Reuters reporting a worst case scenario for the UK of 50 000 deaths. I'm curious how this is arrived at, and also, if it's time limited, i.e., presumably a second wave could kill an
By the time the second wave came round (God/god/gods/Great Cthulhu forbid), maybe there wouldn't be quite so many vulnerable people with underlying health conditions, they having been seen off by the first round.
Sent from my isolation bunker at Cold Comfort Farm.
I could pretty easily create a plausible graph, quetz. One which shows a total of 25K dead at the peak of this epidemic in the UK, followed by a tailing off during which as many die as we get to the bottom of the graph as died on the journey to the top. That would make 50K in this epidemic. The UK total today at 3600 is double what it was three days ago. If that trend continued to the peak, that represents about three more doublings (7200. 14400, 28800) to a peak in 9 or 10 days time.
But it's just a speculative graph. Reality will be different. Either better or worse.
And a second wave might repeat the pattern of lethality. In very different circumstances the second wave of the Spanish 'flu was worse than the first. It's by no means out of the question that a second wave would be as bad as the first.
But reality will be different. Better - or worse? A lot depends on how we continue to fight this and learn the best remedial steps.
I'll take direction from our local health officials, who are now recommending that people cover their faces in public.
Because (to address some of no prophet's points):
1. airborne droplets can travel more than 2m. 2m is basically a compromise that reduces the incidence of transmission whilst still allowing people to interact. It's not a magic barrier. This is why "stay home" is better.
2. When you try and stay 2m away from people in public, you're not going to succeed 100% of the time. You'll come round a corner at a grocery store and meet someone or something. Having a mask is better than not having a mask, as long as you don't think it's a magic "now I can stand next to people" device.
3. Masks probably don't do much to prevent you from getting the virus, but they probably do have some effect on limiting the spread of droplets from you. In other words, if you behave in the same way, and are unknowingly infected with the virus, the rest of us are probably better off with you wearing a mask.
4. The data to support the general use of masks is not very strong. It is certain that if people go out more because they feel less vulnerable wearing a mask, there will be more transmission than had they just stayed at home.
5. Covering your face may also prevent you from touching your face with contaminated hands in public. That helps.
You can catch it through your eyes. Be very careful of a false sense of security a mask may give. ‘Stay home’ is still the best advice. Excellent hand hygiene and not touching your face if you have to go out.
Masks help to stop you infecting others, they don’t stop you catching it.
ISTM, the general mask wearing is aimed at people who have it but do not know they do. The problem with it is that masks are in short supply in some areas and more general public wearing them means less for health care workers
Adam Tooze has a very good interview up on the economic and political consequences of the virus (from about 2 minutes in if you want to miss the adverts). He makes the interesting point that states almost had to 'overreact' early -- or confront the situation currently faced by the US -- where the choice is to take a significant economic hit or end up with a significant death rate (and that choice isn't a purely binary one). The implication is that the East Asian states -- given their generally more vertically integrated governments were better able to follow the former course.
The sewing community are making masks, hundreds of them, different people in different places around the world, but I've seen posts from Australia, USA, Canada and Europe. There are several free patterns out there from pattern designers wanting to help.
The latest call outs are for scrubs and bags for scrubs (to bag up scrubs for washing and so the workers can change into home clothes to go home). One of the pattern companies that has a scrub pattern on its books was giving that one away last weekend.
What is happening with the homemade masks is that they are going to lower level need venues, e.g. vets, and the vets are donating their N95 masks to the hospitals.
Pragmatically, a face covering of any kind will to some extent reduce remaining risk provided it is combined with keeping safe distances. Scarves or home made face masks can help. If any of us get n95 masks for personal protection that's one less mask for the medical professionals whose exposure to risk is greater.
Raving neo-liberal I might superficially be, but they had no choice (scratch a raving neo-liberal eh?). Neither did he I'm sure.
I'm not so sure about that. For starters, we don't have any evidence that Captain Crozier was the one who leaked the letter beyond the word of an administration* that's as mendacious as it is vindictive. Then there's this, from your linked article:
On Thursday, Mr Modly told reporters that Capt Crozier was being fired for allegedly leaking the letter to the media.
He said the letter "created the impression the Navy was not responding to his questions".
"It creates the perception the Navy is not on the job; the government is not on the job. That's just not true."
