I'm not so confident. National security decisions do get made by shadowy figures around round tables.

It's pretty well documented that China covered things up as long as possible; we needed a Chinese doctor to warn us (which is risking one's life in China ... and he died, but we're told it's just coincidence).

I haven't gone into the exact timing of events, so don't have an opinion of what's the more plausible cause of the cover up. — boethius

The ineptness can be also simply wishful thinking. And many it actually works for the politician. That it's a local epidemic that goes away. That you get of with just a scare. Then harsh measures would look like panic.

You see, there are very many outbreaks of diseases that don't make it, are just local things.
For example, look at the list of List of Ebola outbreaks where there are over 30 minor outbreaks of Ebola or other Filovirida. And as I've given as an example earlier, every now and then there is a case of the bubonic plague in the US.

Anyway, I don't know the story so well. But I guess history writing will tell us later.

Any thoughts on how this whole toilet paper craze got started? — Echarmion

Maybe someone had nightmares?

So, what were your points about the economic cost of stopping flying actually about? — boethius

You tell me; with the appropriate quotations, and I'll respond. I'm not going to respond to words you are trying to put into my mouth.

My position has not been an ethical one about what ought to be done to save (mostly elderly) people's lives, as opposed to what ought to be done to stabilize the economy. I have said that the human cost of collapsing our economy is incalculable; that neither you nor I know whether closing international travel early would have resulted in a worse or better outcome overall.

I even said early on that collapse of the economy as soon as possible, since that is arguably the only thing which will dramatically reduce fossil fuel use, may well be the best thing for the planet and humanity overall. My objections to your words have been based on their presenting an overly simplistic analysis.

but that they didn't realize the deaths would be so high as to crash the system s is the incompetence

They may have known this, but that it was already to late, they were between a rock and a hard place.
Johnson's economic advisors would have informed him how fragile the UK economy is at the moment and that any wide reaching measures adopted would bring the house of cards tumbling down. So they couldn't do anything that could compromise the economy. Instead they came out with the strategy line of delay and just keep washing your hands all the time. They might have also known that the number of deaths and the chaos in the health care system would crash the economy as well, but again, there was nothing they could do to prevent any of it.

No10 has been helpless right from the start and the sooner we have everyone staying in their homes except for food shopping and essential trips, the more likely we will be able to ride the first wave intact.

I have grave concerns about the US, it looks like the're going to have a rough ride.

No10 has been helpless right from the start and the sooner we have everyone staying in their homes except for food shopping and essential trips, the more likely we will be able to ride the first wave intact. — Punshhh

Yes, this is right, but I wonder if the economy will be able to sustain itself intact for extended periods where no one is working. It's going to have to be a balancing act between economic considerations and health considerations.

I even said early on that collapse of the economy as soon as possible, since that is arguably the only thing which will dramatically reduce fossil fuel use, may well be the best thing for the planet and humanity overall. — Janus

Are you saying that you'd welcome the death of three billion people worldwide as long as you could have your precious environmental fantasies? This is the trouble with leftists. They claim to love humanity but they hate people. And if you don't agree with them they'd just as soon see you dead.

The modern welfare state was introduced, by and large, by religious conservatives in reaction to the growing power of unions and socialist parties who ran on a platform of those ideas. Socialist "innovation" implemented by conservatives to retain power. Learn some history.

Keynesian economics is a theory not an institution.

Any idea why Germany has a CFR almost an order of magnitude lower than everyone else?

4.5k cases, 9 deaths, comes out at .2 percent. The only other country that comes close is south Korea. Is Germany underreporting deaths? Keeping people on life support far longer? Just random chance?

Literally 16 hours ago:

In a few days they'll do like everyone else and lock down, and they'll say "well, our gamble didn't work, but it was a jolly good try". — boethius

Now:

U.K. to Accelerate Measures After Virus Cases Jump Faster Than Anticipated — Bloombers news

It was obviously never a "strategy" of any sort, just a propaganda slight of hand on gullible people to make them look more responsible: "Well, we had a plan, but we're big enough to admit it's not on track and so we're changing our approach".

Any idea why Germany has a CFR almost an order of magnitude lower than everyone else? — Echarmion

It might be the sausages and sauerkraut.. Reports from Japan suggest that keeping your mouth moist, sipping water every 10 minutes, washes the virus into the stomach, and keeps it from the lungs. Keep the virus population low until the immune system catches up. So Salty and acid diet might help.

