Coronavirus **personal experiences** thread

Off-topic Chatter
2461

Question is, at what cost does “safety” come?

I read a good article a few days ago about some of the unintended consequences of all this. Someone whose kid was recently diagnosed with a brain tumor was having his surgery put off and delayed and put off some more, etc., because of the moratorium placed on most surgeries. Basically, if you ain’t bleeding out your eyes, forget it. Who knows if the delay in surgery could end up costing this kid his life, if the tumor were to grow large enough to be inoperable, or metastatise, etc.?

Eg, we could eliminate all traffic fatalities by simply banning all cars, trucks, etc., but that’s a no-go because we depend on transportation too much, and the cost of “even one fatality is too many!” is just way way too high.

Hell, we can almost eliminate all traffic fatalities (which still wouldn’t do Anton Yelchin a damned bit of good) by lowering speed limits to 5mph, mechanically and/or electronically governed. Again, if we’re constrained to walking-speed to go anywhere, and a 20min drive to work by car now takes 4hrs each way…

See what I mean?

People are being put out of work, if not are already out of work. All the cash bailouts to small businesses, etc., are adding up. Damage to the economy is cumulative and is growing with each passing day. Debt to pay all these loans, etc., is going to be crushing. The productive class is going to see their tax bills skyrocket. Per new laws coming out, people can’t be evicted for nonpayment of rent, and gimmes are demanding rent for all this time be forgiven and not just deferred. Yet the Evil Landlords who are seeing their tenants skip on their rent (and it could be someone with just a 2-family house renting the 2nd floor to someone, not some Evil Slumlord) will still have their property-tax bills coming due, with no deferment, and no rental income to pay it either. Taxes will never be forgiven, count on that.

Airlines which were pissing away cash for years, for stock-buyback schemes, are now left with empty pockets, demanding bailouts (all at taxpayer expense, of course). Of course, they’re Too Big To Fail™, and will of course get those bailouts. Huge chains are also going to get bailed out from funds supposed to go to small Main Street businesses. Your local Pizza Hut franchise will get bailed out thanks to corporate lowyers pushing it through, but the family-owned diner right next to it will go bust.

All these bailouts, etc., are going to get repaid… how?

The owner of a 2-family house now has no rental income from his tenant, can’t evict the non-payer, yet his tax bill must be paid on time (and will likely skyrocket over the next few years), and yet if the water-heater goes blooey, he’ll have to go to the can and crap out the money to fix it, I guess. Oh, The Government™ isn’t guaranteeing the owner his lost rent, either.

I wouldn’t want to be dependent on chemo, or dialysis, or feel a lump anywhere on my body, etc., right now. (Well, ever, but especially right now.) I guess I’d just be expected to “make do” until the kung flu just blows over in a few months…

2462

I’d love to get some perspective on this. Can anyone from modern European countries with more social safety nets (and things like free health care) chime in on this? Do you feel like lockdowns, etc. are causing overwhelming damage to the economy and may not be worth the lives saved?

2463

The problem with Covid 19 is we’re going to be living with it for a long time.

If the lockdown is lifted too soon, the curve will start rising again and the local healthcare system will be in danger of being overrun again. Nobody wants to live with images of people dying in their homes or bodies being left on the street like happened in Ecuador last week. Result is a new shutdown would be issued.

The long-term solution to this is to have a vaccine or to develop an effective method of treating Covid 19 patients, which greatly reduces the fatality rate and recovery time. But either of those could take 18 months or more.

There’s no way we can have the economy shut down for 18 months. People need to work so they can make money so they can afford basic living expenses. The recommended solution from the Epidemiologists is to restart the economy in areas where the virus seems under control. This won’t stop the virus though and it is important to be vigilant to prevent it from regaining a foothold in those areas.

The recommended solution is to have aggressive testing so anyone who displays any symptoms can get immediately tested and an immediate result. Followed by contact-tracing of anyone that person had contact with so they can all self-quarantine.

Another option is to conduct serum antibody tests to identify everyone who already had the Coronavirus and is presumably immune. Those people would then be allowed back to work while everyone else stays at home.

Right now we don’t have any of the above:

  • Rapid widely available testing is still not available in the U.S… Without such testing, there is no way to tell who has it and is contagious. And this is quite serious since it is now thought that the average coronavirus patient passes the virus to 6 other people. This makes it four times as contagious as the flu. Since sufficient testing isn’t available, the only way to provide safe protection right now is maximum social distancing.
  • There is no widely available effective treatment for treating Covid 19 patients. Though there are some treatments that appear to show some promise:
    (1) Chloroquine seems like it probably is ineffective. The evidence for its effectiveness is anecdotal, and there are lots of anecdotes in which it had no effect.
    (2) Avectra sounds like it may be a promising drug for curing the worst cases. It seems it may suppress part of the immune system that causes Cytokine storm, which is though to be one of the major causes of fatality from Coronavirus.
    (3) Blood Plasma from recovering patients seems effective in curing serious cases of Coronavirus
    (4) Artificial antibodies are further behind, but if they become available, and work they should be as effective as blood plasma.
  • An effective vaccine is still 18+ months away. And it could be longer. Apparently the typical timetable for most vaccine development is 9-10 years. So already they’ve really sped things up and are cutting corners in the research.
2464

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not suggesting to do nothing and blithely “go back to normal”. I’m saying there needs to be some perspective and balance. Neither extreme would work well. The point being to find a balance.

