Planning for the next pandemic

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Planning for the next pandemic

Post by spot »

This thread dates from early 2020 and assumes we have collectively recognized that our planning for pandemics was catastrophically inadequate.

We got away lightly with Covid-19 because it only had a mortality between 0.1% and 2%. We could have another of those every year from now to eternity and not bat an eyelid, to be honest. That was a pinprick. The only thing we immediately recognized from 2020 is that global terrorism is a made-up fantasy as far as problems are concerned, and if we have any sense we'll pretend the War on Terrorism never happened because it was too stupid for words. If we shut down our security services it would make no difference to the sum of human happiness, what we urgently need is spare capacity in a health system free of charge at the point of use instead of squeezed resources and a rapacious profitable insurance industry.

So. Planning for the next pandemic. What must the world put in place to handle an equally transmissible, equally asymptomatic pandemic, with the following mortality rate within a month of contracting the disease:

a) 10%

b) 33%

c) 66%

because that's the problem. Covid-19 is a very welcome warning we've been entirely unprepared to handle, and it's important that we make an effort now to find a workable defence before a significantly worse pandemic is triggered.
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Post by spot »

Governmental reaction to Covid-19 has been the exact opposite of what was needed, this time round. Because it's so non-lethal it should have just been allowed to run with no public reaction, saving the national economies. As it is we have the worst possible consequence, mass business collapse and another decade of austerity digging out of debt and joblessness. It was so obviously avoidable.

But with a breakout an order of magnitude more lethal, which is out there down the line eventually, we do need a strategy. I think we need to create and practice a worldwide vaccination plan that can develop, test and implement protection within three months at the most, not this useless eighteen months we saw this time round. Creating that capability has to be an essential legacy from this warning shot.

Telling businesses to close for months on end is self-inflicted damage, next time or this time. I have no idea why anyone with half a brain would even contemplate it much less make it happen.
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Post by LarsMac »

Well, it seems to me that we are looking at a ~4% mortality.

Given that 90% of the fatalities, so far, have been in the + 70 years age bracket, though, and of those most were with compromised health to start with, that may affect whatever plan you can come up with.

But, firstly, there probably needs to be a more immediate global reaction that manages travel restrictions, right up front.

By the time most people had even heard of this thing, the containment had already failed.
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Post by spot »

LarsMac;1531411 wrote: Well, it seems to me that we are looking at a ~4% mortality.


I think we'll find that speaking solely of Covid-19, 7% of those sick enough to need a hospital bed will die and nobody else. That's what my spreadsheet says, now that I've finally projected it all the way.

What baffles me is the lack of recognition that the number who don't catch it before the vaccine is ready will be trivially few. Between 10%-20% perhaps.

If the world doesn't get a process in place to mass-vaccinate in weeks rather than years, though that would be preferable, and the world can't be so authoritarian as China has been, which is arguably preferable, then we need an alternative.

I can put the procedure for the next pandemic here but I know in advance nobody will adopt it. It makes no difference how lethal the next pandemic is, this process still reduces the final death toll.

What you do is this, if you can't extinguish the outbreak and it's capable of spreading worldwide the way this one has.

You work out the minority most affected if they catch it - for Covid-19 that's everyone over 70 and everyone with hypertension or heart problems. You put them into their homes and tell them to stay safe and not mingle.

Then, working out from your key workers - the health providers first - you quarantine volunteer batches from the general population and you infect them all. You get as many ill as your health system can cope with, and you put all the survivors back into the population as healthy and protected, and they go back to work. You quarantine more batches and keep your health system at full operation but not overstretched. You stay way ahead of virus transmission in the wild.

Once you've got a high enough proportion of your population protected from re-infection to make the pandemic fizzle out, you can let the old folk out of isolation and wait for the vaccine to finish off the job.

On a virus like Covid-19 that might reduce the death toll worldwide by as much as good hospital care with the best known available treatment improves on no hospital care. I can't think of anything else which might. It could be done, it's an optimal procedure, it's politically impossible.
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Post by LarsMac »

spot;1531478 wrote: I think we'll find that speaking solely of Covid-19, 7% of those sick enough to need a hospital bed will die and nobody else. That's what my spreadsheet says, now that I've finally projected it all the way.

What baffles me is the lack of recognition that the number who don't catch it before the vaccine is ready will be trivially few. Between 10%-20% perhaps.

If the world doesn't get a process in place to mass-vaccinate in weeks rather than years, though that would be preferable, and the world can't be so authoritarian as China has been, which is arguably preferable, then we need an alternative.

