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Thread: The Corona Virus
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2020-03-10, 05:32 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Corona Virus
On the other hand, the traditional "everyone gets sick because we spend too much time indoors together" season is coming to an end, at least in the northern hemisphere. Another month and the seasonal flu will be well on its way out, and so might the corona virus. So it may not be 2 months from now that we have to worry about, it may be the new wave coming next November, when the virus starts out already spread around the globe and has a full winter to run. Especially in places like say refugee camps it could get pretty bad.
As for the southern hemisphere: good luck.Last edited by Lvl 2 Expert; 2020-03-10 at 05:34 AM.
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2020-03-10, 12:34 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2008
Re: The Corona Virus
The right way to prep is to mix the long-shelf-life foods and commodities into your normal diet and habits. For example, keep a two-week stock of canned or otherwise preserved food with a shelf life of over a year, and have one day a month where you eat and replace the oldest food in your prep stash.
Similarly, if you buy a month's supply of extra soap and toilet paper before a crisis 'just in case', you don't lose much if you use it normally and delay your next regular toilet paper purchase by a month.
Prepping only has a large net cost if you buy something you wouldn't use normally. For example, if you don't normally drink bottled water, but keep a week's supply on hand in case the utility water supply fails, you're paying a premium of about a dollar per gallon per year even if you put it to good use before it expires.Last edited by Bucky; 2020-03-10 at 12:35 PM. Reason: typo
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2020-03-10, 12:35 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Corona Virus
I mean, that's technically correct, but it's one of those cases where you can calculate everything correctly and still get a laughably wrong answer.
Every disease we've ever had experiences exponential growth at first. It doesn't continue indefinitely, though, and not just because of quarantines and lockdowns. Viruses naturally burn themselves out over time, especially as they run out of people with enough social contact to spread it far - following current trends, China doesn't even have a doubling time.
In an infinite plane of uniform density filled with spherical cows, we'd have a reason to worry. As it stands, though, claims like that are just fearmongering.
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2020-03-10, 01:07 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Apr 2015
Re: The Corona Virus
Aren't "people with enough social contact to spread it" a majority of the people in the U.S.? IIRC, Americans hit the point where 50% of us lived in urban areas about a hundred years ago, and that ratio has steadily increased since. Even if you subtract a good fraction to account for people who can self-isolate, work from home, or otherwise live near people but have the ability to minimize social contact, we might still be talking about a majority of the population.
Honestly, it would terrify me more to hear someone in authority say "Don't worry, the infections won't spread as fast once it's spread so much that it's hard to find someone new to infect" than it would for me to hear slight overwarning.
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2020-03-10, 01:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Corona Virus
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2020-03-10, 01:34 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Apr 2015
Re: The Corona Virus
I mean, it makes sense that the people who see a revolving door of visitors or customers would present a greater risk than others and that things might slow down a little bit once those guys are all infected and have done as much damage as they could, but I don't think it'll be asymptotic growth at that point. Once you look at the office drones and other people who primarily interact with the same group of coworkers, and see few, if any, outside visitors, you might see exponential growth with a larger time constant, but it will still be exponential growth nonetheless. And yes, for this population too, it won't be purely exponential because eventually you'll run out of these guys as well.
In defense of Strigon's position, if the growth rate is Wuhan is really slowing down already, then it's doing so at with a very high percentage of the population still (probably) uninfected. The confounding variable, however, is that China was able to impose stringent containment measures that may be logistically or legally impractical in other places.
Honestly, I never understood how so many people "waste" money stocking up on food. I mean, I understand the challenges for people living paycheck-to-paycheck who literally can't spend the money to buy food they won't use for a while without making substantial sacrifices elsewhere. Unless you normally eat out close to 100% of the time (in which case, you absolutely could have money to "waste" if you changed your habits a bit) or cook using 100% fresh veggies and other freshly-made ingredients, chances are there are dishes you like that incorporate some sort of shelf-stable food without noticeably sacrificing quality. Making pasta with fresh tomatoes and hand-made noodles is awesome when you have the time and inclination, but doing so with canned tomatoes and dried pasta can yield some great results as well, and tends to be more practical for people with a busy schedule.