You know what also creates the impression that "the government is not on the job"? Statements like this:
“Nobody from the ship will be allowed to leave the ship other than on the pier,” [ acting Navy Secretary Thomas ] Modly said.
The same Secretary Modly who now claims that the Navy that it's "just not true" that the government wasn't on the job. Crozier wasn't relieved of command for going outside the chain of command, he was relieved because he allegedly revealed the chain of command's murderous indifference.
Crozier wasn't relieved of command for going outside the chain of command, he was relieved because he allegedly revealed the chain of command's murderous indifference.
He was relieved because he manipulated the brass in public, and more because he committed the irredeemable sin of being right whilst doing so. I don't know whether he leaked the letter or not. I rather suspect that he knew that he was ending his career when he wrote it, and wrote it anyway because it was the right thing to do.
It's an example of the old adage about the UK system - the Official Secrets Act doesn't exist to protect secrets but to protect officials (must be in Yes (Prime) Minister somewhere).
Governor Inslee just extended the stay at home to May 4. University of Washington Coronavirus modeling suggests we will reach the peak come April 19. We had a bit of an uptake today but, overall the curve is turning. (Edit: I am referring only to the curve in Washington State,)
In other news Pelosi will be forming a congressional committee to investigate what went wrong in the lead up to the pandemic in the US and what is happening now.
I saw that there has been some recategorisation of deaths in France in residential care- as a result there was a very big increase in the French death total yesterday. The total is also very high today (over 1100). I wondered if French Shipmates have any more information about that.
I don't see anything about recategorisation. It may be a translation error for recensé (which means counted, not recounted). There seems to be some debate over the figures, presumably because cause of death is not always clear.
[ETA apparently earlier deaths in residential care have been added to the death total in one go, today]
I saw that there has been some recategorisation of deaths in France in residential care- as a result there was a very big increase in the French death total yesterday. The total is also very high today (over 1100). I wondered if French Shipmates have any more information about that.
There have been big increases on both April 2 (total 1355) and April 3 (total 1120), Eutychus, so I guess the adjustments have taken place over 2 days.
Here's the explanatory note I found on the worldometer website
On April 2, France reported 884 additional deaths that have occurred in nursing homes over the past days and weeks . The French Government did not include these deaths in their official count, as their count only takes into consideration deaths of hospitalized patients. Following international standards of correct inclusion, our statistics will include these deaths, and will add them to the April 2, 2020 count following the attribution criteria of date of report.
If and when the French government determines and communicates the correct distribution of these additional deaths over time, we will adjust the historical data accordingly.
I can't work out whether that's bad news (more people have died than was thought) good (if morbid) news (if a death rate of x% is assumed, well, those unrecorded deaths mean more of x% have already died, thus slightly improving the odds for the rest of us), or just further proof that no country is telling the whole story.
(By the way, I know prisons hate inmates committing suicide on the premises, and do their utmost to get them to hospital or at least on the way there before doing so, otherwise it messes up their annual reports).
Earlier this week Nicola Sturgeon explained a sudden increase in the number of fatalities in Scotland because previous numbers had been those who had died in hospital, whereas there were now figures for those who had died elsewhere. This sort of correction gets made all the time.
Do you have Google Maps? Well, Google has been watching you. At the request of various governments, Google Alphabet is producing reports to show how the social distancing/quarantine orders are being followed by country, or in the case of the US, by states. See for yourself.
In other news: our local hospital has had to cut its worker salaries by 25%, not because they are being swamped by Covid 19 hospitalizations, but because of the Coronavirus they have had to cut out elective surgeries and out-patient procedures, the bread and butter of most regional hospitals in the US. A friend who works at the hospital said they were told that five similar hospitals in Washington State have had to close down for lack of funding.
I could pretty easily create a plausible graph, quetz. One which shows a total of 25K dead at the peak of this epidemic in the UK, followed by a tailing off during which as many die as we get to the bottom of the graph as died on the journey to the top. That would make 50K in this epidemic. The UK total today at 3600 is double what it was three days ago. If that trend continued to the peak, that represents about three more doublings (7200. 14400, 28800) to a peak in 9 or 10 days time.
But it's just a speculative graph. Reality will be different. Either better or worse.