Just the same way we don’t ban cars, or at least impose a mandatory (and inescapable) 5mph speed-limit, even to save lives, we can’t just shut down the entire planet ’til the plague goes away.

We still have cars and 55/65/etc. mph speed-limits, even though it costs many thousands of lives each year.

Hell, if we waited for drugs that never caused any deaths from unwanted side-effects, we’d have so few lifesaving drugs on the market. We have to accept some unwanted fatalities, even hundreds of lives, if it saves millions.

2465

Can’t say exactly to be from modern European country…but
I see the point, yes.
Without “social networks” situation looks different.

It’s all about nation orientation and perspective how much they are willing to do to prevent deaths. Hard to say accurate prices but I would generally say that in here the price we are ready to pay is “High”.

Our president stated it something like: “We can earn the money back later, now it’s more important to focus saving lives”.
Rather big majority of people think that way (not all), majority of politics also agree on that (naturally not all either).

Also… We are often quoted as a little bit of a pessimistic sort of people.
Well maybe yes, we tend to often think from bad things “what about if it happened to Me or You!?”. Could that raise the bar? Hmm…

We here are not in full lockdown. Yet, lets see.
Personal opinion is, that wiser-than-me people should decide where’s the sweet spot for restriction.

I would be very happy with decreased income & more time at home!!

2466

I’m from a modern european country and I have no idea where this is heading. As Raccoon stated: we are on the COVID-19 timeline, not ours. And the dynamics of COVID-19 still has surprises every day. With the current restrictions in The Netherlands the number of cases seem to be very slowly going down, but these restrictions are not sustainable for two years, so inevitably some restrictions must be lifted at some point. Hopefully to be replaced by a clever system of a high testing regime combined with tracing and quarantining new cases. And then hopefully there is a middle way that makes the country sort of continue……if the virus allows that.

2467

7 coronavirus cleaning questions, answered by an expert

2468

Boosting your immune system to fight the coronavirus: what you need to know

https://www.dietdoctor.com/coronavirus

2469

I wonder how much better the economy would actually be without a lock down. Business needs a certain minimum of foot traffic to pay the bills. If deaths spiked I doubt many people would venture out.

2470

Short of a miracle that is pretty much my view, and the last miracle I believed in was dashed when I determined a long long time ago, at a very young age, that mum and dad were the tooth fairy.

2471

@ nobody in particular:

Before an ugly argument erupts, I’d strongly encourage everyone to try to take a more nuanced view on things. I think/hope that it shouldn’t be a provocative or controversial statement to say that there are currently a lot of things going wrong in the world. And there’s lots of attempts by well-meaning people to fix them. Sometimes they get it wrong, sometimes they help a bit. There is obviously lots of minutia on this subject that should not be discussed here on BLF, but in this case I think we should try to avoid giving the impression in our comments that this virus and its socioeconomic consequences are going to kill us all, while also avoiding the other extreme that it’s a non-issue. Likewise, some proposed solutions might help, while at the same time causing other unintended effects. This post isn’t news for any of you, you already knew all this. It’s just that when you (the anonymous “you” form that causes so much confusion in English) have a strong opinion on something, you (me, you, all of us) tend to use more dogmatic and categorical rhetoric that comes across as unreasonably polarized. So civil discussion on the topic of coronavirus is still allowed and encouraged here, but we need self-awareness and self-control to keep our stronger and more polarizing opinions to ourselves, even if/when said opinions are based on hard, cold facts that we’ve discovered.

2472

Over here, health vs economy is not seen as a choice.

The idea is if we stop social distancing and open up The Netherlands for business, in no time so many people will get ill that the economy comes to a standstill again, and so many will drop dead that society will be terrified.(it will then not be the current best estimate of 0.66% chance of dying after catching the virus if health care is not overrun, but more like 2% to 3% when cases are so many that access to a hospital is out of the question, everyone will know many people who will die).

So restoring the economy, if at all feasable before some potent treatment or vaccin is available, will not be by ignoring the virus but by very carefully taking the impact of the virus into account so that the numbers will stay low-ish while trying to let the country run at a low pace.

2473

We need a hot new flashlight to distract us.

2474

Precisely, in my case I need revolutionary new emitters to play with, like the Laser SMD (from SLDlaser) available under 50 dollar for modding.

2475

People accepted the shutdown and loss of freedoms in order to “flatten the curve” so there was time to get PPE and machines into the hospitals and to gear up to handle the virus. The promise made was, once we’d flattened the curve, restrictions would be lifted. The top of the curve is being or has been reached in various parts of the US, and in just a week or two we’ll be on the downside of the curve.