If you can make even a single meal that relies on stable foods, and you like it enough to have it once or twice a month using Bucky's system, then you can keep a fresh stash without actually adding to your grocery bills. If you normally use more canned or preserved groceries than that, then your stash can be even bigger. Sure, after two weeks of the same thing it may no longer be one of your favorite meals, but at least you won't starve.Last edited by Xyril; 2020-03-10 at 01:38 PM.
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2020-03-10, 10:06 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Aug 2009
Re: The Corona Virus
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2020-03-10, 10:14 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2010
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Re: The Corona Virus
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2020-03-11, 12:45 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2008
Re: The Corona Virus
The gnomes once had many mines, but now they have gnome ore.
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2020-03-11, 06:06 AM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2007
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Re: The Corona Virus
If you assume that the cases that get hospitalized are only a very small percentage of the total number of infected, then you reach the conclusion that a very large number of people have caught it, and thus it's extremely contagious. If you assume that almost all of the people who get it are hospitalized, then the death rate is a few percent, which is extremely high. If you assume both of these things are true, then you conclude that it's both very contagious and very deadly... but you can't assume both of those things are true.
So far, the hardest-hit country has been Italy, which has seen 167.9 deaths per million people in the population. For China, it's only 56.1 deaths/million, though I'm not finding numbers for just Wuhan Province. For comparison, in the 2018-2019 flu season, there were 34,200 deaths from the flu in the US, with a population of 327.2 million, for 104.5 deaths per million population (this year has probably been a worse one so far for the flu, but the statistics aren't out there yet).
So, coronavirus is maybe a little worse than the flu, right now. But it's important to keep in mind that this is a comparison of coronavirus without a vaccine, to flu with a vaccine. We have safe, reliable flu vaccines available to anyone who wants one, and we still have a death rate that high from it. We don't yet have a vaccine for this coronavirus, but even by the most pessimistic estimates, we will within two years.
It makes sense for the CDC and the WHO to worry about coronavirus. That's their job, after all, and they'll be the ones developing that vaccine. Someday, there will be a really bad disease that hits, and they want to be prepared for that one when it comes, and that means taking all potential threats seriously. And one flu-like disease is bad enough; we don't need two. But it's not something that the rest of us need to panic over. Take some simple, common-sense precautions (which will ALSO help protect against the flu), and let them do their jobs.Time travels in divers paces with divers persons.
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2020-03-11, 10:02 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2014
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Re: The Corona Virus
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2020-03-11, 12:10 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Apr 2015
Re: The Corona Virus
Oh, that's a good point. It never occurred to me that that nutritional deficiencies would have a major impact within the hypothetical two or three weeks. Luckily for me, multivitamins are another one of those things that keep pretty well and that I can stock up on with couponing or great Costco sales.
Would the protein in pasta be enough, or does that 1 gram need to have higher levels of those essential amino acids that are hard to get outside of meat?
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2020-03-11, 05:51 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Nov 2008
Re: The Corona Virus
For a 2-week diet, I don't think amino acid balance is a major issue; for some of the stuff your body uses amino acids for, any of them will do, and in a starvation situation you're made of proteins. But I'm just an amateur prepper; if you're worried, ask a nutritionist.
Most of the vitamins aren't an issue in a 2-week period, either. Your body can store months' worth of Vitamin A precursors, and you can famously substitute sunlight for dietary Vitamin D. Vitamin C is borderline, but you won't develop outright scurvy within 2 weeks as long as your diet contains a small amount of it. The B vitamins can be problematic within a week, but they're also present in most foods, and the quickest to run out are also required in the smallest amounts. You're only in trouble if everything you eat lacks a certain B-vitamin for several days in a row, which is very unlikely unless you're eating the same thing every single meal.The gnomes once had many mines, but now they have gnome ore.
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2020-03-11, 09:37 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2007
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Re: The Corona Virus
I would encourage anyone with questions about the coronavirus to visit the CDC website for accurate and up to date information.
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2020-03-12, 02:05 AM (ISO 8601)
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2020-03-12, 10:09 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2009
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Re: The Corona Virus
What about the other 11?
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2020-03-12, 10:14 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2015
Re: The Corona Virus
Seriously, I really hope that scientists can find a cure for the coronavirus soon.
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2020-03-12, 10:58 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2007
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2020-03-12, 11:05 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2015
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2020-03-12, 12:25 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2013
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Re: The Corona Virus
Right now, the biggest reason its so dangerous is that its new and somewhat unknown. We just don't have systems in place to properly handle it right now. Once a vaccine is created and we have a better understanding of how to prevent its spread, fewer people will be getting sick at once and we can devote more resources per person to make sure that they survive even if they get a really nasty case.
