https://staythefuckhome.com/
This shit is the real deal. If you have *any* cases in your local area then you're looking at hospitals being overwhelmed in a matter of weeks. Exponential growth means this looks like it's not a big problem for a while, then it gets visibly bad really quick, then it's overwhelmingly bad and keeps getting worse. Listen to the science on this one, don't go with your gut.
Social distancing is important, do what you can.
Make sure you have some food at home. You'll probably get sick yourself, so stock up on the kinds of things you'll need for that (tylenol/advil for fever, cold medicine of choice, drink water and rest, etc). Most people won't need hospital care. But the few that will can easily overwhelm the system if we have enough cases. Which we will. Soon.
Listen to the science on this one. Please.
https://xkcd.com/2278/
Coronavirus thread
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Ancient History
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Username17
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We've had the first cases in my hospital, which means that it's going to be a few weeks or months before every single bed is converted to respiratory care. I'm currently trying to arrange for the breast cancer surgeries in my department to get expedited because there will be a block of time when we simply don't have any beds to put surgical patients into and it would be nice if this didn't result in a mass die off of my cancer having ladies. We'll see how it goes, because so far I don't think Boris Johnson has considered giving us any money to run extra theater lists to clear the waiting lists.
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Josh_Kablack
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Why is nobody talking about the chance it mutates?.. I mean Covid's Metamorphoses is right there.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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nockermensch
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Well, this is it, right? A global catastrophe that humanity could easily deal with if the planet was already united under some form of collectivism but that will decimate us because Capitalism always has the worst reactions.
Right now, it seems inevitable that a worldwide economic depression will hit in the next few months weeks with the usual follow-ups (unemployment, foreclosures, social unrest aand starvation on the less well nations, etc), and I don't see the current world leaders up to the task of fixing that. This pandemy is looking rather Great Filtery to me right now.
Right now, it seems inevitable that a worldwide economic depression will hit in the next few months weeks with the usual follow-ups (unemployment, foreclosures, social unrest aand starvation on the less well nations, etc), and I don't see the current world leaders up to the task of fixing that. This pandemy is looking rather Great Filtery to me right now.
@ @ Nockermensch
Koumei wrote:After all, in Firefox you keep tabs in your browser, but in SovietPutin's Russia, browser keeps tabs on you.
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Count Arioch the 28th
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Oo-bayShiritai wrote:*Boos in Latin*Josh_Kablack wrote:Why is nobody talking about the chance it mutates?.. I mean Covid's Metamorphoses is right there.
So basically I should do what I always do. I got this, homies.
In this moment, I am Ur-phoric. Not because of any phony god’s blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my int score.
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The Adventurer's Almanac
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If you contract coronavirus, how do you know when you're in the clear to go back out in public again?
My son makes me laugh. Maybe he'll make you laugh, too.
Current CDC guidance for when it is OK to release someone from isolation is made on a case by case basis and includes meeting all of the following requirements:
The patient is free from fever without the use of fever-reducing medications.
The patient is no longer showing symptoms, including cough.
The patient has tested negative on at least two consecutive respiratory specimens collected at least 24 hours apart.
Someone who has been released from isolation is not considered to pose a risk of infection to others.
A lot of speculation is going on about how the whole coronavirus thing might play out, and a lot of it is going on in the kind of sensationalist hysteria that makes me suspect the person speculating listens to InfoWars unironically. A couple of possible scenarios are taking shape, but I have no idea which one of these are actually plausible/probable, and my metric for sorting out which is which basically comes down to which ones' supporters seem like they're not very smart. So I'm gonna post the scenarios I've seen circulating and ask people who are better informed than me to tell me which ones are insane, which ones are possible, and which ones they think are the most likely shape of the future. Going roughly from worst to best case:
-Apocalyptic superplague. Coronavirus has a high rate of mutation/reinfection and circulates through the population, steadily wearing through everyone who doesn't isolate themselves in communities where no one is allowed in without a quarantine period that guarantees they are currently uninfected. Civilization as we know it ends within 10-20 years.