I can put the procedure for the next pandemic here but I know in advance nobody will adopt it. It makes no difference how lethal the next pandemic is, this process still reduces the final death toll.

What you do is this, if you can't extinguish the outbreak and it's capable of spreading worldwide the way this one has.

You work out the minority most affected if they catch it - for Covid-19 that's everyone over 70 and everyone with hypertension or heart problems. You put them into their homes and tell them to stay safe and not mingle.

Then, working out from your key workers - the health providers first - you quarantine volunteer batches from the general population and you infect them all. You get as many ill as your health system can cope with, and you put all the survivors back into the population as healthy and protected, and they go back to work. You quarantine more batches and keep your health system at full operation but not overstretched. You stay way ahead of virus transmission in the wild.

Once you've got a high enough proportion of your population protected from re-infection to make the pandemic fizzle out, you can let the old folk out of isolation and wait for the vaccine to finish off the job.

On a virus like Covid-19 that might reduce the death toll worldwide by as much as good hospital care with the best known available treatment improves on no hospital care. I can't think of anything else which might. It could be done, it's an optimal procedure, it's politically impossible.


We have to be consistent on the numbers, I think.

What we have to work with is limited. We can work with "Confirmed cases" and Deaths, pretty easily. When you start trying to work with ethereal numbers, like "% of those sick enough to need a hospital bed" we can get in the weeds fairly quickly.

I would like to be able to include "those who were infected, but showed no symptoms."

However, that is another value that remains "out there, somewhere."

Some of the numbers are very interesting. South Korea seems to have a fairly effective plan in the works.

Switzerland must be doing something right, as well. While the cases are growing rapidly, they have minimal fatalities.

On the other hand, Italy has now topped China for fatalities, with barely half the confirmed cases being reported.

The vaccine is still pretty far off on the horizon. Unless, possibly something already in the inventory for other bugs can test out as being effective on this one.

Before we can even hope for a vaccine, global testing needs to be available, and the lesson from this must be that travel restrictions and isolation must be launched globally and quickly if there is to be any hope of containing this kind of thing.

Reviewing the history of vaccinations and epidemic behavior suggests that we will be seeing COVID-19 for a very long time.

Hopefully its general fatality rate remains fairly low.
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Post by spot »

LarsMac;1531487 wrote: We have to be consistent on the numbers, I think.

What we have to work with is limited. We can work with "Confirmed cases" and Deaths, pretty easily. When you start trying to work with ethereal numbers, like "% of those sick enough to need a hospital bed" we can get in the weeds fairly quickly.

I would like to be able to include "those who were infected, but showed no symptoms."

However, that is another value that remains "out there, somewhere."




The trouble with "confirmed cases" is that it originated in China where everyone listed as confirmed was in hospital and had been tested. There was a week when they changed away and back to that definition.

In the Rest of the World the confirmed cases count isn't reliant on tests because there aren't the resources. The actuality is that they're the hospitalized ill. I used the phrase "% of those sick enough to need a hospital bed" to be equivalent to confirmed cases when confirmation was no longer being checked. They're ill enough to need a hospital bed. They might, eventually, not get one but they're still in that category. If someone's "sick enough to need a hospital bed" they're clearly a confirmed case whether they have been confirmed by testing or not, it's just a more accurate and more provable term.

I took the % with antibodies but only mild or asymptomatic from the UK government statistics, where they put 84% in that category and 16% needing hospital and therefore "confirmed cases". I've no problem using a figure as official as that. The easy-to-see figure is how many have been put in hospital, and we can call them "confirmed cases" if you prefer. I was trying to be to be consistent on the numbers by choosing an accurate description of a generic label that will cease to be true.

Covid-19 is a permanent disease in the world, but this year it has an open goal with no resistance at all. That can only ever happen once for any disease.
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Post by gmc »

The mortality rate is ten times that of "normal" flu. It' shighly infectious and while it;s true that for most people the effects are milld what you don't seem to take in to account is what the number of deaths would be if those hospitalised did not actually have access to those hospotal beds, Icu units ventilators etc. China, europe have socialised medical care where access to medical care is a given. The US has a far bigger proiblem imo because people will not be going to the doctor because they can't affoird to. I classic highlighting of the simple fact that the health of your neighbour matters for yours free medical is a necessity not a luxury. Hopefully it might stop the sell off of the NHS.
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Post by LarsMac »

gmc;1531493 wrote: The mortality rate is ten times that of "normal" flu. It' shighly infectious and while it;s true that for most people the effects are milld what you don't seem to take in to account is what the number of deaths would be if those hospitalised did not actually have access to those hospotal beds, Icu units ventilators etc. China, europe have socialised medical care where access to medical care is a given. The US has a far bigger proiblem imo because people will not be going to the doctor because they can't affoird to. I classic highlighting of the simple fact that the health of your neighbour matters for yours free medical is a necessity not a luxury. Hopefully it might stop the sell off of the NHS.


