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About the Asian immigrant i can report something interesting. As it happens in many parts of the world, chinese in particular tends to create closed and tight community. In the north of Italy in particular an entire manufacturing industry has been setup by chinese with exclusively chinese emploiees. A massive industrial departement for cloths and various fabric in the city and outskirt of PRATO, near Florence, north of Italy. Well, the chinese community put theirselves in self-quarantine and with their typical discipline got Zero positives!

Coronavirus, a Prato la comunità cinese è in autoquarantena e registra zero contagi - Open

Just to say how racism it's a silly thing. And in the first days of the story, any asian were treated very badly in public. Then people realized how was silly and stopped. I'm sure you'll see some similiar pattern.

And let me say one thing: China as a case of study is for me extremely unreliable for the censorship. Italy will be the first country with a western transparency for the matter. Don't make your evalutions and computations on China numbers. Take Italy for this.... and things are grim...

Can we not take, say, South Korea, or Taiwan, or other Asian countries as examples of good responses to the pandemic, if we don't want to trust Chinese data?

And if we don't want to trust the fact that WHO (who is operating in China) seems to believe that China has successfully fought off the disease, can we also not take the fact that when China tries to pull sneaky things that are visible from space - which "secret hospitals" and "secret mass graves for millions" would be - the west is always quick to expose it?

I find it weird to see how unwilling many people are to accept that you can fight off the disease via legally-enforced social distancing and hygiene measures, when we directly see it working in multiple countries.
 
Can we not take, say, South Korea, or Taiwan, or other Asian countries as examples of good responses to the pandemic, if we don't want to trust Chinese data?

And if we don't want to trust the fact that WHO (who is operating in China) seems to believe that China has successfully fought off the disease, can we also not take the fact that when China tries to pull sneaky things that are visible from space - which "secret hospitals" and "secret mass graves for millions" would be - the west is always quick to expose it?

I find it weird to see how unwilling many people are to accept that you can fight off the disease via legally-enforced social distancing and hygiene measures, when we directly see it working in multiple countries.
Yes, i think definetly we can take as example the other Asian countries.
And i don't see where are questioned distancing and hygiene measures, basically the only effectives.
What i can't see is how to rely on numbers and ratios of a country that censors even internet communication.

I'm talking about THIS:

At least 5 people in China have disappeared, gotten arrested, or been silenced after speaking out about the coronavirus — here's what we know about them

Try to google china critics disappear
 
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I do have a scientific background and there is nothing absolute in my comments.

You are the one who appears to have absolute certainty that we should allow this virus to spread without fighting it.

We didn’t always have the tools to counter virus outbreak. And very rarely has the negative potential been so clear that governments have been incentivised to do what they need to do.
But it is possible to eradicate when there is a huge financial incentive to do so.

Whether governments choose to here is far from clear and seems on the whole unlikely. In China they have done and the original Wuhan outbreak looks largely beatable. But it will be back in the long run if other governments, businesses and charities don’t follow China’s lead on a global scale.

How I would deal with CV-19

The current “flatten the curve” strategy is a result of medical advisors constraining their options with a bad economic assumption and then governments not realising their medical advice contains an economic fallacy.
Flatten the Curve essentially means maintain enough social distancing to balance the health service on the edge of collapse until a vaccine is rolled out in 6-12 months. Due to the intensive care rate and the infectiousness of this virus, it looks like keeping the curve beneath health service capacity requires extreme economic shutdowns of leisure, travel, retail sectors etc.

Flatten the curve is a flu policy and makes sense if the total cost of flattening is lower than than cost of killing the curve, but due to the cost of flattening in this case, killing the curve is far cheaper because it can be done in far shorter period of time.

We know from Wuhan and common sense that 6 weeks full lockdown excluding non essential work, together with N95 masks for all essential workers and for shoppers, will more or less eradicate the virus from your area. We also know from China ex Wuhan and Korea that a thorough: Test, Trace, Isolate policy can keep secondary cases to an insignificant number while allowing the economy to get back running. (Most countries are too late to move straight to a Korea strategy because the virus is so widespread they no longer have capacity for contact tracing, so first they need lockdowns to get numbers under control).

But it is possible a more targeted strategy could allow shorter lockdowns. 2 weeks full lockdown excluding non essential work in-line with Wuhan/California/NY could be enough to buy time for a more targeted strategy.

After 2 weeks lockdown, households with no suspected cases should be tested. If clear they can go back to work (with N95 masks and improved hygiene policies). With tests again performed daily to catch longer incubation periods.