Or that could all be bullshit, but you heard it here first!

Yes, this is right, but I wonder if the economy will be able to sustain itself intact for extended periods where no one is working. It's going to have to be a balancing act between economic considerations and health considerations.

I think that the economy will go into a deep recession in the UK immediately, simply due to the lack of trade in travel, events and hospitality and it's knock on effects. I think we could get through this for a couple of months with help from banks, grants and tax holidays. But that is just the tip of the iceberg, it exposes large numbers of people who are a couple of wage checks away from being homeless, or in debt and an equally large group of people who are maxed out on debt, including mortgages. Once house prices start to drop significantly then the problems become entrenched in negative equity etc.

We were going to have a rough ride anyway with Brexit, before Coronavirus came along. It's turning into a perfect storm with Johnson and Cummings at the helm, blind to anything outside the comfort zone of the privelidged classes and wealthy exploiters. Doggedly following an ideological course of cutting all ties with the EU by the end of the year come what may. He is adamant that he won't ask for an extension to the transition period, currently up to 31 Dec' and intends to broker a trade deal with the EU by June. The very fact that he is not accepting the seriousness of the crisis and allowing an extension to negotiations shows that he is not concerned with getting it right, but only holding on to power long enough to get it done what ever the cost.

The ideologically driven Brexiters have risen up and grabbed control of the reigns in the UK and are accelerating the Brexit train towards the abyss at maximum acceleration just to ensure we go over the edge however bad it gets. This is an existential threat for the Conservative party, because if it fails at this point, they are facing a decade or more of a socialist agenda which would strip out the privelidged wealth of the privileged classes and condemn them to electoral oblivion. They will fight tooth and nail to preserve their privelidge and Brexit was an important step in their struggle against a growing desire for a more social democratic direction for the country.

we could try swilling the virus out of the mouth and into the stomach with an alcohol solution every ten minutes. In fact there are some good brands out there ready to use, like Smirnoff, Jack Daniels etc.

Any idea why Germany has a CFR almost an order of magnitude lower than everyone else? — Echarmion

Although as mentions, cultural differences have an effect, Germany is not yet overloaded. They also have higher health care capacity due to more sustained public health care investments.

Deaths start to rise with triage. Someone with almost non-functioning lungs can be kept alive on a respirator for weeks. Someone with completely non-functioning lungs can be kept alive with a ECMO machine (filters and oxygenates the blood outside the body).

With capacity, many people that would otherwise die recover, and even the people that don't ever recover can have their life extended by many weeks.

At capacity there will still be differences between outcomes in different places due to average age, average weight (obesity makes it harder to breath and so much harder for the body to deal with pneumonia), smoking, culture etc., but they won't be large differences (not near an order of magnitude difference we are seeing). However, once capacity is reached and the system is forced into triage, as happened in Wuhan and now Italy and Iran, deaths rapidly increase. Lung failure of course kills immediately without intervention.

Of note, because old people are triaged to save the young, this biases the data towards "old people dying" even more, leading (at first) young people to minimize it even more and spread it around even more. Statistics seems to suggest the "true danger" of the virus is actually more-or-less equally dangerous to all age groups in that catching the virus doubles your chances of death this year; however, if you're plus 80 and have a 10% chance of dying this year, now it's 20% so results in way higher absolute numbers for older age groups (in addition to the triage bias).

Statistics seems to suggest the "true danger" of the virus is actually more-or-less equally dangerous to all age groups in that catching the virus doubles your chances of death this year; however, if you're plus 80 and have a 10% chance of dying this year, now it's 20% so results in way higher absolute numbers for older age groups (in addition to the triage bias). — boethius

Great. Now I am afraid :wink:

Yes, the very large percentage of critical cases (cases that are unlikely to recover without medical intervention), is why abandoning containment as a policy, as I observed when I joined this thread, was so incredibly irresponsible.

Had containment been pursued, and the threat taken seriously, systems would be overwhelmed much slower as well as at different times. This not only "flattens the peak" for each individual health system, making it easier to deal with, but allows other health systems to move resources around to optimize the global community's response (increase capacity where it's needed, take lessons learned from one crisis spot to the next).

