Westministenders: Peak something

[BigChocFrenzy]

Westministenders: Peak something

The story so far

COVID has changed the world for the next few years, like a slowly exploding nuke:

• killed well over 100,000 people
• made many people afraid to leave their home
• caused a Global Depression

Countries locked down because they needed the extra time to

Raise the Line while Flattening the Curve:

1. Flatten the curve of the numbers needing healthcare to a level the system can manage

2. Raise the capacity of their health services and public health systems - their testing and tracking process

Also, scientists desperately needed time to find out more about COVID:
how to avoid it, how to treat it

What happens next ?

Research teams around the world are working to produce a vaccine,
will become hopefully available within the next couple of years

In the meantime, treatment procedures are being developed to better treat COVID sufferers.

Also in the meantime, countries will need to gradually exit lockdown to rescue their economies from complete catastrophe.

Timing & measures for each country will be dependent on:

Death rate after peak,
health service capacity,
testing & tracing capacity etc

....and also what their govt and public deem an "acceptable" level of extra deaths & serious illness.

Possibly some countries will need to cycle in and out of lockdown,
whereas others will be able to accept the death toll with lesser social distancing measures.

The first few countries are already relaxing lockdown,
so the UK will watch, wait and hopefully learn what works and what doesn't

..... then copy these the correct way round

Fans of history might be amused and intrigued to read the BBC History Magazines picking over the end of WW2 (since VE day was mentioned). There's a lot to learn from it. In particular how Britain was sidelined after the victory as the US took the ascendency. And grappling with the problems of getting Britain back to normal ...

Does Russia have a shale gas industry? [] No.

Neither does my Uncle Festus. Not quite sure what that proves when discussing events of 34 years ago, but I'll play: "Snickers" used to be called "Marathon". Your go.

The stupid stuff is that huge crowd clapping for carers in central London last night.

Yes, what the hell was that? I usually work in that area, and there were fewer people on the street there at rush hour on the last Friday before the school were closed. Where had they all come from?

listening A lot of air freight is essential
Banning holiday flights stops millions more people moving around for journeys not in the least essential

It is easy to find a reason to justify things we want to do

squid that's interesting about the false negatives and confirms everything I've seen elsewhere. Good luck for nights.

I won't be going anywhere near a plane for a very long time if I can help it.

I'd already been avoiding flying for environmental reasons - this week, I was supposed to be in Germany on a research trip, 10hrs on the train there and 10 hrs back - and I think we will see a return to different forms of tourism, more local ones. It's 2hrs to Northern Italy from here in the car, you can get the train to Barcelona in 4hrs, and there are amazing places to holiday in the UK, which is what British people did for decades.

The FT interview with Macron is interesting, although those of us working in French HE know that his claim to have halted all reforms is untrue, as some bonkers ones are still in the pipeline for application in Sept in French universities despite huge protests from academic staff...

Closed systems - ships

What % are infected but never have symptoms ?

What % of the population might have innate whole or partial immunity, as has been documented for some other viruses ?

We don't know, but the results of "closed systems", such as military or cruise ships, show we need more research
COVID does not mutate as significantly as e.g. flu, so any innate immunity could remain for quite some time

Maybe paid volunteer lab rats living in a dorm for several weeks

• since this crisis looks like continuing for a couple of years at least.

Cruise ship Diamond Princess:

. Elderly passengers
. 3700 on ship
. 700 (19%) cases
. 13 deaths

US aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt (94% of crew tested so far):

. fit, healthy, mostly young
. very close quarters together for several weeks
. 4800 on ship
. 600 (12.5%) cases
. 480 (60%) of cases with NO symptoms so far
. 1 death

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-military-sympt/coronavirus-clue-most-cases-aboard-u-s-aircraft-carrier-are-symptom-free-idUSKCN21Y2GB

Vaccination will take YEARS to happen if we want it to be done in a safe way aka if we want it to be actually tested you need 10 years (2~3 yers to be in the first stages of the validation process).

We already have gone through that same issue with swine flu in 2009 and the release of a vaccine that wasnt safe
www.buzzfeed.com/amphtml/shaunlintern/these-nhs-staff-were-told-the-swine-flu-vaccine-was-safe
I'm not sure that doing the same again is such a good idea.

We need the most "economic bang" for our "infections buck"

We have to look first at what things are essential for our economy to restart - not always the things that people find fun to do

Getting all except say the shielded back to work will involve opening schools

• that is a risk and a highly emotional one, but needs to come at some stage

Reopening all manufacturing helps pay for everything

Opening more shops, restaurants, gyms etc - if the earlier relaxations don't spike cases too much - would continue the restart of the economy

Large gatherings like trade fairs, sports events, fetes, carnivals etc - even parties > 50 people - may need to be banned until a vaccine & herd immunity
Judging by the spread after such events - they become epicentres of infection.

People flying abroad mostly - of course not entirely - helps the economies of those other countries,
so not much bang for our buck of large-scale mixing at airports and on planes.

@squid4, I agree about the false negatives too. What Ive read is along the same lines.

Im more curious about the Xray/scan because my understanding is that there are two stages to the disease. One where the lungs do NOT show any cloud on Xray because there isnt still any cytokine storm going on and the second stage (where ICU and ventilators do work) where you can see the changes on the lungs.
If Xrays are used as a diagnostic tool then we can only diagnose the second group??

