Given a choice, always listen to the actual doctor over me.
I think the point stands that the reports on case mortality have ranged from "eh you'll be fine" to "OMFG WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE", depending on which vested interest you're listening to, and the best medical information is "look, we don't know yet, because the data's saying all sorts of things, and there all sorts of confounding factors".
But it's definitely worse than the usual flu (which is, don't forget, also still circulating), and the next question is "are we looking at 1919 bad?". To which the answer seems to be "no, but possibly only just, and the patterns are different, so the young will likely not be too badly affected, but the old are going to get it hard."
What that article said about what happens when the emergency departments get full is also apposite to remember.
I don't know that a full separation quarantine protocol is going to help for long, though: first because we've probably already been exposed (six degrees of separation has its bad side), second because the sort of extended isolation may not be possible at scale (what happens when households run out of food, and don't have anyone who can deliver more?), third because the incubation period means by the time one person in a family feels ill, the whole family has been infected. So any one person getting sick means the whole family goes into lockdown, and everyone they've interacted with for at least a week has to get checked. And probably everyone they've interacted with, which to a first degree of approximation is basically "everyone".
And no-one knows what the procedures are for going into quarantine. (Indeed, if there are any, they've been communicated so badly beyond "just don't go outside or interact with anyone, yeah?" that they might as well not exist.) So people apply common sense in inappropriate ways: they go into isolation via the supermarket, because the alternative is to starve. They have to balance incommensurate absolutes.
Also, the advice about soap and alcohol sanitiser is all well and good, if you can get your hands on the stuff. The supermarket shelves for soap are just as empty as the shelves for TP. So there exist many people who would love to be able to keep up with the recommendations, but are literally unable to do so.
The lockdowns and quarantines are not going to stop Covid-19. Nothing will at this point. The best they can hope for is to slow it down enough for the health system in emergency mode to be able to cope with it until the peak of the wave has passed.
Ironically, I suspect things will get better after a while, because people who've had it and recovered will be able to more easily help those in lockdown, but the sort of controls which are needed are not possible to be implemented, even in a totalitarian dictatorship like China. (Well, maybe if China were several orders of magnitude smaller.) And even then, we probably don't want to know what's happening in North Korea. Because they don't have the health system, they don't have the healthy baseline population, and they have a nasty habit of murdering the bearer of bad news which tends to stop anyone from reporting the actual severity of the situation to anyone in a position to be able to do anything about it until its too late.
no subject
I think the point stands that the reports on case mortality have ranged from "eh you'll be fine" to "OMFG WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE", depending on which vested interest you're listening to, and the best medical information is "look, we don't know yet, because the data's saying all sorts of things, and there all sorts of confounding factors".
But it's definitely worse than the usual flu (which is, don't forget, also still circulating), and the next question is "are we looking at 1919 bad?". To which the answer seems to be "no, but possibly only just, and the patterns are different, so the young will likely not be too badly affected, but the old are going to get it hard."
What that article said about what happens when the emergency departments get full is also apposite to remember.
I don't know that a full separation quarantine protocol is going to help for long, though: first because we've probably already been exposed (six degrees of separation has its bad side), second because the sort of extended isolation may not be possible at scale (what happens when households run out of food, and don't have anyone who can deliver more?), third because the incubation period means by the time one person in a family feels ill, the whole family has been infected. So any one person getting sick means the whole family goes into lockdown, and everyone they've interacted with for at least a week has to get checked. And probably everyone they've interacted with, which to a first degree of approximation is basically "everyone".
And no-one knows what the procedures are for going into quarantine. (Indeed, if there are any, they've been communicated so badly beyond "just don't go outside or interact with anyone, yeah?" that they might as well not exist.) So people apply common sense in inappropriate ways: they go into isolation via the supermarket, because the alternative is to starve. They have to balance incommensurate absolutes.
Also, the advice about soap and alcohol sanitiser is all well and good, if you can get your hands on the stuff. The supermarket shelves for soap are just as empty as the shelves for TP. So there exist many people who would love to be able to keep up with the recommendations, but are literally unable to do so.
The lockdowns and quarantines are not going to stop Covid-19. Nothing will at this point. The best they can hope for is to slow it down enough for the health system in emergency mode to be able to cope with it until the peak of the wave has passed.
Ironically, I suspect things will get better after a while, because people who've had it and recovered will be able to more easily help those in lockdown, but the sort of controls which are needed are not possible to be implemented, even in a totalitarian dictatorship like China. (Well, maybe if China were several orders of magnitude smaller.) And even then, we probably don't want to know what's happening in North Korea. Because they don't have the health system, they don't have the healthy baseline population, and they have a nasty habit of murdering the bearer of bad news which tends to stop anyone from reporting the actual severity of the situation to anyone in a position to be able to do anything about it until its too late.