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New Zealand Reinstates Coronavirus Restrictions After First Locally-Transmitted Case in 102 Days (cnn.com) 93
This virus isn’t going away (Score:1, Insightful)
by Viol8 ( 599362 )LIke other viruses it’ll hang around in the enviroment as it seems to have done here and as soon as they open their borders it’ll be back in. They’re kidding themselves if they think they can remain free of it forever. Instead of absurd lockdowns that kill economies and people with other illnesses who can’t make it to see a doctor, the world needs to wake up and realise that all the people who are vulnerable to this virus will succumb to it eventually and lockdowns will only put it off for some months at b
Multiple studies show lock downs help economies (Score:5, Insightful)
by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @12:27PM (#60389441)because they spring back better and faster then places that don’t lock down. You’re kidding yourself if you think you can “let ‘er rip”.I’m not an idiot. I’m not going to go about my day to day life until there are treatments and a vaccine. That means my dollars aren’t going to be going about day to day life either. No eating out. No movie theaters. No travel. It’s not worth a double lung transplant [cnn.com] or brain fog [sciencemag.org] and fatigue for who knows how long.
That means guys like you trying to force the economy back open are going to fail miserably. You’ll end up making the pandemic worse, which will make guys like me continue to hunker down and spend no money, wrecking your economy.
If you don’t like it, spend more money on public health. This pandemic was completely avoidable but we’ve been knee deep in “Austerity” since 2008 and have woefully underfunded public health initiatives. There are consequences.
Re:Multiple studies show lock downs help economies (Score:5, Insightful)
by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @12:46PM (#60389533) JournalExcept the lenders will start to drop like flies, or limit who they lend money to, which will have massive impacts on credit markets. Is 2008-2009 so long ago that you have forgotten what a crisis in confidence looks like? If you’ve got a few million bucks laying around to buy up defaulting properties, bully for you, but for most people that is not an option, and making a whole bunch of people homeless because you think the best way to motivate people is to put a gun to their heads doesn’t seem like any kind of sane public policy.
There’s only one way through a pandemic. We’ve known it for centuries, even before we even knew what caused pandemics. When the last great outbreak of the bubonic plague hit London in 1665, Parliament delayed its sitting, shops were closed, mass meetings were banned and anyone with symptoms, or even suspected of having the disease, were quarantined. Just because we haven’t experienced anything on that level in decades doesn’t mean that the formula has changed. Seattle weathered the 1918-19 flu pandemic because it took extremely proactive measures, over public outcry, and in the end its recovery was far faster, and the mortality rate was far less than cities like Pittsburgh that went full steam ahead, and ended up shooting themselves in the foot.
There’s no magic solution here. There are simply less bad ones, and partial shut downs where distancing can’t be accomplished is the only sensible solution. It’s the only one that means an actual and tangible recovery, and the only that doesn’t punish people because they aren’t as foolhardy as you are.
Re:Multiple studies show lock downs help economies (Score:4, Insightful)
by MunchMunch ( 670504 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @01:03PM (#60389661) HomepageExactly. People advocating to re-open without science-based objectives met to control the spread don’t seem to understand that they’re not saving the economy. They’re advocating jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. Businesses don’t magically make money when they are open. Macroeconomics is a series of interwoven mutually-dependent systems. People are not living normally, and their spending habits will not be normal until we have a vaccine.And we can’t just say X% of the population will die and we should just accept it. Apart from being totally unethical and inhuman in its lack of empathy, it is scientifically unsound. Herd immunity won’t happen for a significant time, and likely won’t happen fast enough to keep up with mutations. We’d just be dooming the population to some portion dying constantly, until a vaccine.
Re:Multiple studies show lock downs help economies (Score:4, Interesting)
by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @01:13PM (#60389741) JournalAnd the evidence of that is what’s happening in some US states. They opened up early, despite warnings from public heath officials, and now are facing huge increases in infections. How are their economies faring.