“Evil is evil. Lesser, greater, middling, it's all the same. Proportions are negotiated, boundaries blurred. I'm not a pious hermit, I haven't done only good in my life. But if I'm to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all.”
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2020-03-12, 08:28 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2009
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Re: The Corona Virus
This is my skeptical face. Because it's been running since the start of January and there's far less than 65-and-a-half million infected that the model would suggest, and two weeks (15 days, 3 doublings) from now you'd have 524,000,000 infections. Two weeks from then we'd be at 4.2 BILLION. That wouldn't be Hospitals Out Of Space, that'd be 4/7ths of the planet. The End Of The World As We Know It (But I feel fine).
This is what you'd rationally have to call "hilariously impossible".Last edited by Misery Esquire; 2020-03-12 at 08:35 PM.
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2020-03-12, 08:40 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2004
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- Australia
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Re: The Corona Virus
Well this has started to get out of control rather fast.
The problem with this is that it is a lot more contagious and a lot more deadly than the flu, coupled with being totally new so there is zero natural immunity to it, as well as it taking days before the symptoms appear, making it impossible to curtail and we are a long way off of a vaccine.
The flu has a reproductive rate of 1.3-1.5 in winter. This thing is clocking in at 2 to 3. I saw elsewhere someone doing some rough maths on contagion numbers. As they said the actual maths is a lot more complex but it was good enough for purposes of illustration.
1.3 ^2 = 1.69
1.3 ^3= 2.85
1.3^4 = 3.71
2.5^2 = 6.25
2.5^3 = 15.65
2.5^4 = 39.06
So in just 4 exponents it has multiplied ten times more than the common flu.
Now couple that with a mortality rate that seems to be between 1 and 3.5%. For the over 80s in rises to around 15%.
And couple that with the fact the virus seems to be able to survive for hours outside the body and days on surfaces.
And couple that with no knowing for days that you are infected and meanwhile you are spreading it everywhere you go.
You can see why the experts are concerned.
The whole lock down isn't so much about containing it, as that is rather impossible outside severe draconian rules that tend not to work in western liberal democracies, but about slowing the growth, so that less people get sick at once. Italy's problem right now is that too many people got sick all at once and simply overwhelmed the health system.
What they are aiming for is this;
We better hope that the worst case scenario doesn't play out. Germany is expecting up to 70% of the population to contract it. If the 1% mortality rate is correct than you are looking at a million dead Germans.
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2020-03-12, 09:29 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2020
Re: The Corona Virus
Note that a vaccine will likely be 18 months out* before it's distributed in significant numbers. We sort of have to operate on the assumption that everyone will get it unless they take excessive steps to avoid catching it**, so the goal is to keep too many people from catching it at once***, identify and treat it early when people do catch it, and prevent other things**** from making the situation worse. This is a definite crisis. It's one we can handle(look at how Vietnam, China, and South Korea are doing), but it will get worse before it gets better. Don't panic, but don't be foolish either.
*Number is VERY variable, but there's basically no way it's under 12 months. Basic manufacturing takes far too long.
**If you are over 50 or immunocompromised, you're high risk. Take the excessive steps to avoid catching it. Everyone else, try not to catch it, but if you do it's not the end of the world. Just take excessive steps not to give it to anyone else.
***This disease gets much worse once hospitals run out of ICU rooms and ventilators
****Flu, riots, economic meltdown, etc
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2020-03-13, 12:37 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2010
Re: The Corona Virus
Even if you assume the most mild interpretation of this as just another flu (which we have enough data to disprove at this point), flu infects 200 million to 600 million a year (based on 0.1% fatality rate and 200k-600k flu deaths a year) - and that's not because we have 600 million people constantly carrying the flu, that's basically growing from a seed population over the course of a few months each flu season. So numbers you're calling hilariously impossible are within a factor of 10 of things we see happen like clockwork on a yearly basis.
