I expect he'll pull through, but he's sicker than they're admitting. I don't think we'll be seeing much of him for a while. I'd be more concerned about his partner who's pregnant and not responsible for having a dummy of a bf who thought shaking hands with COVID patients was a good idea.

I could be wrong (no shit), but don't we end up with the same number eventually infected whether we isolate or not? Isolating spreads out the infection over time, allowing health providers better opportunity to care for the patients, but the herd gets immune more quickly without isolation. — Hanover

Correct.

I expect he'll pull through, but he's sicker than they're admitting. I don't think we'll be seeing much of him for a while. I'd be more concerned about his partner who's pregnant and not responsible for having a dummy of a bf who thought shaking hands with COVID patients was a good idea. — Baden

Yes, I agree its statistically likely he'll survive. Even on a respirator, half of patients survive, and I think UK is democratic enough to be obliged to say the PM can no longer lead; so I don't think it would be at that 50-50 prognosis state at the moment.

However, unless it really was "just some tests" -- maybe a happy photo opp will emerge -- he'd be well over the roughly 1% risk profile of his age group if this is a sign it's getting serious, which would then explain the no recent photo and maybe queen speech. But yes, definitely all only speculation for now.

Here's a good update on where we are. Lot of info:

https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest

Correct. — frank

No, it's not. Look at your government's models and follow the numbers.

What's supposed to stop it spreading?

We talked about this a lot already. Look at South Korea, for example. Continued social distancing, masks, track and trace etc until we get a vaccine. This is the dance part of the hammer and the dance. It does not involve 60% of the population needing to be infected, which is the proportion required for herd immunity against COVID. And though the worst case is not absolutely impossible (we never get a vaccine, we can't impose proper measures, it keeps mutating), so 60% of us still end up getting it, I don't see that happening. And if you look at the curves in South Korea, China etc, it's not going to happen there.

tl;dr They could end up being the same thing if the current strategy fails or isn't done right. The evidence suggest to me that's unlikely.

It's too late for the US to do what SK did, and take a closer look at information coming from there. Their scientists have warned that it's not over and it's possible they could end going down the same path as the rest if the world.

Until there is a vaccine, it will spread through human contact, through its long viability on steel and other surfaces, it's hours of viability on swirling aerosol, and the continued presence of carriers.

On the bright side, some are working on a medication to neutralize it.

Don't disagree much. Only want to emphasis that there are three distinct strategies, herd immunity, mitigation, and suppression. The world is tending towards suppression right now and I'm both on board with that and cautiously optimistic about it.




https://towardsdatascience.com/a-data-science-view-of-herd-immunity-what-do-we-have-to-pay-to-stop-the-virus-3a05fc2ce720

Yep. There's "herd immunity" the minimum effort strategy and herd immunity, that thing we'll reach naturally or by vaccine.

Yes, we could actually get herd immunity via vaccination like we did with smallpox which would be a good result. So, 60% don't actually need to get the disease. I'm arguing here against herd immunity as a political strategy like the UK was proposing (and isolate vs don't isolate re Hanover). But, yes, it's good to clear that up. (And I don't expect we'd reach 60% naturally with suppression done right.)

Can monkeys get coronavirus?

No. A tiger got it though. In other news, the UK has moved passed Italy to third in daily deaths. It will blow past Spain within a few days.

Tiger King?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52177586

She DOES have a cat in hell's chance

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-05/spanish-government-aims-to-roll-out-basic-income-soon

"The Spanish government is working to roll out a universal basic income as soon as possible, as part of a battery of actions aimed at countering the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, according to Economy Minister Nadia Calvino.... But the government’s broader ambition is that basic income becomes an instrument “that stays forever, that becomes a structural instrument, a permanent instrument,” she said."

Woahhhh.

You could say Finland is prepared. While its neighbors are scrambling, the country is sitting on an enviable stockpile of medical supplies dating to the 1950s. It includes personal protective equipment like face masks, but also oils, grains and agricultural tools.

Finland is now tapping into this supply for the first time since World War II, positioning the country strongly to confront the coronavirus. — The New York Times

@ssu

Well, that's one country that's learned from this.

All thanks to Russia, actually.

If we had a 1 000 km border in the East with Canada, everything would be different.

True or fake news?

A local newspaper says that thanks to the corona-virus lock down, overall death figures in the US are collapsing:



Especially deaths of children and teens, people under 18 has decreased -20%.


Reasons have said to be lower traffic, less accidents and less drunk people doing stupid things when people stay home. Also the common flu is getting now a beating alongside the corona-virus. They did report that the stats are preliminary. Have not been able to verify it from another media outlet.

So, something good about the pandemic?

So, last week I got a picture on a group text from my local rabbi performing a funeral of a member of the synagogue by himself because no family or friends could attend. I then recently learned his father contracted the virus and then died. He was a rabbi in the Hasidic community in NY. I suspect he too was buried at a funeral that no one attended. And now the good rabbi, hundreds of miles away, in his outpost in Atlanta, away from family and friends, sits shiva alone.

Yeah, I was wrong. This should be treated more seriously by me than it has been. If we're not here to occasionally change our minds, then why do we visit here?

My boss's father just died in NYC. He can't go up there to be with family. It sucks.