People have a very particular and predictable set of responses to some imminent and obvious disaster, and it’s not shrugging shoulders and acting as if the shit isn’t hitting the fan. When they say the tornado on the horizon, they don’t just sit on the porch and go “Oh well, gotta finish this beer”. When they feel the earth shake beneath their feet, they don’t just hop in the car and take the kids to school. And when they see hospitals filling up, and friends and coworkers getting sick, they don’t pack the family up and go to Arby’s or buy tickets to Disneyland. People may, in general, be ten kinds of stupid, but our primate brains were built specifically to recognize an imminent danger (so built for it that we’re actually pretty bad at assessing the risks of more remote crises). And, of course, the nature of contagious diseases is that they will wax and wane a bit, so people will get lazy, and the disease will come back with a vengeance, and then any notion of “pandemic fatigue” will disappear, and parents will keep their kids home from school, won’t return to theaters and restaurants, won’t take discretionary trips, and at best will periodically screw up the courage to go to the grocery store.
You cannot make people walk through fire just because you imagine the only way to fix the problem is to tell them not to worry, and it’s unlikely they’ll get badly burned. A few may say “fuck it”, and act brave, but really, all those idiots mobbing state legislatures protesting mask rules are actually in a more full blown panic than someone who opts not to go back to a job because they don’t feel their employer is taking their safety seriously, or stops spending money at restaurants or hotels.
- I’m just not spending any money except on groceries.
So naturally, you’re ready, willing, and able to crack your wallet open and pay the medical costs for everyone affected? Those lung transplants are godawful expensive. Months of therapy and rehab aren’t cheap either.
NO? You don’t want to do that? What’s that Lassie?, you say it’s cheaper to take necessary measures to contain the outbreak?
Then you can be fired, default on your mortgage and we can buy your assets on the cheap. No problem for the economy.
Most folks on Slashdot work for companies that are perfectly content with their workers working remotely for the foreseeable future, so no you can’t buy their assets on the cheap.
But let’s suppose for one moment that this were not true. With most workers hesitant to return physically to work, if the people who own those properties can’t afford to own them without returning to work, and a significant percentage of them say, “Screw the house,” who do you think is going to buy that house from you in the futur
- by DarkOx ( 621550 )
Its perfectly fine for the economy. It just means some of the have nots will see their little savings become worth more (deflation) and the haves will see their assets decline in value. It will be big wealth transfer but given the wealth gap it might even be good for the economy.
I think the studies really are saying that whatever you do, don’t half-ass it— you need to be consistent in message and strategy.
In Month 5, Sweden’s strategy seems to be proving itself out pretty well; they have a pretty good immunity level and people and businesses are functioning pretty much as normal with almost no restrictions. They might face a challenge now with people coming back to work from summer vacations, but they are doing generally well.
Re:Multiple studies show lock downs help economies (Score:5, Insightful)
by Maxo-Texas ( 864189 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @12:55PM (#60389577)Um.
You seriously consider 83,126 cases for 10,343,403 population to be “pretty good immunity level”?
Recall, Sweden’s goal was herd immunity by June 1st.
Herd immunity for Covid19 requires 75%-80% of the population to be infected before you can return to concerts, conventions, and other large gatherings. And even then infections continue at a lower rate until over 90% of the population is infected.A blood antigen study showed 7.3% in Stockholm, 3.7% in the next two largest cities, and below 3.7% in the rest of the country. The national rate is under 3.7%. That means they are 1/20th of the way to herd immunity.
It’s clear the swedish people got the message: The government is going to let you die and so they have gone to ground.
As a result, at a minimum, on April 30th “The National Institute for Economic Research (NIER) said in a statement Wednesday that it believed that Sweden’s economy is set to shrink 7% this year and unemployment to rise to 10.2%.” It’s gotten worse since then.
By rushing things- Sweden got a lot of old people killed before treatments were figured out. So their population shut itself down.
But they don’t have “pretty good immunity”.
If they were really open, they’d have more infections- and more deaths than they are reporting. Right now only 1/122 swedish citizens are officially infected (and about 1/30 by prevalence studies). In the US, it’s 1/66 ( and probably about 1/16 in reality ).
Sweden’s response bought them an economy that is only doing marginally better than neighboring countries. It didn’t succeed at anything but illness and death.
- by DarkOx ( 621550 )
Sweden’s response bought them an economy that is only doing marginally better than neighboring countries.
Ah but better is better isn’t it. Yes no shock when all your trade partners slit their economic wrists, its hurts your economy too.