The only plausible explanation is that policy makers in the West simply didn't see human life as having any intrinsic value, and by the time the economic consequences were investigated of different approaches (takes a while because economists are not real scientists and they mainly just deal with retro-active predictions and so want to see how things play out elsewhere) it was too late to pursue an optimum strategy both from a public health and economic point of view.

Turns out you really can't serve two masters; you will love the one and hate the other, and your house will be divided in times of crisis.

Stolen from facebook and completely unchecked, so I'm just exposing my political bias and naivety, but it's a good laugh, unless you're in the US.

TRUMP’S RESPONSE TO THE COVID-19 (HIS WORDS)

January 22: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”

February 2: “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.”

February 24: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA… Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”

February 25: “CDC and my Administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus.”

February 25: “I think that's a problem that’s going to go away… They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we’re very close to a vaccine.”

February 26: “The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”

February 26: “We're going very substantially down, not up.”

February 27: “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

February 28: “We're ordering a lot of supplies. We're ordering a lot of, uh, elements that frankly we wouldn't be ordering unless it was something like this. But we're ordering a lot of different elements of medical.”

March 2: “You take a solid flu vaccine, you don't think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?”

March 2: “A lot of things are happening, a lot of very exciting things are happening and they’re happening very rapidly.”

March 4: “If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better.”

March 5: “I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work.”

March 5: “The United States… has, as of now, only 129 cases… and 11 deaths. We are working very hard to keep these numbers as low as possible!”

March 6: “I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down… a tremendous job at keeping it down.”

March 6: “Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test. They’re there. And the tests are beautiful…. the tests are all perfect like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This was not as perfect as that but pretty good.”

March 6: “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it… Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”

March 6: “I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault.”

March 8: “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on CoronaVirus.”

March 9: “This blindsided the world.”

March 9: "The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party, is doing everything within its semi-considerable power (it used to be greater!) to inflame the CoronaVirus situation, far beyond what the facts would warrant.”

March 10: "It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away."

March 13: National Emergency declared.

It was obviously never a "strategy" of any sort, just a propaganda slight of hand on gullible people to make them look more responsible: "Well, we had a plan, but we're big enough to admit it's not on track and so we're changing our approach". — boethius

Especially when there's some news that the lock down is working to curb the growth rate of infections. I guess the "lock down" option will be very trendy now. No huge public outcries because of the actions have been heard in Poland, Denmark, Czech Republic or Spain.

Anyway, this will be a great leap in the digitalization of the whole society! Just think how many workplaces have to learn now to use Skype, Teams, Whatsapp etc.

That's a great list, thank you unenlightened. And really shows how Trump deals with things.

You should add the telling example of how Trump thinks about everything from Feb 28th:
"The Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus - One of my people came up to me and said, 'Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.' That did not work out too well. They could not do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. ... They tried anything. ... And this is their new hoax."

Next Trump will start bragging about how his quick and dramatic decisions saved the US from a worse outbreak! That we will surely hear. And the Trumpists will reurgitate that whimsical view even on this forum.

Germany Tries to Stop US From Luring Away Firm Seeking Coronavirus Vaccine

Contacted by Reuters, a spokeswoman for the German Health Ministry said: "We confirm the report in the Welt am Sonntag."

Welt am Sonntag quoted an unidentified German government source as saying Trump was trying to secure the scientists' work exclusively, and would do anything to get a vaccine for the United States, "but only for the United States."

Such a great guy. :confused:

“Liberal innovations” such as Keynesian economics and the modern welfare state. — NOS4A2

If you think "liberal innovations" are bad.. So are "free-market capitalism". Antinatalism scoffs at both of these as FORCING more people into the world in the first place by having more children. A pox on both your houses. Both liberals and conservatives feel entitled to force their ideologies on yet another generation to live out their demented ideas about ways-of-life.. Oh but great, if the child doesn't like it they can just go kill themselves! What a foolish unsettling system all ideologies are and people who thus create more progeny to have to live out their ideological abstractions. Its all using people for an ideology. Its all ego-stroking thinking YOUR child MUST be created to experience life. All of you can go bugger off with your ideologies and forcing others to live them, honestly.