It is highly infectious, it seems, but the only statistics we really have are the ones based upon those who report to a facility to be tested and treated.

Only those who feel symptomatic are likely to be tested, and only the ones with positive test results will be counted in the WHO and CDC stats.

Therefore, the fatality rate is a portion of those "confirmed cases"

I have seen those estimates of infected vs Confirmed, too.

So, if we assume that the reported "Confirmed" cases are 15% od the actual infected, then we are looking at somewhere around 1.6 million active cases in the world, already.

The reported fatalities now becomes a much smaller percentage of the whole. (somehere around 0.6%) Still a bit higher than for the common influenza.

Of course, now we have to consider how we determine how many of those will have developed antibodies, and immunity to further infection.

And, how many of the asymptomatic cases can still infect other people? For how long?

And, how many of those who have recovered are susceptible to re-infection? for how long?
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Post by Bryn Mawr »

LarsMac;1531499 wrote: It is highly infectious, it seems, but the only statistics we really have are the ones based upon those who report to a facility to be tested and treated.

Only those who feel symptomatic are likely to be tested, and only the ones with positive test results will be counted in the WHO and CDC stats.

Therefore, the fatality rate is a portion of those "confirmed cases"

I have seen those estimates of infected vs Confirmed, too.

So, if we assume that the reported "Confirmed" cases are 15% od the actual infected, then we are looking at somewhere around 1.6 million active cases in the world, already.

The reported fatalities now becomes a much smaller percentage of the whole. (somehere around 0.6%) Still a bit higher than for the common influenza.

Of course, now we have to consider how we determine how many of those will have developed antibodies, and immunity to further infection.

And, how many of the asymptomatic cases can still infect other people? For how long?

And, how many of those who have recovered are susceptible to re-infection? for how long?


About a week ago the (I think) UK government admitted that the probable count of infections here was between ten and fifty thousand rather than the four hundred that had tested positive at the time.
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Post by FourPart »

Bryn Mawr;1531505 wrote: About a week ago the (I think) UK government admitted that the probable count of infections here was between ten and fifty thousand rather than the four hundred that had tested positive at the time.


That's because it's suspected that it may have been around longer than realised - just that we didn't realise that it was anything other than Seasonal Flu, the vast majority of which cases never get reported. If this is the case, then I suspect this may be what I had over Christmas as the symptoms match exactly what is said of C19. Dry cough, difficulty in breathing, etc.

I'm in 2 minds about the Lockdown principle. I see the logic behind it, but other countries which have had the full Lockdowns (Italy, Spain, etc) are also the countries with the highest Death Toll, so the effectiveness of this protocol does leave itself open to be qestioned.
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FourPart;1531608 wrote: That's because it's suspected that it may have been around longer than realised - just that we didn't realise that it was anything other than Seasonal Flu, the vast majority of which cases never get reported. If this is the case, then I suspect this may be what I had over Christmas as the symptoms match exactly what is said of C19. Dry cough, difficulty in breathing, etc.

I'm in 2 minds about the Lockdown principle. I see the logic behind it, but other countries which have had the full Lockdowns (Italy, Spain, etc) are also the countries with the highest Death Toll, so the effectiveness of this protocol does leave itself open to be qestioned.


If yours was C19 then you are one of the blessed who can save the country - immune and able to work :-)

As to lockdown, try reversing it - the countries that have tried it are those that were in-extremis in the first place and their death toll might have been far worse without.

To my mind we cannot stop it at this stage and extending it just increases the damage to the country but if we totally overwhelm the NHS then the death toll will go through the roof so we must make the effort to slow it.