-Indirect apocalypse. The plague doesn't kill humanity or even inflict enough fatalities to directly end civilization, but it causes enough economic damage and political instability to cause a 30s-grade depression and a massive surge of war across the globe as devastated economies scramble for resources, which transitions directly into climate-apocalypse a few decades hence. Civilization as we know it ends on schedule, but the initial decline is much more rapid.
-This is life now. Coronavirus becomes part of the background radiation like flu, except significantly more deadly. The initial economic shock wears off after a few years and things mostly go back to normal, except that people dying of coronavirus in their 50s and 60s is normal just like people dying of cancer or heart disease in their 70s and 80s is now. Mortality rates below 50 remain low enough and infection rates infrequent enough that most people don't personally know anyone who dies of corona before the age of 50, although below-50 deaths are very large in absolute terms annually. Other than significantly lowered lifespan, civilization is mostly unaffected and may even benefit in a macabre way from cleaning out lots of conservative voters without society establishing a precedent for the en masse slaughter of political opponents.
-The worst pandemic in a century, but it passes. Coronavirus has a reinfection rate too low to survive once it runs out of naive hosts, or else an effective vaccine is developed within a few years, or else effective quarantines kill it off within a few years. Coronavirus racks up a global death toll in the millions/tens of millions before it's cured/contained/our biology adapts to it. The population of people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s is decimated in the meantime, but the plague does not become a permanent fixture of the future. The decline in elderly population levels out after a few years as people 60 and below faced few fatalities in the plague, and begin aging into the partly-vacant 70s/80s age brackets. The decline in key demographics may swing some critical elections, but also might have no impact on history at all.
-It's better at spreading than it is at killing. It turns out that a lot more people get infected with coronavirus without even noticing than was initially anticipated, and death rates are misleading because most survivors aren't counted as being amongst the infected at all. Coronavirus has a low rate of reinfection or an effective vaccine is quickly developed, and global death rates are kept down to "only" a few tens or maybe hundreds of thousands in the meantime. Alternatively, the death rate is low enough that coronavirus becoming part of regular flu season doesn't drastically impact average lifespans, despite a high absolute amount of deaths every year. The economic impact stings, but does not rise to the level of becoming a second crisis. The impact on the current trajectory of history is minimal.
-And, of course, it's possible that the most probable outcome is one that I haven't even heard about.
-Apocalyptic superplague. Coronavirus has a high rate of mutation/reinfection and circulates through the population, steadily wearing through everyone who doesn't isolate themselves in communities where no one is allowed in without a quarantine period that guarantees they are currently uninfected. Civilization as we know it ends within 10-20 years.
-Indirect apocalypse. The plague doesn't kill humanity or even inflict enough fatalities to directly end civilization, but it causes enough economic damage and political instability to cause a 30s-grade depression and a massive surge of war across the globe as devastated economies scramble for resources, which transitions directly into climate-apocalypse a few decades hence. Civilization as we know it ends on schedule, but the initial decline is much more rapid.
-This is life now. Coronavirus becomes part of the background radiation like flu, except significantly more deadly. The initial economic shock wears off after a few years and things mostly go back to normal, except that people dying of coronavirus in their 50s and 60s is normal just like people dying of cancer or heart disease in their 70s and 80s is now. Mortality rates below 50 remain low enough and infection rates infrequent enough that most people don't personally know anyone who dies of corona before the age of 50, although below-50 deaths are very large in absolute terms annually. Other than significantly lowered lifespan, civilization is mostly unaffected and may even benefit in a macabre way from cleaning out lots of conservative voters without society establishing a precedent for the en masse slaughter of political opponents.
-The worst pandemic in a century, but it passes. Coronavirus has a reinfection rate too low to survive once it runs out of naive hosts, or else an effective vaccine is developed within a few years, or else effective quarantines kill it off within a few years. Coronavirus racks up a global death toll in the millions/tens of millions before it's cured/contained/our biology adapts to it. The population of people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s is decimated in the meantime, but the plague does not become a permanent fixture of the future. The decline in elderly population levels out after a few years as people 60 and below faced few fatalities in the plague, and begin aging into the partly-vacant 70s/80s age brackets. The decline in key demographics may swing some critical elections, but also might have no impact on history at all.