Now some folks are saying we need to stay shut down for months. Maybe for a year or more. I call “foul” over this. Yes, more people will catch Covid-19. More people will die. But we all have an appointment with death. The real issue is, we kept the thing manageable for the medical community.

We have to remember that not everyone will catch the virus. And of those who do, the vast, vast majority will have moderate, mild, or no symptoms from it. Only a tiny minority will need hospitalization, and only a portion of those will die. Martin Dubravec, MD, an immunologist in Michigan, has written that many people have a partial immunity to Covid-19 due to their having had a similar coronavirus in past years; he calls it “cross reactive immunity.” We have to balance the virus’ potential future effects against all the adverse effects of the shutdown itself. I know that no one here has ever seen a prolonged nationwide shutdown before, so our minds can’t begin to encompass the enormity of all the unintended consequences. We tend to prefer the known to the unknown, so in this case people tend to be more able to wrap their heads around the hospital situation and cling to that, than to try to picture all the socioeconomic dominos that line up in a complex structure like ours and which are now falling over. But does anyone recall this quote, attributed to Ben Franklin?
“For the want of a nail the shoe was lost,
For the want of a shoe the horse was lost,
For the want of a horse the rider was lost,
For the want of a rider the battle was lost,
For the want of a battle the kingdom was lost,
And all for the want of a horseshoe-nail.”

How fragile or how resilient is the national infrastructure? The more intricate a mechanism and the more moving pieces it has, the more fragile it is. Our infrastructure is more fragile than some might think; entire books have been written on this.

The US has been called “the world’s breadbasket.” Our food production capability is being affected. The longer we stay in shutdown mode, the worse the shortages will be during the next couple of years. How bad will those shortages be? Hard to know, we’ve never been through this before. But we have to be thinking ahead.

2476

Don’t get too stressed, we are all just waiting to see the peak. Once we see it, we can plan for the future. We will reboot slowly at a pace that will keep hospitals at nearly-full capacity until we reach the magical 60% immunity or so that is needed to stop the wild spread.

Are you judging by looking at shelves in a store? I can explain.
I have multiple connections in food production from farm to store shelf, and I can assure you the supply chain is fully operational. Even in overdrive. Many companies used to offer multiple products. They do many of their variations by loading a warehouse with one product, then shutting down the assembly line for cleaning and re-tooling. This cleaning and conversion can take days. But in this crisis, to meet the new demand, they have changed tactics. Instead of shutting down the assembly line for conversion, they just run one product at full capacity and never stop. As a result, there is only one of their products “left” on the shelf of your store. But the company is feeding more people than ever. I hope that makes everyone feel better :laughing:

2477

Nope, I don’t think it’s valid to look at current store shelves as proof of what is to come. What I’m looking at are the crops rotting in the fields in Florida and California right now (see link at post 2499), the milk that’s been dumped because schools are closed, the fruits and veggies a bit farther north that will rot next month if we don’t lift the restrictions, and whether spring planting will be able to occur on time. I grew up in farm country. Planting, fertilizing and harvesting must take place within narrow time windows. And then it must be processed and shipped. Will canneries be operating? Will grain elevators be staffed? Will trucks be moving? Will fertilizer and herbicide manufacturers be producing what the farmers need to make their crops viable? Lots of moving parts.

2478

Exactly the same has been reported happening with food manufacturing in here too.

But…:
Finland is somewhat depended on foreign workers to do planting and farmwork in summer time. Locals wont do farmwork since it requires living away from city, manual work and a wage of about 9usd/h. They are negotiating so, that key personnel could travel in and out during pendemic.
It may have some later effect, we may see drop in variation of what is available.

And for total quarantines: I’m sure that nothing like one year is needed :slight_smile:

2479

Yes, and this will not continue to stay manageable with the current lockdowns simply taken away, it will then soon become unmanagable. The solution is not simple, to get the country going again most restrictions in movements and gathering of people must continuously stay in place, with only the most neccessary activities for running the country re-started, with on top of that lots of testing, tracking and early quarantaining.

A rough calculation, do not pin me down on inaccuracies, better even, correct them if numbers are grossly wrong.
If lockdowns across the US are simply lifted and the virus runs its course, let’s assume that with the epidemic at its height 20% of the US citizens have the disease at the same time (this is my most uncertain number, it is just a guess). In the Netherlands it is cureently estimated that about 2% of the people who catch the virus (not from the people tested, but from all people who catch it) need hospitalisation. So that is 2% from 20% of 390 million US citizens = 1.5 million beds needed. The US in 2015 had 900,000 hospital beds with an average occupance of 65% (numbers from CDC).

I do not dare to do a calculation on the need of IC capacity and ventilators, I guess that people in need of a ventilator will simply die.

2480

Yep, I sure know, I grew up doing it.
As far as current events, word is everyone has all the supplies and labor they need. You might have grown up looking at little hobby farms or small family farms. The massive farms are already supplied for the year on seed, fuel, equipment, and labor. It is all looking good.

PS- if anyone wants to panic buy a truck load of soybeans, I can hook you up :slight_smile: