The overall odds that you have died from corvid-19 this season so far in the US are 1 in 2433 (based on 411 deaths per Million population at https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ ).
Often the "not horrible odds" argument is made by someone being dismissive of folks who are following health orders -- I still look both ways if I cross the street.
Interestingly, those odds are not accurate for everyone, regardless of whether its a COVID death or an automobile accident death.
Literally, by spouting your 1/2433 odds, you being disingenuous for most people. A person could greatly reduce their personal odds by taking extra vitamins and eating healthy and getting good sleep, entirely without wearing a mask.
Your street crossing example is an example of you following a health order for your own personal safety. You could simply use the crosswalk without looking - that would be you relying on others to wear their mask to ensure your personal safety.
When you make your personal safety dependent on my goodwill, I'm going to let you fall, hard.
I was just trying to get apples to apples numbers to your equally disingenuous numbers.
Your point seems to be that folks should not follow health orders since the odds are good for most people, and that you will do your part to make sure folks will get what they deserve?
People don't get what you think they deserve, they always get what they deserve, period.
People haven't worried about flu death rates or (insert other disease) death rates before. Why should I go out of my way to protect someone who won't protect themselves by staying home locked away from the world?
After I recovered from my COVID, why should I wear a mask if I'm COVID antibody positive? To make you feel better?
Q: Can asymptomatic coronavirus disease be transmitted?
A: Asymptomatic transmission refers to transmission of the virus from a person, who does not develop symptoms. There are few reports of laboratory-confirmed cases who are truly asymptomatic, and to date, there has been no documented asymptomatic transmission.
IIRC, I've read the WHO tends to drag its feet with new information, and is usually the last major organization to come around to new findings. They might not be the best group to listen to in a fast moving area like this.
> But interviews with nearly 20 scientists — including a dozen W.H.O. consultants and several members of the committee that crafted the guidance — and internal emails paint a picture of an organization that, despite good intentions, is out of step with science....
> But the infection prevention and control committee in particular, experts said, is bound by a rigid and overly medicalized view of scientific evidence, is slow and risk-averse in updating its guidance and allows a few conservative voices to shout down dissent.
> “They’ll die defending their view,” said one longstanding W.H.O. consultant, who did not wish to be identified because of her continuing work for the organization. Even its staunchest supporters said the committee should diversify its expertise and relax its criteria for proof, especially in a fast-moving outbreak....
> The W.H.O. has found itself at odds with groups of scientists more than once during this pandemic.
> The agency lagged behind most of its member nations in endorsing face coverings for the public. While other organizations, including the C.D.C., have long since acknowledged the importance of transmission by people without symptoms, the W.H.O. still maintains that asymptomatic transmission is rare.
> “At the country level, a lot of W.H.O. technical staff are scratching their heads,” said a consultant at a regional office in Southeast Asia, who did not wish to be identified because he was worried about losing his contract. “This is not giving us credibility.”
They're attempting to paint this advice as coming from experts- but without attaching names, we're relying solely on the credibility of the author from the NYT. Given the incentive structure of being an internet blogger (sensationalism = $$$$), that credibility is very limited.
Science is much more rigorous than this article- but it's a fun read.
> we're relying solely on the credibility of the author from the NYT. Given the incentive structure of being an internet blogger (sensationalism = $$$$), that credibility is very limited.
because WHO is a top of the pyramid standards body (of sorts), they are slow to adopt new lines of thinking. Very waterfall, not agile. When the ISO updates a publication we have a near zero expectation it will be amended any time soon.
WHO follows a similar mechanism, which, prima facie, seems fitting — until it's not — COVID-19 being the glaring counterexample we're living through right here & now.
They don't say something different. The key part is who does not develop symptoms, i.e. ever. From what I understand the WHO basically distinguishes between asymptomatic transmission (which they say is uncommon), and presymptomatic transmission.
I don't know. If you are right and they make that distinction. I think they even know much less about presymptomatic transmissions. Because why would they leave that information out.
Because they are handling their communication terribly. A while back there were headlines about this precise topic, i.e. WHO saying that asymptomatic transmission is rare - it caused quite a stir and a number of articles followed explaining the nuances and this distinction.
I would add that they only state that there are few reports of truly asymptomatic cases (thus suggesting that asymptomatic cases don't exist) and thus so far there have been no documented case of asymptomatic transmission, which is to be expected if asymptomatic cases don't exist.
It's the risk of having any credibility to burn. In contrast, crackpots spreading rumors about the efficacy of zinc or the logical impossibility that a mask won't stop the virus but does stop oxygen from reaching the brain have no credibility to lose, so their observable percentage loss is lower.
