stimpy

Military convoy moving in to Paris, via the porte de Charenton minutes ago.

stimpy

Well its not that bad. Lots of people are still going to work as needed. And the military is mainly in Paris and perhaps soon in other major cities. Not everywhere.

JDiver

From the capital of Mexico, an amazing piece of information from a childhood friend - and a great reason not to visit, even though there’s no travel ban on going to, or returning from, Mexico - yet.

nk15

Yea, unfortunately you need a martial law type of enforcement in situations like these, about a third or half of the population doesn't get it. And they will still try to evade it. Funny thing, I got a random text yesterday by mistake (wrong recipient), where the sender and the recipient were planning house parties to evade social distancing requirements...

The governments need to better educate people though, in the US it is every locality for themselves, lots of confusion, differences, and mixed messages...

stimpy

Regarding gyms, Equinox just announced that all New York, New Jersey and Connecticut gyms will shut down this evening. I guess I'll have to go jog in Central Park.

trueblu

Sadly, the West fiddled away for two months of 'this is just the flu' instead of ramping up the necessary resources (e.g. high capacity testing, pandemic preparedness protocols and strengthening infrastructure) to mitigate spread. Almost the entire West Coast US outbreak is due to lack of complete contact tracing of the very first US case (as by genetic phylogenetic tracing of cases).

About 4 weeks back, I said it may take $100B dollars for the US to try to really mitigate COVID-19, and most people on the thread were skeptical that the actual disease impact if we don't do anything will cost that much...it will now be trillions of dollars for the US alone.

The problem is that everyone except the UK, still thinks this is a "winnable" war...by the way we're going, it's not. UK at least gets that. I still think we need to mitigate as much as possible to prevent healthcare infrastructure collapse. What we're seeing in Italy is horrific, but even extrapolating number of cases 10-fold, they only have 200k cases...they have another 30 million to go before things start to get better.

China is basically closing its borders in all but name, and will need to do so for 12 months. However, if it does so, it can actually revert to almost normal economic activity within a couple of months. It will have basically lost 10-20% of its annual GDP for the next year. Most countries will lose much more, and will have millions of lives lost to boot.

The problem with the 'cure is worse than the disease' is that infrastructure collapse is usually the worst possible outcome that any nation can imagine. So any costs to prevent that become justified. I have no idea what our hospitals will look in the West by late May. If they basically become non-functional, that will have knock-on effects for other services in time, although I don't anticipate total collapse of infrastructure in any worst case scenario: just a lot of (what could have been prevented) unnecessary deaths.

It's likely we'll adjust to the new way of life, I'm sure we will: the human spirit is incredibly resilient.

Many businesses will go bust, and that will have huge consequences, including, as has been alluded numerous times, on health disparities and so on. Having said all that, I don't expect this to last more than a year from now (as per UK predictions). So the hit will be terribly hard, but it won't last long, unlike e.g. 2008 (although I'm not an economist: but generally, rebuilding after a disaster promotes economic stimulus). There will be other positive consequences as well, but unfortunately, they have morbid connotations.

Be well!

tb

T8191

trueblu ... thanks for another very constructive input. Most of us here are, inevitably, wading around in the weeds of ignorance and speculation. Your professional input is hugely valued, as others have noted earlier.

PS: Glad to hear your view that UK is broadly getting it right.

T8191, 75-yo ... and being careful!

trueblu

Thanks for the kind words...But I should say that you're putting words in my mouth: I think the UK understanding is more realistic. But I actually think to implement that understanding, we really need to be far more aggressive in social distancing. The lack of social distancing behaviours by the general public in the UK is just shocking! And BoJo can say we are a mature democracy and all that, but I'm not seeing it from what people are doing...

Keep healthy Uncle T!

tb

narvik

Thanks -as always- for your well thought out and well articulated post.
You illustrate a realistic picture of what this outbreak could look like. In my opinion there are other possible developments also. Ones that aren't as dire.

​​​​​​For one, we might still get "lucky" with warmer weather around the corner (in the Northern Hemisphere).
Here's hoping...
​

trueblu

You're right, I've been caught out by how amenable COVID-19 is to containment by aggressive measures, but those aren't being implemented.

Sadly, even if the warm weather thing is real, which I think it will be, it won't help if the baseline numbers are huge: if we have doubling every 3 days, the UK will have e.g. 2M cases in a month when the weather is appreciably warmer. Slowing doubling to 10 days, i.e. a third of the current growth rate, will result in 30M in the UK being infected by end of May...not much help. EVEN if COVID-19 all but disappears with the warm weather, it will just come back in the Autumn to a largely susceptible population.

What we need to do is to minimise the growth rate now, and the count on the warm weather to incrementally increase cases until we get 30M infected by November...and then so many will be immune that the growth rate won't shoot up in the Autumn...

tb

notquiteaff

I think Florida right now has relatively wam weather (77F in Miami) and 155 cases. Do we know how much that is due to community spread vs. “imported” cases (obviously, the state is in normal times seeing a lot of visitors). Death count is 1 FL resident, 5 out of state residents according to https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/en

Same for Texas.

Stuttgart21

On two separate occasions within the last 48 hours or so, I've heard different opinions on that. The story goes Italy has done a reasonable job of identifying people who died of covid-19. But other than testing the deceased, they haven't done much testing at all. The number of actual cases is much bigger than ten times the figure reported. So in Italy, you're fairly close to the point at which you may call the disease endemic.

Not my thoughts. Just trying to relay the opinion from two experts' statements in the media.

shallowdrift

Warm in Iran and that hasn't seemed to help much there.

trueblu

If we assume growth rate of doubling every 3 days, which appears typical, from 1 case in mid-January, which is absolutely earliest they will have seen a case, to now, which is 60 days, is 20 doublings, i.e. 1M cases. I think that's the absolute upper bounds of where we are in Italy and essentially assumes no mitigation measures whatsoever.

Most of the northern half of Iran actually has a cold winter...although temperatures warming up now.

tb

Boggie Dog

Dallas County, Texas announces closing and limits on gatherings.

Dallas County, City Limits Groups to 50; Closes Bars, Restaurants to Pick-Up Only

Quote:

Leaders in the city and county of Dallas Monday ordered all community gatherings to be capped at 50 people and that all bars, lounges, taverns, nightclubs, health clubs and theaters to close as the city combats the spread of COVID-19.

Too little, too late? Does it do any good if all other areas of the state and country don't follow suit?