I don’t think it is taboo. It’s just we don’t know what to tell you that will satisfy your curiosity and you’re starting to sound a little like a broken record.
We can brainstorm all day long, but it is kind of pointless without doing research. Since none of us are interested in being test subjects, I don’t think that’s going to happen.
All you can do is make a choice accepting that there is some non-zero probability that it will have an bad outcome, so do what you can to mitigate that which you can control. Which is what we already do, you know? You drive around in your car knowing that there’s some non-zero probability that you could kill someone or be killed. But you wear a seatbelt (hopefully) and use defensive driving techniques (hopefully) so that you can at least make a risky situation less risky. Maybe you can talk to your mother on the phone while she is sitting on her front porch and you’re sitting in your car with the windows rolled up. We can’t tell you that this is “safe”, but we know enough to say it is safer than you sitting with her on the porch.
I agree that officials should be telling people to get more than a weeks’ worth of groceries. But if you tell people to do that, you risk causing people to hoard because they think the grocery stores are going to be shut down. And also not everyone can afford to stock up.
I am only sounding like a broken record because people keep accusing me and others of not caring, not taking this seriously, being self-indulgent when we ask questions. And there’s been tons of good information actually provided–Banquet Bear brought up the much more cohesive and coherent recommendations from NZ–that was really useful. Others brought up competing view by experts, which is informative. There was a good discussion of areosol vs droplet transfer. We can have a good conversation–but not if people are shamed for wondering where the line is. Because clearly a line does exist.
I have only seen a couple of posts that can be construed as shaming or accusatory. Most people are just wondering what you’re looking for that hasn’t already been said already.
Your insistence that you’re just trying to figure out if X is safe makes my eyes reflexively roll a little, as someone who works in risk assessment. When people ask me this question, they are never asking just for the sake of general knowledge. They are asking so that I will give them cover to go out and do something they really want to do–something they know is risky. Now, you are a great person and I don’t think you are are a rebellious risk-taker. You may be sincerely asking so that you can learn more about how the virus is transmitted. But look, we’ve all met people who are “just asking questions”. Those people usually have some ulterior motive. There are much better resources out there for information about COVID-19 than the SDMB, and you know this. So there should be no surprise that people have responded the way they have to you. We aren’t going to be able to crunch any numbers and tell you that anything is safe. It would be irresponsible for us to even try to do this even if there were some numbers to crunch.
If you want to scold the sanctimonious posters for being sanctimonious, go on and do that. I’ll join you. I hope I haven’t come across as sanctimonious. But you have received plenty of information that can help you make an informed decision. You’re probably not going to get anything else from us other than more exasperation.
Not really. Perhaps that is the most important takeaway. There is no actual line. Sometimes the risk drops off fast, sometimes it only slowly tails off. But there is never a line. The nature of droplets is that there is a fast tail-off. But it isn’t at a simple constant distance. And even then, one person’s fast tail is another’s uncomfortable risk.
10 feet is not really a line. It is just a useful starting point. It doesn’t mean that if you brush past an infectious person in the supermarket you are doomed. Nor does it mean that if you are 10 feet from an infectious person you are guaranteed safe.
As I said earlier, in some ways, 10 feet isn’t about personal risk. If you are the epidemiologist advising government, and you run the simulations, and find that the mix of manageable parameters that leads to control of the outbreak in acceptable time includes advising people to stay ten feet apart, you are going to advise that people stay ten feet apart. However you know that this is an average. Some people will ignore it, some people will still be unlucky. There is always a non-zero risk, and that non-zero risk is factored into the simulations. You still expect that some infections will still occur. But overall management of the pandemic becomes viable.
Sweden’s got just as high a rate of increase as anywhere else and they seem to be assuming that they can just change their method of dealing with it once they’ve got a problem.
This seems unlikely given that every other country has found that you have to change your method of dealing with it at least two weeks before you have a problem.
Sweden worries me. The information we see from simulations from Sydney Uni for Australia suggests that there is a huge sensitivity to the number of people obeying the isolation rules in controlling the outbreak. They showed that if 80% of the population did the full social distancing and stayed at home, the curve would peak and drop quickly. At 70% compliance, the curve just climbed, we assume following the expected logistic curve for an uncontrolled outbreak.
Most of the population of Sweden seem to be doing things like working from home, and generally trying to be responsible. But that is probably not going to be enough. Right now the numbers look grim.
Surprisingly though on the divoc-91 normalized to population deaths graph they are day 10 after the 1 death per million mark and running a relatively low 1.05 geometric growth yesterday and 1.26 over the past 10 days. Less than most other countries have been running at that point. About the same rate as their neighbors Denmark and Norway who did full lock downs weeks ago. (Although Norway has a lower number.) Maybe not yet enough time? One should expect that Denmark and Norway would flatten the rate off soon. If Sweden’s death rate per million does not start to veer higher than theirs … ?? Age demographics very similar.
