stop digging holes in our beaches pls

Better digging holes on your beaches than digging holes in your dikes.

Europe beaches are probably about as good as the beach in Galveston, Texas.  If you want a proper beach you have to go to a real island.

The big questions surrounding the pandemic:

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/10-questions-about-the-coronavirus-that-are-still-unanswered-1.4944990


HOW MANY PEOPLE HAVE BEEN INFECTED?

We've been over this many times, random anti body tests can maybe give an answer.

HOW DO CHILDREN TRANSMIT THE VIRUS?

While children appear to be less affected by the coronavirus than older generations, Bogoch said it’s still unclear what role they play in transmitting it to others. He also said they still don’t know if children are being infected, but are affected differently than adults.

Jude Uzonna, an immunologist and infectious diseases researcher at the University of Manitoba, said there is now evidence that children are experiencing widespread and systemic inflammatory response syndrome, which is similar to an inflammatory illness called Kawasaki disease.

“It’s still unanswered,” he said. “If it is true, that young kids are really having this kind of condition, are you going to be sending your kids back to school?”

WHAT IS THE SEVERITY OF ILLNESS?

In addition to early evidence of a potentially dangerous inflammatory response in children, both Bogoch and Kozak said it’s still too early to know what the spectrum of the illness is in different individuals.

Bogoch said they’re still trying to understand how the virus affects blood clotting in some patients, for example, or why some people have reported a loss of smell or taste. He said they’re also still in the process of studying how the virus binds to different parts of the body, such as brain cells and kidney cells.

CAN PEOPLE DEVELOP IMMUNITY TO THE VIRUS?

Although there has been plenty of talk of concepts, such as “herd immunity” and “immunity passports,” which are based on the premise that people who contract the virus won’t be able to get it again, Uzonna said they still don’t actually know if patients can develop a protective immunity to the virus and if they can, how long it would last.

Kozak said preliminary data suggests patients who contract the virus develop antibodies that will likely be protective against a second infection, but he said they still don’t know enough about the disease’s correlates of protection, which are markers that can be measured in a lab to determine whether someone is protected.

WHEN IS SOMEONE NO LONGER INFECTIOUS?

Furthermore, in addition to not knowing how long someone may be immune to coronavirus, Kozak said they also don’t know when a patient is no longer infectious. He said there is interesting data from Germany and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that suggests people may not be shedding the infectious virus about eight or nine days after they develop symptoms, but they still don’t know for sure.

HOW WILL MUTATIONS AFFECT THE VIRUS?

There have been studies claiming to show the coronavirus has mutated into more virulent strains; however, Kozak said that is still not certain.

“It is entirely possible that there are mutations that are associated with either worse disease or more mild disease,” he said. “So from a virology standpoint, that’s what we would want to look for. We want to know if there are any mutations where you’re more likely to get admitted to hospital and maybe the ICU or you’re more likely to be fine and just be able to go home.”

WILL THERE BE COMPLICATIONS AFTER RECOVERY?

With a lot of diseases, Kozak said patients will often develop complications from it months or even years after they have recovered. For example, in the aftermath of the West African Ebola outbreak, Kozak said survivors experienced a lot of rheumatological or eye problems, even after they had recovered.

“So what we don’t know with patients, will there be a syndrome of like a viral syndrome, which occurs in patients after they’ve recovered from COVID?” he asked. Kozak said it’s still too early to be able to answer those questions because they’re only starting to study the long-term effects on patients who recovered in January.

WHY ARE SOME AREAS HARDER HIT?

Uzonna said researchers are still unable to explain why some populations have been harder hit by the pandemic than others. He said many experts predicted that Africa would be devastated by the virus due to inadequate infrastructure and healthcare, but that hasn’t happened yet. “Nobody has seen anything like that. So why is that? Why is Africa so far doing relatively OK compared to other countries?” he asked.

Uzonna said African nations aren’t taking more precautions than other countries so he wondered if there are other contributing factors. “I don’t think it’s related to genetics because if you look in the U.S., the majority of the people who die are African Americans. I don’t think the African American have changed so significantly over time so there must be something that we don’t know yet,” he said.

HOW DO WARM TEMPERATURES AFFECT THE VIRUS?

Because the flu is considered a seasonal illness that affects more people in the colder months, some people have wondered if the coronavirus will follow the same trajectory and weaken in the summer. Uzonna said they don’t know how warmer temperatures will affect SARS-CoV-2 because it’s different from the virus that causes the common flu.

Bogoch said they can’t rely on data suggesting that warm temperatures and ultraviolet rays will decrease the spread of coronavirus because places such as Ecuador, El Salvador, and Bangladesh have all experienced intense outbreaks despite their warm climates.

WILL THE VIRUS DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY?

While Bogoch and Kozak said they’re confident scientists will be able to develop a vaccine to protect against COVID-19, they said it’s still not clear how protective it would be and how long the protection would last.

“Is the vaccine going to be 100 per cent protective? Or is it going to be like the flu vaccine where it significantly reduces your risk of getting this infection, but doesn’t eliminate your risk of getting this infection?” Bogoch said. “And if people get infected, is there the possibility that with the vaccine, they just might mitigate some of the severity of the infection that they'll have.”


The biggest question is missing, how do we prevent this from happening again!

Yep, shutting down the airlines was the best thing to do. It's also population density and general mobility. The North here is also still exempt from any cases (The one they thought there was was a false positive) Definitely not due to warm weather!

However it's still spreading, just at a lot slower rate without parties and tourism. The daily growth rate in Africa is only 1.023x, a doubling time of about a month. India currently has a doubling time of about 13 days, while Italy had a doubling time of 4.5 days right around lock downs started.

The question is probably a bit inaccurate, it's why some areas are hit faster than others. Anyway it's directly tied to why social distancing is so effective.

This summer will be tricky. People will be itching to get out again, numbers are down, party hard...

Time for a Europe update

All heading down except France doing some adjustments again.
Russia currently accounts for 51.6% of Europe's daily reported cases, UK follows with 16%, Spain already down to 4.2% of Europe's total.
Big thumbs up to Norway, they reached the bottom of my graph!

Daily reported deaths

Again, France doing corrections (resurrected 217 people today, -217 deaths) temporarily putting Italy back in 2nd place.
The UK still adds 30% of daily deaths in Europe but is now just under 300 deaths a day.

Looking at the week over week growth comparisons

Everyone is below the 100% except Austria. However Austria is only at 40 cases a day, no problem yet.
Ireland and Spain are both just under half of what they were reporting last week.

Europe is doing well, just under 80% week over week, currently 18K new cases a day, down from a 3 day avg peak of 42.7K on April 3rd.
Daily reported deaths are under a 1,000 currently, the 3 day avg peak was on April 8th, 4,409 deaths.

Really can't agree with that. Europe has very nice beaches but the problem is the weather in the north and the intrusive beach vendors in the south.

I guess the latter wouldn't be an issue on private beaches but I never went to a private beach in Europe.

Galveston looks like it's missing some sand, everything seems flat in most pictures.

Yea I was perhaps a little too harsh.  I was thinking more of the beaches in northern Europe.  I'm sure Mediterranean side has some good beaches.  I'm not much of a beach fan though anyways ever since Jaws.

We sadly achieved 5 million infected :(

Its kinda depressing seeing the numbers in some countries.. some go steady but slowly down finally after 2-3 months(wich is good).. while others go higher and higher by huge magins.