That is dependant, however, on the profile of the deaths. I have seen a suggestion that 98.5% of those who’ve died have serious underlying health problems. That, surely, opens the possibility of strict isolation for the few and allow the rest to fall ill and get the damned disease out of the way once and for all, otherwise we will be suffering for years with a population with limited immunity.
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Post by LarsMac »

FourPart;1531608 wrote: That's because it's suspected that it may have been around longer than realised - just that we didn't realise that it was anything other than Seasonal Flu, the vast majority of which cases never get reported. If this is the case, then I suspect this may be what I had over Christmas as the symptoms match exactly what is said of C19. Dry cough, difficulty in breathing, etc.

I'm in 2 minds about the Lockdown principle. I see the logic behind it, but other countries which have had the full Lockdowns (Italy, Spain, etc) are also the countries with the highest Death Toll, so the effectiveness of this protocol does leave itself open to be qestioned.


South Korea's actions seem to have been fairly effective, as was China's, once they caught on and initiated it.

Italy's lockdown was obviously too little, too late, as it seems, was Spain's

It might useful to explain how a few people in Britain may have experienced this thing a month before anyone knew anything about it, even in China.
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Bryn Mawr;1531617 wrote: If yours was C19 then you are one of the blessed who can save the country - immune and able to work :-)

As to lockdown, try reversing it - the countries that have tried it are those that were in-extremis in the first place and their death toll might have been far worse without.

To my mind we cannot stop it at this stage and extending it just increases the damage to the country but if we totally overwhelm the NHS then the death toll will go through the roof so we must make the effort to slow it.

That is dependant, however, on the profile of the deaths. I have seen a suggestion that 98.5% of those who’ve died have serious underlying health problems. That, surely, opens the possibility of strict isolation for the few and allow the rest to fall ill and get the damned disease out of the way once and for all, otherwise we will be suffering for years with a population with limited immunity.


I am not sure we have data yet to show that people who have been infected and survived are either now immune, or are now not infectious.

There is a assumption that this is so, based on experience with many other infectious diseases, but we have very little data, so far, to support that with this bug.
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Post by Bryn Mawr »

LarsMac;1531619 wrote: I am not sure we have data yet to show that people who have been infected and survived are either now immune, or are now not infectious.

There is a assumption that this is so, based on experience with many other infectious diseases, but we have very little data, so far, to support that with this bug.


The second should be easy enough to check, test for antibodies and then for the virus and if you have the one without the other then safe.

The Chinese should be able to tell us the answer to the first, have any of the seventy thousand plus recovered patients come through the system a second time? If not the the probability is the there is immunity.
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Bryn Mawr;1531633 wrote: The second should be easy enough to check, test for antibodies and then for the virus and if you have the one without the other then safe.

The Chinese should be able to tell us the answer to the first, have any of the seventy thousand plus recovered patients come through the system a second time? If not the the probability is the there is immunity.


Hopefully, by now, the Chinese are in the midst of figuring this out.

With only 80 some thousand reported cases, after several months, obviously something they have been doing is working, and they now have time to figure out the details.
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Post by magentaflame »

The death rate of the 'known' cases so far is at below 3% worldwide.

I think making the internet more available worldwide.

Getting rid of money and only having cards.

limit the travel of human beings across the world.

stop building high rise buildings
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Here in the States, it seems that each state, and each city must learn the lessons on their own, never picking up what the other communities have initiated and found to work.

And they do as little as possible until the count of infections sneaks up on them.
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Post by spot »

LarsMac;1531787 wrote: Here in the States, it seems that each state, and each city must learn the lessons on their own, never picking up what the other communities have initiated and found to work.

And they do as little as possible until the count of infections sneaks up on them.


We're all watching for a convincing downturn in the rate of transmission in America, it's bound to happen.
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spot;1531789 wrote: We're all watching for a convincing downturn in the rate of transmission in America, it's bound to happen.


May. I think. It seems to just be getting up a head of steam, here.
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The 'radical' left just wants everyone to have food, shelter, healthcare, education and a living wage. Man that's radical!....ooooohhhh Scary!
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Post by spot »

magentaflame;1531794 wrote: https://www.google.com/covid19-map/

Interesting info.


Did you ever see that film with Fred Astaire, from a Nevil Shute novel? On the Beach?

Similar sort of data.
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Post by magentaflame »

They've warned all cruise ships/ foreign ships to leave our ports or they will be looking at five years imprisonment and baggage handlers at Sydney airport have just tested positive. They have turned domestic flights around mid air. At least they are being serious about it here . And if now we are facing 6 months imprisonment for being out of our homes without a proper excuse and in the company of more than one other person.....I'm good with that.
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Post by magentaflame »

spot;1531795 wrote: Did you ever see that film with Fred Astaire, from a Nevil Shute novel? On the Beach?