- by Viol8 ( 599362 )
The illness and death that is going to overcome all those other smug lockdown countries eventually.
Recall, Sweden’s goal was herd immunity by June 1st.
Not true! Sweden NEVER had a goal to reach herd immunity, that is some kind of urban myth propagated online.
If you believe you are right, please show credible sources to back them up. But to save you the time, there is an interview with the Swedish foreign minister from earlier this spring that describes how she is fighting this misconception.
So someone, please mod parent down, Sweden has probably made a lot of wrong decisions regarding Covid-19, but this narrative is incorrect.
Sweden’s economy is set to suffer more than any of their Nordic neighbors this year, and they have the highest unemployment rate. This in exchange for a death rate an order of magnitude higher than those neighbors, and a corresponding greater number of people permanently affected. They seriously screwed up their response by every measure.
But believing that lockdowns don’t hurt is mental. Lockdowns are self-induced economic depressions. Go search for the list of companies who have had to declare bankruptcy, it’s incredible. Economic depressions hit the lower ends of society the hardest. 40 MILLION PEOPLE lost their jobs in the US. I don’t know what proportion of those jobs had medical insurance, but it’s a safe bet that a very hefty percentage of them did. All that medical insurance is now gone with the COVID winds. “Doesn’t hurt?!” Ridiculo
Lockdowns hurt.
Excessive deaths from overwhelmed hospitals and police gathering dozens of dead bodies per week from the streets also hurts.
There is no good path out of this.
But there are several bad paths and resuming “business as usual” is worse because it both destroys the economy and kills a lot of people.
Until we get a vaccine, this has the potential to explode and kill 5% of the population- that’s 16 million dead in the U.S. Over a billion dead globally. And that includes many people 20 to 49. In
- Whatever, Chicken Little.
- by etash ( 1907284 )i generally agree with your sentiment but 5% is not 1 billion globally. at 8billion 5% is merely 400million.
- tired talking point right here [arstechnica.com].
TL;DR; lock downs don’t increase death or stress all that much. If you live in a society that doesn’t abandon you to die in a pandemic they don’t increase it much at all. Turns out going to work/school is also stressful.
And the point of me saying “I’m not an idiot” is that I can read the CDC’s data, studies on the long term health effects of the virus and I know the odds of it affecting me. America has an aging population with lots of pre-existing conditions. If we “le
40 MILLION PEOPLE lost their jobs in the US. I don’t know what proportion of those jobs had medical insurance, but it’s a safe bet that a very hefty percentage of them did. All that medical insurance is now gone with the COVID winds.
And this is why we need a national health insurance system. Had the Republicans done that instead of forcing the Democrats to go with the half-a**ed measure called Obamacare, the lost jobs wouldn’t matter nearly as much, particularly with the foreclosure and eviction bans that
- by DarkOx ( 621550 )
Riiight sure; in country where small businesses make up 40% of the GDP you want us to believe that they were all months away from ruin…
BULLSHIT
No eating out. No movie theaters. No travel.
As someone who has done all three of those in the past 24 hours there’s nothing “normal” about any of those activities. You’re not crammed in tight spaces with people breathing on you, people are getting booted from establishments for breaching social distancing rules in all of the above.
Now if your local establishments aren’t taking precautions then maybe it’s worth not giving them specifically your dollars, but right now it seems like the last place I’m likely to catch COVID-19 is at a mostly empty restau
I’m not an idiot. I’m not going to go about my day to day life until there are treatments and a vaccine. That means my dollars aren’t going to be going about day to day life either. No eating out. No movie theaters. No travel.
That’s great for you, since obviously you’re not someone whose job depends on people traveling, eating out, going to movies, etc., so you get to save money all this time. And you just assume that when you can spend that money again, all those movie theaters, restaurants, hotels, airplanes, etc., will be there waiting for you. Good luck with that.
- It seems to me the places that had the most severe lockdowns had the least damage to the economy, while places that are allowing a constant slow burn are receiving the most damage.
With voluntary self isolation dropping mobility 25% or so (people just not wanting to get their parents or themselves sick), clearly there’s economic damage. I suspect far more damage than alert level 3 in one city 3% of the time.
