Coronavirus **personal experiences** thread

[Bwana]

I like to see whomever started this flattened .

[Tom_E]

I don't feel or see any flattening around here with 1.3% of the people in our town and county having or had it, including my 70 year old sister and her husband with serious med issues (just recently). Also I know for a fact from people we know, younger people with the classic symptons got turned away from the hospitals and told to self-isolate without being tested.

I live in Suffolk County (20,800 confirmed out of ~1.5 million), up-to-date info on the county here. In my township of Babylon, the infection rate is 1.36%. Our county is ranked 3rd for the highest # of cases in the country, and the county next west is 2nd (Nassau) then next west 1st (NYC).

One of the best info sites here: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

[bwl123]

Horrifying simulation reveals the dangers of jogging during the coronavirus pandemic: Viral particles from another runner could infect you even if they are six feet ahead - but staying NEXT to them may be safer

Simulation shows how jogging next to somebody may be safer

Direction and strength of wind???

[pennzy]

Testing is going to be the key going forward. Opening the country is not going to be like flipping a switch. Certain areas and certain people as well as different types of businesses will be able to open up. With the low numbers of tested people right now it is really hard to know where we stand. I hear a few areas starting to talk about opening up. It will come but it sure won’t be anything like it was pre virus. Wait to the lawyers get involved. Workplace safety rules. Customer safety. Whole new field of lawsuits coming.

[Sidney_Stratton]

@Firelight2

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

/…/
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.

Can’t find anything about “Avectra” - care to elaborate?

[Henk4U2]

@pennzy

Testing is going to be the key going forward. Opening the country is not going to be like flipping a switch. Certain areas and certain people as well as different types of businesses will be able to open up. With the low numbers of tested people right now it is really hard to know where we stand. I hear a few areas starting to talk about opening up. It will come but it sure won’t be anything like it was pre virus. Wait to the lawyers get involved. Workplace safety rules. Customer safety. Whole new field of lawsuits coming.

Couldn’t somebody publish an article in the Fake News Gazette that May 1st there will be a mandatory convention of the Personal Injury Lawyer Trade Association in the Astrodome? No social distancing, no masks, just brave men and women, face to face, mano a mano, and ample wining and dining, a fortnight long. And then move on to the next “vital” profession.

[MtnDon (Don Miller)]

@Henk4U2

Couldn’t somebody publish an article in the Fake News Gazette that May 1st there will be a mandatory convention of the Personal Injury Lawyer Trade Association in the Astrodome? No social distancing, no masks, just brave men and women, face to face, mano a mano, and ample wining and dining, a fortnight long. And then move on to the next “vital” profession.

[Rexlion]

Happy Easter to those who celebrate it.

Our local church planned to stream today’s Sunday service live on facebook from a basically empty church, but a handful of volunteers were needed to run the camera, play the piano, read, and sing. As some of the volunteers arrived, a guy standing just off the property line started yelling at them in an angry tone, “Go home! Go home!”

I guess he’d appointed himself to help flatten the curve. Or maybe he just wished he could flatten someone.

[bwl123]

Coronavirus could attack immune system like HIV by targeting protective cells, warn scientists

Covid-19 may attack immune system like HIV, doctors fear

[hank]

Fauci expresses 'cautious optimism' coronavirus outbreak is slowing, US could...

No promises here, just appropriate caution.

Fauci on Sunday expressed “cautious optimism” that the deadly coronavirus outbreak is slowing down in the United States, and said that parts of the country may start to reopen as soon as May.

Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned on CNN’s “State of the Union” that the entire country won’t suddenly turn back on like a “light switch.”

But there are “indications” that some of the metrics used to gauge the crisis “are starting to level off” in some areas, he said.

Asked when parts of the U.S. could start to relax some of their strict social-distancing measures, Fauci said that the process could probably begin “at least in some ways, maybe next month.”…
…
… the number of deaths from the coronavirus will tend to lag behind the number of infections and hospitalizations, meaning that evidence of progress can be found even when the virus is at its peak of lethality.

“Once you turn that corner, hopefully we’ll see a very sharp decline,” Fauci said.

In other states with less severe outbreaks than New York, Fauci said that at the end of the month “we can look around and say, ‘OK, is there any element here that we can safely and cautiously start pulling back on?’ If so, do it. If not, then just continue to hunker down.”

Fauci appeared on CNN on Easter Sunday, when President Donald Trump previously said he hoped the country would be reopened to allow for people to gather in “packed churches” for the Christian holiday. After those remarks, however, the White House extended its social distancing guidelines through the end of April.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services projected that lifting states’ extreme containment measures – such as ordering residents to stay home and closing schools and nonessential businesses – after just 30 days would lead to an infection spike this summer, The New York Times reported.

Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he assumed that any lifting of restrictions would cause an increase in cases, heightening the need to be able to identify, isolate and trace them.

And in an interview on CNN on Friday, Christopher Murray, the director of the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, which had created a model for Covid-19 deaths, said the data he had seen had persuaded him that a premature lifting of social distancing restrictions — without adequate testing and contact tracing, among other safeguards — could see a renewed surge in infections, and deaths.

“It’s enough to say that if we were to stop at the national level May 1, we’re seeing a return to almost where we are now sometime in July,” Dr. Murray said

Remember even once the spread of the viruses is halted by social distancing, 95 percent of the population will still be vulnerable to infection.
All it takes is one foolish person to start a new hotspot spreading, once people are interacting frequently in an area.