Similar sort of data.


It rings a bell . I shall youtube it.
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Post by spot »

magentaflame;1531797 wrote: It rings a bell . I shall youtube it.


Lord no. Dreadful place, YouTube.

https://hdbest.net/on-the-beach-1959-4812.html

No registration, free film, pretty good quality print. Misery-inducing plot, mind. Great film.

Turn off the captions, on the right, half way down the list. Not an obvious place.
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Post by LarsMac »

I was a young fellow when that came out.

Another one was a flick called, Alas Babylon, made from a book by Pat Frank.

There is a scene in that film that I have been reminded of a few times in the last couple of weeks.
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Post by FourPart »

The actual Death Rate is bound to be a lot lower than specified, as the Death Rate is only based on a percentage of Confirmed Cases. The question is, what percentage of people who have C19 have actually come forward & been confirmed against those who have got it & got over it thinking it to be just regular Seasonal Flu? I have heard it speculated that less than 10% of those who get it are actually known about. The others simply recover. I think once the Antibody Tests get about that we might be in for a surprise to found out how many people have actually had it.
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Post by Bryn Mawr »

FourPart;1531904 wrote: The actual Death Rate is bound to be a lot lower than specified, as the Death Rate is only based on a percentage of Confirmed Cases. The question is, what percentage of people who have C19 have actually come forward & been confirmed against those who have got it & got over it thinking it to be just regular Seasonal Flu? I have heard it speculated that less than 10% of those who get it are actually known about. The others simply recover. I think once the Antibody Tests get about that we might be in for a surprise to found out how many people have actually had it.


I can only hope so, mass immunity is our only hope of a long term die back in cases.
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Post by spot »

The UK government figure, last I saw, was that an estimate of 16% of infected people are confirmed cases and the other 84% have not been counted or tested or seen. I hope they based that on a statistical sampling of the population sometime in March but I don't know that they did.
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Post by LarsMac »

So, I've read some discussions on this technique.

We now have some testing with using the concept to treat patients here in Colorado.

Critically ill Evergreen man first in Colorado to receive ‘convalescent plasma’ to help fight COVID-19

The plasma came from a donor who recovered from COVID-19. Doctors hope the antibodies in the donor's blood will help Dr. Michael Leonard's immune system fight a vicious case of COVID-19.
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Planning for the next pandemic

Post by spot »

The first person to put a scam "Chinese antibody inoculation kit" onto eBay will make a fortune. And I bet there are vital key directors of the political process putting their names down for the real thing on a list somewhere too.

And "UK coronavirus peak at least two weeks away, chief scientist says", so you can bet the US peak is at least that far off. Why were politicians saying ten days, last week? It clearly can't be. New York TV news clips of interviews with grieving relatives, for example, show background people crowded together outdoors like on a normal work day, I can only hope they were exceptions to what ought to be a social rule not to.

That chief scientist was talking about deaths, it turns out, and nothing at all about when the UK figures will peak, neither daily deaths nor daily confirmed cases.

Vallance said the peak of the outbreak could still be weeks away. “I would expect the deaths to continue to keep going up for about two weeks after the intensive care picture improves. We’re not there yet, but that’s the sort of timeframe I would expect.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ ... ntist-says




We can extrapolate back from there. Two weeks after the number of people entering intensive care peaks. Entering intensive care is perhaps on average three days after entering hospital as a confirmed case, which is on average 11 days after becoming symptomatic, which is on average 5 days after infection.

He's estimating between two and three weeks from the daily confirmed case count peaking to the daily death count peaking, which fits those countries which have passed their maximum daily death count.

He's not saying when he thinks the first of those indicators, the daily confirmed cases total, will peak. Neither is anyone else. Actually lifting the stay at home advice requires the total to drop quite a way, unless the restart is made prematurely because of political pressure. One might think June was the absolute earliest one could reasonably hope for in terms of getting out and re-opening the pubs again in the UK. Were I a betting man I'd plump for August. Looking at the rate of drop of daily confirmed cases for those countries where it's dropping, like Spain and Italy and several more, the cases ought to be low enough to restart case-tracing and contact isolation after three months. I think that means three months from peak daily confirmed cases to releasing the majority of the restrictions.
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Planning for the next pandemic

Post by spot »

For the first time, the UK at least is starting to get a picture of the shape of this pandemic.

