Posted on 03/08/2020 3:05:23 PM PDT by Vermont Lt
It’s about to break anyway. I got it in 2013, so it’s reaching it’s eventual end.
Of course I’d have to order a new one from... CHINA.
FML!
This is a no win situation for America.
Mass quarantines are not going to work at all, and that’s the only thing that has a chance of working.
We may be about to get run through.
HONG KONG
Comment: HK had cases long before the US. But they closed their border immediately, shut down large gatherings and schools.
The Centre for Health Protection (CHP) of the Department of Health (DH) announced that as of 8pm today (March 9), the CHP is investigating an additional confirmed cases of COVID-19, taking the number of cases to 116 in Hong Kong so far (comprising 115 confirmed cases and one probable case).
The case involves a 44-year-old man (the 116th case) who is the driver of the 56-year-old male patient of the 106th case confirmed on March 6. The patient has good past health and normally lives at his employer’s home at Block A, Po Shan Mansion on 14 -16 Po Shan Road, Mid-levels. He moved to 341 Des Voeux Road West, Kennedy Town on his own on March 5 and was sent to the quarantine centre as a close contact on the following day. He developed a cough since March 7 and has had a fever since yesterday (March 8). His respiratory specimen tested positive for the COVID-19 virus today. He is now under treatment at Ruttonjee Hospital and is in a stable condition. The patient had no recent travel history.
https://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/202003/09/P2020030900642.htm
This old farm kid is nostalgic for that self-sufficiency and distance. Far too close to it all now.
Schools on Spring Break may go ahead and tell students not to come back for awhile.
Time to cancel all the tournaments/March Madness along with the Kentucky Derby.
———\
good luck with that
Santa Clara county last Thursday said no more large gatherings including the San Jose Sharks hockey team....the team not only played the game that night anyway..but over the weekend too
Shutting down gatherings and schools might slow it down enough to possibly keep it from overwhelming our healthcare system.
Japan, France, HK and others have done this. Why haven’t we?
When Bezos sold 4B worth of Amazon stock back the end of January, think he didn’t see what was coming?
He’s in NZ now. Probably in his bunker.
GERMANY
BERLIN, March 9 (Reuters) - Germany on Monday reported 210 new confirmed cases of the coronavirus, the Robert Koch Institute said.
The number of cases rose to 1,112, up from 902 reported on Sunday. The largest number of the cases, 484, were in the western region of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state. (Reporting by Riham Alkousaa Editing by Paul Carrel)
https://news.trust.org/item/20200309073332-qn91r/
"In conclusion, we have demonstrated that gold and silver nanoparticles display excellent antibacterial potential for the Gram negative bacteria E. coli and the Gram positive bacteria BCG. These NPs display their best performance when aggregation is not observed at high levels. By changing surface modifications agents, gold NPs with the same shape and size exhibited different inhibitory effects. Our mechanistic analyses indicated that PAH capped gold NPs caused cell lysis, while citrate capped gold NPs did not. Strong antibacterial activities were observed for silver NPs due to their inherent elemental properties. In terms of anti-TB drug development, this study suggests that NPs may represent useful candidates, but will require significant development to ensure optimal bactericidal activity and low host toxicity."
Well, it would certainly seem so... :)
Yep.
*****
Why are Korea’s Covid-19 death rates so low?
Robust healthcare, prior preparation, aggressive testing – and good fortune
https://asiatimes.com/2020/03/why-are-koreas-covid-19-death-rates-so-low/
I don’t think that there’s going to be any stopping it.
Things like that happening here would spark mass panic. Americans are frickin’ crazy.
And because those things were not done, I suspect we’re going to have mass panic coming from the other direction.
There isn’t any way off this train, and the brakes aren’t working.
https://www.ncsl.org/research/health/state-quarantine-and-isolation-statutes.aspx
There are laws, actually.
(someone on another board said ‘by what right do they tell me I can’t leave my house?’)
We haven’t had a scary microbe in nearly 3 generations and then even it wasn’t as widespread as this is going to be.
Retired from the “city”. Spent 10 years building up the place. County has the same population as in the Civil War. Self-quarantined on my organic farm. 2 year supply (no joke) of fresh, fresh frozen, canned, dehydrated foods from 60 or so different varieties I grow each year.
You name it I have it. Just put in seedlings and seeds for the growing season. Garlic coming up looks great. Wife does the herbs, fire cider, makes kefir, yogurt, kombucha, etc. all the wood I need for heat. Plenty of water in the river and springs. Fresh eggs every day.
