Bad science fiction.
Current best estimate is 5-8% of the population have antibodies. To get to herd immunity through infection by the end of the year would mean a million or so extra deaths, which even Republican politicians are starting to decide is a bad plan.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/06/25/coronavirus-cases-10-times-larger/
Did you not read my reply to Honkman about the same thing? I’m guessing not, or you wouldn’t have repeated what he said.
.Random discussion of Covid-19 not specifically related to restaurants or food - #77 by DoctorChow
Pool testing does sound good in principle.
My concern right now is that there are a lot of people that actually think things will be just fine by the end of this year or early next year, and are letting down their guard. I’m also concerned that excess hospital capacity, spare PPE and ventilator inventory, aren’t being built up. If we fail to have adequate hospital capacity and capabilities we may once again have to “flatten the curve” by slamming the doors shut.
Covid-19 is a coronavirus in the same general category as the common cold. If we do find a “cure” or vaccine for covid-19, one for the common cold should not be too far off. I think that covid-19 is going to be with us indefinitely, but will become less common and less severe, maybe joining the ranks of a “chest cold”…
In the meantime, the issue is how to deal with having lifeblood in our personal lives and in society, while containing the infection rate, because it’s going to go on for a long time. That’s what the experts and the governments are wrestling with. I’m glad I’m not one of them to have to make decisions that affect so many of us.
Dude, when you first posted your comment on that link all you had was the below sentence.
First, it was not obvious as @honkman stated.
Second, you keep editing your comments over long periods of time. I totally edit my comments after the fact for clarity but expecting people to go back and then read an entire paragraph addendum that didn’t exist previously and that can change the entire meaning of the original comment is confusing at best.
OK, I thought it was obvious; you & Honkman (and probably others) didn’t. Fair enough. And yes, I do tend to edit my posts, sometimes many times.
I tacked on the “best case scenario” paragraph in the first place because as I was writing the reply to Robert’s Denmark comment, I started thinking about all of the ridiculously optimistic blather that’s floating around in the news. It’s been frustrating, and I wanted to speak out on that, tongue-in-cheek, without a new post.
The ridiculously optimistic blather has nothing to do with thinking.
I meant “blather”, or something like that. I’ve edited the wording. Good catch.
Scientists’ egos and semantic hairsplitting delayed widespread response to asymptomatic transmission for months.
This was a seriously dismaying read.
“Consider that about 6.5% — or 8.4 million — American households don’t have a checking or a savings account with a bank, according to a survey from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. The vast majority of them are Black or Latino — the same people who are getting COVID-19 at disproportionate rates, are losing their jobs at disproportionate rates and, in California, are so poor that they are becoming homeless at disproportionate rates.”
Financial exclusion is a problem for lots of reasons. Requiring stores to accept cash will have a negligible effect and creates an unnecessary expense for businesses whose customers rarely use cash anyway.
From the NY Times’s updates:
… in hot-spot states like Arizona, Florida and Texas, many people have had a hard time getting tested, with long lines and crowding that raises tensions and the risk of infection. “Pushing, yelling, ZERO social distancing enforced,” one Houston resident wrote on Twitter. Two testing sites at Houston stadiums reached capacity and had to turn people away just a few hours after opening on Saturday, according to the local health department.
No social distancing in line to get tested in a state where the positivity rate is on track to pass 20% next week, which means that around one in five people in the line is positive.
The next day:
“Because of the public-private partnership that President Trump initiated, we are literally able to test anyone in the country that would want a test who comes forward,” Mr. Pence said.
Meanwhile, back in Sweden:
Note the steady drop in intensive care requirements since April there.
At the outset, there were two ways worldwide to mitigate this unstoppable virus. One was to “flatten the curve” so as to not exceed existing hospital bed capacity, PPE, and ventilators and other equipment presently on hand to treat the very sick.
The other way would have been to massively invest in emergency measures involving federal and state procurements and other spending to greatly increase the headroom needed to meet worst-case medical requirements. Rather than spend two trillion dollars in the US on after-the-fact band-aid payouts following severe economic damage from lockdowns, two trillion dollars could have been spent crash manufacturing PPE and ventilators. MASH-type temporary hospitals could have been built, staffed, and maintained until the peak had passed, without foreclosing on the ability to rapidly deploy them again at any later time. Doing these things would “raise the bar” of peak medical capacity so as to be prepared to deal with the very worst case of medical exigency; i.e., the projected curve with the highest peak.
Rather than trying to “flatten the curve”, in other words, allow the virus go as it will but be prepared to deal with it medically by dramatically raising the capacity maximum.
The lack of action in January and February forced the issue in March, when there was no longer time to raise the bar; there was no choice but to “flatten the curve”, which was done forcibly by way of government intervention. To flatten the curve, we closed the economy. We cancelled everything. We “locked down”.
Deaths from this new virus were and are inevitable even with adequate medical capacity, and when originally talking about “flattening the curve”, it was said to be likely that the same number of people would die by either path. (Although, one thing that many now agree on in hindsight that was done very wrong was failing to protect those in care homes, where so many of the early deaths occurred.)
The largest wave of the 1918 Spanish flu lasted just two months. There was no vaccine. There was a lot of hospital overload and a lot of unavoidable deaths, including my DH’s grandmother. But it ended, and life moved on.
I continue to be keenly interested in the Swedish approach. People seem to think that they haven’t done anything at all there to mitigate the spread, which isn’t true. Their economy has suffered, but mostly because they rely on trade with countries whose economies have greatly slowed.
Getting back to pool testing, it seems like it might not work if the pool size exceeds the positive test rate in a given area.
For example, if 10% of a given population being tested by the current method(s) are positive, and the pool sample size is 20 people, statistically two people in each pool would be positive. That would in turn cause the collective pool to be considered positive. Am I missing something here?
The pool could be very small, though, and still offer some advantages. At the extreme, a pool of only two would double the rates of case elimination and cases to trace.
The latest pronouncement from the Grand Guru of All Things Infectious:
Like: Oh, really? You just figured that out?
No - there is also the Asian approach (SK, Vietnam) that so far looks like the most successful approach.
And raising the bar with a virus you haven’t understood within 1-2 months enough to treat in hospitals effectively would have been a complete disasters with millions of deaths. More capacity in hospitals doesn’t lower IFR significantly if you haven’t researched the virus enough
No - it was also always said that it gives time to find repurposed drugs to better treat patients. You still haven’t understood what flatten the curve means and why it is done. The AUC is not the same
He always understood it but it is tactic now that he has to raise the case against anti-vaxxer because many people don’t understand that if there are too many (and the US is unfortunately the most prevalent country) we all will suffer and a vaccine might not end this situation (especially with the orange idiot repeating anti-vaxxer comments over the last years)
I would also say this comes across as disingenuous and symptomatic of bad faith arguments.