Five weeks ago we slammed in a nationwide isolation rule. Essential workers carry on but with whatever safety procedure is appropriate. The rest stay home, and when out of the home they stay six feet from anyone else. Nobody travels unless they must for work.

Alongside that, the hospitals ramped up capacity. The number of ventilators went up by around five times in some hospitals at least, the number of beds went up by (I guess here) 50,000 by clearing less essential patients and building new capacity.

The consequence is that every patient needing hospital treatment has been brought in and treated effectively, every hospital patient needing intensive care has had intensive care, medics from trainees to consultants have worked 13 hour shifts and it's been unprecedented but it's worked.

The peak of patient admissions has started to drop, three weeks after the shutdown began. We have now two weeks of reductions, a rough guess would be 12% fewer each week. If we were to keep the same gradient of reduction, we could be down to few new cases in about sixteen weeks. By few I mean going down from the present 4,600 Covid-19 hospital admissions a day to 4,600 a week.

That is obviously not going to happen, sixteen weeks at the current level of isolation. People are restlessly anticipating no more than another six weeks before they can get back to work.

The expectation and the reality do not conform. Maybe the summer heat will accelerate the 12% per week reduction but it's not going to switch off infectivity like a lightbulb.

I'm discussing the UK here. These are not even options in America. America is not going to remain isolating other than by personal choice.

What I think is going to happen in the UK is that the rate cannot be brought down to a level where contact tracing and self-isolation will actually defeat the virus. I think the new phone apps and sending people back to self-isolation like a sin-bin in a football match will help a lot once more people are back at work, but the numbers are not going to fall much from where they are now. Maybe they can drop to a half of now, but they're not going down to insignificance.

The hospitals will stay fairly full of fairly ill people for the next year. During 2021 we'll be slowly exposed to the vaccines which will come on stream, and the pandemic will turn into a background problem like flu. Then we can all write books about it.

The good thing about this scenario, which I think is likely for the UK, is that everyone who needs good treatment in hospital will get it, doctors and nurses will figure prominently in the Honours Lists, and the UK will keep the final death toll to between 125,000 and 200,000 by the time we call it quits. The government can even choose which of those two figures it wants, the higher the figure the more the economy can be rescued. That flexibility is hugely better than a half million people dying in fields and warehouses which we would have had with no intervention.

As for America? I don't think it gets the choice, I think it's far worse off. Pick any number in seven figures. If it starts with a 1 it will be a reprieve, 3+ will be awful. Most of the rest of the non-European world is on the same track.

China and South Korea and New Zealand have a harder job, which is to sustain case-chasing and contact isolating for the next two years. I hope they can succeed. If that policy falls away then they have the exponential growth back and they're into isolating whole regions the way China did to put the lid down hard.

So how to plan for the next pandemic. We were very very lucky that this one has so low a mortality. If this one had 10% of infections being lethal we would have had all the same problems but a lot more screaming.

To prepare for the next pandemic I think we need mandatory pre-installed contact tracing apps on every smart phone, we need to regard smart phone tracing as a social necessity and have them all registered automatically to our traceable identity, and we need to stamp on every future virus outbreak immediately and leave the questions until after we've got on top of it, not before. We need the adequate peak hospital capacity permanently on standby, and we need universal healthcare worldwide.

I hope we can extend this into a discussion about pandemic planning.

What we do not need now is for America to declare it was deliberately attacked. I note that Republican activists have been briefed this week to stop defending the President and to start attacking China instead.
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Post by Bryn Mawr »

The day we get mandatory tracking on smartphones then I either go back to my dumb phone or I stop carrying a phone at all!
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Bryn Mawr;1532401 wrote: The day we get mandatory tracking on smartphones then I either go back to my dumb phone or I stop carrying a phone at all!


At the moment, people in the UK consider those who breach personal distancing to be antisocial dogs. What will you do if carrying a tracer smartphone at all times carries similar opprobrium?
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Post by Bryn Mawr »

spot;1532402 wrote: At the moment, people in the UK consider those who breach personal distancing to be antisocial dogs. What will you do if carrying a tracer smartphone at all times carries similar opprobrium?


At the moment this is not a police state, they cannot force you to buy and carry a smartphone.

As to public opinion, who knows if you are carrying a smartphone, if it is equipped with a tracker and if it is turned on.