Honey from the bees she keeps. Just had Guinness venison stew with dumplings. You have to ford the river to get here. 300 yard defensible perimeter. I stay home mostly. Wife does the gallivanting but can’t think of anything we need. Did buy Everclear though, I guess I’ll have to steam up some shine this year.
That’s why most gloves are nitrile these days
That’s exactly what I fantasize moving to.
It’s not about stopping, it’s about slowing it.
The panic some might have now will pale in comparison when our healthcare system crashes.
From an engineer who crunches the numbers:
I think most people aren’t aware of the risk of systemic healthcare failure due to #COVID19 because they simply haven’t run the numbers yet. Let’s talk math. 1/n
Let’s conservatively assume that there are 2,000 current cases in the US today, March 6th. This is about 8x the number of confirmed (lab-diagnosed) cases. We know there is substantial under-Dx due to lack of test kits; I’ll address implications later of under-/over-estimate. 2/n
We can expect that we’ll continue to see a doubling of cases every 6 days (this is a typical doubling time across several epidemiological studies). Here I mean *actual* cases. Confirmed cases may appear to rise faster in the short term due to new test kit rollouts. 3/n
We’re looking at about 1M US cases by the end of April, 2M by ~May 5, 4M by ~May 11, and so on. Exponentials are hard to grasp, but this is how they go. 4/n
As the healthcare system begins to saturate under this case load, it will become increasingly hard to detect, track, and contain new transmission chains. In absence of extreme interventions, this likely won’t slow significantly until hitting >>1% of susceptible population. 5/n
What does a case load of this size mean for healthcare system? We’ll examine just two factors — hospital beds and masks — among many, many other things that will be impacted. 6/n
The US has about 2.8 hospital beds per 1000 people. With a population of 330M, this is ~1M beds. At any given time, 65% of those beds are already occupied. That leaves about 330k beds available nationwide (perhaps a bit fewer this time of year with regular flu season, etc). 7/n
Let’s trust Italy’s numbers and assume that about 10% of cases are serious enough to require hospitalization. (Keep in mind that for many patients, hospitalization lasts for *weeks* — in other words, turnover will be *very* slow as beds fill with COVID19 patients). 8/n
By this estimate, by about May 8th, all open hospital beds in the US will be filled. (This says nothing, of course, about whether these beds are suitable for isolation of patients with a highly infectious virus.) 9/n
If we’re wrong by a factor of two regarding the fraction of severe cases, that only changes the timeline of bed saturation by 6 days in either direction. If 20% of cases require hospitalization, we run out of beds by ~May 2nd. 10/n
If only 5% of cases require it, we can make it until ~May 14th. 2.5% gets us to May 20th. This, of course, assumes that there is no uptick in demand for beds from *other* (non-COVID19) causes, which seems like a dubious assumption. 11/n
As healthcare system becomes increasingly burdened, Rx shortages, etc, people w/ chronic conditions that are normally well-managed may find themselves slipping into severe states of medical distress requiring intensive care & hospitalization. But let’s ignore that for now. 12/n
Alright, so that’s beds. Now masks. Feds say we have a national stockpile of 12M N95 masks and 30M surgical masks (which are not ideal, but better than nothing). 13/n
There are about 18M healthcare workers in the US. Let’s assume only 6M HCW are working on any given day. (This is likely an underestimate as most people work most days of the week, but again, I’m playing conservative at every turn.) 14/n
As COVID19 cases saturate virtually every state and county, which seems likely to happen any day now, it will soon be irresponsible for all HCWs to not wear a mask. These HCWs would burn through N95 stockpile in 2 days if each HCW only got ONE mask per day. 15/n
One per day would be neither sanitary nor pragmatic, though this is indeed what we saw in Wuhan, with HCWs collapsing on their shift from dehydration because they were trying to avoid changing their PPE suits as they cannot be reused. 16/n
How quickly could we ramp up production of new masks? Not very fast at all. The vast majority are manufactured overseas, almost all in China. Even when manufactured here in US, the raw materials are predominantly from overseas... again, predominantly from China. 17/n
Keep in mind that all countries globally will be going through the exact same crises and shortages simultaneously. We can’t force trade in our favor. 18/n
Now consider how these 2 factors – bed and mask shortages – compound each other’s severity. Full hospitals + few masks + HCWs running around between beds without proper PPE = very bad mix. 19/n
