SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)

RobinLFC said:
Yeah, unfortunately. I was optimistic at first for the summer but it looks nailed on for a RIP Werchter and Pukkelpop :(
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Yeah there is absolutely no way these will happen. Even if we have it well under control by then, those festivals typically expect artists and fans from all over the world and there will be plenty of countries still struggling then. They would be ideal places for a new outbreak.
 
Regulus Arcturus Black said:
That's because it's in society now and unstoppable until a vaccine is found or herd-immunity (if possible) reached, so what's the point of testing you?
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What if hes an nhs worker thats into a lockdown now and might not have the virus?

Yet prince Charles can get a test?

Edit.. also if they done some sort of testing or forced isolation for people coking back from italy china etc this eould never have got widespread in the first place.
 
Fiskey said:
I fully understand the effects of lag, I felt that was obvious. RAB and I were talking about rates of infection, and when I said brink of capacity I was referring to the forecast.
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Sure but then you'd still have to build in a very large margin of error, just to be safe. We've seen how quickly countries have been overwhelmed. No two countries are exactly the same but still, you'd rather be on the safe side and take your measure a week too early instead of too late.
 
Regulus Arcturus Black said:
No, hence I didn't reply because I'm pretty certain you can't so felt like wasted typing time.

Damn, and now I've done it again.

I haven't denied God in this thread either Bob, doesn't mean I believe in one.
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Did you also quote someone claiming God exists and fully agreeing with his post ?
 
Regulus Arcturus Black said:
It's NOTHING like Italy for fecks sake man.

Italy won't be possible here because we simply don't live like that for a start, we maintain social distance at the best of times and 90% of the country is a wilderness.

Why do people even have such view of things they have very little idea about? In Sweden we have put lots in place to combat this.
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Except that's not actually very helpful is it? Population density is one of the easiest ways for disease to spread, and having most of your people congregated in a few areas rather than spread out across the landmass is not particularly useful.

Location-of-study-population-Map-showing-population-density-in-Sweden-by-municipality.png
 
onemanarmy said:
FYI, I know someone at LiveNation who always tells me which bands will play on the bigger festivals in Belgium, days before the announcements and his take is that Werchter and Graspop are already cancelled at this point. They are just waiting till they are forced by the govornment, to be able to reach out for insurance money.

No American, UK, Australian... bands will fly into our country in 2-3 months time, it's impossible imo.
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Yeah same here - one of the best friends of the missus is at the top of the chain for Graspop, they don't really have hope anymore. Heard from a relative yesterday that Werchter cancelled the order for all their T-shirts for crew and stuff as well, so definitely looks like you're right. It sucks but it's the right decision at this point, it's just not worth it to risk it. Same goes for Tomorrowland which attracts people from all over the world, that's just not possible. Gladiolen is already cancelled.

There's still a slimmer of hope in me that Reggae Geel will do an edition for local people only :lol: but even that wouldn't really be the same without the Dutch and other foreigners present.

Oh well. I guess it's time for a lot of BBQs then, if that's already allowed again in summer.
 
Fiskey said:
But if you lock down too early, you will never know whether it's a week early or two months too early.
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There is no "too early". Certainly not in any country were people have been travelling for the past month or so.
 
Ainu said:
Sure but then you'd still have to build in a very large margin of error, just to be safe. We've seen how quickly countries have been overwhelmed. No two countries are exactly the same but still, you'd rather be on the safe side and take your measure a week too early instead of too late.
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I would cut it as close as possible to be honest. The cost of shutting down is so extreme.
 
Arruda said:
There is no "too early". Certainly not in any country were people have been travelling for the past month or so.
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There is if you value the economic cost. If you don't then I could agree with you.
 
Kentonio said:
Except that's not actually very helpful is it? Population density is one of the easiest ways for disease to spread, and having most of your people congregated in a few areas rather than spread out across the landmass is not particularly useful.
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How does Italy look side by side @Kentonio

Italy - 206 per Km2

Sweden - 25 per km2

So your point again?

Then also consider that Swedes are famous for living alone in big cities from 18. They rarely flat share and next to never stay with parents. How is that in Italy?
 
Classical Mechanic said:
I think that’s a very shallow interpretation of what’s going on in Britain. About half a million volunteers have been mobilised here to look after the vulnerable and Dyson look like they’re going to manage to manufacture 10000 ventilators from scratch in month. These are just two examples of the monumental collective effort that’s happening here. When countries shut down will only be a very small part of this story when all is said and done.
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No it's not, it's exactly what happened up until last week.
 
Fiskey said:
I would cut it as close as possible to be honest. The cost of shutting down is so extreme.
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The cost for shutting down too late could be even more extreme. And I can't help but think about all those health workers, what we'd be putting them through by taking measures too late is just horrendously unfair. No amount of daily applaus from our windows is enough for that.
 
Regulus Arcturus Black said:
Hmmm.... once again, it depends what you want the lockdown to achieve and how long you're prepared to lockdown for.
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The lockdown is meant to avoid the ovewhelming of health services. And you have to remain in lockdown until they are able to function "normally".
 