It’s going to be a long while ’til I’d want to sit inside an airplane or a crowded room again.

[hank]

As of April 2, from Johns Hopkins

[MtnDon (Don Miller)]

@hank

It’s going to be a long while ’til I’d want to sit inside an airplane or a crowded room again.

I already was a reluctant flier.

[hank]

Why the Second Wave of the 1918 Flu Pandemic Was So Deadly | HISTORY

==
EXCERPT

While the global pandemic lasted for two years, the vast majority of deaths were packed into three especially cruel months in the fall of 1918. Historians now believe that the fatal severity of the Spanish flu’s “second wave” was caused by a mutated virus spread by wartime troop movements….
…
… Harris believes that the rapid spread of Spanish flu in the fall of 1918 was at least partially to blame on public health officials unwilling to impose quarantines during wartime. In Britain, for example, a government official named Arthur Newsholme knew full well that a strict civilian lockdown was the best way to fight the spread of the highly contagious disease. But he wouldn’t risk crippling the war effort by keeping munitions factory workers and other civilians home. ….

[hank]

John Conway, a brilliant mathematician and a gentle soul, died today of COVID-19 in Princeton. John was the inventor of the “Game of Life” and made many contributions to mathematics. He was a warm and gentle soul.
4:35 PM · Apr 11, 2020

[sb56637]

@hank

Why the Second Wave of the 1918 Flu Pandemic Was So Deadly | HISTORY

Thanks, interesting.

[heyho]

I have just watched this on the BBC iplayer.

BBC Four - Contagion: The BBC Four Pandemic

Stunningly, chillingly accurate predictions and mathematical modelling of infections carried out using a bespoke phone app and mathematicians from Cambridge University.

Was made 2 years ago.

Edit: It’s on YouTube, search for BBC contagion.

[phouton]

@Rexlion

Flatten the curve, flatten the curve, and once it’s flattened we can open everything back up again. Here’s an article from USA Today, March 11. Note this quote: “In flattening the curve, the goal is not so much to reduce the total number of people getting sick but to slow the rate at which they do.” And the reason given was hospital capacity. Here’s NBC News saying, “While the virus can’t be stopped in its tracks, in can be slowed. Stopping it from spreading quickly will help ensure that health care systems can cope with the strain of the outbreak.” People all over the internet took up this idea and used it to hammer on opponents of shutdown, promising that it would be brief. Short duration was the general consensus. If Fauci didn’t say this outright, he at least encouraged the thought.

Hmm… I don’t know where those impressions came from. I don’t recall anyone suggesting that. Logically, flattening the curve does the exact opposite: spreading out perhaps the same total number of cases means it takes much longer for the curve to come back down.

The fast ways would be to do nothing and have a huge spike (catastrophic failure of health system and increasing fatality rates), or to quarantine aggressively (eg. Taiwan) which results in a small spike and eradication of the virus from the population (requires widespread screening and rapid testing).

Note that flattening the curve is not a solution to the virus; it’s a solution to avoiding health care collapse. It’s buying time until a cure is found. That means easing restrictions will undo the flattening and create new spikes.

As for Fauci’s statements, my impression is that he’s been very cautious about accuracy while also trying to relieve people’s stress and give hope, i.e. bedside manner. It’s possible some interpreted them overly optimistically, but I haven’t found fault in his phrasing.

I like this video of simulations comparing some “curve” results of different measures such as doing nothing, aggressive quarantining, various levels of social distancing, the effect of central hubs, the effect of reducing contagiousness, etc.

Simulating an epidemic

I wonder if Taiwan’s approach had been used globally, whether the pandemic (and lockdowns) could have been avoided without even needing to find a cure. Now given how widespread it has become, that approach becomes much more difficult. But maybe not impossible? It might still be faster than the race to a vaccine.

While waiting for an actual solution, I think there’s much “lemonade” to be made. If an undesirable situation is unavoidable, might as well make use of the silver linings.

Oh, and Happy Easter.

[hank]

Cautionary (further links in the original page at Coronavirus economy plans are clear: No return to normal in 2020 - Vox )

EXCERPT:

I’ve been reading the major plans for what comes after social distancing. You can read them, too. There’s one from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, the left-leaning Center for American Progress, Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics, and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer.

I thought, perhaps naively, that reading them would be a comfort — at least then I’d be able to imagine the path back to normal. But it wasn’t. In different ways, all these plans say the same thing: Even if you can imagine the herculean political, social, and economic changes necessary to manage our way through this crisis effectively, there is no normal for the foreseeable future. Until there’s a vaccine, the United States either needs economically ruinous levels of social distancing, a digital surveillance state of shocking size and scope, or a mass testing apparatus of even more shocking size and intrusiveness.

The AEI, CAP, and Harvard plans aren’t identical, but they’re similar. All of them feature a period of national lockdown — in which extreme social distancing is deployed to “flatten the curve” and health and testing capacity is surged to “raise the line.” That’s phase one. Phase two triggers after a set period (45 days for CAP, three months for Harvard) or, in the AEI plan, after 14 days of falling cases and a series of health supply markers….

[pennzy]

Yea, the digital tracking is scary. The covid equivalent to the Patriot Act.

[sb56637]

@phouton

Note that flattening the curve is not a solution to the virus; it’s a solution to avoiding health care collapse. It’s buying time until a cure is found.

Exactly, this appears to be the major point that hasn’t been clearly communicated.