HCWs are already getting infected even w/ access to full PPE. In the face of PPE limitations this severe, it’s only a matter of time. HCWs will start dropping from the workforce for weeks at a time, leading to a shortage of HCWs that then further compounds both issues above. 20/n
We could go on and on about thousands of factors – # of ventilators, or even simple things like saline drip bags. You see where this is going. 21/n
Importantly, I cannot stress this enough: even if I’m wrong – even VERY wrong – about core assumptions like % of severe cases or current case #, it only changes the timeline by days or weeks. This is how exponential growth in an immunologically naïve population works. 22/n
Undeserved panic does no one any good. But neither does ill-informed complacency. It’s wrong to assuage the public by saying “only 2% will die.” People aren’t adequately grasping the national and global systemic burden wrought by this swift-moving of a disease. 23/n
I’m an engineer. This is what my mind does all day: I run back-of-the-envelope calculations to try to estimate order-of-magnitude impacts. I’ve been on high alarm about this disease since ~Jan 19 after reading clinical indicators in the first papers emerging from Wuhan. 24/n
Nothing in the last 6 weeks has dampened my alarm in the slightest. To the contrary, we’re seeing abject refusal of many countries to adequately respond or prepare. Of course some of these estimates will be wrong, even substantially wrong. 25/n
But I have no reason to think they’ll be orders-of-magnitude wrong. Even if your personal risk of death is very, very low, don’t mock decisions like canceling events or closing workplaces as undue “panic”. 26/n
These measures are the bare minimum we should be doing to try to shift the peak – to slow the rise in cases so that healthcare systems are less overwhelmed. Each day that we can delay an extra case is a big win for the HC system. 27/n
And yes, you really should prepare to buckle down for a bit. All services and supply chains will be impacted. Why risk the stress of being ill-prepared? 28/n
Worst case, I’m massively wrong and you now have a huge bag of rice and black beans to burn through over the next few months and enough Robitussin to trip out. 29/n
One more thought: you’ve probably seen multiple respected epidemiologists have estimated that 20-70% of world will be infected within the next year. If you use 6-day doubling rate I mentioned above, we land at ~2-6 billion infected by sometime in July of this year. 30/n
Obviously I think the doubling time will start to slow once a sizeable fraction of the population has been infected, simply because of herd immunity and a smaller susceptible population. 31/n
But take the scenarios above (full beds, no PPE, etc, at just 1% of the US population infected) and stretch them out over just a couple extra months. 32/n
That timeline roughly fits with consensus end-game numbers from these highly esteemed epidemiologists. Again, we’re talking about discrepancies of mere days or weeks one direction or another, but not disagreements in the overall magnitude of the challenge. 33/n
This is not some hypothetical, fear-mongering, worst-case scenario. This is reality, as far as anyone can tell with the current available data. 34/n
That’s all for now. Standard disclaimers apply: I’m a PhD biologist but *not* an epidemiologist. Thoughts my own. Yadda yadda. Stay safe out there. /end
Addendum: to anyone who found this useful or interesting, highly recommend you follow @trvrb who actually does modeling and forecasting for a living. This thread is a great place to start:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1236095180459003909.html
And we’re still bringing it in. All travelers from international flights should immediately be quarantined in a regulated facility, not pinky swear they’ll stay home. They are potential killers. All international flights should have been shut down weeks ago.
I’m slowly working on it. Got the land. Almost fenced in. Got buildings put up. Going bigger with a garden this year, with high tunnel. Bought another peach tree. Got a few laying hens. Got livestock guardian dogs. Will be getting meat goats and kunekune pigs. Planting as many wild, native edibles as I can get my hands on.
SINGAPORE
Three more cases discharged, ten new cases of COVID-19 infection confirmed
9th Mar 2020
1. Three more cases of COVID-19 infection have been discharged from hospital (Cases 112, 138 and 151). In all, 93 have fully recovered from the infection and have been discharged from hospital.
2. As of 9 March 2020, 12pm, the Ministry of Health (MOH) has confirmed and verified 10 more cases of COVID-19 infection in Singapore. Of these:
• Six are part of the cluster involving a private dinner function at SAFRA Jurong (333 Boon Lay Way) on 15 February;
• One is linked to the cluster at The Life Church and Missions Singapore (146B Paya Lebar Road); and
• Three are imported cases.
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