-It's better at spreading than it is at killing. It turns out that a lot more people get infected with coronavirus without even noticing than was initially anticipated, and death rates are misleading because most survivors aren't counted as being amongst the infected at all. Coronavirus has a low rate of reinfection or an effective vaccine is quickly developed, and global death rates are kept down to "only" a few tens or maybe hundreds of thousands in the meantime. Alternatively, the death rate is low enough that coronavirus becoming part of regular flu season doesn't drastically impact average lifespans, despite a high absolute amount of deaths every year. The economic impact stings, but does not rise to the level of becoming a second crisis. The impact on the current trajectory of history is minimal.
-And, of course, it's possible that the most probable outcome is one that I haven't even heard about.
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Whipstitch
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Not a doctor, so I'll get swooped on this hard by frank, but this is the kinda stuff that bears repeating so I'll talk a bit anyway.
The most comforting thing here is viruses aren't actually being managed by some dude trying to wipe out Madagascar in Plague Inc. Mutations will happen but selective pressure tends to favor the virus strains that leave their carriers healthy enough to keep going about their business rather than die or isolate themselves. Subsequent novel strains won't necessarily be as deadly as SARS-CoV-2 and unusually lethal strains like the coronavirus responsible for the 2002 SARS outbreak are often easier to detect and contain precisely because the symptoms so regularly require hospitalization instead of being merely confused with a cold. The infamous Spanish Flu was a notable exception to the general order of things but my understanding is that WW1 had a hand in letting things get out of hand. Drafts, displacement and trench warfare on a massive scale is wholly incompatible with social distancing or isolation strategies and so even strains of flu that were pretty aggro had regular opportunities to infect people en masse and eventually shit just snowballed.
Anyway, life is going to get super sad and I fear greatly for pretty much everyone in my family over 40 but if we're taking bets on the apocalypse you should still go with climate change.
The most comforting thing here is viruses aren't actually being managed by some dude trying to wipe out Madagascar in Plague Inc. Mutations will happen but selective pressure tends to favor the virus strains that leave their carriers healthy enough to keep going about their business rather than die or isolate themselves. Subsequent novel strains won't necessarily be as deadly as SARS-CoV-2 and unusually lethal strains like the coronavirus responsible for the 2002 SARS outbreak are often easier to detect and contain precisely because the symptoms so regularly require hospitalization instead of being merely confused with a cold. The infamous Spanish Flu was a notable exception to the general order of things but my understanding is that WW1 had a hand in letting things get out of hand. Drafts, displacement and trench warfare on a massive scale is wholly incompatible with social distancing or isolation strategies and so even strains of flu that were pretty aggro had regular opportunities to infect people en masse and eventually shit just snowballed.
Anyway, life is going to get super sad and I fear greatly for pretty much everyone in my family over 40 but if we're taking bets on the apocalypse you should still go with climate change.
Last edited by Whipstitch on Fri Mar 13, 2020 6:17 am, edited 2 times in total.
bears fall, everyone dies
Coronavirus isn't intentionally trying to wipe out humanity, but it's also not intentionally trying to survive as a species. Each individual virus acts to survive and reproduce, but there is no greater plan to survive x generations from now. Coronavirus might just be terrible environmentalists with a short-sighted strategy that capitalizes on an environment of abundance so hard that said environment is destroyed.
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DSMatticus
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While governments are reluctant to publish any of their internal modelling for obvious reasons, the coronavirus is less and less of a mystery everyday. We're not really exploring uncharted territory anymore - we made it through all that, and now we're just triangulating exact coordinates. So here's what we're pretty sure about: .5-1% actual case fatality rate with treatment, doubling rate of 6 days, about 12 days from infection to death in those unfortunate enough to go that way, 5-15% of cases will require some degree of hospitalization, and fully capable of infecting more than 40% of the populations it's exposed to. I said more than, because the upper estimate on that goes much higher, but 40% is looking a lot like the floor (before policy response).