And a second wave might repeat the pattern of lethality. In very different circumstances the second wave of the Spanish 'flu was worse than the first. It's by no means out of the question that a second wave would be as bad as the first.
But reality will be different. Better - or worse? A lot depends on how we continue to fight this and learn the best remedial steps.
Someone may have already pointed this out further back on this thread but the modelling that Imperial did that drives a lot of the UK government decision making is publicly available.
It shows death tolls of anything from around 9,000 (with the sort of measures put in place but also presumably the assumption that the public obeys then properly) up to 500,000 (if no measures put in place) based on the most plausible R0.
Paper was published around the middle of March so there is probably more info available now - I think it was mentioned that the virus is slightly more infectious than they originally thought although one of the variables included in the modelling is different R0 values.
In other news: our local hospital has had to cut its worker salaries by 25%, not because they are being swamped by Covid 19 hospitalizations, but because of the Coronavirus they have had to cut out elective surgeries and out-patient procedures, the bread and butter of most regional hospitals in the US. A friend who works at the hospital said they were told that five similar hospitals in Washington State have had to close down for lack of funding.
That is like some ghastly parody of reality. I can't even begin to process it.
Yes, I'd seen it, Bullfinch. But I think the UK Deputy Chief Medical Officer was right to say that as more data become available, benchmark assumptions will be refined but that trend lines re the apex of this particular epidemic cannot yet be drawn with much confidence. There are many things not clear to me; for example whether warmer weather may affect the virulence, how this new virus might evolve through time, how long lived or short lived immunity might be. And behaviourally, how long self-isolation will be effective.
A lot of variables are in play. This is nasty already; just how much nastier it will become is something we'll find out. Globally, it looks like there will be another 90,000 confirmed cases and a further 6,000 deaths on April 3 (GMT) . Both those daily figures are set to increase for some time - but we don't really know by how much and for how long.
There are many things not clear to me; for example whether warmer weather may affect the virulence, how this new virus might evolve through time, how long lived or short lived immunity might be.
A Trump adviser working with White House officials on messaging for the pandemic response said Trump "took a gamble" that warmer weather would cause the virus to dissipate, siding with aides who were pushing back on the dire warnings coming from doctors on the coronavirus task force.
On February 10, Trump had said of the virus: "You know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April. We're in great shape though. We have 12 cases -- 11 cases, and many of them are in good shape now."
The adviser said the President took a gamble "and got it wrong" in reference to Trump's decision to ignore the predictions from the administration's own experts.
And now we know how Donald Trump went bankrupt running casinos, where the business model is that people essentially walk through the door and hand you their money.
I do not buy it. Yes, the supply chain is part of the issue. But the shelves were bare before most people would have run out of their stock on hand and 40% sounds like a lot, but it is ~1 roll a day for most families. Vids of people hoarding are plentiful on YouTube. I've spoke to shop workers and they tell me tales of the same thing.
tl;dr supply chains make hoarding a bigger problem, but hoarding still happens.
It essentially says although there are some hoarders, they do not represent the typical buyer and are not the main problem.
The main problem is that the supply chain is not geared to handle the demand that has shifted from using workplace supplies, such as toilet paper, to home supplies. The workplace supplies are not one-to-one replacements of the home ones, so they cannot be easily shifted to home use and they are in different supply chains, some of which do not service the same stores anyway.
I agree that supply chain issues are a real problem in this, but I also think hoarders are a larger part than the article does.
List of countries with at least 5,000 known COVID-19 cases.
United States - 277,467 (257,782 / 12,283 / 7,402)
Italy - 119,827 (85,388 / 19,758 / 14,681)
Spain - 119,199 (77,488 / 30,513 / 11,198)
Germany - 91,159 (65,309 / 24,575 / 1,275)
China - 81,639 (1,558 / 76,755 / 3,326) 4.2%
France - 64,338 (43,823 / 14,008 / 6,507)
Iran - 53,183 (31,954 / 17,935 / 3,294)
United Kingdom - 38,168 (34,428 / 135 / 3,605)
Turkey - 20,921 (20,012 / 484 / 425)
Switzerland - 19,606 (14,169 / 4,846 / 591)
Belgium - 16,770 (12,755 / 2,872 / 1,143)
Netherlands - 15,723 (13,986 / 250 / 1,487)
Canada - 12,375 (9,981 / 2,186 / 208)
Austria - 11,524 (9,334 / 2,022 / 168)
South Korea - 10,156 (3,654 / 6,325 / 177)
Portugal - 9,886 (9,572 / 68 / 246)
Brazil - 9,216 (8,724 / 127 / 365)
Israel - 7,428 (6,985 / 403 / 40)
Sweden - 6,131 (5,568 / 205 / 358)
Australia - 5,454 (4,841 / 585 / 28)
Norway - 5,370 (5,279 / 32 / 59)
The listings are in the format:
X. Country - [# of known cases] ([active] / [recovered] / [dead]) [%fatality rate]
Fatality rates are only listed for countries where the number of resolved cases (recovered + dead) exceeds the number of known active cases by a ratio of at least 2:1. Italics indicate authoritarian countries whose official statistics are suspect. Other country's statistics are suspect if their testing regimes are substandard.