So it's more or less the "let them eat cake" moment of the American "fiscal conservative" elite. — boethius

In my opinion true (and admirably stated - I've added it to my list of great things to say if ever I have the chance) but not true enough, and if only it were. Then the Jacquerie might come out! But most of American history has comprised just such jacquerie moments, "more-or-less," even from the start, though in different ways, viz, our whiskey rebellion, Shay's rebellion, through Bloody Kansas and the Civil War to the veterans' march on Washington, civil rights, Viet Nam war protests, others too numerous to mention and not all honorable, and now the great sullen disgust at and about our atrocious president.

But there is room for nuance. Many rich individuals are giving large sums to help with Covid-19. And digging a little deeper, it has always seemed to me, which I accept without hard proof, that a system like ours, as a consequence of how it works, must allow for the possibility of there being the very rich, maybe even thee and me. They should be taxed a lot more, and most of them agree, but that's after-the-fact. So my food-cart-quick snack of a thought is that our jacquerie do not line streets with heads on pikes because they also wish they were them.

One of our "founding fathers" Thomas Jefferson famously made the following remark c. 1787. (Reference from wiki.) "“What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure,” Jefferson wrote in a letter to William S. Smith, a diplomatic official in London, on November 13, 1787. Jefferson was commenting on Shays” Rebellion, an armed uprising in Massachusetts that had been put down earlier that year by organized state militia forces. “God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion,” Jefferson remarked. “Let them take arms.”"

Rifles and law. It takes both though ideally the rifles are on permanent reserve and law suffices. But without practice.....

I’ve volunteered to become a contact tracer and I start training tomorrow. It is something I can do from the home office. I’ll let you guys know what it involves.

↪Hanover My boss's father just died in NYC. He can't go up there to be with family. It sucks. — frank

My best friend, an old schoolmate, died suddenly early last month. I was planning to go with my family and with his other friends to the funeral last Friday. His sister was planning to come from Austria here. The sister naturally couldn't come now and the parents, who are quite old, kindly asked that people wouldn't come to the funeral and proposed that a proper memorial service would be held afterwards at the time of the burial, likely in the summer. With gatherings of over ten people not being permitted, even if funerals are allowed, it's an understandable and reasonable decision.

The pandemic effects our lives in various ways.

Cool. Good luck.

The personal tragedies are terrible. There are good reasons now not to go to the hospital so that at least your last moments can be with your family.

Of course it’s true that not going outside will reduce the “paths of transmission”. I would argue that you’re not so much reducing a path of transmission as you are storing it for later, but the point is taken.

I’ve been following the case of Sweden intently due to its different approach. The chief epidemiologist, Anders Wallensten said people will eventually ignore stay-at-home orders if they are too stringent, so it's better to adopt measures that can be sustained over a long period of time. Another epidemiologist who earlier criticized the UK’s lockdown approach, Anders Tegnell, said that they are only pushing the problem ahead of them, merely kicking the can down the road so to speak. He also said that mass unemployment and a ruined economy brings with it its own public health problems.

Do you disagree with them?

You asked about India earlier. I was wrong to treat is as a celebratory case. So wrong. The brutality of what happened to the poor over there was worse than anything out of the horrorshow that already is 'the West'. Via Arundhati Roy:

"As an appalled world watched, India revealed herself in all her shame — her brutal, structural, social and economic inequality, her callous indifference to suffering.

The lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things. As shops, restaurants, factories and the construction industry shut down, as the wealthy and the middle classes enclosed themselves in gated colonies, our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens — their migrant workers — like so much unwanted accrual.

Many driven out by their employers and landlords, millions of impoverished, hungry, thirsty people, young and old, men, women, children, sick people, blind people, disabled people, with nowhere else to go, with no public transport in sight, began a long march home to their villages. They walked for days, towards Badaun, Agra, Azamgarh, Aligarh, Lucknow, Gorakhpur — hundreds of kilometres away. Some died on the way.

They knew they were going home potentially to slow starvation. Perhaps they even knew they could be carrying the virus with them, and would infect their families, their parents and grandparents back home, but they desperately needed a shred of familiarity, shelter and dignity, as well as food, if not love.

As they walked, some were beaten brutally and humiliated by the police, who were charged with strictly enforcing the curfew. Young men were made to crouch and frog jump down the highway. Outside the town of Bareilly, one group was herded together and hosed down with chemical spray.

A few days later, worried that the fleeing population would spread the virus to villages, the government sealed state borders even for walkers. People who had been walking for days were stopped and forced to return to camps in the cities they had just been forced to leave.

Among older people it evoked memories of the population transfer of 1947, when India was divided and Pakistan was born. Except that this current exodus was driven by class divisions, not religion. Even still, these were not India’s poorest people. These were people who had (at least until now) work in the city and homes to return to. The jobless, the homeless and the despairing remained where they were, in the cities as well as the countryside, where deep distress was growing long before this tragedy occurred. All through these horrible days, the home affairs minister Amit Shah remained absent from public view."

https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca

I need to quote more:

"What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than a virus. Some believe it’s God’s way of bringing us to our senses. Others that it’s a Chinese conspiracy to take over the world.

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next."