It might be false but it's not logically impossible, for example if you were breathing through a tiny but non-filtered hole the aerodynamics could make it very difficult to breathe while allowing aerosol droplets through in small quantities. In fact, there is a good lesson buried in the insanity, which is that having something over your face, even if it is making it harder to breathe, might not be perfect protection.
Part of why the situation is complicated is that both you and the parent are correct depending on the source, and both claims are currently supported depending on the source.
I've seen mixed messages as to the infectiousness of the virus with regards to asymptomatic carriers (or those with hardly-noticeable symptoms). Can anyone point me to some recent research that clarifies this? It seems like the most important statistic for creating policy in the near future, as fevers can be detected with thermal cameras.
Can somebody explain what is meant by viral shedding here? Some of those links mention cotton swabs used for testing. So viral load is shedding of infectious "compound" into throat and nose mucus. But no symthoms means there is no cough yet. How much of that is shedding into air you breath out? Is it assumed this is the same?
I anticipate that it would be common knowledge that viral shedding is known to end (i.e. people get better or die). Outside a negligible amount of cases, is this not common knowledge?
We can get our fellow furry and otherwise critters to respond as 21st century Homosapiens. Someone simply needs to start the World Wildlife News Network and soon they too will act according to the new improvements to what worked "for all of history". :)
Birds, with many being social creatures traveling in flocks will try their best to pretend not to be sick for this reason. They know the flock will leave them behind if they show signs of illness.
Annoyingly, this translates into one's pet parrot doing its best to pretend it's not sick and makes it hard to tell when you should take it to the vet.
I have a friend with pet rabbits -- apparently this is common in most prey animals.
Individuals won't indicate that they are sick unless there's a statistical advantage to doing so. Non-social animals don't get help from their peers, and traveling birds can't help their weak peers fly even if they tried.
I would add that human beings consider "social fitness" as well, and are cousin species, Chimpanzees and Bonobos (contrary to the idea they've evolved to be peace-loving 'hippies'), also gang up on the weakest members of the band.
When did the rest of the humans ascended? Am I the only one who is still an animal? OMG!
Or is that a social study article that takes a look to how the majority of the homo sapiens (the prevalent animal species in this rock) are now under social distancing recommendations?
A lot of articles that start with a personifying narrative return to that narrative by the end. This article never did, so I guess I will never know what happened to the poor lobster that had to flee his home.
A genius university Dean recently re-labeled "Social Distancing" to "Physical Distancing". Lets not be "socially distanced", but rather simply "physically distanced".
Just putting this out there in hopes that it catches on.
There were a few news articles about changing the name, heard it on the radio for a few weeks, etc... but literally everybody in my bubble refers to it as social distancing.
Social Distancing has the first mover advantage on Physical Distancing.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadThe later is probably devolution at play, from having fallen into a too cushy a life in non-evolutionary time ranges (modern cities)...
IMO if someone in your group starts vomiting can mean the food we just ate is bad so would be safe to throw up sooner then later.
I was raised with animals in a village and I have no trouble with cleaning animal excrement but human excrement's smell instantly has an effect on my stomach(I had to get some samples for a medical test from my son poop). But sure there are daily working with such thing and they get used to it.
Because past societies were much more open to bodily functions and accepting some degrees of "dirt".
I think there are still many people around the world that are living in extreme poverty and I am sure they still feel disgusted by shit,bad food and putrefied bodies - so are you basing your theory on something you read or is something you think is correct , I will be happy to change my mind so please inform me.
Humans kick people out far before the stakes are that high. I'm reminded of how people with Leprosy were treated before there were drugs to treat it.
Generally speaking "hanging around with the least fit members of your species" is a losing strategy if you want to not starve long enough to reproduce so it should come as no surprise that evolution selects for the trait of avoiding the least fit members of one's species to varying degrees (depending on the specifics of the species and the type of "least fitness" in question).
They "care" (in as much as they care for anything) about results...
One of the reasons why was because they had some of the strongest containment measures in the entire world. One of the strategies they did early on was to have a very strict quarantines of villages/regions known to have infections. They would quarantine second and third degree connections to people who were infected. It may seem extreme, but given the fact that the number of total infections is fewer than 500, it's hard to argue that it wasn't effective.
Which is more of an infringement on liberty, a temporary quarantine or permanent death?
America has a deeply-ingrained "rugged individualism" cultural myth that includes the notion that sometimes the pioneer in the wildneress starves to death or gets set upon by wild beasts, and that's "just a thing that happens," "just God's will," "the price of freedom," etc.
'Liberty or death' is a nice slogan, but it is in no way a core part of what made the US the most powerful empire in history.
