…of have I got my estimations wrong?
The BBC had an illustration of how much difference social isolation would make. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52056111
Their numbers:
1 person infects 2.5 others in 5 days and they infect 406 after a month.
With social distancing,
1 person infects 1.25 others and they infect 15 after a month - a drop of 96%.
If this were true, this would reduce infections to a trickle after 30 days, I actually calculated a similar number.
So why have doubled in the last week? Sure, that is less than UK or US, but how can it be so high? They were doubling every 4 days and now every 8 days, but a 95% reduction in contact should reduce it much more.
There’s a long lag between what we do and the numbers we see. The time between exposure and first onset of symptoms is typically 4-5 days. But no one is being tested because they have a sore throat, we are mostly only testing the very ill. It usually takes another week after the onset of symptoms until someone gets very sick. (“first I had a cold, then it turned into a flu”) And then it takes a while for test results to get back, if the person even gets tested.
So The numbers you see today were already set 2+ week ago, and reflect what we were doing before then.
Keep in mind that data now reflect infections from 7-14 days ago. If social isolation were called for within the last week, it would take time to take it seriously and time to enforce it. We might not see a slowing of the infections until a week or two from now, and it would only be gradual. This is a hell of an infectious disease, and people have to know it’s going to take time and discipline to see results. And any let up could easily reignite the crisis.
The other thing to consider is that social distancing is far from universal, even now. It’s more prevalent in some parts of the country (mainly blue states) than others. For instance, a couple days ago, the governor of Mississippi overruled the efforts of local governments to impose social distancing regulations in their jurisdictions.
A national 3-week shelter in place order would do wonders, but as long as Trump is President, that won’t happen. :mad:
Another thing that inexplicably does not get nearly enough attention is the use of masks: there is growing evidence that they actually do help. Not so much in terms of being an absolute fail-safe measure of preventing an individual from getting the disease, but in terms of slowing the rate of overall transmission, masks are huge. There’s a reason why Asians wear them. Everyone needs to practice social isolation, and everyone should probably wearing some sort of mask, or a bandana if nothing else to prevent their cough droplets from infecting others.
Masks have more effect when the sick folks are the ones wearing them. Of course we can’t even get sick folks to stop having “Corona Virus Parties” until they are sick enough to need hospitalization. The testing has significant delays in implementation, and a somewhat larger than usual accepted level of inaccuracy.
Stay home. Stay ten feet away from anyone if you go anywhere. Wash your hands for forty seconds with soap, water, and your own personal scrub brush every time you touch anything that isn’t yours.
Why are your recommendations double any recommended guidelines?
I added up the numbers local to me. My county + the adjoining counties + the next ring of counties add up to fewer than 50 confirmed cases and 1 death for a population of over a million. 1/3 of those are from a group that was overseas about a month ago. That county’s numbers haven’t outpaced any other area county over the past two weeks.
I sometimes wonder if a best strategy might be to use the low risk groups to become intentionally infected very early on and keep the high risk groups under tight quarantines. This would reduce the chain reaction effects of infection significantly. Those who have recovered could be utilized in helping to care for those high risk that can’t go out. I am praying that infection rates are many times higher than we currently know. Earlier than expected crests in deaths might indicate this.
I think we’re getting to the point where the only real way to slow this thing down measurably is a 3-week lock-down. The details and logistics would have to be worked out, and I don’t trust this administration to do it. We’re gonna be dealing with this for months.
I read somewhere that the way to get sick people to wear masks is to get everyone to wear them–otherwise, people are reluctant to label themselves as a plague-carrier when they might just have allergies. So the impact of masks on healthy people is greater than their technical ability to prevent infection.
Not only have news reports not encouraged the wearing of masks, but in some cases, even some of the experts have indirectly discouraged their use in public by suggesting that they won’t protect individuals from getting sick.
I think this goes back to goes back to something I said in the thread about Japan’s response to COVID, where people were making a big deal about the Japanese attending cherry blossom festivals. While I’d absolutely acknowledge that this was a bad idea, simply wearing masks has probably slowed transmission of the virus, and many cultures in East Asia have an unwritten rule that you wear masks so as not to spread your germs.
Worse, the emphasis in the news is that the only masks that matter are the N-95 masks, which has led to some individuals hoarding these masks that are essential for healthcare workers.
Just all up and down the line, the American response has been an exercise in ineptitude, not just from the policy side but also in terms of sharing accurate information. All we hear is “Stay six feet apart” and “wash your hands” and this has fundamentally misrepresented how the virus has been spread in a majority of cases.
I feel like we are dodging raindrops. Nature is nature and we can be protected from everything. This is like a natural disaster. It looks like it is on track to kill about 1,000,000 people in the united states unless current infection rates are far higher than we know. I would expect the numbers will end up coming in at around 200,000 when all is said and done. If we shelter in place till things calm down and then go back out will it not just start over? I think the only thing we can change is how badly medical facilities will be over run, how many lives will be affected by this in the long term say 1 year?
If you read higher-quality sites, like the CDC info, it didn’t say “wearing masks is useless”, it said “we don’t have enough masks, they should only be worn by sick people and those caring for of living with sick people.”
I found [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxAaO2rsdIs]this video from 3Blue1Brown interesting. It shows simulations of the spread under various different conditions.
Unfortunately it is very difficult to predict who will have mild symptoms. Low risk does not equal no risk. Something like 40% of the people hospitalized are under 55, and 20% are under 40, or something like that.
We also don’t know how strong the acquired immunity is. It’s possible that people who only get mild symptoms may not be immune at all. Some people who seemed to get over COVID-19, and even tested negative, later tested positive again. It’s possible that was due to testing errors, but we just don’t know.
It can also take weeks for people to recover. Even those with mild cases that don’t require hospitalization may be sick for weeks.
I think what it comes down to, is if there was a good strategy to get over this quickly and with minimal risk, that’s what we would already be doing. At the moment, the strategy we have is to simulate herd immunity through isolation.