Re:This virus isn’t going away (Score:5, Insightful)
by prefect42 ( 141309 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @12:30PM (#60389469)Although if you have faith in there being a decent vaccine at some point soon, you can do as New Zealand have and be strict and highly responsive to outbreaks, and have less restrictions than countries that sat back and did very little until they had a widespread outbreak. If a vaccine does emerge quickly, countries like New Zealand end up looking rather good. If a vaccine is a long time coming, then they probably are fighting a battle they can’t win, but do note that in general they’ve had fewer restrictions than other countries that have had large numbers of deaths. I find it hard to criticise their approach as things stand.
The world has seen a great many pandemics, and you know what, we’re still here. The 1918-19 pandemic killed a lot of people, made a lot more people sick, seemed a bit like an apocalypse, but in the end it did fade away and the economic damage was healed. Making this is a zero sum game is itself a symptom of the panic.
- They’ve made the conscious decision to make extreme short term sacrifices for a long term benefit. The entire country has done very well at the marshmallow test. [wikipedia.org]
They might get a working one out the door soon, but I doubt it’ll be quick enough to prevent all the deaths that are going to happen as lockdown is relaxed. So 2 choices – hide under the duvet until this virus goes extinct, maybe in a few thousand years , or get back to work and accept that 0.5% are going to die from it no matter what.
They might get a working one out the door soon, but I doubt it’ll be quick enough to prevent all the deaths that are going to happen as lockdown is relaxed. So 2 choices – hide under the duvet until this virus goes extinct, maybe in a few thousand years , or get back to work and accept that 0.5% are going to die from it no matter what.
I know you said the vaccine might not be available soon, but to take a few thousand years seems a bit much!
I would agree if the only option you have is “flattening the curve.” There are other things that could be done. In the future, after some people kill themselves off, something like this is going to happen: https://news.osu.edu/ohio-stat… [osu.edu]
Make them so cheap everyone can have one. Combine with an educated populace that actually cares about other people, and you could make a real dent in a virus like COVID-19.
Considering the economic damage that can be done, this is the only logical course for the future.
We can all hide in our basements until a vaccine is available (in sufficient quantity) or we can get back to work.
I’m one of those crazy right-wingers who thinks it should be a personal choice. Don’t like it? Then just keep hiding in your basement. Nobody’s going to make you come out.
Re:This virus isn’t going away (Score:5, Insightful)
by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @12:50PM (#60389545) JournalBut it’s not a personal choice. Your choice impacts the people you interact with. What you’re really saying is your choice should override their safety. That’s not a declaration of your liberty, it’s a declaration of war on those around you, that somehow you’re more important, and that your personal choice overrides their rights.
Yes, life is, but when one recognizes an unwarranted risk, then it’s foolhardy to ignore it. Some people have no choice. If you do, and go out anyways and risk other people, then at best your a selfish piece of shit, at worst your a sociopath.
- by DarkOx ( 621550 )
Humm and demanding my savings be devalued so you can hide in your basement indefinetly isn’t an act of war?
If you are going to use that kind of bullshit hyperbole, it cuts both ways. People who make your argument are not magically morally superior except in their own frightened child like minds.
Re:This virus isn’t going away (Score:4, Insightful)
by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @01:35PM (#60389865) JournalIf your savings are being devalued, it’s because of the lack of confidence, and that won’t go away because you imagine you can put a gun to everyone’s head and force them back to work. It won’t work. What will work is controlling infection rates as much as possible. That will increase confidence, not just threatening people with homelessness and starvation unless they work to keep your ‘savings” intact.
- by DarkOx ( 621550 )
It will lack of confidence all right, lack of confidence in the dollar because of trillions of dollars in new debts that can’t ever realistically be repaid so you can hide.
Conversely if I hold a gun to your head and threaten you with homeless or starvation either you play ball and get your ass back to work and things go back relatively normal -or- you don’t and we see deflation which is GREAT for my savings.
Economies have survived lockdowns in the past. Those lockdowns have cost a lot of money, and yet here we all are. You seem to have a dim view of our ability to navigate these crises and come out the other side; and yet societies have rebuilt after pandemics, hurricanes, earthquakes, droughts, crop failures. Yes, some have faltered and disappeared, but to imagine that Western nations, the wealthiest political entities in the entire history of our species, cannot handle the debt burdens that get incurred by c
The narrative is with the Covisterics at the moment. In 10 years we can all look back and laugh about how the paranoid bedwetters killed the world economy but at the moment all one can do is despair.