If American states were treated as individual countries twelve of them (New York, New Jersey, Michigan, California, Massachusetts, Louisiana, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Washington, Georgia, and Texas) would be on that list. New York would be ranked between Spain and Germany.
You can catch it through your eyes. Be very careful of a false sense of security a mask may give. ‘Stay home’ is still the best advice. Excellent hand hygiene and not touching your face if you have to go out.
Masks help to stop you infecting others, they don’t stop you catching it.
I think it's funny that people say "Act as if you have it and don't want to spread it to others," until it comes to masks, then it's all "Don't bother it doesn't keep you from catching it." You can't have it both ways.
The shelves were empty of TP before people started working from home. We were talking about TP shortages at least 2 weeks before we were given a laptop and sent home. We were before the state, and our state is early.
You can catch it through your eyes. Be very careful of a false sense of security a mask may give. ‘Stay home’ is still the best advice. Excellent hand hygiene and not touching your face if you have to go out.
Masks help to stop you infecting others, they don’t stop you catching it.
I think it's funny that people say "Act as if you have it and don't want to spread it to others," until it comes to masks, then it's all "Don't bother it doesn't keep you from catching it." You can't have it both ways.
I'm with you intuitively. The virus is very small (about 80 nanometres) and so has an ability to get through even finely meshed properly designed medical protective facemasks. But I think the risk is very small. With home made masks, or scarves, the risk of viruses getting through (in either direction) is clearly higher. But any form of inhibition seems likely to reduce the risk of transmission.
Yet the Deputy Chief Medical Officer of the UK said yesterday that the evidence was that facemask wearing by the population in general had not been shown to be effective in studies. That genuinely puzzled me but it may relate to the quality of facemasks generally used by the public. I don't know what studies he was referring to.
I appreciate the argument of saving the best quality face masks for medical professionals if supplies are limited. Also the argument that facemasks, social distancing and hygienic precautions should go together. But even if facemasks and coverings are inefficient it seems very surprising if they do not reduce risk to some extent. So I'm doing some more digging!
I think it relates to how they are used. You potentially get virus on the inside of the mask - from you if you are infected - and on the outside, from other people. But at some point you take the mask off, so firstly you need to do that before it is so saturated as to be useless and secondly you need to do that in such away as not to transfer virus to your facial orifices, and in such a way as not to transfer virus to shared surfaces.
Medical staff are trained and monitored in how they don and doff ppe - the general public are not. This could make a big difference to what impact mask wearing by the general public has. Likewise, if mask wearing causes the public to take other risks then the net benefit may be offset by the consequences of that.
E.g. I have a mask so I go to visit my elderly mum - but I wore it to the supermarket this morning, came home took it off briefly went to the loo washed my hands, pick up the mask soiled from the virus I’ve breathed out - my hands are now contaminated with virus but I am unaware of this. I go to my mothers house, she opens door, I don’t touch her or the front door, but I walk through to the kitchen - opening the kitchen door with my virus contaminated hands on the way, and then I wash my hands because I am trying to be careful.
I got to the sitting room to sit two metres away from mum and chat. She goes to the kitchen to get a cup of tea - carefully doesn’t offer me one because I can’t take my mask off - but gets virus on her hands from the kitchen door handle. Sips tea, wipes hand on lip, catches virus.
I go home, 5 days later she’s ill - I don’t realise she caught it from me.
But if I didn’t have a mask, I wouldn’t have gone to visit her.
