After we all spend the next two weeks at home with our stacks of toilet paper and cleaning supplies what are medical professionals are looking for to say we can all go out again?
The idea is, they won’t say that we can all go out again. Coronavirus has a fairly long incubation time between when you catch it and when you start showing symptoms. If you have it, then by the time the two weeks are up, you’ll have symptoms, and hopefully be tested to confirm, and continue to stay away from others, and get medical care if you need it. If, after two weeks, you’re still not showing symptoms, then you can be confident that you’re not infected, and you can go out and mingle again without worry about potentially infecting others.
That’s why the advice we’re getting here is to self-isolate if you have symptoms, and that most of those who do will clear it within 7-14 days. This could presumably continue to apply more or less indefinitely, or at least until numbers of new cases are so low that the response can shift back to test+trace contacts.
This is different from limiting mass gatherings: presumably those restrictions would be lifted when numbers of new cases drop to negligible levels (but what would constitute “negligible” is unpredictable, like so much else about what is, after all, a new virus - e.g., we don’t know if it might come back in a mutated form, or just disappear).
In about a week or two there will be enough test kits to start screening people and then they can start to track the rate of new infections. Fellers law is that epidemics end as fast as they start so they will have a good idea of how long that will take.
Care to elaborate? I’m not familiar with this one.
One way the epidemiologists hope to to know they have been successful is when the public starts complaining that the precautions were a gross over-reaction. If that happens then the precautions worked and the spread was stopped. If everyone is saying wow, the docs were right this is serious-that is a failure.
It is a curious business to be in. As business where success is partly measured by the how much criticism are received.
But experts are now saying the virus can be asymptomatic in children and very mild in young adults, and these age groups are NOT staying home. I’ve been watching that here in my corner of western Washington, where there are fewer cases here than in King County: the restaurants and bars are packed at night, and the mall is still busy, mostly–from what I can tell–with 20-40-year-olds.
If young people are still infecting each other, how long would it take for the virus to have run through that population? Isn’t that how long the rest of us will be socially isolating?
We might not, but the more we stay home, the better the chances.
We old farts mostly stay home but some excursions are necessary or prudent. A weekly supply of fresh milk is necessary. Vehicle repair is prudent. I’m scheduled to venture out in two days for some necessary shopping (meds, mostly) and a prudent drive to the dealer to have faulty RV airbags replaced, which they should have done a year ago but they ran out. :smack: So, go out and maybe catch the COVID if I haven’t already? Or stay home till we drive the RV, then get in a wreck and die? Hmmm…
Best I can do is practice 2-meter distancing. If I survive, it worked.
Social Distancing does not prevent people from getting the disease, but it slows the rate of infection so that health services can manage the cases.
It’s called “Flattening the Curve”
If the infection rate is no longer an exponential increase, then social distancing is working.
And it should be noted that as soon as test kits are widely available, the numbers will appear to sky rocket, even if nothing changed.
No one is saying you’re not allowed to leave your house. They just don’t want people to gather unnecessarily. Go get your air bags fixed, but skip the retirement party for your friend’s mom.
Illinois just shut down all bars and restaurants, but stores are still open.
I looked up the working definition of Social Distancing and was mildly depressed to find that I’ve been doing it for a while now.
As one of my friends just posted on Facebook:
So I’ve been applying social distancing all this time? And here I thought I was just an anti-social recluse!
How do you distinguish an “over-reaction perception” being a success versus having applied the social distancing too early? If the latter people could resume normal life and then get hit. Also the USA is a big country. It seems the entire country is following the same start time. So maybe New Rochelle declares it was bad but not so bad, now things have died down maybe. But then some place that locked down with everyone else thinks they are done like New Rochelle, and so they resume normal activity and then might get hit later, as they are really entirely new to the virus. Is that a possibility?
The paper linked to in this tweet alleges to show direct evidence of curve flattening by comparing two regions in Italy which implemented shutdowns at different times. As close to an A/B test as we’re going to get.
To a certain extent, what you described is the point of all this. In a perfect world this would be a stop gap. If we had a way to lock everyone up so they had no contact with anyone else for the amount of time it takes to go from the moment you catch it until you’re no longer contagious anymore, this entire thing would be behind us in a matter of weeks.
But we can’t do that, so we compromise. We ask everyone to limit their contact with others as much as possible. There’s no martial law, no curfews, just avoid big gatherings for the next few weeks. It’s not going to stop anything, and it’s entirely possible the majority of people that would have gotten it will still get it anyway. However, what it does is slows it down. If I was going to get it tomorrow night at my brother’s birthday party along with a dozen other people, maybe instead I’ll catch it next week and the other dozen people will catch it over the next 3 weeks.
So, plenty of people still get it, but at a rate at which our medical professionals can handle. They’d rather have thousand people show up over the next month than a thousand people show up tomorrow.
TLDR: Flattening the curve.
ETA, I keep wondering about jails. It seems like that’s going to be really problematic.
Probably not. There is already much more social distancing between visitors & residents than in nursing homes, in some jails there is no social contact as there is a partition between the inmate & any visitors. Also, generally the population is younger & healthier than those of nursing homes so less co-morbid factors.
If the situation gets bad enough, they can enforce a lockdown; keeping inmates in their cells enforces social distancing much greater than can be done with the general public.
We won’t know for a while, but if it’s starting to work, we’ll see the number of cases/deaths drop below the current trend.
But: It’s going to take longer than two weeks. The best estimate I read is that the peak of the epidemic in the US is expected to be in May. We’re going to be staying as far away from people as we can for months. It’s not going to be better in two weeks. It’s going to be far worse. And two weeks after that, it’ll be still worse. And two weeks after that, it’ll be even worse. Brace yourself. Barring some dramatic and fairly unlikely change, we’re not keeping to ourselves for a few weeks. We’re probably drastically cutting down on social contact for the next year.
And as testing capability ramps up, we’ll start to see known cases increase faster than the curve because there are a lot of latent cases out there that we just don’t know about, so it’s going to take a while for the data to become reliable.
Dr. Fauci made a good point at today’s press conference (though he probably lost major points by not kissing butt and praising the fast reaction of the Administration throughout his portion of the event).
He said that the data we have available to determine the progression of the pandemic is behind the actual progression, so if the measures being put in place look like they are an over reaction, we’re probably reacting about right for where the pandemic actually is. (my paraphrase)
When the dust settles, we’ll know if what is being advised (and in some cases enforced) is too much or not enough, but I agree that if we are going to err, it is better to be a bit over reactive rather than under.
Yes, the data in that excellent Medium article that we’ve all seen claims that the time between implementing a restriction and it having an effect , is about ten days.
And if you think about it, it **has **to be at least five days, because that’s the average incubation period. If we all start <some particular restriction> today, it won’t stop the infections of all the people who got infected yesterday, who’ll be showing up at doctors offices some time after the weekend.