Picture this: people are being asked to return to work. The novel coronavirus has stopped spreading — social distancing has worked. But there’s still no vaccine. The virus is still out there in the world.
Try throwing it in the river.
If it floats it’s a witch, so we kill it.
If it drowns it’s not a witch.
Problem solved, Texas Lieutenant Gov. Dan Patrick ®
So wise in the ways of science.
“Picture this: people are being asked to return to work.”
I say Jenny McCarthy and Dan Patrick go first.
… to Chiselin’ Trump’s newly resumed Nuremberg-style rallies.
“But it’s horrible. It’s wrong. It’s lethal.”
And is emerging as the right-wing approach. Nice job, everyone.
Seriously, as you are all aware I have run through the math, and the only way out I see myself and the better half is to hope that herd immunity manifests itself. The effects start to kick in when 60% of the population is immune. That will happen long before a vaccine is ready…
We are cooked if this becomes a new variant of the common cold…
Updating the numbers I have been crunching the past few days, and I noticed something. Of the countries with more than 100 deaths due to COVID-19, Germany has the lowest case-fatality rate, of 0.47% (better than South Korea, who are at 1.32%):
Curious as to what they are doing to achieve this lower rate?
From the article: “The issue is one of size: there is so much infection spreading through the U.S. at the current moment that asking — and answering — the question of who is already immune in a way comes too early, when the priority remains interrupting further spread.”
Gary Slutkin, an epidemiologist and former WHO official who worked on reversing disease spread: “But I don’t know how it would change what we need to do now.”
We’re weeks behind in testing. They dithered for purely political reasons, people became sicker, and now we’re left with few good choices. But, we still must test as many people as possible. You can’t clean your house if you don’t know where the grime is. but, sometimes, you have to clean surfaces that seem grime-free … just because.
I think assuming no one is immune until vaccination start up (a year+ from now) is the only way to go. That means, to me, that businesses need to begin making work-from-home part of their regular order of business, not an option, but the default state of any and all workers that can. For business that can’t do that it means new procedures to limit exposure, strict and enforced sanitation, and most importantly paid time off for people that have even the faintest of symptoms. This virus is just one of many that is going to plague this planet as population and climate change continue to increase so putting these into effect now seems the way to slow large scale outbreaks.
Yeah, re: Germany, I have noticed that as well, it could be that there testing is far more effective in that the ratio of actual to confirmed is lower. It could also be assigning cause of death incorrectly. Clearly this is to be monitored…
Seems like there’s two different questions: the epidemiological and the economic.
Certainly the epidemiology takes priority right now and the ~ “shelter in place” approach seems to be the only thing that makes sense.
Eventually, though, you want to loosen the restrictions and doing it gradually by letting those that have deleted immunity roam free might makes sense (assuming the immunity proves out and lasts for a sufficient length of time)
Cuomo for President
It’s coming, he is still young…
German discipline and efficiency.
I suppose it’s a question of the nature of immunity wrt/ COVID-19. Certainly we should be able to figure out who has recovered from it, but only if the antibody tests are widely available.
There are workplaces where the recovered/immune could still practice social distancing for the vast majority of the time.
To throw another wrench in this argument, how does one determine if a blood antibody test truly is an indication of immunity? One can develop antibodies that are not completely viral suppressive. I assume a viral load test would also be required (current definition of recovered COVID-19 is two negative RT-PCR tests 24 hours apart). No viral load + blood antibodies + feeling fine = suggested immunity?
On the other hand, some reports of re-infection of recovered COVID-19 patients are speculated to be false positive RT-PCR of viral RNA fragments (not complete viral RNA).
Seems I’m not the only one who has noticed. When Googling just now to see what the comparative COVID tests per capita is by various countries, this article from The Guardian popped up.
From the article:
While Germany has not tested its citizens at the same high rate practised in South Korea, guidelines have been in place for more than a month for people to be tested even if they have early-stage symptoms but have either had contact with an infected person or recently visited a “high-risk area” such as Lombardy in Italy or Wuhan in China.
China is beginning to let people out of Hubei beginning today. The rest of the world will learn a great deal from the results of this relaxation of restrictions.
I had heard about the re-infection observation, given that it was only reported for isolated incidents I chalked it up to a testing issue…
I hope that it is indreed the case and there is acquired immunity…
