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Post 13 Mar 2020, 4:40 pm

I am still reading droplets are the main way of spreading the virus while surfaces may do so but are not thought to be the major way it spreads--is there some new study out there on this, RJ?
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Post 14 Mar 2020, 5:54 am

freeman3 wrote:I am still reading droplets are the main way of spreading the virus while surfaces may do so but are not thought to be the major way it spreads--is there some new study out there on this, RJ?


Thanks; you are correct. From the WHO:

It is not certain how long the virus that causes COVID-19 survives on surfaces, but it seems to behave like other coronaviruses. Studies suggest that coronaviruses (including preliminary information on the COVID-19 virus) may persist on surfaces for a few hours or up to several days. This may vary under different conditions (e.g. type of surface, temperature or humidity of the environment).


So, it is mostly, but not completely, spread by close contact and touching other people.
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Post 14 Mar 2020, 2:02 pm

Regardless of what we might guess as to what the outcome will be, it is certainly necessary to game-plan for the worst case scenario. And it should be a federally-coordinated response. How many intensive care patients would you expect for each state? Major city? What is the capacity for treating intensive care patients? How much are existing plans to expand that capacity? How many ventilators and safety equipment would you need for each local area?

It seems to me we need the federal government to stockpile four things that could deal with a worst-case scenario:

Ventilators
Safety Equipment for health care workers
A mobile group of health care workers
A team of workers to convert/expand ICU capacity and equipment also

Then have a distribution network to get these four things quickly to hard-hit areas.

So the federal government would need to be in constant contact with hospitals around the country. And we should be getting testing kits to every hospital and maybe every urgent care center. Those are the front-lines. They keep talking about a million test kits...where are they going?

We also should be talking to hospitals about triage. Because clearly a lot of people in the ER are not there for life or death problems.

I don't exactly have a lot of confidence that we've got any concrete plans if the worst-case scenario happens At least Trump has stopped shaking hands...
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Post 15 Mar 2020, 10:41 am

freeman3
I don't exactly have a lot of confidence that we've got any concrete plans if the worst-case scenario happens


Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a Pulitzer-prize winning historian. She is also a Senior Fellow of International Affairs and Agora Fellow in Residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where she co-directs LSE Arena, a program on disinformation and 21st century propaganda. The link below is an article in which she reflects on the possible historical significance of this pandemic.Your unease about "concrete plans" scratches the surface Freeman..

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... m=referral
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Post 16 Mar 2020, 2:50 pm

We're not going to be able to change fundamentals of our democracy like a two party system. But we do have to firm up the foundations of our democracy. Give more people a stake in the existing system. I remember reading some time ago that democracies generally do not succeed (or at least there is a higher rate of failure) unless GDP per capita is $2,000 or over. I think there is a tipping point where there is enough bourgeois so to speak who want their economic power reflected in political power and totalitarianism can be overthrown.

Obviously, our country has plenty of money. But a lot of people arent getting basic things like health care, adequate shelter, even food. Not being able to get jobs that pay enough money to live on. It's not necessarily true that people will be loyal to an abstract concept like democracy. I mean, their vote means very little by itself and if powerful interests are having a hugely disproportionate say in the decisions of government, so democracy is just an illusion, anyway. So they look for a charismatic leader who will speak for them. Sound familiar? The ancient Greeks talked about this; it's nothing new.

The one thing the Great Depression and World War II forced the country to do was have the government intervene in the economy to make sure people were taken care of to a certain extent . It wasn't communism, it wasnt socialism; and it wasnt fascism. But if FDR had not done that then our country would have almost certainly turned to one of those types of "isms".

But once the danger was over things started to slowly turn. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 made it tougher on unions. But still workers did ok until the 70s changed things. The cost of the Vietnam War and the oil embargo hurt the US economy and gave the right-wing an opportunity. Right-wing think tanks were funded. Propaganda went out that the government was the problem. Unions were the problem. And then Ronald Reagan got elected and they were able to start chipping away at the foundations of the liberal state: fair wages, adequate health care, pensions, access to an affordable college education.

So now we have a greedy, narcissistic buffoon who hopefully has been exposed by his pitiful response to this crisis. Things that might be almost funny normally are not funny when his being president could wind up costing a lot of people their lives. But that is only the start. We need to get back to the liberal state if we want a stable democracy: everyone having access to health care, everyone having access to an affordable college education, liveable wages at a minimum and fair wages overall, and very high taxes on high incomes.

The anti-government ideology of the right-wing has played a part in the three major crisies of the 21st Century: (1)The Bush Administration deemphacized counter-terrorism before 9-11; (2) its ideology of deregulating the financial markets created the Financial Crisis and also led to it not doing anything to stop it until 2 years after it was clear the housing market was out of control; and the Trump Administration's contempt for government led to it not putting competent people in government, it got rid of the pandemic group of the NSC, and it does not appear that it wants to have a national response to the crisis, leaving too much of the responsibilty to states. We do not have internal borders so the federal government needs to be heavily involved in coordinating things. I swear to god this Fauci guy is about the only guy you trust in that Administration; they're extremely lucky they have him.

Anyway, Biden will not change things much. He is part of the existing order. I am extremely disappointed that Warren did not appeal to more people, because I think she could have made things a lot better. She has the intellect to take Sanders' criticisms of the existing order and come up with policies that changes things. When I was in law school a criminal law professor said something that was brilliant: it's not ideology that determines whether someone is a good prosecutor or criminal defense attorney, it's whether as a kid you liked to build blocks or whether you liked to knock them down. Sanders is good at knocking blocks down and is better in being a moral opponent to the existing order, while Warren is better at building blocks up and would make a good president. Biden is good...I dont know what the hell he is good at except getting along with people.
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Post 17 Mar 2020, 7:34 am

freeman3
Anyway, Biden will not change things much
.