Households with suspected cases should be tested after 3-4 weeks to allow extra time to catch household chain infections. If clear, they too can go back to work.

After this, the country should only open easy borders to countries that have adopted a similar “kill the curve” policy. Most countries should do this before too long, but all borders can be opened in a year or so once everyone is vaccinated.

Adopting a 4-7 week "kill the curve" strategy should allow much more thorough support for industries to allow them to quickly re-hire and ramp back up afterwards. Currently the "flatten the curve" policy is open ended and governments need to maintain borrowing capacity and dry powder to allow them to support current measures for 6 months plus which means measures are not comprehensive enough to prevent long term economic damage. It is also much harder for debt and equity markets to have confidence to fund companies to avoid bankruptcy when these shutdown measures are open ended.
 
Last edited:
Data through Mar 20

Screen Shot 2020-03-21 at 4.53.21 AM.jpg
 
An update on the situation in Malaysia, which is where I'm currently staying:

A nationwide government shutdown went into effect this week, and will last until the end of the month.

Police are apparently patrolling the streets, and have been fining people RM1000 ($250, which is quite a lot of money to Malaysians) for violating the stay at home notice.

A girl, who was staying over at my place since Thursday, decided to go home a day early, because she heard from a friend, who works for the government, that tomorrow the army will get involved to make sure that everybody, who is not involved in critical industries, stays at home in accordance with the government order.

With restrictions as strict as these in place, the Malaysia numbers are bound to peak and start coming down, probably towards the end of next week.
 
About the Asian immigrant i can report something interesting. As it happens in many parts of the world, chinese in particular tends to create closed and tight community. In the north of Italy in particular an entire manufacturing industry has been setup by chinese with exclusively chinese emploiees. A massive industrial departement for cloths and various fabric in the city and outskirt of PRATO, near Florence, north of Italy. Well, the chinese community put theirselves in self-quarantine and with their typical discipline got Zero positives!

Coronavirus, a Prato la comunità cinese è in autoquarantena e registra zero contagi - Open

Just to say how racism it's a silly thing. And in the first days of the story, any asian were treated very badly in public. Then people realized how was silly and stopped. I'm sure you'll see some similiar pattern.

And let me say one thing: China as a case of study is for me extremely unreliable for the censorship. Italy will be the first country with a western transparency for the matter. Don't make your evalutions and computations on China numbers. Take Italy for this.... and things are grim...

I hadn't heard anything one way or the other about the Asian community in Italy. It's good that they have been careful.

For the record I grew up in a heavily Asian community near east LA (Monterey Park). It was a very multi-ethnic city. I never went to a school that was more than 15% white until college. There was no ethnic tension at all until Chinese from Taiwan started moving in (but that's a different story). As people we're not all that different. Most of the differences racists harp on are just cultural differences which are learned behaviors, but there are genetic differences that can contribute to diseases, like some genetics are more prone to developing sickle cell anemia and others are more likely to develop celiac disease.

How I would deal with CV-19

The current “flatten the curve” strategy is a result of medical advisors constraining their options with a bad economic assumption and then governments not realising their medical advice contains and economic fallacy.
Flatten the Curve essentially means maintain enough social distancing to balance the health service on the edge of collapse until a vaccine is rolled out in 6-12 months. Due to the intensive care rate and the infectiousness of this virus, it looks like keeping the curve beneath health service capacity requires extreme economic shutdowns of leisure, travel, retail sectors etc.

Flatten the curve is a flu policy and makes sense if the total cost of flattening is lower than than cost of killing the curve, but due to the cost of flattening in this case, killing the curve is far cheaper because it can be done in far shorter period of time.

We know from Wuhan and common sense that 6 weeks full lockdown excluding non essential work, together with N95 masks for all essential workers and for shoppers, will more or less eradicate the virus from your area. We also know from China ex Wuhan and Korea that a thorough: Test, Trace, Isolate policy can keep secondary cases to an insignificant number while allowing the economy to get back running.

But it is possible a more targeted strategy could allow shorter lockdowns. 2 weeks full lockdown excluding non essential work in-line with Wuhan/California/NY could be enough to buy time for a more targeted strategy.

After 2 weeks lockdown, households with no suspected cases should be tested. If clear they can go back to work (with N95 masks and improved hygiene policies). With tests again performed daily to catch longer incubation periods.

Households with suspected cases should be tested after 3-4 weeks to allow extra time to catch household chain infections. If clear, they too can go back to work.