The spread of Covid19 through a naive population without access to a vaccine has been faster than flu - that's not particularly surprising considering the additional factors in play (asymptomatic carriers, higher base rate of infection, lack of innate or externally applied counter-measures). So I wouldn't be too shocked if the peak Covid19 numbers this year are significantly worse than the peak numbers of a bad flu season from previous years. If the fluctuation scale between strains of flu is a factor of 3 or 4 (e.g. some years its 200k deaths, some years its 600k deaths), then going from say 600 million cases to 2.4 billion cases isn't really that big of an excursion to imagine - it's kind of a 1 sigma event in the big picture.
I'm not going to hazard guesses about numbers to expect this fall or next year, but I will say that one thing that has been eye-opening to me about this pandemic is that we (me included, here) have the ability to normalize pretty horrific states of being. More than any particular dangers during this initial expansion, I'd be worried that after we stress about this for a few months we'll all be in a mindset of 'okay, we did what we had to do, but lets not do any more' and we'll just accept that 'its a normal part of the human condition that e.g. about once every ten years you have to be hospitalized for a few weeks with a tube down your throat' or 'an extra 1% of the population dies every year, but its mostly old people so we'll just absorb that into the life expectancy numbers and it's easier to think about that way' or things like that.
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2020-03-13, 02:21 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: The Corona Virus
It also doesn't start from a low number of people in one region of one country. It starts with a minimum of thousands, already worldwide, and grows in fits from there - retaking ground that it previously resided in as it takes on the vaccine for the previous year, taking most of the winter and spring seasons to do so - the growth of it usually keeps running even up to autumn when it gets to start over again. This is a claim that Corona in 4 months will infect 4 billion people. That's 1 billion a month, or 33 million per day.
Succinctly; 600 million over >6 months starting from the tens of thousands vs. 4(+) billion in 4 months starting from near 0.
Yes, I'm going with hilarious.
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2020-03-13, 02:38 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Dec 2010
Re: The Corona Virus
Well, lets use your numbers here. So we start with a thousand flu cases and in 6 months we have 600 million. That means that under your model, flu has a doubling time of 9 days (Covid has an observed doubling time of something like 3-7 days depending on interventions, but lets leave that be for now). Currently we have 130k observed cases of Covid19 (it's likely more in reality due to the lag between infection and testing, limited testing, and things like that), but lets also leave that for now.
So in 4 months, if Covid19 were flu under your model, we'd have 130000 * 2^(4*30/9) cases. That's 1.3 billion cases.
So even your math predicts 1.3 billion infections four months from now.
The rate of expansion isn't a question. Exponential processes can absolutely scale to affect global populations within the span of a year - they do it every year. If there's any sort of deviation, it's not about whether it could possibly grow that fast, it's at what we expect the saturation level of infection of the population to be. Will this be something that once it's had its shot at everyone only 5% of people get it, or 90%, or what? With vaccines and accumulated immunity, flu is something like 5-10% each year.Last edited by NichG; 2020-03-13 at 02:41 AM.
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2020-03-13, 05:50 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2010
Re: The Corona Virus
This is likely what will happen. People are wildly irrational about statistics when it comes to large numbers for everyday occurences. Consider people’s fear of flying vs the statistically more likely death just driving to the airport.
One thing to note here the fatality rate we’re seeing (whatever the number ends up being) is not the excess fatality rate. This thing is affecting elderly and already vulnerable people the most. There is likely at least some overlap between these covid deaths and those who would have died from other causes in this time period.
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2020-03-13, 10:30 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2018
Re: The Corona Virus
It's really eerie how... Everything is shutting down. Sports, cultural events, everywhere people can gather. I'm glad we're taking the necessary measures to prevent the worst from happening, but boy, it's super unsettling.
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2020-03-13, 10:42 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jan 2009
Re: The Corona Virus
Taiwan is a case study on how to handle the situation correctly. They have had only 48 confirmed cases and one death so far. and there is a huge amount of travel between it and China. They jumped on the problem quickly setting up isolation for travelers who might have been infected, but didn't go overboard in their actions and have been highly transparent about what they are doing. They learned a lot from SARS some years ago and put those lessons into action. Big thumbs up to them.
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2020-03-13, 12:37 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2010
Re: The Corona Virus
All schools universities and daycare are closed for the next two weeks up here in Quebec. Arenas, libraries, sports centers and pools all closed in Montreal. Government has banned all indoor events with more than 250 people.
Canada is now warning against all international travel, limiting airports that are accepting international flights and prohibiting all ships with >500 people from docking in Canada until July.
Seems severe but definitely the right thing to do to keep community transmission down.