Coronavirus (COVID-19) Discussion Thread

[EricHiggin]

SvennoJ said:

The initial problem was also trust. There was a shortage of masks, first responders needed them, yet confiscating shipments and forcing factories to produce for the government only is another thing we can't do here. We can't stop scalpers either, hoarding was a big problem at the start and was more dangerous than the pandemic itself.

At first it was widely believed that the main path of transmission was from surfaces and touching people. That the main pathway is through the air took a long time to be recognized and still isn't really. A reason why I don't trust the back to school stuff, lack of ventilation measures. But when you believe the virus transmits through surfaces and touch, whole social distancing doesn't make much sense.

It's the world we live in nowadays. The government doesn't trust the people and vice versa. Both continually show they can't be trusted. I don't know the answer to that. Initial screw ups are unavoidable with a new unknown disease (unlike making a game) and the biggest problem was not trusting the Chinese data and recommendations. It took way too long to figure out how much more vulnerable older people are and many were sentenced to death by closing schools in Italy, getting the grandparents to take care of the kids while the parents continued working. Here it exposed the shortcomings of our elderly homes, although shortcomings is an understatement.

It's been almost a year now. Currently we do have a good grasp on what works and what doesn't. Yet how do you convince people? My sister still believes masks are completely pointless, since numbers went up in the Netherlands despite people using masks.

Perhaps it's the result of poor education standards. How much did you get here in school about probabilities, exponential spread, growth factors, pandemics, etc. We did get the math part in school but never in relation to biology and pandemics. In biology we did look at bacterial growth but not at viral spread. R0, never heard of that before this all started. In history we did learn about the Black plague and Spanish flu. But nothing connected all the dots, all separate things, taught in different years.

(Btw the online schooling is a joke, it just teaches my kids to let the computer do the work for them. My wife caught our 9 year old copy pasting text he was supposed to read into a text to speech thingie from windows, let the computer read it to him. Then dictate his summary to one note instead of writing or simply copy paste parts. Crafty buggers)

SvennoJ said:

I wonder how it will go next week. It just came out that everyone has to stay home from the 24th, basically Christmas is cancelled.

https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/ontario-will-enter-province-wide-lockdown-as-of-christmas-eve-sources-say-1.5239437

These sources, who have direct knowledge of the situation, say the lockdown will begin at 12:01 a.m. on Dec. 24 and will last for 28 days in the southern portions of the province and 14 days in the northern parts.

This lockdown will look similar to the province-wide shutdown back in March, with only essential businesses being allowed to remain open.

The sources say this decision was made based off COVID-19 modelling data. The data has shown that under any scenario, Ontario will see 300 people in intensive care by the end of December. At the current rate of transmission, that number would grow to 700 patients by the end of January.

The province has said that once the number of COVID-19 patients in Ontario’s intensive care units (ICU) surpasses 300 supporting other medical needs not related to the disease becomes nearly impossible. There are currently 261 patients infected with the disease in ICUs across the province.

So basically they did F all to increase capacity, 300 ICU beds is the limit for nearly 15 million population in Ontario.


I hope they get our roof finished before Thursday. It would suck if that gets cut off since by the end of the lock down we'll be in the middle of winter. They were working on it today, aiming to be done on Tuesday if the weather cooperates.

Ya trust in general was a problem to begin with. It's near impossible to make meaningful progress if that's where you're starting from.

Early on you'd have to be a little more cautious if you aren't sure what's going on exactly. We did know people weren't dropping like flies, so a lockdown didn't make sense, but masks would've been quite a minor ask, and social distancing, a little more so, though still not anywhere near lockdown. You want to be ahead of the game but you also can't go overboard or you'll get what we've gotten now where people can't be bothered.

Pretty sure we can force industry to change for war if it's bad enough. Maybe in this case it wasn't deemed a big enough emergency or it's flat out illegal. Then have the Gov subsidize the manufacturing to a degree and have the Gov distribute them as directly as possible. The U.S. incentivized biz I believe.

Our education system sucks, even prior to the lockdowns. It doesn't teach much of what should be taught, and more importantly, teaches kids to memorize and repeat instead of to think critically and be creative. We want intelligent humans, not dumb robots, especially in situations like pandemics.

Saw this lockdown coming a mile away. So did the people who flooded the stores recently, some hoarding.

First lockdown was a little bit before Easter. The rest of the time just restrictions, heavy or light, even Thanksgiving. Now another lockdown right before Christmas. Covid must be the devils work...

28 Days Later. Again. Maybe it's time to give it a watch.