Coronavirus

[EinSV]

Brett Winton raises the possibility that there could be a large latent immune population that could help avoid some of the worst case scenarios (especially in combination with other strategies to slow the spread).

What if there already is a large latent-immune population?

 

[Cherry Wine]

Just want to give a shout out to this board for giving me a heads-up on this virus. I definitely feel like I got an early start on some basic preparations; some friends of mine in the Bay Area have been completely blindsided by this.

 

[TheTalkingMule]

Not to mention there is no immunity in the population and the doubling rate is extremely short. I think some people underestimate what an exponential function can do...

With a doubling rate of 2.5 days, 8 days is a factor of roughly 10. A factor of 1000 is roughly 24 days.

How DARE you insult any TMC poster when it comes to exponential growth!

Immunity is the only real problem. It's starting to look like the death rate will be manageable and flu + CV deaths will total something south of 2x 2018's flu total.

Our numbers are definitely way behind since we're not really testing people. Folks are gonna freak when the numbers start jumping over the next week from both testing and spreading, but there's simply not enough time for this to be a huge problem before it warms up and flu season ends.

This effort will push off maybe 100k deaths from this flu season to somewhere in the next 3.

 

[H Mak]

Hi from Liverpool. This is my favourite forum and I have learnt so much, especially from the prominent regular posters. So I thought I should join and say thank you.
I have been buying $TSLA for about a year in small packets and now have enough to have felt the pain over the last few weeks. I have a Model 3 on order (God knows when it will be delivered - it's 6 weeks since I ordered). So all in all, a big Tesla fan.

The last couple of weeks have felt really uncomfortable. I have many other equities, although Tesla is by far my biggest holding. I've felt panicky (not helped by the doom-mongers on the main news channels in the UK, BBC and ITV) and my resolve to be greedy when others are fearful has been tested. But so far I've held firm.

I started to look for some context to try to make sense of things, so looked at data from the countries which are well past their peak, and where new daily cases have dwindled to a handful, namely China and south Korea.
The resource below is really useful. It shows virus data for all countries, and if you click on a country it breaks down the figures. The "daily new cases" graph is compelling and it shows what we can eventually expect in the west - i.e. that the frenzy we are experiencing now will indeed peak and then dwindle away. At which point people will relax, go back to work, and things will return to normal, including the share price.

An interesting observation on China: It has a population of 1.45 billion and 80,879 (0.006%) of them are reported to have had the disease. Or to put it another way, 99.994% haven't. Context.

All of which has made me more relaxed about riding out this hiatus and not selling a single share.

Coronavirus Update (Live): 182,403 Cases and 7,144 Deaths from COVID-19 Virus Outbreak - Worldometer
.

 

[Cosmacelf]

Just FYI, the US does have an emergency ventilator stockpile. And I know of one local ventilator manufacture that has switched over alll production to ventilators for hospitals, which hospitals are buying with recently released emergency funds.

 

[EVNow]

I gotta say, it didn’t sound like a great plan. And even worse from a political perspective.

Reminds me of the report a few years back that said smoking is good because the government saves money when the smoker dies.

"Thanks for voting for me. But we'll wait for herd-immunity - too bad you might die before that".

 

[Sean Wagner]

UK Government backpedaling on its original plan:

Quote .../ In a telephone conference with the heads of big engineering companies on Monday evening, Boris Johnson, the prime minister, called for 30,000 [respirators] to be made within two weeks, according to two executives with knowledge of the discussion.

Over the weekend, Matt Hancock, the health secretary, had said that the NHS has only 5,000 ventilators, which deliver oxygen to patients unable to breathe alone, and that it would need “many times more than that”. /... Unquote, Source: Subscribe to read | Financial Times

 

[bkp_duke]

On an only semi-related note, and question for everyone:

How much do we think CO2 and pollution levels are going to drop due to the coronavirus pandemic? In the 2008-9 recession there was a noted drop for both. We going to drop as much or more this time?


Just thought we might need a slight change of conversation for a short bit.

