Posted on 08/06/2020 8:21:50 AM PDT by Republican Wildcat
‘Once inhibitions have been lowered by intoxicants’
oh, the horror...we can’t possibly allow things like imbibed spirits to (gasp) make us relax a little...why, such a ghastly thing has never happened in the entire history of mankind...
we should all look to the rioters and looters of the past two months as role models for avoiding the heartbreaking ‘lowering of inhibitions...’
That approach would cost a lot of lives. Here's some quick math on how many: herd immunity for SARS-CoV-2 is achieved at roughly 70% population exposure. There are 330 million Americans. 70% of that is 231 million. Infection Fatality Rate (how many infected - not cases, but actual infections) is 0.64 - 0.66%. 231,000,000 * 0.0064 is 1,478,400. At 0.66%, it's 1,524,600. We'll have a vaccine before the end of the year. Multiple vaccine candidates are in phase 3 clinical trials right now and at least two (Oxford and Pfizer) say they anticipate FDA approvals as soon as October. Pfizer says they'll have 100 million doses available this year.
Your best case will cost an additional ~1,200,000 American lives. The actual best case (one or more safe and effective vaccines available) will cost no additional American lives. The best approach therefore is to take reasonable steps (reasonable does NOT include shutting the economy down) to limit the spread until a safe and effective vaccine can be deployed in a few months.
"Just like you have for the cold, flu, chicken pox, mumps, etc..."
There's a reason you can catch a cold or the flu year after year: your immune system has no long term effectiveness against them. In the case of colds, it's because there are over 200 different viruses from at least 3 different families of viruses that cause the set of symptoms we call the common cold. In the case of the flu, there are multiple major strains, each of which rapidly mutate. Your immune system can't keep up, so you can repeatedly get the flu. In fact, Influenza changes so rapidly that our older methods of vaccine building can't keep up either. They take months to produce, but Influenza moves faster than that so it's usually only 30-40% effective. The generation 3 vaccines (e.g. Moderna's) show promise in turning the tide there as they could be produced in weeks instead of months.
You then mentioned chickenpox (varicella), which actually used to hospitalize 11,000 and kill about 100 people in the US each year before the vaccine (primarily from shingles). Mumps was also stopped not by "herd immunity" (it afflicted humans for hundreds, possibly thousands of years), but by a vaccine released in 1967. Smallpox is probably the greatest example of this. We didn't beat smallpox with herd immunity. Indeed, it spent thousands of years ravaging humanity, killing over 500 million people in its last 100 years of existence. With a massive worldwide vaccination campaign, it was eradicated from the face of the Earth in 10 years.
There's a reason President Trump has invested billions of Federal dollars into a vaccine for COVID-19: he knows that's how all this stuff ends. No more shutdowns, no more curfews, no more masks; all of it ends with a safe and effective vaccine. And it's right around the corner.
I get that at Costco. I just took one of the masks they gave me and cut the top part of each fold off, giving me a bunch of 1/4” wide slots in the mask. I breathe like it’s not even on. And nobody says anything. :)
Wouldn’t there be fewer people there off peak hours?
New “scientific” discovery: the chinese-wuhan red death virus is especially active after 10:00 PM....and not one minute before.
It behaves like Gremlins?!!!
This is a tactic which actually increases the number of people who come in contact with each other. By reducing the number of hours a business is open, it forces the same number of people to visit within a condensed amount of time. For example, if a business is open for 10 hours and you have 100 people visit the average might be 8 to 12 people per hour visiting. But, if the business is open for four hours, and 100 people visit, you’re probably looking at 20 to 30 people visiting per hour, which puts more people in close proximity for the shortened duration of time. The government is just trying to push the numbers higher. Before you know it, businesses will only be allowed to be open for 30 minutes per day. It will look like Walmart on Black Friday, but with drunk people.
Wow is covid-19 a circadian rhythm virus that activates at 10PM wherever you are?
Indeed - that makes perfect sense.
My math is on point.
The Case Fatality Rate (CFR) is falling, as it’s based on the total number of cases. It stands at 3.237% in the United States as of right now (162,630 deaths over 5,024,583 confirmed cases equals 0.032366865 or 3.237%). Those figures are from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us.
The Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) is calculated separately from that figure. It’s based on the number of deaths over the estimated actual number of infections; not confirmed cases. Unlike the CFR, the IFR is not subject to things like delays in reporting, lag between cases being diagnosed and deaths occurring, or missed diagnoses (e.g. untested and/or asymptomatic cases).
Based on multiple studies, the current best IFR for COVID-19 is 0.64 - 0.66%. Documented here (scenario 5): https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html and here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033357v1 and here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.10.20127423v1 and many other places.