In a similar vein, I could reduce the cost of my insurance by allowing them to fit a tracker to my car - in the words of The Duke, “the hell I will”.
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Our government yesterday "encouraged" all Australians to "get the app" . It was turned on last night. The doctors standing with the minister proclaiming it is safe that they themselves were putting it on their phones. That anyone breaching the privacy act would be jailed. . I made a comment that it was one step to far for me. I was called "stupid", ignorant, "one of the flat earther sheep" .....I don't care.

We've had many breaches of privacy in this country. Not one person from any company has been jailed. It will record connections of 15 minutes or more. I call bull****. They keep saying it's voluntary but there is a strong social guilt trip attached to that understanding .

I don't DO bluetooth . And my Location is always turned off. Some tried to make the argument that we share too much of ourselves on social media anyway so why be against it. ...well I dont' share my immediate location on any social media or generally for that fact .

Cyber experts were demanding just last night for the government to release the source code...so it can be continually monitored. that has yet to happen . We know Amazon has the contract.

So they can stick it up their arses.
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It'll play hell with your battery life.
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Who developed the app? Too many seem to end up being spyware for various countries. I don't care about being tracked but I don't want the damn thing listening to me fart in my sleep.
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Post by spot »

Snooz;1532441 wrote: I don't care about being tracked but I don't want the damn thing listening to me fart in my sleep.


I uninstalled all the Google apps off my phone except the play store and camera, then I disabled the microphone and camera from everything else except the actual video phone functions. I still don't trust it but it's less bad. How people can live with Alexa baffles me.
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But that's the problem . We found out that certain things on our smart televisions and those things we talk to to make the lights go on and off were listening to us. We are only hearing from ministers not cyber experts. It was only after the minister told everyone to turn on that suddenly the experts were screaming down our airwaves to release the source code and that it should have been done already .

Plus we know form whistle blowers and cyber 'dudes' over the years how our info ( unbeknown to us at the time) were invading our privacy. It will be years before we know just how much of our privacy has been invaded once again .

Then you have the government saying that they won't even be allowed near the info...I'm not comfortable with Amazon knowing but not my government. Data has to be stored somewhere, even a high school kid knows that but the government is telling us it won't be...WTF? Data is stored and transmitted through Data centres. I know this because I used to work in one. ...(think royal mint without the firearms)

Simply put, I don't bloody trust the barstards.
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Post by devist8me »

This is also because of the "presumptive" positive cases reported early on. These folks weren't for sure positive, they only exihibited symptoms and had to wait 3-5 days to truly text positive. "Premumptive" positives were considered in those early statistics.



Bryn Mawr;1531505 wrote: About a week ago the (I think) UK government admitted that the probable count of infections here was between ten and fifty thousand rather than the four hundred that had tested positive at the time.
I probably posted that in an ambien trance-soryy
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Post by spot »

This is an impressive long-term plan which, if implemented, would allow any region to monitor any disease outbreak and home in on infection hotspots quickly. I've heard of no other process which could have that effect. It avoids having large-area lockdowns and disruption, it's hugely cheaper than what we're doing now and if it were in place it would immediately cope with outbreaks of new diseases. Investing a small proportion of the current costs would bring lasting benefit.
An Israeli company has developed technology that can identify and locate Covid-19 outbreaks by sampling sewage. This is from the AFP:

An Israeli company is monitoring coronavirus traces in a coastal city’s sewers and hopes to deploy its technology more widely to provide early warning of future concentrations of the respiratory disease.

[...]

Although Yaniv saw “challenges going through the raw sewage”, due to the amount of other materials, she was convinced it is the best way to forestall a virus outbreak.

It is also more practical than trying to test the entire population regularly and, once the technology is in place, it can be used to detect other diseases.

“If you have a platform to detect viruses, specifically corona, we can use the same platform for other viruses,” said Yaniv, a PhD researcher at the university’s biotechnology engineering department.

After the Ashkelon pilot, a number of Israeli municipalities have expressed interest in the technology, but authorities have not commissioned Kando to roll out the project more widely.

As well as the health benefits, Goldfarb is hopeful his firm could prevent a repeat of the sweeping economic shutdown which was imposed to stop the spread of coronavirus.

“Decision-makers can take decisions based on data and they can close specific areas,” he said. That means “people will not lose their jobs, that means that people will have a better future – (and) the next outbreak will be managed much better.”


https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/ ... st-updates
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Re: Planning for the next pandemic

Post by spot »

I'll drop this here because the entire article was worthwhile, and someone sometime is definitely going to try to put this pandemic behind us and say it can never happen again.