I do not buy it. Yes, the supply chain is part of the issue. But the shelves were bare before most people would have run out of their stock on hand and 40% sounds like a lot, but it is ~1 roll a day for most families. Vids of people hoarding are plentiful on YouTube. I've spoke to shop workers and they tell me tales of the same thing.
tl;dr supply chains make hoarding a bigger problem, but hoarding still happens.
The shelves were empty of TP before people started working from home. We were talking about TP shortages at least 2 weeks before we were given a laptop and sent home. We were before the state, and our state is early.
Long before we had lockdown we'd all seen the steps that had been taken in China, and a large portion of the population would have been thinking "that may happen here too", and as a consequence looked in their kitchen cupboards and thought "I need to make sure I've enough food if I can't get to the store for a week or more". That would lead to larger than usual sales of most food items. For that to apply to loo rolls you need all those people to also think "and, I also need to have enough toilet paper". Most people have a fairly good feel of what food they buy, if you do a weekly shop and are thinking "I need a weeks food in reserve" you buy twice as much. The things we buy very occasionally we probably have a much weaker grasp of how much we use, and loo roll is in that category of many people buying a large pack every few months (in my case, closer to once a year) and not noting how much we use each week; for some people that uncertainty about how much they use meant that they played it safe and got more than they would actually need. Once shelves start to get empty then the added "if I don't get it now it might not be there next time I come in" panic kicks in for some people. It doesn't take more than a small minority of people to follow that logic for supermarkets operating on just in time delivery models to suddenly have empty shelves. We probably all know someone who weeks before lockdowns came into effect was saying "we should prepare just in case what's happening in China happens here".
On Newsnight last night, they were talking about the exit strategy, although nobody really described one. This morning Neil Ferguson seems to be saying that some relaxation may happen in two months. At some point, people may realize there is no strategy.
South Korea lite, involves having community scale antibody and antigen testing and a contact tracing software (both of which are currently in active development).
Vaccination, several are currently being tested.
What we don’t have is a definitive timeline. Statements about two months etc, will be related to how soon they think community scale testing and contact tracing will be at the right capacity. Short timescales of 2/3 months relate to the South Korea strategy - which is effectively paritial lockdown and interim - and longer timescales of 12 to 18 months refer to the likely length of time to develop *and make sufficient quantities of* an effective vaccine.
At least in the UK (and Germany - though I can't find the german language article I read) nothing points to widespread hoarding - but to a combination of supply chains and a paucity of storage space in supermarkets -- with most of them moving to stocking shelves directly from lorry pallets (there's a reason they used to be so keen on loyalty schemes -- though these days there are other means of achieving similar results).
There's undoubtedly some localised panic buying for certain items, but it's relatively limited in scope - or we'd see it in figures.
I think it relates to how they are used. You potentially get virus on the inside of the mask - from you if you are infected - and on the outside, from other people. But at some point you take the mask off, so firstly you need to do that before it is so saturated as to be useless and secondly you need to do that in such away as not to transfer virus to your facial orifices, and in such a way as not to transfer virus to shared surfaces.
Medical staff are trained and monitored in how they don and doff ppe - the general public are not. This could make a big difference to what impact mask wearing by the general public has. Likewise, if mask wearing causes the public to take other risks then the net benefit may be offset by the consequences of that.
E.g. I have a mask so I go to visit my elderly mum - but I wore it to the supermarket this morning, came home took it off briefly went to the loo washed my hands, pick up the mask soiled from the virus I’ve breathed out - my hands are now contaminated with virus but I am unaware of this. I go to my mothers house, she opens door, I don’t touch her or the front door, but I walk through to the kitchen - opening the kitchen door with my virus contaminated hands on the way, and then I wash my hands because I am trying to be careful.
I got to the sitting room to sit two metres away from mum and chat. She goes to the kitchen to get a cup of tea - carefully doesn’t offer me one because I can’t take my mask off - but gets virus on her hands from the kitchen door handle. Sips tea, wipes hand on lip, catches virus.
I go home, 5 days later she’s ill - I don’t realise she caught it from me.
But if I didn’t have a mask, I wouldn’t have gone to visit her.
Very helpful, DT. Particularly the idea that unless properly trained and advised, you could self contaminate and then contaminate others by the way you remove the face protector.
