Coronavirus (Covid-19) Discussion
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With Japan, the truth is that we have no idea. The best indicators I have seen are those that trace the daily COVID deaths, starting all the curves at the same point (generally at the day the country hit 10 deaths). Unfortunately they are imperfect because many countries do not report the full COVID death number (e.g., France only counts deaths at hospitals). They are also a lagging indicator. It's very easy for countries to underreport the number of cases, willingly or not.
Japan has some things going for it, like the widespread use of masks, the fact that most people don't routinely shake hands, etc. It also has elements going against it like the high population density. In the past, the governments and media were rather less transparent than in the US; I'm not sure if it's still the case.
from all the new measures like distancing and stringent hygienic routines (which don't get me wrong is also important), the biggest takeaway i have so far on this ongoing issue by seeing how most countries deal with this is that contact tracing is the key and it is (or was) the most important issue on keeping cases low and stoping spread.
it worries me a lot when countries admit that they cannot link a case back to its source or that they have no idea where certain case numbers have been or be in contact with. because in that situation, there could be mega clusters that they have no idea about.
it might be easy to say this is perfect for smaller countries like singpaore and taiwan and it also might be a whole different ball game for a bigger one. sad to say, most didn't realise or implement it early enough before things spiral out of control.
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@louisbosco I largely agree with you. I believe that the largest failing of Western democracies so far has been the lack of fast testing.
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Booze.
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It’ll be interesting to see if his data proves correct.
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Quote from above article: "While many epidemiologists are warning of months, or even years, of massive social disruption and millions of deaths, Levitt says the data simply don’t support such a dire scenario"
It depends what people mean by "months, or even years". If he's saying that everything over 4 weeks is too pessimistic, he's definitely going against the green. If he's saying: "we will have figured something in the next 2-3 months that will allow us to climb out of the hole", then I think he's well within the consensus.I haven't seen anyone mentioning millions of deaths in Western countries if we actually act semi rationally. Millions of deaths are if we just go about our business as if nothing had changed.
In other words, I think this article is based on a straw man argument.
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Still can’t find sanitizer or Clorox at the store. I’ve got a half a bottle of sanitizer left which I use sparingly. Plenty of bog roll and paper towels at Target though
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Still can’t find sanitizer or Clorox at the store. I’ve got a half a bottle of sanitizer left which I use sparingly. Plenty of bog roll and paper towels at Target though
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Hand sanitizer? In Austria pharmacies started to make their own…
https://www.who.int/gpsc/5may/Guide_to_Local_Production.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK144054/ -
On a different note:
Tokyo’s infection spike after Olympic delay sparks questions
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-30/tokyos-infection-spike-after-olympic-delay-sparks-questions -
I've found that sanitizing spray and wipes remained available long after hand sanitizer disappeared, and so did hard cleaning vinegar. All those will work (and so will soap as we all know by now).
Correct. For non medical people, washing hands with a soap for 30 sec is sufficient, the viral envelope of SARS-CoV-2 is not very firm.
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I've found that sanitizing spray and wipes remained available long after hand sanitizer disappeared, and so did hard cleaning vinegar. All those will work (and so will soap as we all know by now).
I’ve still got about 3/4 a bottle of Clorox left that I use for surfaces, so that should last awhile. but it’s hard to know when these items will be available again which is why I look. I did buy another refill bottle of liquid hand soap since my son and I use a lot of it. The wipes are redundant but I still look in case my ex-wife needs some.
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Much is reported about deaths in hospitals in the UK, and the British media has just picked up on residential care home deaths in France today.
Sadly we have had our first reports of care home deaths in our work today. The care home staff work tirelessly, putting themselves and others at risk because they do not have any PPE. We have been screaming at Government to get supplies to care providers for weeks. There is a significantly greater risk of deaths within the care home population than there is in hospitals. It just isn't being reported here yet.
I need PPE and I'm just not getting it. I've signed up to volunteer in my local area too, and will be in higher risk areas. We need those supplies yesterday!!
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@den1mhead thank you, but not posted for acknowledgement, just to highlight that there are 10s of 1000s of staff and volunteers that don't have access to the supplies the health services do.
Its easy to criticise thos in office, but honestly, regardless of political ideology, they have a thankless task at the moment, and for the first time in my living memory parties in the UK are pulling together.
I am proud to live in a democracy, and my role in my LA is to have oversight of international and domestic legislation with regard to deprivation of liberty. Any signatory to the ECtHR is bound not to breach the convention unless it does so in accordance with an instrument of law. The UK could use legislation to control infectious disease - if you were suspected of diagnosed as infected, but not the non-contagious general population. Governments had to get that legislation written and through Parliament. The Coronavirus Bill was 329 pages written in a few days. There are also lots of separate regulations. The British people should read them. They are Orwellian!
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In the US there was a huge push for biothreat regulation in 2001 after the anthrax attacks. They had a biomonitoring and bioresponse program for about a decade. After that, it was called a boondoggle and was dismantled with extreme prejudice. Should be interesting if any of the politicians that called it a waste of time are eating crow right now.
Dr. Fauci was one of the people that screamed an yelled that it was necessary, but it fell upon deaf ears. -
If you guys have time you should look at how Governor Larry Hogan has been handling the Covid19 thing. He's been really proactive and had intelligent plans to control the spread. Even though MD has a pretty decent sized population, we don't have that many infections or deaths.
I'm proud to have voted for him twice.