 

[Cherry Wine]

On an only semi-related note, and question for everyone:

How much do we think CO2 and pollution levels are going to drop due to the coronavirus pandemic? In the 2008-9 recession there was a noted drop for both. We going to drop as much or more this time?


Just thought we might need a slight change of conversation for a short bit.

In the short term, possibly more. We could be looking at an almost complete cessation of industrial and commercial activity across wide swaths of the world all at once.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

On an only semi-related note, and question for everyone:

How much do we think CO2 and pollution levels are going to drop due to the coronavirus pandemic? In the 2008-9 recession there was a noted drop for both. We going to drop as much or more this time?


Just thought we might need a slight change of conversation for a short bit.

There's always a tweet. I happen to follow them...

Keeling_Curve on Twitter

What does it take for the coronavirus (or other major economic events) to affect global carbon dioxide readings?

"Scripps Oceanography geochemist Ralph Keeling said fossil fuel use would have to decline by about 10 percent around the world and.....would need to be sustained for a year to show up clearly in CO2 levels. No events in the 62-year history of the Keeling Curve – including the downturn of 2008 and the Soviet Union collapse in late 1980s – have caused such a drop to date."

It doesn't look like 2008 was really noticeable:

https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/k...ugins/sio-bluemoon/graphs/mlo_full_record.png

Zoomed out view to show what our addiction to fossil fuel energy is doing:

https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/wp-content/plugins/sio-bluemoon/graphs/co2_10k.png

Note the y-axis in both plots starts at 200ppm, not 0ppm (pet peeve of mine to display data this way but it is what it is).

 

[Uncle Paul]

Imagine that by the time we flood the hospitals with severly ill people, they will have significantly added to their inventory of ventilations. Additionaly more inhalation therapists will need to be quickly trained to specifically handle the larger number of patients hooked up to the machines. Even Candy Stripers will be emergency trained to save additional lives. Regulations will be over ridden to increase the emergency care for the elderly.

Governments are already reaching out to local same day surgery centers to curtail elective proceedures, and prepare to use their facilies to handle flu victims. This should add significantly to the number of beds that will become available as the need rises.

Hospitals are also being asked to cancel most elective proceedures, and essentially become specialized in treatment of flu patients.

Lots is going on behind the scenes to quickly ramp up our medical care capabilities. It is going to become a war like footing, with more and more resources allocated to handle the epidemic.

Regarding the Global Warming situation, I imagine that all those resources will be reallocated to deal with the more pressing urgent flu matters.

CO2 levels, pollution and factory production will be mitigated, but long term that will come back to top of mind planning for future generations.

In other words, when the house is on fire, not so much attention is paid to cleaning the dirty carpets.

 

[AlexS]

Just want to give a shout out to this board for giving me a heads-up on this virus. I definitely feel like I got an early start on some basic preparations; some friends of mine in the Bay Area have been completely blindsided by this.

Everyone should have moved here from main thread. I assume a lot of ppl especially heavy call holders got crushed who didn't protect. It was big mistake to separate.

 

[linux-works]

lockdown happening tonite, sigh..

I ventured out (bay area) to see if the food stores are stocked. took a long time to find any parking spot, at all. that was bad sign #1. then, no grocery carts. all in use. bad sign #2. checkout lines were at least half an hour wait. #3 - I'M OUT. no, I'm not waiting in a line for half an hour next to breathing human beings.

good that I prepped over the last few weeks - but it looked scary, today. was my first time out in days, too.


btw, I'm thinking the calendar - is actually wrong. TODAY is groundhog day, and this groundhog is going back into his hole for another few days, at least.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

Brett Winton raises the possibility that there could be a large latent immune population that could help avoid some of the worst case scenarios (especially in combination with other strategies to slow the spread).

What if there already is a large latent-immune population?

With his 'analysis' of China being a problem because it has an older population, isn't he conveniently leaving out South Korea, which has a young population, and where the infections grew exponentially and would have overwhelmed the healthcare system? I'm sure there are plenty of people who would be asymptomatic or might not be susceptible for whatever reason. But empirically we can see it doesn't matter. We've decided (wisely) that it is unacceptable for our hospitals to collapse and have all of our doctors and nurses get sick - and all the patients in for other life-threatening reasons would die as well.