If you think "liberal innovations" are bad.. So are "free-market capitalism". Antinatalism scoffs at both of these as FORCING more people into the world in the first place by having more children. A pox on both your houses. Both liberals and conservatives feel entitled to force their ideologies on yet another generation to live out their demented ideas about ways-of-life.. Oh but great, if the child doesn't like it they can just go kill themselves! What a foolish unsettling system all ideologies are and people who thus create more progeny to have to live out their ideological abstractions. Its all using people for an ideology. Its all ego-stroking thinking YOUR child MUST be created to experience life. All of you can go bugger off with your ideologies and forcing others to live them, honestly. — schopenhauer1

What about apolitical parents, with no political party affiliation, having children?

Without the younger generation, who is going to pay for your medication and hospital visits when you are old and retired? You end up running into the same problem China is after the implementation of their "one-child" policy.

Solution: Coronavirus.

Or that could all be bullshit, but you heard it here first! — unenlightened

Now that's a catchy phrase!

Without the younger generation, who is going to pay for your medication and hospital visits when you are old and retired? You end up running into the same problem China is after the implementation of their "one-child" policy.

Solution: Coronavirus. — Harry Hindu

That is precisely the thinking that gets us into this position. You would be using the suffering of the next generation (by having them knowing the world contains some suffering) to try to mitigate what is happening currently, thus continuing the cycle. Not a good policy if you want to end the cycle itself. Coronavirus is exactly the kind of thing you would bringing on to a new generation.

It seems that Trump has succeeded in getting into every socialist-in-liberal-clothes' heads. Trump is all they think about to the point where almost every philosophical topic turns into an opportunity to bash Trump. That's pretty sad when that is what dominates the thoughts in your mind.

That is precisely the thinking that gets us into this position. You would be using the suffering of the next generation (by having them knowing the world contains some suffering) to try to mitigate what is happening currently, thus continuing the cycle. Not a good policy if you want to end the cycle itself. — schopenhauer1

I asked my kids if they are suffering because they know there is suffering in the world. They said, "No. There is also happiness in the world that wouldn't be realized if there wasn't some suffering". Smart kids.

I asked my kids if they are suffering because they know there is suffering in the world. They said, "No. There is also happiness in the world that wouldn't be realized if there wasn't some suffering". Smart kids. — Harry Hindu

That makes no sense actually. Do you pine over the happiness not being realized by the non-existent aliens on Mars?

Contacted by Reuters, a spokeswoman for the German Health Ministry said: "We confirm the report in the Welt am Sonntag."

Welt am Sonntag quoted an unidentified German government source as saying Trump was trying to secure the scientists' work exclusively, and would do anything to get a vaccine for the United States, "but only for the United States."

Such a great guy. :confused: — Michael

Make America great again, by stealing German scientists again.

Here are some decent and sensible people who I think can be trusted.

https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/what-we-do/news-stories/news/covid-19-outbreak-crisis-update-march-13?fbclid=IwAR1G4-3OBhuBjIu3WLvVrWBix1Q0uW8l27U8dDyrHEvxnA8YSpU-UwF7QyQ

Based on a recent report by the WHO-China joint mission on COVID-19, 20 percent of the confirmed cases will be severe and require hospitalization for sustained monitoring and supportive treatment. The report indicates that 6 percent of total confirmed cases (or about 30 percent of those hospitalized) will become critical and require specialized intensive care, such as mechanical ventilators.

If you think "liberal innovations" are bad.. So are "free-market capitalism". Antinatalism scoffs at both of these as FORCING more people into the world in the first place by having more children. A pox on both your houses. Both liberals and conservatives feel entitled to force their ideologies on yet another generation to live out their demented ideas about ways-of-life.. Oh but great, if the child doesn't like it they can just go kill themselves! What a foolish unsettling system all ideologies are and people who thus create more progeny to have to live out their ideological abstractions. Its all using people for an ideology. Its all ego-stroking thinking YOUR child MUST be created to experience life. All of you can go bugger off with your ideologies and forcing others to live them, honestly.

I’m almost certain that antinatalist rationalization is merely excuse-making for those too scared to have children. Don’t have children, sure, but don’t pretend you’re saving the soul of a child who will never exist anyways.

Make America great again, by stealing German scientists again. — unenlightened

Yep, there's a long tradition to that!

It seems that Trump has succeeded in getting into every socialist-in-liberal-clothes' heads. Trump is all they think about to the point where almost every philosophical topic turns into an opportunity to bash Trump. That's pretty sad when that is what dominates the thoughts in your mind.

It’s how they signal their bona fides to one another.