When cooking rice I like to fill my saucepan to the brink of capacity before adding the water and boiling. It's the science way to do things.
 
Shakesey said:
South Africa's 21-day lockdown starts tonight at 00:00 and guess what!

No alcohol and cigarettes to be sold from tomorrow! :lol: :lol: :lol:
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@Ish let me know if I need to send you an express package with some Belgian ones :D
 
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Arruda said:
The lockdown is meant to avoid the ovewhelming of health services. And you have to remain in lockdown until they are able to function "normally".
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yes, so if a country is nowhere near being overwhelmed in terms of its health services, then why lockdown unnecessarily and inflict all the damage it does to society/small business etc?
 
Fiskey said:
There is if you value the economic cost. If you don't then I could agree with you.
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Well you think that Cheltenham being allowed to go ahead was a “great idea” because some businesses made some money, public health be damned, so I think we all know where your values lie.
 
Shakesey said:
South Africa's 21-day lockdown starts tonight at 00:00 and guess what!

No alcohol and cigarettes to be sold from tomorrow! :lol: :lol: :lol:
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We started our 21 day lockdown today. Wonder if there's some consensus between some countries on the ideal timeline.
 
stepic said:
yes, so if a country is nowhere near being overwhelmed in terms of its health services, then why lockdown unnecessarily and inflict all the damage it does to society/small business etc?
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Because if it is nowhere overwhelmed it is in risk of being. And it will happen without warning or time to stop it. You have to act one month before things happen. That's how it has been everywhere, without exceptions.
 
Fiskey said:
It's obvious in context.
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It always is :smirk:

The problem is the same as it's always been, models aren't accurate enough, in Norway we didn't expect the amount of cases of covid-19 related to Norwegians going skiing abroad (majority related to a bartender, obviously, as afterski is the most important part of going skiing), which meant that it spread faster than anticipated. Considering the amount of countries that have underestimated the rate of spread for their models, it'd hardly be shocking if the same goes for Sweden as well.

The argument that can be made is that if minor safety measures were introduced earlier, like telling people to reconsider going abroad for winter holiday etc, we'd achieve a decent enough rate to achieve herd immunity without the downside of closing shops and going into lockdown.

The plan in Norway is still herd immunity, we're just calling it something else for obvious reasons.
 
Regulus Arcturus Black said:
How does Italy look side by side @Kentonio

Italy - 206 per Km2

Sweden - 25 per km2

So your point again?
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Would you like to think a little more carefully about what you just said? My entire point was that having people congregated in small parts of the country isn't helpful. So how does dividing the total landmass of the country by the population help your case in any way?

Regulus Arcturus Black said:
Then also consider that Swedes are famous for living alone in big cities from 18. They rarely flat share and next to never stay with parents. How is that in Italy?
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You certainly have advantages in a number of regards over Italy, but it would be a very bad mistake to assume that you're somehow just not going to be effected by this and life can go on as normal. It's not going to help having people living alone if people are still free to meet up in bars and restaurants.
 
Arruda said:
Because if it is nowhere overwhelmed it is in risk of being. And it will happen without warning or time to stop it. You have to act one month before things happen. That's how it has been everywhere, without exceptions.
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well this is where all the modelling comes into play. if the health services aren't stretched at all, and you lock everything down, sure, you stopped the risk of them being overwhelmed. but what then? just stay locked down forever? at some point you then have to ease off the restrictions - and with that the same risk will be back (hence the 'second wave'), which takes us straight back to the beginning again.

the UK's numbers saw that without restrictions, the health services would be overwhelmed. so lockdown was the right thing to do. you can't just assume that's also the case for every other country in the world. every country is different, and it's a given we can't stay locked down forever. when you start and finish each lockdown (and there may be more of these, I'm sure) has to be based on the modelling. if Sweden think their numbers show that its health services won't be overwhelmed (and they are modelling into the future), then it makes no sense to lockdown too early.
 
Wednesday at Stoke said:
China ripping off Spain with tests that are 30% accurate



https://elpais.com/sociedad/2020-03...onavirus-comprados-en-china-no-funcionan.html
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That's bad news as I suspect that a lot of countries were hoping to use that kit.

It also shows the danger of the over-optimistic cries on hearing that the NHS labs are testing sample kits and hope to have millions of test kits in a couple of weeks. As with the drug trials, there's going to be a lot of failed products and theories - real tests (run as quickly as they can be safely but properly done) are essential. It's also a reminder why rushing into trials or even production of a vaccine has risks of its own.
 
hungrywing said:
It's not impossible, but it is extremely unlikely (I'm assuming a lot of posters will have already pointed this out). If-something-looks-too-good-to-be-true and all that.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/oxmu2rwsnhi9j9c/Draft-COVID-19-Model (13).pdf

https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m1216



If you know R0 and the average incubation period/time till death, you can loosely extrapolate large trends. It takes this long to kill, and we had our first death here on day D an d there were P patients on that day, and we assume Z amount of the population is 'highly susceptible' and then plug in the death rates correspondingly, so that means we probably had X amount of cases on day Y...

Looks like they made a couple of huge assumptions, particularly the one that Hunter mentions at the end.
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Thanks for the info
 
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