My math is fine. My facts are fine. Trying to achieve herd immunity without a vaccine would be absolutely insane. It would kill over a million Americans who could otherwise live. It’s not my fantasy that over a million Americans die needlessly; it’s the result of the fantasy of reaching herd immunity without a vaccine. My goal is - as always - is the preservation of human life from conception to natural death. COVID-19 is a largely preventable disease. We can slow its spread with reasonable precautions that don’t tank our economy and we can wipe the disease out with a safe and effective vaccine. President Trump says it’s coming soon. Trust in President Trump to deliver.
Your herd immunity rate is outdated. It is not 70%. It is now estimated to be around 20%. Plus many people have T cell immunity from prior coronavirous like the common cold. It’s pretty obvious that is why NY and Northern NJ are not getting outbreaks anymore, especially considering all the protesting that went on. I don’t know how to post a link but it’s all explained at coronavirousbellcurve.com
also what about Sweden?
The CDC director has already stated that actual cases in the US is as much as 10x higher than the current confirmed cases figures, based on multiple studies of serology testing done across the country. That puts Louisiana, Arizona, Florida, New York, Mississippi, and New Jersey all over your 20% mark. So all of them should have no new cases because they’ve reached herd immunity. Louisiana is at 27,372 confirmed cases, so apparently they’ve been importing cases for quite some time.
Either that or 20% is woefully low. The R0 is ~3.8. There is a portion of the population (35-40%) who remain asymptomatic, possibly due to some particulars of their immune system response. That’s a positive thing and we should be happy that’s happening. Around 40-45% will get through it with mild to moderate symptoms without medical help. Roughly 20% will wind up in the hospital. And about 0.64-066% will die. That’s what we have at this point. Wishful thinking doesn’t get us anywhere. We have to deal with the reality of the situation and plan for it accordingly. Wishful thinking leads to rude awakenings when reality comes crashing in, which leads to fear and panic.
If we simply accept the reality of what’s taking place and plan prudently to deal with it as best we can, there is no need for fear or panic. The strategy is clear: slow the spread with reasonable measures that minimize economic impact, develop and deploy a safe and effective vaccine as quickly as possible, and achieve herd immunity with minimal casualties so we can return to normal life.
I’ve praised Sweden’s general approach from the start, with one exception (that they themselves admit): they did a very poor job protecting the elderly, especially those in long term care facilities. The consequence is a much higher than necessary death rate in Sweden. It’s the reason people have been able to cast doubt on their approach (looking just at their numbers in a vacuum), but aside from that they very quickly came up with reasonable rules to keep businesses open without the hospitals becoming overwhelmed with patients.
Kentucky makes it very difficult to find data on WuFlu hospitalizations. In fact, I still haven’t found it, not for the state or by county.
Wonder why they don’t have that info handy...
Our county in NY of 350,000 has THREE people hospitalized.
https://scphs.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/a27a4678ee04436599141f0168a64637
This all political, not medical.
One form if the common cold is a corona virus. I didn’t see panic over the common cold.
12-20% of cases of the common cold are caused by one of four types of coronaviruses. And there’s no panic around the common cold because it’s a mild to moderate respiratory illness that doesn’t typically present significant risk of hospitalization or death. Most colds are caused by rhinoviruses.
There are seven coronaviruses that infect humans. Four can cause symptoms of the common cold. One is SARS-CoV-1 (SARS 2003), which killed a lot of people (relative to how many were infected), but did not spread very successfully and thus burned itself out. Another is MERS-CoV (MERS 2012), which also killed a lot of people, but did an even worse job of spreading and also burned itself out.
SARS-CoV-2 is the last coronavirus known to infect humans. It spreads much better than SARS-CoV-1 and also kills fewer people (IFR of 0.64-0.66%), but with the spread it can achieve throughout a population, the nominal death count is high enough to be concerning (163,000 in the US so far in just a few months and that could reach upwards of 600,000-800,000 if left unchecked). That said, the virus itself is no reason to panic. We’ve dealt with worse and we know how to deal with this one. We’re already quite close to a vaccine for it. It’s genetically stable and the immune system reacts to it, so we have a straightforward path to end it. But it’s new and we got a lot of misinformation from China early on that led to confusion, and when nobody knows what’s going on but they see people dying, they get scared. That’s why there’s a panic.
The best approach is clear, simple guidelines for businesses and individuals to follow to help slow the spread without harming the economy while we complete the vaccine. Once the vaccine is widespread, the virus will have no one left to infect and it will die out. We shouldn’t be in a panic about this, we should be handling it reasonably.
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