- >Nobody is suggesting we hunker in the bunker. What is being suggested is that we take reasonable precautions rather than skipping down the primrose path pretending nothing’s wrong.
Do you have any evidence that ending lock downs will magically make economies grow again? A pandemic is a psychological hit as much as it is a health crisis. Confidence won’t just return because you say “Fuck it, let’s ignore the virus and act as if it isn’t here.” Look at jurisdictions where it’s full steam ahead for a return to school. Parents in many jurisdictions aren’t happy, so as much as you think people will just willingly march to the proverbial abattoir to save the economy, creating confidence in
- by DarkOx ( 621550 )
Do you have any evidence that ending lock downs will magically make economies grow again?
Do you have any evidence that before the government and media created a panic we would have seen an economic crisis? Seems to me the markets first took their dive AFTER NY and OH started closing stuff down not before even though the pandemic was already widely know. Its also try previous pandemics like the swine flu killed 60k+ plus and nobody batted an eye. So we are to believe that in a country as large as our a single step in magnitue is suppose to be responsible for one of the sharpest economic drops in
Re:This virus isn’t going away (Score:5, Insightful)
by smooth wombat ( 796938 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @12:46PM (#60389531) JournalInstead of absurd lockdowns that kill economiesYou mean all those job creators can’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps when they hit a bump? Like how people are supposed to have 3 – 6 months worth of an emergency fund saved.
What happened to all that money these companies got through the largest tax cut in this country’s history? Did they save for a rainy day or did they squander the money on stupid things like stock buybacks and executive bonuses? Why is it these companies can’t go more than a week without begging the government for money? Are they that incompetent that the only way for them to survive is via socialism?
Yup, completely idiotic restrictions. Which is why Taiwan only has 450 cases and 7 deaths compared to the 8,300 dead in Florida, a state whose population is only fractionally smaller than Taiwan’s. It’s why New Zealand went three months without a single recorded case because of those “idiotic” restrictions.
I can’t wait for all the cases coming out of Sturgis. With 250,000 people all bunched together and not wearing masks, expect to see hospitalizations soar as well as the spread of covid 19 running amok when these people return home. Not to mention all the dead. But hey, 170,000 dead in five months is no big deal. It’s just like the flu.
- It’s all the indoor activity that is going to cause problems. There are virtually no examples of purely outdoor gatherings causing spread of coronavirus. None whatsoever if people wear masks and somewhat distance themselves. Because of the immense dilution that wind provides, (And possibly sunlight helping) the viral load passed to others is so low the R value is decreased substantially. This also means that come fall, just like with any other respiratory disease, it will get worse.
Re:This virus isn’t going away (Score:5, Insightful)
Wake up! Did you somehow totally miss the part where they managed 102 days with zero transmissions? I’ll bet that was pretty good for their economy. Yes, they will need to restrict entry into their borders until the rest of us get our shit together and pull our pants up.
As for being vulnerable, we have yet to find evidence that there is anyone who isn’t vulnerable.
- Lockdowns are not merely to prevent the virus entirely. Lockdowns are to slow down the spread so that the medical communities can handle the cases of infection. There are so many hospital beds, supplies, personnel, etc.
There will be a vaccine soon enough. Meanwhile, theyâ(TM)ll go back into lockdown for a bit, get it back under control (meaning ALL cases are under control, NZ effectively eliminated the virus) and go back to having sports with packed stadiums and crowded bars and other events like they were doing last month.
Compare that to the US. How many millions are going to be lost by not being able to have 40,000 person events? NZ gets to because they handled this well.