I think what worries me is that about two weeks ago Sweden knocked the growth rate to about 1.10, which was great. But it has maintained that number almost perfectly ever since. So although a lower growth rate, they remain perfectly exponential. Maybe they can ride it out at this growth rate. I sort of doubt it. They probably have bought themselves some time. The lag time with the virus numbers makes it hard.
I was out walking a few minutes ago. I do my best thinking when I’m walking.
I’m just going throw this out for folks to chew on. I’m not an epidemiologist, but my job is in public health (on the environmental side). A lot of the decisions we make in my arena are based on whatever the Powers that Be consider acceptable losses. Acceptable losses of wildlife habitat, for instance. And yep, acceptable losses of human life too.
Science can tell us that if we allow X, we can expect to see a Y% decrease to a resource over Z amount of time. But science does not tell us whether Y% is acceptable. Typically, government policy dictates what an acceptable loss is, and then we use science to find the “X” that is associated with that acceptable loss. So for instance, X might be the maximum amount of a pesticide that is allowed in food.
Now in the case of the 6 ft social distance, my educated guess is that a ton of research has found that 6 ft is the maximum social distance the average person can reasonably attain most of the time without work productivity and quality of life being impacted above some threshold. The mortality predicted if 90% of the population maintains social distancing at or greater than 6 ft for some extended period time during the COVID-19 pandemic equals the acceptable loss.
So the cold, calculating risk assessor in me thinks that 6 ft was not chosen because it is especially safe. I suspect it was chosen because it was deemed to be the guideline with the highest likelihood of being complied with by most of the population most of the time. Perhaps a social distance of 25 ft would reduce the infection rate by 90%, while 6 ft just reduces it by 50%. But 25 ft isn’t realistic for most people most of the time. Why recommend something that isn’t attainable? When it comes to public policy, you gotta recommend something that is realistic and then accept whatever follows from that. That’s your acceptable loss.
So, Manda JO, this is why I don’t feel comfortable with people acting like there’s a “safe” here. For all we know, 6 feet really isn’t all that safe in any sense of the word. For all we know, standing 6 feet away from the average infected person only reduces your risk of getting infected by a small amount compared to if you stood right next to them. But it’s still something. Just like only going grocery shopping once a week versus twice a week is something, even if going to the store just one time is sufficient to get you infected. If we all try to do as many things as we can to mitigate risk, we will definitely see an overall reduction in potential losses across the population. But we as individuals can do all of these things and still find ourselves among the unlucky folks considered “acceptable losses”.
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Sweden’s doing fine on cases, but much much less good on deaths.
‘Cases’ can be fudged for a week or two by changing your testing regime. Deaths are less amenable to creative accounting.
I wish they had a ‘in critical care’ data set for some of these comparison charts. That’s also pretty difficult to fudge (although less informative once you’ve maxxed out your hopsital beds)
The number I cited was the death rate normalized to population. For now at least they are doing pretty average for this point. Better than some.
It may change, it would be surprising if Denmark, doing more, did not get significantly better results. But as of now the statement that they are doing much less good on deaths is a false one. Tomorrow we will see.
Manda JO - we’ve known eacb other on these boards for a long time now, right? I respect you enormously. Please know that I’m saying the following with love and caring: you don’t seem to be quite yourself when it comes to this issue. The coronavirus is making us all anxious. Perhaps it’s hitting you especially hard. This thread seems to really be winding you up. Maybe you’d feel a little better if you stepped away from it for a couple of days?
The US has not enforced “social distancing”, it has only recommended it. Nicely requested people to follow our instructions, please, as far as possible. Unfortunately, as the case of New York shows, this is too feeble to really stop a raging pandemic. The Chinese locked down entire cities and prohibited anyone from even stepping out of home. They enforced mandatory temperature checks each day, shut down all forms of transport, and of course all movement of people to and from the quarantined cities. I think they reaped the rewards - zero new cases in Wuhan, and a death toll of less than 3500. In India, in some locations paramilitaries have been asked to enforce strict curfew. Necessities are door-delivered and people who go out, even alone for a walk, have faced police action.
I think the US will come to the realization that to stop this beast, we need aggressive quarantine, not spineless social-distancing guidelines. A quarantine was suggested for NYC but not enforced. The cat may be out of the bag now, though.
You may well be right, but the WHO says there have been 3310 deaths in China so far. Unless we have authoritative information to the contrary, I suppose this number stands. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the true Chinese death count was an order of magnitude above what is claimed. Even a count of 30K dead is surprisingly low for a billion-plus population living in dense conditions. That is why I think US death projections (200K+) are highly overrated.
It is all about how many people pass on the virus. Suppose 10 people have the virus, and under normal behavior they pass it on to 25 others. They want that number below 10 at the worst. 8, the virus stops eventually, but 5 or fewer is going to be quicker. They may be content with having it at 1, 2, 3 instead of zero, but beyond a certain point, containment doesn’t work or is too slow.