To put that in perspective: 330,000,000 * .40 * .005 = 660,000. That is the death toll we would expect to see in America if we failed to mitigate infections, but the disease was on the nice end of experts' estimates and we had infinite healthcare resources. I believe that would make it the leading cause of death in America for 2020. Now, we are failing to mitigate infections, and the disease does look increasingly like it's on the nice end of our estimates... but we don't have infinite healthcare resources. In fact, as I understand it, the U.S. has a relatively low number of hospital beds per capita because our healthcare system is profit-driven and there's no money in keeping a bunch of empty hospital beds lying around taking up space while you wait for completely random demand spikes. If we peak fast and hard, we could plausibly break ten million deaths. The last "wave" of the infection alone could require nearly ten million hospital beds, and the percentage that will actually get beds at that point will be negligible. Pre-ACA we were in the middle of a rural hospital collapse because there was simply no money to be had providing healthcare to poor low-density areas, and I believe that collapse never really reversed so much as mostly stalled.
To give you an idea of how fucked shit can get, there were hospitals in Italy operating at 200% capacity when the country went on lockdown. Remember when I told you it takes 12 days - about two doubling periods - to go from infected to dying in a hospital bed? That means for every single person currently dying in a hospital bed in Italy, there are 2-3 more on the way. The quarantine isn't going to stop that because it already happened - they were infected before the quarantine, they just aren't far enough along to require hospital resources, or possibly even know they are sick. And while it's difficult to assess exactly what's happened in Italy infection-wise, I can tell you that Italy wasn't even halfway to the peak of the curve they were on when they declared "oh fuck shut it down shut it all down."
It's probably going to be worse in the U.S. It's not just that the response is going to be a mixture of incompetence and cruelty, it's that we don't have free healthcare and we don't have paid sick leave and the government isn't going to help people with rent or food or any of the shit they actually need to stay home. There is no hope of "flattening the curve" in the United States. Too many of us can't stay home, and if our bosses or the government tell us too, a bunch of us will be back out on the streets looting before the pandemic is over.
It's not going to do this every year. At least, not to this extent if at all. There's also nothing exceptionally difficult about making a vaccine for this. Nor is it particularly lethal in the grand scheme of things humanity has weathered before. This just does not have the potential to be apocalyptic anymore than the Spanish Flu did. It's just your run-of-the-mill once-in-a-century pandemic. Lots of people are going to die, and the U.S. looks poised to take home the gold in the category.
To put that in perspective: 330,000,000 * .40 * .005 = 660,000. That is the death toll we would expect to see in America if we failed to mitigate infections, but the disease was on the nice end of experts' estimates and we had infinite healthcare resources. I believe that would make it the leading cause of death in America for 2020. Now, we are failing to mitigate infections, and the disease does look increasingly like it's on the nice end of our estimates... but we don't have infinite healthcare resources. In fact, as I understand it, the U.S. has a relatively low number of hospital beds per capita because our healthcare system is profit-driven and there's no money in keeping a bunch of empty hospital beds lying around taking up space while you wait for completely random demand spikes. If we peak fast and hard, we could plausibly break ten million deaths. The last "wave" of the infection alone could require nearly ten million hospital beds, and the percentage that will actually get beds at that point will be negligible. Pre-ACA we were in the middle of a rural hospital collapse because there was simply no money to be had providing healthcare to poor low-density areas, and I believe that collapse never really reversed so much as mostly stalled.
To give you an idea of how fucked shit can get, there were hospitals in Italy operating at 200% capacity when the country went on lockdown. Remember when I told you it takes 12 days - about two doubling periods - to go from infected to dying in a hospital bed? That means for every single person currently dying in a hospital bed in Italy, there are 2-3 more on the way. The quarantine isn't going to stop that because it already happened - they were infected before the quarantine, they just aren't far enough along to require hospital resources, or possibly even know they are sick. And while it's difficult to assess exactly what's happened in Italy infection-wise, I can tell you that Italy wasn't even halfway to the peak of the curve they were on when they declared "oh fuck shut it down shut it all down."