'Liberty' has always applied to a very small culturally white subset of the population. 'Death' came to the rest.
The US got through World War 2 relatively unscathed compared to the rest of the world with its manufacturing infrastructure and vast natural resources intact, profited from loans made to aid Europe's recovery, entrenched its military hegemony leveraged by being the sole nuclear power, and made the US dollar the world's reserve currency.
Sometimes people need to understand (I know this is not a popular opinion) that for the general good they need to give up their liberties for a while.
Following your logic, we should say that people must have sufficiently armored vehicles to go out, so that it's safe in case they're hit by a drunk.
This plainly doesn't work. Social problems can't be fixed by individualist solutions. The vast number of people who are in the huge risk class (probably a quarter of Americans) can't be forced to stay in house arrest to avoid death, when much easier solutions could prevent the disease from even existing, as seen in Vietnam.
A few weeks of highly localized, tight quanatine are nothing compared to what is going to happen and be required to prevent millions from dying in the US alone. Unfortunately that ship has long sailed away..
Even hard core libertarians accept government force to contain epidemics.
I'm saying the principle is clear.
A quick Googling suggests about 60 million people over 65 in the US. Then we should add some millions for problems like diabetes. So, 1 in 5? 1 in 4?
Further, some young people seem to have permanent lung damage from the disease.
As David Friedman put it:
> "There may be two libertarians somewhere who agree with each other about everything, but I am not one of them."
AFAIK, the classic "minarchist" position is that the reason to even have a government is to provide certain important Public Goods that can't be provided otherwise.
Those are (1) National defense, (2) A legal system with courts, jail, police etc, (3) Fighting epidemics. (3) is far less discussed (until 2020), but it's agreed on when mentioned.
Is it still OK to restrict freedom to just keep people in fear?
Unfortunately some people want to ruin things for everyone.
Seriously,
"More than 820 million people are hungry globally"
"https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/15-07-2019-world-hunger...
820 million people on this earth were hungry in 2019.
When you are hungry, really hungry, which is not something most people in the western world know about, and also have only limited dirty water supply, then you have other problems, than a new disease, all the rich, old people are scared about.
So no, it is not at all realistic, to have the world in its current state, in effective lock-down, without causing more harm, than good. Unless you don't care about the poor in the first place.
The vaccines on trial and in research, may not work.
Containment does work. Isolate the sick. Lock down for 4 weeks. Face masks everywhere. Keep socially distant. Avoid indoor settings.
Get groceries delivered, or have an employee inside do the shopping and packaging, and you pick up the order outside.
These are hard choices, but it can effectively kill this virus in 4 weeks. It’s not rocket science anymore.
Bats been all over the world much longer than humans have [1]. Pangolins are widespread across Asia and Africa, and have been for 10s of millions of years [2]
> also might have been exposed to milder coronaviruses in the past (common cold, etc).
The whole planet has been exposed to milder coronaviruses in the past and present - that's the "common" part. They are so common that they are a confounding factor in the current COVID19 antibody tests, thus reducing the confidence of a positive test result in areas that don't have a known outbreak.
1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10914-005-6945-2#....
2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangolin
I could imagine in some circumstances it isn't. The slowest in your group will likely be first targeted / caught by a predator.
If you are in a herd and can be near another other herd member, it would not be beneficial to be near the one that predators are likely to target. If you are near that member, any mistake you make while running away might be your last. Less so the further away from that member (and the predators) you place yourself.
Predators do not always catch their prey. A fit herd can escape without any of its members being eaten. A herd benefits from having its weakest members culled, not by having weak members. No herd animal I can think of would slow down a trek for its weakest members.
Here’s a story about albinos in Africa but harmful superstitions and brutal people are rampant throughout the world, western or otherwise.
https://www.cnn.com/2016/06/07/africa/africa-albino-hunted-b...
Citation? I can't find any sources, even non-credible ones, on Google. In fact, your comment is the top result for me when I search 'vitiligo "stoned to death"'.
We’ve also been doing this forever. If I go somewhere and someone has a runny nose and is coughing, I am going to stay away. Nothing new here.
COVID is different in the sense that we assume everyone has it. We distance from healthy looking individuals.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20101253v...
0.25% is what the preprint says for overall infection fatality rate -- 1 in 400 probability of dying if you are infected.
And for the 2017-2018 flu season, the odds of dying from it were 1 in 5400. [2]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
2. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
The overall odds that you have died from corvid-19 this season so far in the US are 1 in 2433 (based on 411 deaths per Million population at https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ ).
Often the "not horrible odds" argument is made by someone being dismissive of folks who are following health orders -- I still look both ways if I cross the street.