People flying abroad do help the UK economy quite a bit though (see the chinese and the japenese coming to spend money in mass in london and the likes).

Getting all except say the shielded back to work will involve opening schools
- that is a risk and a highly emotional one, but needs to come at some stage

It would be good if people made distinctions between different school age groups and getting people back into work. University and older secondary age kids could probably manage more remote working, and not absolutely need parents home to look after them. Primary and nursery schools are a different matter.

Also, that article that Red linked to above indicates that a surprising percentage of people don't want to spring back to "normal." So what would a mixed remote/on site work and schooling option look like, potentially? Who would it be for? (And wouldn't it would be sensible to keep some aspects of remote working and schooling active in case there are needs for further lockdowns in the future?)

I do hope there will be some provision giving to those of us who have our entire families overseas, though. For some of us a "holiday" is not just a jaunt for sun & sand.

I am in the same position. This is one where I definitely don't want to go back to the old days, before the cheap flights - when if your family went abroad to live, you didn't know whether you would ever see them again.

Or say, when the Berlin Wall went up and families got split up because of it.

Closed systems - ships

I imagine NASA are all over current events, since they have massive implications for long term space travel. Especially if we have to send animated people.

DW and I are still happy to take that one-way trip to Mars.

QuestionMark The old conservative practice is dead, because this is an emergency

This will NOT take 10 years of testing - unless there are unforeseen problems in actually finding an effective vaccine

None of those other epidemics killed well over 100,000 people and started a Global Depression

While we wait for a vaccine, thousands more people in each country will be dying of COVID
Hundreds of thousands more will also die prematurely because of the Great Depression

For COVID, vaccines are being developed far more quickly than usual because "wasting" money is no longer a consideration
So govts and also institutions like e.g. Bill Gates' have chosen to develop all lines of research in parallel, instead of in sequence, trying one after the other

Yes, of course foreign tourism helps the economy, but it is a matter of cost / benefit analysis

Governments will weigh up how much risk they can afford to take, for how much benefit

We know we cannot resume a completely normal life until vaccination and herd immunity
So it is a matter of identifying which things are too "costly" in terms of infection

A plane journey, including mixing at both airports, may be as disproportionately bad in comparison to a car journey as it is wrt environmental impact

And for most people, some car journeys are essential to resume work or daily life, whereas a flight is not

QuestionMarkNow
The reference to scans was a comment made by the French doctor I saw who'd been working in China. I presume he was talking about severe cases, because my understanding is also that the characteristic markings on the lungs don't occur in mild cases. It's interesting, though, because he very clearly said tests were acknowledged to be unreliable, yet so much focus has been put on them.

Yes, of course foreign tourism helps the economy, but it is a matter of cost / benefit analysis

And the sentiments of the destination nation. Imagine being a Brit abroad, and there's news (or rumours ) of a Covid outbreak in the UK, and all of a sudden all Brits become ... unwelcome in that hotel. Or town.

There is of course a slight asymmetry in that it's easier to spot a Brit abroad than a tourist in the UK. Another negative of the Anglosphere.

"I do hope there will be some provision giving to those of us who have our entire families overseas"

I don't
I made the choice to live abroad - including mostly while my mum was alive - and would not risk others for my choice

It would cause great resentment among those not allowed to fly to the sun^
There would be much faking of documents and relatives too

That "wish" to see family in person has a disproportionate "cost" to the community
It's not for ever, hopefully just for a couple of years

Also, while this crisis continues, we will probably continue to have lockdowns in one country or another, every few months

and then the frantic demands to repatriate those people who chose to go abroad and were stranded ...

It is important to realise the very fine balancing act each country must perform
the very small margin for error

Even in Germany, with well under ⅓ the total deaths (hospital + care homes) as the UK and still huge spare capacity in the health system,
Merkel warned how quickly things could get out of control when restarting the economy:

Merkel explained why planned relaxation of measures in Germany can only be done slowly and cautiously:

Germany's R0 is currently about 1.0
If it goes up to 1.1, i.e. by 10%, the health system reaches ICU capacity in October.
If it goes up by 20%, it reaches capacity in July.

https://mobile.twitter.com/KristinaFassler/status/1250486433263034375
(Merkel speech video)

That sounds quite similar to the way people spoke to EU citizens in the UK who hadn't had the foresight to apply for British citizenship when they didn't need to, BigChoc.

Also, while this crisis continues, we will probably continue to have lockdowns in one country or another, every few months

Which travellers will need to be able to weather. So that's the cost of 14 days in isolation somewhere, plus the ability to say to your employer "guess what - I know it was a weeks holiday, but you ain't seeing me for 21 days ..."

Obviously the UK won't require people travelling into the UK to isolate, because we're special. But that's the price the rest of the world will have to pay for being so ordinary.

I made the choice to live abroad - including mostly while my mum was alive - and would not risk others for my choice.

If this had been predicted, I think a good number of people would have made a different choice.

If this had been predicted, I think a good number of people would have made a different choice.

You could say that about anything though ...

I am not sure oldest schoolkids can sustain remote working that well. Their content is far more complex!

I am not sure oldest schoolkids can sustain remote working that well. Their content is far more complex!

Well it is harder to get up chimneys ...