It's probably going to be worse in the U.S. It's not just that the response is going to be a mixture of incompetence and cruelty, it's that we don't have free healthcare and we don't have paid sick leave and the government isn't going to help people with rent or food or any of the shit they actually need to stay home. There is no hope of "flattening the curve" in the United States. Too many of us can't stay home, and if our bosses or the government tell us too, a bunch of us will be back out on the streets looting before the pandemic is over.
It's not going to do this every year. At least, not to this extent if at all. There's also nothing exceptionally difficult about making a vaccine for this. Nor is it particularly lethal in the grand scheme of things humanity has weathered before. This just does not have the potential to be apocalyptic anymore than the Spanish Flu did. It's just your run-of-the-mill once-in-a-century pandemic. Lots of people are going to die, and the U.S. looks poised to take home the gold in the category.
Only because you have so many people. Don't just ignore the efforts of Australia and the UK in being really fucking shit in initial conditions, preparation and response, we're trying to have American-style casualties but we just don't have the numbers.
Count Arioch the 28th wrote:There is NOTHING better than lesbians. Lesbians make everything better.
Trivia, virus don't have species neither do they survive because they're not really alive to begin with.Chamomile wrote:Coronavirus isn't intentionally trying to wipe out humanity, but it's also not intentionally trying to survive as a species. Each individual virus acts to survive and reproduce, but there is no greater plan to survive x generations from now. Coronavirus might just be terrible environmentalists with a short-sighted strategy that capitalizes on an environment of abundance so hard that said environment is destroyed.
They don't have cell structures, they don't even have their own metabolism, they're literally just inert particles while outside a host cell.
Virus are as close to undead as the real world goes.
FrankTrollman wrote: Actually, our blood banking system is set up exactly the way you'd want it to be if you were a secret vampire conspiracy.
It's a lot worse than just the likely rate of infection. A lot of fucking people are not going to bother with a hospital visit period because it is unaffordable. Not just in terms of numbers but because we need money. I absolutely cannot afford to miss more than maybe two weeks of work. My sister cannot either. We both know this because it was tested before. Anymore than that and we fall completely behind on everything and we end up in a place where we're choosing between rent and eating. The good old republican party decided to nix the paid time off bill that was fast tracked (which is going to be a handy detail when I'm forced to convince people to show up for Biden). Worse people ALREADY are trained to not go to the hospital even if they 'might' have coverage because they can get fired for it (my sister did when she was only inconvenienced at work not that she couldn't still do the job), they are not used to seeking out hospitals, the hospitals in the area are terrible (see any of the hospitals in NW Indiana), the hospitals are understaffed (see previous), they don't believe they are 'that' sick, or in the special case trumpers they still believe it is a hoax.
Before Trump opened his big mouth several times and it came out that he is forcefully bungling what response we could have to it I just thought we were in for a late but still contained outbreak of a bad flu. Now I see it's gonna probably be a lot worse than that.
Before Trump opened his big mouth several times and it came out that he is forcefully bungling what response we could have to it I just thought we were in for a late but still contained outbreak of a bad flu. Now I see it's gonna probably be a lot worse than that.
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Count Arioch the 28th
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What's it look like outside of China as far as death rates? The Chinese kind of are susceptible to this sort of thing due to having a COPD rate through the roof, a very high population density, the fact that Chairman Mao told everyone to spit snot and phlegm all over every surface as a cure-all so that's what they all do now, and reliance on traditional medicine rather than actual medicine...
I mean I heard they supposedly built "hospitals" that were more like "cinderblock buildings that were empty and had neither floors nor ceilings that were painted to LOOK like hospitals so they can save face in the international community".
I mean I heard they supposedly built "hospitals" that were more like "cinderblock buildings that were empty and had neither floors nor ceilings that were painted to LOOK like hospitals so they can save face in the international community".
In this moment, I am Ur-phoric. Not because of any phony god’s blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my int score.