Unfortunately in the US the economy is not g
You are correct, that the virus will be around for a while. BUT we have to wait for either an effective cure or a vaccine before we can get rid of the lockdowns. The viral prevalence can be greatly reduced if we get a vaccine. The virus can even be eliminated if enough people were willing to be vaccinated. Although not nearly as contagious as Covid, smallpox was eliminated using vaccines (except for a few samples in labs). Polio is almost eliminated. Of course deluded anti-vaxxers claim smallpox and polio a
Hidden Reservoirs (Score:5, Insightful)
by apoc.famine ( 621563 ) <apoc@famine.gmail@com> on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @12:14PM (#60389369) JournalThis strongly suggests that we’ll never be rid of COVID-19. The article notes that the person hadn’t traveled and wasn’t known to be in contact with someone who did. That means for more than 3 months COVID-19 either was in one infectious individual with no symptoms, or more likely, was still spreading unnoticed among the populace.
One person got symptoms, got tested, and suddenly we find that 3 of their family members are asymptomatic. That suggests a much higher percentage of asymptomatic spreaders than anyone has really been suggesting, as far as I’m aware.
Three months of spreading without anyone showing symptoms is a long damn time. It suggests that once we go back to some sort of normal that we’ll definitely have pockets popping up regularly. That’s going to make mass gatherings, whether for school, entertainment, or business less enticing for a lot of people. That in turn hinders a return to some normalcy.
God is this pandemic depressing.
- These are all hypotheses at this point. New Zealand is shutting down Auckland to collect data. I suspect we will have answers in a couple of days.
suddenly we find that 3 of their family members are asymptomatic
You know that how? Has a sufficient amount of time elapsed to conclude they weren’t pre-symptomatic? How long ago did this testing happen?
“historic recollection of a past event using slow-ass commoner logistics measuring a past infection”
What? The tests took place yesterday. How is it “a historic recollection”?
We’re buying time for a Vaccine (Score:4, Interesting)
by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @12:30PM (#60389467)and treatments. That said, we won’t be rid of pandemics until we stop under funding public health initiatives. And not just the obvious stuff like vaccine research (which was well underway during the SARs outbreak and then we slashed the funding as soon as we got a break) but also things like cleaning up the wet markets, providing universal healthcare so people don’t skip doctor’s visits, providing paid sick leave to everyone so they don’t show up to work sick, providing child care benefits so people don’t send sick kids to school, etc, etc.Bottom line, we can stop pandemics, but it means some very large changes to how we run our society. And there are a lot of people who just plain don’t want to do that. They’d rather live with the pandemics and the deaths and the lingering side effects.
There are always going to be novel pathogens. Evolution is a thing; viruses and bacteria continue to evolve, develop novel traits, and continue to propagate. Eventually they burn themselves out, but what we can choose to do is to take measures that make getting from Point A to Point C less damaging overall, by trying to suppress Point B.
Just because we’ve built a world of concrete skyscrapers, a sort of psychological wall against nature, doesn’t mean we aren’t still part of the natural world. When you think
- just that we can contain them before they become pandemics. But to do that we need to change how our society functions. We can’t just leave everything up to the “Invisible Hand” and hope God or profit motive sorts it all out.
Vaccines, for example, are surprisingly unprofitable, and as mentioned a whole lot of research was done on general purpose vaccines going into the SARs pandemic and then dropped like a bad habit as soon as the panic stopped.
The Black Death isn’t exactly a good example. People pr
Thinking about this some more, if it holds up that it was out there spreading and only after 3 months did a case get symptomatic enough for someone to go to the hospital, I bet this thing has been around for a lot longer than anyone is suspecting.
If one person got sick enough to go see a doctor in January of 2019, nobody would have even considered that it was a new disease. It doesn’t matter what country they were in. And if another showed up in March or April of 2019, even the same doctor wouldn’t likely m
Thinking about this some more, if it holds up that it was out there spreading and only after 3 months did a case get symptomatic enough for someone to go to the hospital, I bet this thing has been around for a lot longer than anyone is suspecting.
It seems to me that a disease that spreads silently for several months but suddenly causes an influx of so many severe cases that it overwhelms hospitals are two diametrically opposed concepts. The only way I see it working is if people are pre-symptomatic for several weeks. Perhaps 14 days of quarantine isn’t long enough.
It’s all speculation at this point. We have to wait for the data before we jump to any conclusions.
Honestly, I’ll wager it was probably making the rounds last fall, but like anything that functions on a logarithmic growth scale, it takes time to build up critical mass. Let’s imagine the virus first started making the rounds in Wuhan in early December (might have been earlier, but we don’t know). That means there symptomatic carriers early on, but that because it behaves to some extent, at least in the early infection, like any number of more typical contagious diseases, no one would have thought any more
It’s not until masses of people start having symptoms that anyone would notice. That could mean we’ve been missing cases for a year or more.