I guess the answer to the question the article poses is: Practically speaking, it doesn't matter.

 

[Causalien]

Everyone should have moved here from main thread. I assume a lot of ppl especially heavy call holders got crushed who didn't protect. It was big mistake to separate.

Heh. Well I now spend most of my time here since the mods didn't like me polluting the main thread with Coronavirus.

 

[Causalien]

lockdown happening tonite, sigh..

I ventured out (bay area) to see if the food stores are stocked. took a long time to find any parking spot, at all. that was bad sign #1. then, no grocery carts. all in use. bad sign #2. checkout lines were at least half an hour wait. #3 - I'M OUT. no, I'm not waiting in a line for half an hour next to breathing human beings.

good that I prepped over the last few weeks - but it looked scary, today. was my first time out in days, too.


btw, I'm thinking the calendar - is actually wrong. TODAY is groundhog day, and this groundhog is going back into his hole for another few days, at least.

The one regret I have is that even though it's pandemic style freakout. I didn't see everyone wearing masks. So it wasn't socially acceptable to whip out my pandemic full face mask yet. I really wanted to wear those and say some vader quotes.

 

[EVNow]

This is an excellent summary of the new Imperial college report 9. Shows why mitigation doesn't work and need all out disease suppression like China/Korea.

Thread by @kakape: Wow. Only now getting to read this #covid19 paper at the end of a busy day. But what a read. It Spells out the issues very clearly. Quick th…

What happens if nothing is done: “We predict 81% of the GB and US populations would be infected over the course of the epidemic.” Peak in deaths after 3 months. “In total, in an unmitigated epidemic, we would predict approximately 510,000 deaths in GB and 2.2 million in the US."

"For an uncontrolled epidemic, we predict critical care bed capacity would be exceeded as early as the second week in April, with an eventual peak in ICU or critical care bed demand that is over 30 times greater than the maximum supply in both countries"

So what about the two strategies. Well, basically, the report says, mitigation will not work. Even in the most optimistic scenario surge limits for beds in both general wards and ICUs would be exceeded at least 8-fold.

What’s worse: "even if all patients were able to be treated, we predict there would still be in the order of 250,000 deaths in GB, and 1.1-1.2 million in the US” And this is basically with the strategy the UK government seemed to be advocating last week.​

 

[Zloy]

On an only semi-related note, and question for everyone:

How much do we think CO2 and pollution levels are going to drop due to the coronavirus pandemic? In the 2008-9 recession there was a noted drop for both. We going to drop as much or more this time?


Just thought we might need a slight change of conversation for a short bit.

A few weeks ago I've read in New York Times Japan that their influenza rate was down 60% compared to the 2018-2019 season. They attributed it to the measures undertaken due to the coronavirus. If I remember correctly it was something on the order of 100K down to 40K of reported flu cases.

I imagine it isn't just influenza that is being "affected" by the measures but many other bugs as well. It is also likely that a few lives will be saved as the number of accidents should drop following fewer cars on the road... Hope decreased pollution will save some lives too. I just want to think there are not only bad outcomes from this virus.

 

[linux-works]

I have a black vader-like mask and definitely wore mine, today. some wore what they had, but about 90% of the people had no gloves (damn, guys, gloves are $10 a box of 200; why no gloves??) and no masks. masks, I understand - you can't buy them yet, but you can (and could) get gloves. yeah, they look goofy when they are blue - but I am not here to make fashion statements

people were crowding right next to each other, not doing the 6' distance thing.

humans are really stupid creatures. in general, its really true - and events like this really prove it.

 

[Causalien]

UK Government backpedaling on its original plan:

The UK Only Realised "In The Last Few Days" That Its Coronavirus Strategy Would "Likely Result In Hundreds of Thousands of Deaths"

Whoa... And I thought Boris Johnson was some badass sociolpathic jaded SOB willing to stare down 5% death. Turns out can't do math.