After this, the country should only open easy borders to countries that have adopted a similar “kill the curve” policy. Most countries should do this before too long, but all borders can be opened in a year or so once everyone is vaccinated.

Adopting a 4-7 week "kill the curve" strategy should allow much more thorough support for industries to allow them to quickly re-hire and ramp back up afterwards. Currently the "flatten the curve" policy is open ended and governments need to maintain borrowing capacity and dry powder to allow them to support current measures for 6 months plus which means measures are not comprehensive enough to prevent long term economic damage. It is also much harder for debt and equity markets to have confidence to fund companies to avoid bankruptcy when these shutdown measures are open ended.

The problem is the tests aren't there to test people after two weeks isolation and there is a massive shortage of masks to give people. The health professionals who are being exposed to this stuff are running critically short of masks and other basic medical supplies.

This plan relies on tests and supplies that don't exist. Once supply catches up with demand maybe something like this can be done. for right now the only thing to do is social distancing and treating everyone as if they are infected.

The other solution in this lack of supply environment is to just let people congregate and let the disease spread like the seasonal common cold. About 80% of the population will be fine, some will be as ill as they might with an average case of the flu (a bit different symptoms, but just as ill), but they would get through it. The horror show is with those who are in the approximately 20% who will get ill enough to need hospitalization.

In the US that's 64 million people. The US has about 900,000 hospital beds and about 100,000 intensive care beds for those who develop severe cases. There is a lot of talk about needing to ramp up production of critical supplies, but it hasn't even started yet. Some health care providers are tapping the public to sew masks and make other low tech items. The existing manufacturers of critical care equipment are ramping up as best they can. I heard an interview with a ventilator maker in the Seattle area that hopes to have their production at about 5X normal within 90 days, but their current production is not very big because it's not exactly a growth market most of the time.

If just 1/10 of the 64 million people who are likely to develop severe cases end up needing hospitalization at once, anyone who didn't see it coming and try to do something to slow it down will be justifiably pilloried for their lack of foresight. It's easy for the young to say that most of that 64 million are old or not very productive because of their other health problems, but it's also their parents, grandparents, and possibly friends who are at risk.

In the past, pandemics in which a significant percentage of the population got sick at once sometimes led to collapse of the government. It just about happened in Philadelphia in 1783.

1793 Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic - Wikipedia

Philadelphia teetered on collapse with a smaller percentage death toll during the 1918 flu pandemic
https://www.history.com/news/spanish-flu-deaths-october-1918

The death toll doesn't need to get that high for it to leave deep scars on the public psyche. The population of the US in 1918 was a little over 106 million and the death toll in the US was about 675,000. That's 0.6%. Heart disease currently kills about that many Americans a year (lower percentage with a larger population), but it's not an unusual death so people don't freak out about it.

The death toll from the 1918 flu has been the gold standard for the pandemic we want to avoid for 100 years. My parents were born just after this (1920s) and their parent's generation was scarred from it.
 
Progress in antibody testing:

New blood tests for antibodies could show true scale of coronavirus pandemic

Although I kind of worry about this. If you're in an area that managed to avoid a hospital overload (either through better control in the hospitals against nosocomial transmission, or through general restrictions on public activities, or even just population cooperation in regards to social distancing), and then people start finding out that they - and many of their friends and family members - already got the disease but didn't notice (Iceland/deCODE and Vò data shows that the vast majority of cases are asymptomatic or mild (50-75% no symptoms whatsoever), and would never get caught without random sampling or whole-population testing)... how are they going to react? How are they going to interpret all of this interruption to their lives and fear?

Kind of makes you wonder if this virus hasn't been among us for a long time. How many times have we been sick with the "flu" when really it wasn't? How many of the 70,000 flu deaths this year in the U.S. weren't actually flu deaths? How about last year, the year before, etc... if news had never made it out of Wuhan about the outbreak there, would we even have noticed the < 300 U.S. deaths?
 
The problem is the tests aren't there to test people after two weeks isolation and there is a massive shortage of masks to give people. The health professionals who are being exposed to this stuff are running critically short of masks and other basic medical supplies.

This plan relies on tests and supplies that don't exist. Once supply catches up with demand maybe something like this can be done. for right now the only thing to do is social distancing and treating everyone as if they are infected.

.
This is only because nobody has paid for them. This can all happen very quickly if funding is committed to it. China was performing over 300k tests per day over a month ago.

Every country should be ordering as many tests and masks as possible from every domestic company with capacity and also from China. It is not difficult to have enough in 2 -3 weeks time.