While a surgical mask may be effective in blocking splashes and large-particle droplets, a face mask, by design, does not filter or block very small particles in the air that may be transmitted by coughs, sneezes, or certain medical procedures. Surgical masks also do not provide complete protection from germs and other contaminants because of the loose fit between the surface of the face mask and your face.
Surgical masks are not intended to be used more than once. If your mask is damaged or soiled, or if breathing through the mask becomes difficult, you should remove the face mask, discard it safely, and replace it with a new one. To safely discard your mask, place it in a plastic bag and put it in the trash. Wash your hands after handling the used mask.
The shorter term alternatives to vaccine might be if the balance of risk shifted because partially effective antiviral treatments were identified, and/or if the antibody test confirmed that a larger proportion of the population had been infected than suspected and therefore we were therefore closer to herd immunity....There is a very recent paper from Imperial estimating percentage of people infected as at the end of March in different European countries and the upper and lower bounds for each country are hugely different (larger than the differences between the countries).
The fabric masks can include filters that are being made from vacuum cleaner filters in some cases. But they should be worn once and washed and the filter regarded as disposable.
On numbers accuracy, I looked at the Johns Hopkins website and compared it with the worldometer web site. Some marginal differences almost certainly caused by different time standards, but both show very similar pictures particularly for the countries most affected.
There are concerns about a number of national sources of information; I see that Reuters got suspended for its reporting about Iran. Concern about the Chinese figures continues. Plus the gut feel that the disaster waiting to happen in refugee camps may indeed be happening - but not necessarily being counted.
I think there is a global interest in accurate counting to help work out just how infectious and dangerous this virus is turning out to be. But as always, national political interests may muck up the counting.
They are obviously not one of the more important countries in terms of numbers but apparently Iceland's figures are of specific interest as they are testing a much higher proportion of their population than anyone else.
Two thirds of the population of Iceland is concentrated in and around Rekayvic. I'm not sure how spacious or concentrated a city it is, but that may be having some impact.
Just looked at graphs. I think Italy has passed its peak in new cases, (around 21 March) probably also in new deaths (about end March). Spain looks to doing the same but a few days later. The decline down the other side of the curve looks pretty slow in both cases. The next couple of days should tell whether the declines are settling in.
The UK curves for both new cases and deaths still seem to be ascending, as do those for the USA.
Comments
By the time the second wave came round (God/god/gods/Great Cthulhu forbid), maybe there wouldn't be quite so many vulnerable people with underlying health conditions, they having been seen off by the first round.
Sent from my isolation bunker at Cold Comfort Farm.
But it's just a speculative graph. Reality will be different. Either better or worse.
And a second wave might repeat the pattern of lethality. In very different circumstances the second wave of the Spanish 'flu was worse than the first. It's by no means out of the question that a second wave would be as bad as the first.
But reality will be different. Better - or worse? A lot depends on how we continue to fight this and learn the best remedial steps.
Because (to address some of no prophet's points):
1. airborne droplets can travel more than 2m. 2m is basically a compromise that reduces the incidence of transmission whilst still allowing people to interact. It's not a magic barrier. This is why "stay home" is better.
2. When you try and stay 2m away from people in public, you're not going to succeed 100% of the time. You'll come round a corner at a grocery store and meet someone or something. Having a mask is better than not having a mask, as long as you don't think it's a magic "now I can stand next to people" device.
3. Masks probably don't do much to prevent you from getting the virus, but they probably do have some effect on limiting the spread of droplets from you. In other words, if you behave in the same way, and are unknowingly infected with the virus, the rest of us are probably better off with you wearing a mask.
4. The data to support the general use of masks is not very strong. It is certain that if people go out more because they feel less vulnerable wearing a mask, there will be more transmission than had they just stayed at home.
5. Covering your face may also prevent you from touching your face with contaminated hands in public. That helps.
Masks help to stop you infecting others, they don’t stop you catching it.
The latest call outs are for scrubs and bags for scrubs (to bag up scrubs for washing and so the workers can change into home clothes to go home). One of the pattern companies that has a scrub pattern on its books was giving that one away last weekend.
What is happening with the homemade masks is that they are going to lower level need venues, e.g. vets, and the vets are donating their N95 masks to the hospitals.
