Coronavirus

I wish I knew the math to say "for every hour you isolate you save X lives." People do die from stuff all the time but this is a case where we are able to help people not die. Everyone who isolates is saving lives right now.

Not just deaths from the virus, too.
Deaths from every day illnesses and accidents will increase because the resources to help them are tied up addressing virus patients.

People don’t like to be inconvenienced, but if they are kept informed and given goals they will largely work together.
Many, many people are being misinformed and the government is failing to do communication right - amongst other things.

My favorite part is the idiots proclaiming: "600,000 people die every year from the flu, but a few thousand cases of this will overwhelm the system? People are overreacting!"

I'm like: "I put 1000 gallons of gas in my car every year, but I don't understand why I can't put 100 gallons in it today!"

n815e wrote: Many, many people are being misinformed and the government is failing to do communication right - amongst other things.

Yes. Unfortunately, the Idiot-in-Chief is one of the prime sources of misinformation. When he misstated the type of quinine that he thought was a brilliant idea (none of them are viable for this virus), people rushed to pharmacies and drained them and now people who actually need that drug (like lupus sufferers) can't get it. Then he suggested another type of quinine to combo with another drug. Said combination can produce fatal arrhythmia, so you had pharmacists rushing to Twitter to tell people NOT to do this. It's just insane that there are no adults in the room that can take his phone away like you would with a child.

Stumbled across this journal over on BGG of one of the Admins living in Italy, this is where we are all likely heading: www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/270443/our-life-lockdown

Shows how, even with a lockdown, the disease continues to spread almost unabated, because our idea of a "lockdown" is not enough. And the US is basically following the same path as Italy...

ChristopherMD wrote: I wish I knew the math to say "for every hour you isolate you save X lives." People do die from stuff all the time but this is a case where we are able to help people not die. Everyone who isolates is saving lives right now.

This image, while overly simplistic, gets the point across about how "exponential" works:

It really would behoove everyone to stop listening to Donald Trump. He is not a voice of reason in this troubling time. There are doctors, nurses, epidemiologists, and others with the expertise to help you and yours. I would recommend highly that you reach out locally and nationally to your employers and governments to urge anything that would ease your anxiety and that of those around you. Do you need a rent stoppage? Utility bills relaxed? Some food or human contact? These things can be arranged for. There are many lives at stake and not doing our utmost to take care of each other is a dereliction, especially for those in power.

On the "cure" and treatment front, again, Ars Technica has one of the best pop-sci readouts . The whole chloroquine thing isn't totally made up, it may have a pH effect on cells that could keep the virus at bay, but we need to study it and not just rely on anecdotes that fuel panic and shortages. I'd also like to see some IL-6 inhibition therapies tried out, to knock down the most devastating complication (primary pneumonia). This is a tough read, so trigger warning:


The key right now, noted above and elsewhere is to slow the spread of the illness. We will come up with therapies, we will find more hospital beds and come up with some cool hacks to expand ventilator functionality, but these all get better and easier with time. You get time by self-isolating, social distancing, and washing/sanitizing as best you can. If you need someone to talk to, call friends, call family, message me. You can get the Woebot app to ease your state of mind and develop some good mental health habits if you don't want to talk to any real people about your state of mind.

One bright side for me, personally, is adding a 35-min FITNESS BOXING workout to my daily routine. I will be fucking ripped coming out of this.

A little gallows humor for your day.

cdennett wrote:

charlest wrote: That site gave me some hope, at least locally. We've already adopted shelter in place here in Missouri and I was surprised to see the estimated infection rate of only 1% given this action.

Yeah, but can you do it for 3 months? Do Americans have the fortitude? I give it 3-4 weeks before these restrictions are relaxed. I see too many people on social media already complaining about how many people die from this thing or the other, and why are we reacting so strongly to this.

I can see this being like a 2 months on, 1 month off sort of thing. Maybe even more lax if some of the many drug treatments in clinical trials are shown to be effective.

I think we can do this.

One of my concerns is that the President is using the daily pressers as a substitute for his rallies. So they're becoming more about putting on a show than educating or calming the public. There's a payout to him disrupting the orderly business of managing the crisis.

The news needs to stop covering the pressers, but that's not a viable option. They're over a barrel just like they were in 2016.

