Currently Online 
LurkerJ said:
Thank you for the articles. I did read them, however, they're not bullet proof, and they don't mirror what's happening on the grounds, and in many cases they contradict each other as well. Not dismissing all of them, but I scratched my head many times reading them. The Medium article, for example, talks about fatality rate and those who will become critically ill rate and uses the most extreme of the reported numbers, when you and I agreed earlier that the reported number of cases and most numbers surrounding covid19 are inaccurate because the confirmed number of cases remains unknown, the author also says that the critically ill covid19 patients need 4 weeks of assisted ventilation? when the most generous of numbers regarding that hovered around 1 week, and 4 days on average. And then you read further the author admits that: "My curves are not correct! My back-of-the-envelope calculation is not a proper simulation, or a good model of what’s going on either. Don’t cite it as such!" and then he goes to say that the point he is trying to make has nothing to do with the numbers he used? and that China has successfully eradicated the virus? according to whom? according to China? who is barring of the CDC and just kicked out reporters from the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post and censoring the hell out of the story. As for the Rappler article, it's 2 days old, but that's a lot of time when it comes to covid19. it starts by including Japan as a success story and how it managed to avoid lock down but now Tokyo is about to declare national emergency and start a lock-down, this is me just being nit picky though. The more questionable bits of the article starts with "If you hammer the coronavirus, within a few weeks you’ve controlled it and you’re in much better shape to address it" and that "The time needed for the hammer is weeks, not months." But then the author goes on to use Wahun success story as evidence to back up his numbers, but we all know that Wahun was locked down for two months... and it wasn't the European style kind of lockdown, and this goes back to what I said earlier. Everyone is on lock-down but each country's approach is different, and not co-ordinated, and isn't happening simultaneously, and that is of course, if we assume China is telling the truth. Still an interesting article to read, but it places too much faith on how theoretically all of those ideas will translate perfectly into reality, and I have already talked about why the lack of international standardized approach to the problem and how 2 months (or 8 weeks) is "too long of a period of time for most of the globe. Again, not dismissing the importance of keeping the infectivity rate as low as possible, just questioning how that can happen without wrecking the economy especially that we haven't seen a single international simultaneous step being taken and everyone reacting unilaterally. |
Yes those 2 articles simplify things a lot. However an earlier study by the imperial college looked at the most efficient mitigation strategy to flatten the curve for the UK which involved quarantining everyone over 70 as the main strategy and came to the conclusion that still 8x as many hospital beds (in total while most are already occupied) would be needed at the top of the flattened curve.
They published a new study looking at more countries saying the same thing.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-Global-Impact-26-03-2020.pdf
I just started reading it but here's an excerpt from the summary:
We estimate that in the absence of interventions, COVID-19 would have resulted in 7.0 billion infections and 40 million deaths globally this year. Mitigation strategies focussing on shielding the elderly (60% reduction in social contacts) and slowing but not interrupting transmission (40% reduction in social contacts for wider population) could reduce this burden by half, saving 20 million lives, but we predict that even in this scenario, health systems in all countries will be quickly overwhelmed.
This effect is likely to be most severe in lower income settings where capacity is lowest: our mitigated scenarios lead to peak demand for critical care beds in a typical low-income setting outstripping supply by a factor of 25, in contrast to a typical high-income setting where this factor is 7. As a result, we anticipate that the true burden in low income settings pursuing mitigation strategies could be substantially higher than reflected in these estimates.
Our analysis therefore suggests that healthcare demand can only be kept within manageable levels through the rapid adoption of public health measures (including testing and isolation of cases and wider social distancing measures) to suppress transmission, similar to those being adopted in many countries at the current time. If a suppression strategy is implemented early(at 0.2 deaths per 100,000 population per week)and sustained, then 38.7 million lives could be saved whilst if it is initiated when death numbers are higher (1.6deaths per 100,000 population per week) then 30.7 million lives could be saved. Delays in implementing strategies to suppress transmission will lead to worse outcomes and fewer lives saved
Btw atm South Korea is an example of success. They were up to detecting nearly 700 new cases daily and have managed to get it down to averaging around 100 new cases daily since March 13th.
Essay Pro