I'm not so sure about that. For starters, we don't have any evidence that Captain Crozier was the one who leaked the letter beyond the word of an administration* that's as mendacious as it is vindictive. Then there's this, from your linked article:
You know what also creates the impression that "the government is not on the job"? Statements like this:
The same Secretary Modly who now claims that the Navy that it's "just not true" that the government wasn't on the job. Crozier wasn't relieved of command for going outside the chain of command, he was relieved because he allegedly revealed the chain of command's murderous indifference.
He was relieved because he manipulated the brass in public, and more because he committed the irredeemable sin of being right whilst doing so. I don't know whether he leaked the letter or not. I rather suspect that he knew that he was ending his career when he wrote it, and wrote it anyway because it was the right thing to do.
In other news Pelosi will be forming a congressional committee to investigate what went wrong in the lead up to the pandemic in the US and what is happening now.
[ETA apparently earlier deaths in residential care have been added to the death total in one go, today]
I'm not French, but previous French counts of COVID-19 deaths included only deaths for hospitalized patients, omitting anyone who died anywhere else.
Here's the explanatory note I found on the worldometer website
(By the way, I know prisons hate inmates committing suicide on the premises, and do their utmost to get them to hospital or at least on the way there before doing so, otherwise it messes up their annual reports).
In other news: our local hospital has had to cut its worker salaries by 25%, not because they are being swamped by Covid 19 hospitalizations, but because of the Coronavirus they have had to cut out elective surgeries and out-patient procedures, the bread and butter of most regional hospitals in the US. A friend who works at the hospital said they were told that five similar hospitals in Washington State have had to close down for lack of funding.
Someone may have already pointed this out further back on this thread but the modelling that Imperial did that drives a lot of the UK government decision making is publicly available.
It shows death tolls of anything from around 9,000 (with the sort of measures put in place but also presumably the assumption that the public obeys then properly) up to 500,000 (if no measures put in place) based on the most plausible R0.
Paper was published around the middle of March so there is probably more info available now - I think it was mentioned that the virus is slightly more infectious than they originally thought although one of the variables included in the modelling is different R0 values.
That is like some ghastly parody of reality. I can't even begin to process it.
A lot of variables are in play. This is nasty already; just how much nastier it will become is something we'll find out. Globally, it looks like there will be another 90,000 confirmed cases and a further 6,000 deaths on April 3 (GMT) . Both those daily figures are set to increase for some time - but we don't really know by how much and for how long.
Speaking of which:
And now we know how Donald Trump went bankrupt running casinos, where the business model is that people essentially walk through the door and hand you their money.
tl;dr supply chains make hoarding a bigger problem, but hoarding still happens.
The main problem is that the supply chain is not geared to handle the demand that has shifted from using workplace supplies, such as toilet paper, to home supplies. The workplace supplies are not one-to-one replacements of the home ones, so they cannot be easily shifted to home use and they are in different supply chains, some of which do not service the same stores anyway.
I agree that supply chain issues are a real problem in this, but I also think hoarders are a larger part than the article does.
The listings are in the format:
X. Country - [# of known cases] ([active] / [recovered] / [dead]) [%fatality rate]
Fatality rates are only listed for countries where the number of resolved cases (recovered + dead) exceeds the number of known active cases by a ratio of at least 2:1. Italics indicate authoritarian countries whose official statistics are suspect. Other country's statistics are suspect if their testing regimes are substandard.
If American states were treated as individual countries twelve of them (New York, New Jersey, Michigan, California, Massachusetts, Louisiana, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Washington, Georgia, and Texas) would be on that list. New York would be ranked between Spain and Germany.
No countries have joined the list since the last compilation.
I think it's funny that people say "Act as if you have it and don't want to spread it to others," until it comes to masks, then it's all "Don't bother it doesn't keep you from catching it." You can't have it both ways.
Yet the Deputy Chief Medical Officer of the UK said yesterday that the evidence was that facemask wearing by the population in general had not been shown to be effective in studies. That genuinely puzzled me but it may relate to the quality of facemasks generally used by the public. I don't know what studies he was referring to.
I appreciate the argument of saving the best quality face masks for medical professionals if supplies are limited. Also the argument that facemasks, social distancing and hygienic precautions should go together. But even if facemasks and coverings are inefficient it seems very surprising if they do not reduce risk to some extent. So I'm doing some more digging!
Yes - and it tends to help psychologically too ‘this is serious’.