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Username17
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Well, Boris Johnson has announced that the UK is entering Stage Two of the response. So there's that.Koumei wrote:Only because you have so many people. Don't just ignore the efforts of Australia and the UK in being really fucking shit in initial conditions, preparation and response, we're trying to have American-style casualties but we just don't have the numbers.
But seriously, it's difficult to convey how uniquely terrible the response of the United States of America is to this situation and how much of it is Donald Trump's fault personally. The US has the lowest number of per capita tests performed of any country in the developed world. Donald Trump has been actively sabotaging the response because he's convinced himself that if the reported numbers are kept low that his approval will rise. That probably sounds like a completely unhinged conspiracy theory, but he's literally said that is what he's doing and that that is why he's doing it.
Yesterday, Hillary Clinton (the woman who would be president if he we counted votes like normal people) was clowning on Trump as so:
So if we had Hillary Clinton in charge instead of this useless abomination, we'd simply rollout a national response of increasing interventions as the progress of the disease warranted it. Saving somewhere between thousands and millions of lives. But instead we don't even know how progressed the disease is because Trump 'wants to keep the numbers down.'Hillary Clinton wrote:I know this is all hard for you, @realdonaldtrump, so let me spell it out:
- Free testing
- Fee waivers
- Emergency sick leave
- Quarantines
- Cancellations
- Giving a damn
And he is keeping the numbers down!
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Thaluikhain
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Disagree, they might be trying, but I think the US has gotten both of those countries beaten. It helps that the US has more in the way of impressive problems with their healthcare and workers' rights.Koumei wrote:Only because you have so many people. Don't just ignore the efforts of Australia and the UK in being really fucking shit in initial conditions, preparation and response, we're trying to have American-style casualties but we just don't have the numbers.
Australian PM Scott Morrison might have told people to avoid gatherings of 500+ people, starting from Monday so he can go to the footy and to his big cult thing on the weekend, but that's not Trump level. Especially as he backpedaled on the footy once people called him out.
Important to remember that a whole bunch of poor young people getting sick but not dying from the disease still means they might not be able to go to work even if they survive and therefore might not be able to pay rent or whatever.
Also a lot of places are going to shut down because people don't want to go out to congregate, which means all the employees aren't getting paid.
Deaths are a big deal and hospital resource allocation is something we have to worry about but we are also going to be fucked by just "a bunch of people getting sick at the same time."
Also a lot of places are going to shut down because people don't want to go out to congregate, which means all the employees aren't getting paid.
Deaths are a big deal and hospital resource allocation is something we have to worry about but we are also going to be fucked by just "a bunch of people getting sick at the same time."
The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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nockermensch
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It'll be this one. I can't see a massive global recession not happening now.Chamomile wrote:-Indirect apocalypse. The plague doesn't kill humanity or even inflict enough fatalities to directly end civilization, but it causes enough economic damage and political instability to cause a 30s-grade depression and a massive surge of war across the globe as devastated economies scramble for resources, which transitions directly into climate-apocalypse a few decades hence. Civilization as we know it ends on schedule, but the initial decline is much more rapid.
Maybe not an outright apocalypse, but I expect that the second order effects will end having a much worse toll on our civilization.
@ @ Nockermensch
Koumei wrote:After all, in Firefox you keep tabs in your browser, but in SovietPutin's Russia, browser keeps tabs on you.
Mord wrote:Chromatic Wolves are massively under-CRed. Its "Dood to stone" spell-like is a TPK waiting to happen if you run into it before anyone in the party has Dance of Sack or Shield of Farts.
Yeah, it's fun knowing that, when I'm sick, I still pretty much have to show up to work anyway. I can't afford to just take time off work, or go see a doctor enough times that I get permission to see the kind of doctor who knows anything about the kind of illness I have.Thaluikhain wrote:It helps that the US has more in the way of impressive problems with their healthcare and workers' rights.
I'm young enough that I probably won't die from this, and I'm not supposed to care how many other people suffer or die because I can't take off work.
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Josh_Kablack
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"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."