I think we got off lightly with Covid-19, compared to what we might get another time.
In the past few decades, we have witnessed a surge in new viruses jumping from animals to humans. Some, like H5N1 and H7N9, caused severe disease, but stuttering transmission in humans. Other severe infections, including SARS, have been more transmissible, but we managed to contain them relatively early on through isolation and contact tracing. Our efforts to stop the spread of swine flu were less successful, but luckily it turned out to be milder than other pandemic strains. The new coronavirus combines the troublesome features of all these viruses to give a disease that is both easily transmissible and can overwhelm health systems. As for vaccines, the shelves were pretty bare.

For now, we are firefighting. We have the knowledge to bring this pandemic under control, but it has exposed countries’ lack of preparedness. In the future, we need to invest in research when times are quiet. That will ensure we can respond effectively when another disease threatens, because there is no reason to assume that covid-19 will be the last – or the worst – pandemic we face.

paywalled at https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg ... -outbreak/
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Re: Planning for the next pandemic

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spot wrote: Thu Jun 25, 2020 3:57 pm I'll drop this here because the entire article was worthwhile, and someone sometime is definitely going to try to put this pandemic behind us and say it can never happen again.

I think we got off lightly with Covid-19, compared to what we might get another time.
I think that it is just getting started.
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Re: Planning for the next pandemic

Post by magentaflame »

Oh why not! Whilst we're spreading pestilence around the place... :lol:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ ... olia-china
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Re: Planning for the next pandemic

Post by spot »

If it weren't for the travel ban, I'd been planning to go there this summer.
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Re: Planning for the next pandemic

Post by Bryn Mawr »

magentaflame wrote: Sun Jul 05, 2020 4:29 pm Oh why not! Whilst we're spreading pestilence around the place... :lol:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ ... olia-china
The last big outbreak killed a third of the population if my memory serves.
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Re: Planning for the next pandemic

Post by spot »

I have an odd plot for your consideration.

A lot of information is stripped away to get this. It shows the fifty most affected countries, to throw away potential effects of small sample size from the remainder.

Then it throws away time. This is just a plot, by country, of what percent of deaths had occurred by the time a given percent of positive-tested cases had been been reported. So, for each country, when the line is flatter it's having fewer deaths as the case numbers rise. When the line is steeper it's having more deaths for each equal size group of reported new cases. Either way the line starts with no cases no deaths, and goes up to all cases so far and all deaths so far.

There are clearly a couple of odd countries in the background of the plot. Some have cases or deaths uncovered suddenly and added in, a few have double-counted batches removed once they've been discovered in the stats. One reports cases and deaths once every 20 days or so, by the look of it.

The blue diamond line is the major outlier. It has its first 75% of deaths during its first 40% of cases and then the rest of the cases are less lethal.

I can think of potential causes. Maybe the entire country suddenly started testing a lot of less symptomatic cases. A positive is a positive whether it's life-threatening or mild. Or maybe the lockdown lifting put a lot of youth back into circulation and they're going positive while the oldsters are still holed up and being cautious.

In either event, it happened in that country and nowhere else. It's America.


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Re: Planning for the next pandemic

Post by Bryn Mawr »

So who's the people line? My first guess was China but then I decided that must be the light blue.
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Re: Planning for the next pandemic

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Bryn Mawr wrote: Fri Aug 07, 2020 11:35 am So who's the people line? My first guess was China but then I decided that must be the light blue.
I'll ask the lad to put a key on there.

He also saw, which I didn't, that there's two countries aligned very closely to the US curve. I'll be interested to know who those are.

And we can highlight the UK too.
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Re: Planning for the next pandemic

Post by spot »

Here's a further guess, related to mask-wearing reducing the viral load of the infection and resulting in a milder response about which we speculated here a while back.
In an article published this month in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, Gandhi noted that in some outbreaks early in the pandemic in which most people did not wear masks, 15 percent of the infected were asymptomatic. But later on, when people began wearing masks, the rate of asymptomatic people was 40 to 45 percent.

She said the evidence points to masks not just protecting others — as U.S. health officials emphasize — but protecting the wearer as well. Gandhi makes the controversial argument that while we’ve mostly talked about asymptomatic infections as terrifying due to how people can spread the virus unwittingly, it could end up being a good thing.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2 ... Fstory-ans
The lifting of America's lockdowns coincides with the large-scale adoption of mask wearing in public settings. It may have triggered the lower deaths to positive case ratio. That would make sense if it were so and it appears to fit the graph on a superficial viewing.
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