Seems iffy. Because we’ve also seen that when this thing hits a concentration of vulnerable folks like in an old age home, it’s not something anyone can miss.
It boggles my mind that it is depressing that COVID can sit undetected in a community for three months, because what that means that the virus is overall not as dangerous as is popularly believed.
The evidence keeps piling up that COVID is extremely dangerous for certain classes of people, and not very dangerous at all for the rest.
We need to be spending a lot more research and prevention dollars FOCUSING on those classes of people because this fools errand of trying to contain the virus among the general po
- The odds of it spreading asymptomatically for 3 months seem astronomical. We know some people are asymptomatic. However, if 50% of people are asymptomatic, and spread to one other person every 5 days, that would be like flipping a coin 20 times in a row and coming up heads. (A 0.0001% chance of happening BTW)
I think it’s far more likely someone snuck into the country undetected. There may have been a few asymptomatic cases from that person until this one now. However, 3 months in a row of asymptomatic
Stay Tuned (Score:5, Insightful)
by Thelasko ( 1196535 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @12:16PM (#60389379) JournalThe New Zealand government has been very open, and has more success containing COVID-19 than any other nation. I suspect the end of the investigation will yield new or interesting information about COVID-19 transmission.P.S. The official government briefing on the case can be found here. [beehive.govt.nz]
The New Zealand government has been very open, and has more success containing COVID-19 than any other nation.
While New Zealand has done relatively well compared to most other countries in the world, several other countries have been more successful.
For example, Taiwan has a cumulative per capita death rate 15x lower than New Zealand, also without shutting down the economy.- Yes, Taiwan has been more successful than New Zealand. After posting I discovered New Zealand’s clam as “most successful” is self proclaimed. However, we need to be careful that some authoritarian countries may be manipulating the data. I don’t feel this is a concern for either New Zealand or Taiwan.
Yeah, all of those “look at New Zealand” articles (Score:5, Interesting)
by Rei ( 128717 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @12:18PM (#60389393) Homepage… were tempting fate. Cases will randomly continue to slip past any system. What matters is that you demonstrate the ability to stamp them out. We had an outbreak here recently, for example [covid.is], 20 days after our last one’s last local transmission. Looks like it’s getting back under control – but of course one doesn’t want to speak too soon.
It’s not entirely clear how the current outbreak got into the country. The last one was some Romanian burglars who came to the country, were supposed to be quarantined, but immediately broke quarantine to go rob some flats. There were no “unknown source” community transmission cases there, however, so it wasn’t a serious threat. Our current outbreak was more problematic as genetic studies showed two people who didn’t know each other had somehow acquired virtually identical strains, one tracing back to the other, meaning that there was an unknown infected go-between. So we’ve had to tighten regulations – max gathering size down from 500 to 100, business enforcement on social distancing, masks on buses for the first time, etc. And of course back to much higher testing rates, both of suspected cases, as well as random sampling the population to see how common the disease actually is and to catch latent pockets.
- They knew they were tempting fate. In fact, they knew this day would come. Regulations are already tightened. They’re as prepared as one can be, as they’ve had the benefit of watching other’s mistakes.
The landmark “doesn’t lessen any of the risk” of another spike in infections, Ms Ardern said. “One hundred days is a milestone to mark but, again, we still need to be vigilant regardless,” she added.
BBC [bbc.com]
- What’s concerning to me is all the cases lately of transmission where the vector is unknown. With coronavirus looking like it might be prone to spread by animals [nature.com] we need to know for sure as this will drastically change evidence based responses. At least two cases have come from mink already.
Re:SARS-Cov-2 is everywhere (Score:4, Insightful)
And naturally, those who do get more severely affected can expect the full financial support of society for their expensive treatment and rehab, right? Being that they were doing their part and taking the risk for the good of everyone? That’s right, isn’t it?
- The number of pussies at
The detection is in south Auckland which is where the primary airport for managing international quarantining is located. Which makes it the most likely area of where reintroduction will come from.
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