Incrementalist's never do. The one thing that will likely change significantly is a return to a respect for expertise within government, and for government itself. Its all the expertise from Obama's administration that Trump eliminated .

There is a chance Warren will be VP....or Stacey Abrahams or Sally Yates, who is a blank slate...
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Post 18 Mar 2020, 4:01 pm

If it takes 12-18 months for a vaccine and the virus does not go away..we're not going to hibernate for that long, are we? The economy will be in shambles. So I started thinking about testing and whether massive testing would be the answer. Like if you could test everyone every day, certify they are ok so they can go out (maybe you could have scanners people would check into with their phones when they enter a building--if you have a negative test you can go in ). I just heard that an Orange County lab got processing down to an hour. I know this is an absurd, impossible idea, but maybe someone could figure how to do this. Or a self-test you could do at home, the results that are immediately sent out to a processing place. You could log in on video to make sure it's done correctly and the result verified. Something.
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Post 19 Mar 2020, 6:40 am

freeman3 wrote:If it takes 12-18 months for a vaccine and the virus does not go away..we're not going to hibernate for that long, are we? The economy will be in shambles. So I started thinking about testing and whether massive testing would be the answer. Like if you could test everyone every day, certify they are ok so they can go out (maybe you could have scanners people would check into with their phones when they enter a building--if you have a negative test you can go in ). I just heard that an Orange County lab got processing down to an hour. I know this is an absurd, impossible idea, but maybe someone could figure how to do this. Or a self-test you could do at home, the results that are immediately sent out to a processing place. You could log in on video to make sure it's done correctly and the result verified. Something.


Relief would also come from medicines that combat the virus. That can come much more quickly than 12 months. There are already some rumors that the Japanese have something …
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Post 19 Mar 2020, 1:06 pm

Trump says he doesnt want to procure safety equipment and ventilators and send it out to the states because the federal government is not a "shipping clerk".
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Post 19 Mar 2020, 5:22 pm

In line with RJ's post the FDA is taking a look at some drugs--I think one was for malaria--and trying to get then approved for use against this virus. The history of anti-virals is not great, but certainly partial effectiveness is better than nothing. The other thing is that at some point there is a tipping point (I think) where the virus burns itself out. I believe a virus needs to have on average have each patient infect one another person to keep propagating. The more people that are infected the less opportunities the virus has to infect other people. China looks as if it has been effective in nipping it in the bud. They had zero new cases today But even if we have failed at that, if we flatten the curve so were not overwhelmed with cases at some point with enough percentage of the population infected, it will start to get easier to stop. At that point, we can perhaps focus on restarting the economy again, keeping some measures but not all, and continue to take steps to protect vulnerable populations.
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Post 20 Mar 2020, 7:52 am

The current working hypothesis is that the human body builds up immunity once exposed. (This is the same as all other virus.)
If 80% of those who get the virus have only mild to no symptoms .... then you have to worry about the other 20%.
So far, of them half get sick enough to need hospitalization.. That's the real need...

So the job is to balance the hospital capacity with need. An effective quarantine will have to be in place for a while but epidemiologists and public health officials will need to figure out when its time to start letting people get out and be infected again - because those who get really sick will have ready access to a ventilator.

I've been self quarantined since Friday... And don't expect to get out for another week. Most of Toronto has been like that, as we're a cooperative bunch plus we had SARS a dozen years ago and saw this first hand. It certainly slows business down...

When we see the beaches in Florida yesterday ... I have a feeling things could get real bad in places like the sunshine state. Maybe that means the pandemic surges through, a lot more people die, but the event is over sooner then later.
Without sounding too cynical, that's sometimes called Darwinism...
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Post 21 Mar 2020, 10:29 am

I'm starting to think that we should measure the physical distancing in months not weeks. In the US we are still seeing an escalation of people getting the viruses, independent of the knuckleheads in Florida. In Italy we are still seeing an increase in death rates. In the Boston hospitals, many nurses and doctors have the virus but didn't realize it. Not only will this lessen the number of medical staff, it means that our existing medical staff is still spreading it.

I think flattening the curve will take until at least late April. But after that, if people go back to normal, won't the curve just bulge again? I'm thinking August. Lucky for me that I've been practicing social distancing for many years.
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Post 21 Mar 2020, 1:19 pm

You may be right...but how does the economy function during a long-time lockdown? That's going to be an extraordinary different question to answer.

I don't think a $1,200 check is going to last very long...
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Post 21 Mar 2020, 2:08 pm

Here is an interesting article discussing the results of modeling of different societal strategies to combat the virus.

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5e74 ... b7c5416fac

I dont think the strategies discussed in the article are workable in the long-term. We need to come up with something else. Some way to re-start the economy after a lockdown occurs. And the only way to do that (I think) is to have real-time knowledge of who has (or who may have) the disease. Because otherwise as RJs notes it will just come back with a vengeance. What if the virus causes tell-tale changes on heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, temperature, etc? And something like an apple watch could note that?

That test I talked about got approved by the FDA--it takes 45 minutes to get results. Not good enough, though.

We need a game-changing advance.
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Post 21 Mar 2020, 7:50 pm

I think it's inexcusable by the way that Trump has not launched a massive federal program to make more masks, ventilators, and hospital beds. He says he is a war-time president...what does he think you do in a war? You marshall the vast resources of the nation to fight the enemy. That's what we did during WWII--building enormous numbers of ships, planes, tanks, artillery shells, etc. That was not done by California, Illinois, or New York--that was done by the federal government. If the guy had any knowledge of history, he would know that.