So long as it doesn’t give a false sense of security.
Is it coincidence that the countries who went straight to public mask wearing were the quickest to ‘flatten the curve’?
Medical staff are trained and monitored in how they don and doff ppe - the general public are not. This could make a big difference to what impact mask wearing by the general public has. Likewise, if mask wearing causes the public to take other risks then the net benefit may be offset by the consequences of that.
E.g. I have a mask so I go to visit my elderly mum - but I wore it to the supermarket this morning, came home took it off briefly went to the loo washed my hands, pick up the mask soiled from the virus I’ve breathed out - my hands are now contaminated with virus but I am unaware of this. I go to my mothers house, she opens door, I don’t touch her or the front door, but I walk through to the kitchen - opening the kitchen door with my virus contaminated hands on the way, and then I wash my hands because I am trying to be careful.
I got to the sitting room to sit two metres away from mum and chat. She goes to the kitchen to get a cup of tea - carefully doesn’t offer me one because I can’t take my mask off - but gets virus on her hands from the kitchen door handle. Sips tea, wipes hand on lip, catches virus.
I go home, 5 days later she’s ill - I don’t realise she caught it from me.
But if I didn’t have a mask, I wouldn’t have gone to visit her.
South Korea lite, involves having community scale antibody and antigen testing and a contact tracing software (both of which are currently in active development).
Vaccination, several are currently being tested.
What we don’t have is a definitive timeline. Statements about two months etc, will be related to how soon they think community scale testing and contact tracing will be at the right capacity. Short timescales of 2/3 months relate to the South Korea strategy - which is effectively paritial lockdown and interim - and longer timescales of 12 to 18 months refer to the likely length of time to develop *and make sufficient quantities of* an effective vaccine.
A few of these have been posted now; just to cover links I posted:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1241507154030473216.html
https://libcom.org/blog/empty-supermarkets-food-supply-chain-workers-perspective-23032020
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/media/2020/03/stockpiling-primarily-problem-fuelled-press-and-government
At least in the UK (and Germany - though I can't find the german language article I read) nothing points to widespread hoarding - but to a combination of supply chains and a paucity of storage space in supermarkets -- with most of them moving to stocking shelves directly from lorry pallets (there's a reason they used to be so keen on loyalty schemes -- though these days there are other means of achieving similar results).
There's undoubtedly some localised panic buying for certain items, but it's relatively limited in scope - or we'd see it in figures.
Very helpful, DT. Particularly the idea that unless properly trained and advised, you could self contaminate and then contaminate others by the way you remove the face protector.
Lots to be learned by reflecting on your example.
Plus I found this link which includes this quote.
Off to wash my hands!
Firstly from Sewcialists, a sewing community site, one of the current team is an Italian biochemist and wrote this article (link) entitled A Scientist's Thoughts on Homemade Masks
Secondly, from Instagram - Melissa Fehr, who produces activewear patterns under Fehrtrade, is a bone marrow transplant survivor - she posted this Instagram story (link to slide show) with her research on materials which includes links to some face mask patterns, the article above and this Wired article (link) entitled It's Time to Face the Facts America, Masks Work
Trend facemask pattern donated by the Trend patterns for people to use during this pandemic.
American site with tutorials for 5 free diy face masks including pleated fabric masks. There are pleas in America for the home dressmakers to produce masks for hospitals - list here.
The fabric masks can include filters that are being made from vacuum cleaner filters in some cases. But they should be worn once and washed and the filter regarded as disposable.
There are concerns about a number of national sources of information; I see that Reuters got suspended for its reporting about Iran. Concern about the Chinese figures continues. Plus the gut feel that the disaster waiting to happen in refugee camps may indeed be happening - but not necessarily being counted.
I think there is a global interest in accurate counting to help work out just how infectious and dangerous this virus is turning out to be. But as always, national political interests may muck up the counting.
Just looked at graphs. I think Italy has passed its peak in new cases, (around 21 March) probably also in new deaths (about end March). Spain looks to doing the same but a few days later. The decline down the other side of the curve looks pretty slow in both cases. The next couple of days should tell whether the declines are settling in.
The UK curves for both new cases and deaths still seem to be ascending, as do those for the USA.
This may be something to do with the fact that the shortage is in the process of being sorted out. Cynical? Moi?