That's exactly what he's doing. He's a narcissist who basically lives for praise from others, which is why you see Pence kissing his ass on a daily basis ("Thanks to the president's leadership, I tied my shoes on the first try today!") That's why he attacked that reporter who asked what he'd say to people who are scared. It was a softball (and not very newsworthy) question, but it wasn't in Trump's wheelhouse. To him, being in charge means everything is already fine and no one should be scared. Admitting that people are frightened means people are criticizing him, because everything is about him. It's morbidly hilarious.

What the press corps should be doing is simply continuing to ask the questions he reacts to poorly until he finally gives an answer (badly.) He'll eventually get frustrated and want to cancel the PCs entirely, which at this point would be a positive to the overall situation, but which his aides will insist he not do and we might eventually get some useful info out of the daily circus (but I doubt it.)

Jackwraith wrote: That's exactly what he's doing. He's a narcissist who basically lives for praise from others, which is why you see Pence kissing his ass on a daily basis ("Thanks to the president's leadership, I tied my shoes on the first try today!") That's why he attacked that reporter who asked what he'd say to people who are scared. It was a softball (and not very newsworthy) question, but it wasn't in Trump's wheelhouse. To him, being in charge means everything is already fine and no one should be scared. Admitting that people are frightened means people are criticizing him, because everything is about him. It's morbidly hilarious.

What the press corps should be doing is simply continuing to ask the questions he reacts to poorly until he finally gives an answer (badly.) He'll eventually get frustrated and want to cancel the PCs entirely, which at this point would be a positive to the overall situation, but which his aides will insist he not do and we might eventually get some useful info out of the daily circus (but I doubt it.)

I think this is why he keeps referring to it as the "Chinese virus." It makes people attack him for being stupid, racist, and xenophobic. That is a culture war battle he knows how to win, and one that his base will support him on. And it takes attention away from the real issue, which is why he ignored the issue for six weeks and why his response has been so disastrous.

Sagrilarus wrote: One of my concerns is that the President is using the daily pressers as a substitute for his rallies. So they're becoming more about putting on a show than educating or calming the public. There's a payout to him disrupting the orderly business of managing the crisis.

The news needs to stop covering the pressers, but that's not a viable option. They're over a barrel just like they were in 2016.

pressthink.org/2020/03/today-we-switch-o...n-emergency-setting/

I think these are good policies that are right along with your point here.

ChristopherMD wrote: I wish I knew the math to say "for every hour you isolate you save X lives." People do die from stuff all the time but this is a case where we are able to help people not die. Everyone who isolates is saving lives right now.

With all due respect, the moral calculus isn't nearly as cut and dry as the pro-containment folks make it out to be. How many children and young adults do we condemn to poverty (and thus reduced years of life and lower quality for all those years) for every year (at reduced health) we save of a potential casualty? Will the attempt to economically rebuild out of that poverty speed up climate catastrophe and cause humankind extinction by the end of the century? Honestly I don't know. I truly, deeply hope that there is an effective vaccine ASAP so we don't destroy the future for us all.

One of the truly bizarre things is I imagine that the pro life crowd is pro coronavirus, while the pro choice crowd ends up pro containment. And their reasons are actually flipped. Just goes to show our values aren't really based on logic at all.

For some reason it brings to mind Avengers when Cap continues to insist that heroes never trade lives. He won't even let Vision sacrifice himself. Half of creation ends up dying for that ideal.

mtagge wrote: With all due respect, the moral calculus isn't nearly as cut and dry as the pro-containment folks make it out to be. How many children and young adults do we condemn to poverty (and thus reduced years of life and lower quality for all those years) for every year (at reduced health) we save of a potential casualty? Will the attempt to economically rebuild out of that poverty speed up climate catastrophe and cause humankind extinction by the end of the century?

This is only if you assume that the only way to build out of this tragedy is to do things exactly the way they were done before. This is potentially a transformative moment, where people realize that the proper way to run a government (and a country) is not to cater to the interests of a wealthy few (by, say, paying a ridiculous amount for 90 F-35 fighter jets, 1/3 of which the Pentagon doesn't even want, which Congress decided was a high priority this week) but instead to make sure that the bulk of the population has an opportunity to move forward without the fear of losing their health insurance by losing a job, of being homeless from losing that job, or being bankrupted even with a job by a medical emergency. If the approach to the economy, post-crisis, has to be radically different and depend on a fair amount of government spending (paid for by the wealthiest, who can easily afford to), then so be it. It will simply bring the US up to the level at which many other industrialized democracies currently function.