They should have ordered these 2 months ago admittedly. The reason they didn't was due to extremely false economies. But now it should be clear tests and masks are far far cheaper than the shutdown measures they are implementing.
 
Yes, i think definetly we can take as example the other Asian countries.
And i don't see where are questioned distancing and hygiene measures, basically the only effectives.
What i can't see is how to rely on numbers and ratios of a country that censors even internet communication.

I'm talking about THIS:

At least 5 people in China have disappeared, gotten arrested, or been silenced after speaking out about the coronavirus — here's what we know about them

Try to google china critics disappear
You can make a point of china, but maybe take a look at your own president. He is lying, making stuff up and still sits there. and off course people like to post stuff like that, but the situation in the US is much worse. Trump is just lying, and he is not even attaced on that (yeah, in some opinion article in some newspaper. But nobody has the guts of shouting at him how f*cking stupig the guy is.
 
This is only because nobody has paid for them. This can all happen very quickly if funding is committed to it. China was performing over 300k tests per day over a month ago.

Every country should be ordering as many tests and masks as possible from every domestic company with capacity and also from China. It is not difficult to have enough in 2 -3 weeks time.

They should have ordered these 2 months ago admittedly. The reason they didn't was due to extremely false economies. But now it should be clear tests and masks are far far cheaper than the shutdown measures they are implementing.
Yesterday I had contact with a friend who works in the Advent Helath hospital in Orlando. they do test, aprox. 3500 cases every day (!) this is first not reflected in the daily numbers. Secondly, the results of the test will come in the next TWO weeks. Yes, you read that correctly, TWO weeks. Some thest take an hour, we use test in NL that take maximum 24 hours. But two weeks is really bad, se I expect a hughe spike in cases and deaths in the US.
 
Has their been any further information on Tesla producing ventilators with basic functions, few bells and whistles, since Elon said they could if needed? On the one hand he seems very skeptical that a lot more will be needed in the time it would take to get some production going.
On the other, Elon loves a challenge and delights in showing how much more agile and capable Tesla is than other manufacturers.
 
The political position on COVID-19 in my two countries is dramatically different:

US- all the world knows. The president lies and distorts and either denies or claims near-omniscience. But he's the actual CEO and does establish government policy or lack thereof.

Brazil- The President admires the US one and is sycophantic in the extreme. But, he really does not control the bureaucracy so despite his vehement objections the Federal, State and local governments are taking actions. Tests are happening, opening capacity for diagnosis and treatment is happening. Adequate, no. However, testing capacity was begun in Brazil in late January, so testing has happened and is happening. Social distancing and other steps are working.

When comparing the two my spouse and I chose to wait this out in Brazil, at least in part because we have better health access in Rio than we do in Miami. Without much question I think we'd be better off in someplace where social organization permits strong direct government and private coordinated responses driven by scientific evidence. We have no such option available to us.

Despite all the disarray, incompetence and politics interfering with rational action I suspect the present catastrophe will burn out by July or so. Clearly, it will return, but the world will be better prepared then. In the meantime there will have been deep recessions to depressions around the world. There will have been no escape.

The only positive might well be that everywhere from Istanbul, Beijing and Venice to Sao Paulo, Mexico City and much of the industrial world will actually see the sky. In my Rio de Janeiro home I traditionally have seen the pollution in the city below us although this area has never been among the world's worst. Right now the skies are brilliantly clear. One effect of all this, we have reason to hope, will be acceleration of the world moving off fossil fuels.

Sadly some politicians are trying to bail out the oil and gas industries. I hope they fail! We need clear air and water!
 
Heart disease currently kills about that many Americans a year (lower percentage with a larger population), but it's not an unusual death so people don't freak out about it.

The main reason people don't freak out about it is that it seems like almost ever person that lives beyond the average life span dies of heart disease. My wife's grandmother died at 98. Cause of death? Heart disease.

I seriously hope heart disease gets me at 98!! So no I ain't panicking about heart disease (although I eat healthy to avoid it if I can).
 
Yeah, Florida to me is the ticking time bomb of this all. Slow to react, highly aged population, and a lot of people going to and coming from. It won't look good in a week, and probably pretty horrifying in two.

We should all be concerned that the spring breakers, cruse ship passengers are heading home ( some escorted by the National Guard ) . A local report said that Dobbins AFB had to take in 500 passengers from that cruse ship instead of the earlier reported 34. Time to move them on to make room for the new cases.

A family member who is in the medical profession reminded us that the 'regular sanitizers' that are sold in stores when they have supplies , are not capable of killing viruses only bacteria.