Literally, by spouting your 1/2433 odds, you being disingenuous for most people. A person could greatly reduce their personal odds by taking extra vitamins and eating healthy and getting good sleep, entirely without wearing a mask.
Your street crossing example is an example of you following a health order for your own personal safety. You could simply use the crosswalk without looking - that would be you relying on others to wear their mask to ensure your personal safety.
When you make your personal safety dependent on my goodwill, I'm going to let you fall, hard.
Your point seems to be that folks should not follow health orders since the odds are good for most people, and that you will do your part to make sure folks will get what they deserve?
People haven't worried about flu death rates or (insert other disease) death rates before. Why should I go out of my way to protect someone who won't protect themselves by staying home locked away from the world?
After I recovered from my COVID, why should I wear a mask if I'm COVID antibody positive? To make you feel better?
Q: Can asymptomatic coronavirus disease be transmitted?
A: Asymptomatic transmission refers to transmission of the virus from a person, who does not develop symptoms. There are few reports of laboratory-confirmed cases who are truly asymptomatic, and to date, there has been no documented asymptomatic transmission.
IIRC, I've read the WHO tends to drag its feet with new information, and is usually the last major organization to come around to new findings. They might not be the best group to listen to in a fast moving area like this.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/04/health/239-experts-with-o...
> But interviews with nearly 20 scientists — including a dozen W.H.O. consultants and several members of the committee that crafted the guidance — and internal emails paint a picture of an organization that, despite good intentions, is out of step with science....
> But the infection prevention and control committee in particular, experts said, is bound by a rigid and overly medicalized view of scientific evidence, is slow and risk-averse in updating its guidance and allows a few conservative voices to shout down dissent.
> “They’ll die defending their view,” said one longstanding W.H.O. consultant, who did not wish to be identified because of her continuing work for the organization. Even its staunchest supporters said the committee should diversify its expertise and relax its criteria for proof, especially in a fast-moving outbreak....
> The W.H.O. has found itself at odds with groups of scientists more than once during this pandemic.
> The agency lagged behind most of its member nations in endorsing face coverings for the public. While other organizations, including the C.D.C., have long since acknowledged the importance of transmission by people without symptoms, the W.H.O. still maintains that asymptomatic transmission is rare.
> “At the country level, a lot of W.H.O. technical staff are scratching their heads,” said a consultant at a regional office in Southeast Asia, who did not wish to be identified because he was worried about losing his contract. “This is not giving us credibility.”
Science is much more rigorous than this article- but it's a fun read.
You mean these names? They're linked in the article.
https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa939...
They're credible enough and this action public enough that the WHO got the message: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/health/coronavirus-aeroso....
> we're relying solely on the credibility of the author from the NYT. Given the incentive structure of being an internet blogger (sensationalism = $$$$), that credibility is very limited.
The NYT isn't a blog.
because WHO is a top of the pyramid standards body (of sorts), they are slow to adopt new lines of thinking. Very waterfall, not agile. When the ISO updates a publication we have a near zero expectation it will be amended any time soon.
WHO follows a similar mechanism, which, prima facie, seems fitting — until it's not — COVID-19 being the glaring counterexample we're living through right here & now.
I would add that they only state that there are few reports of truly asymptomatic cases (thus suggesting that asymptomatic cases don't exist) and thus so far there have been no documented case of asymptomatic transmission, which is to be expected if asymptomatic cases don't exist.
But the WHO are medical professional people. And I am not. Like most people.
And I want to be able to trust the professionals.
And trusted and cited for medical facts all around.
But if they would be caught bending medical facts to political will .. that would be not helpful.
The same confusion happened over masks.
https://www.physiciansweekly.com/covid-19-viral-shedding-can...
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejme2009758
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/931898
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0869-5
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/sars-cov-2-viral-load-and-the-...
Annoyingly, this translates into one's pet parrot doing its best to pretend it's not sick and makes it hard to tell when you should take it to the vet.
Individuals won't indicate that they are sick unless there's a statistical advantage to doing so. Non-social animals don't get help from their peers, and traveling birds can't help their weak peers fly even if they tried.
Or is that a social study article that takes a look to how the majority of the homo sapiens (the prevalent animal species in this rock) are now under social distancing recommendations?
A genius university Dean recently re-labeled "Social Distancing" to "Physical Distancing". Lets not be "socially distanced", but rather simply "physically distanced".
Just putting this out there in hopes that it catches on.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/15/world/social-distancing-l...
https://globalnews.ca/news/6717166/what-is-physical-distanci...
There were a few news articles about changing the name, heard it on the radio for a few weeks, etc... but literally everybody in my bubble refers to it as social distancing.
Social Distancing has the first mover advantage on Physical Distancing.