Well said, @Doc Tor - please would you be our Prime Minister? Pretty please?
It depends on how often you'd like to see the PM look baleful and tell the honourable leader of the opposition/journalist/member of the public/foreign head of state to "just fuck off". Because that's what you'd be getting.
Another factor is the disease development. It can take upto 14d for symptoms to appear after infection. A further 7-14d for those to develop to the point of being serious enough to need hospital care (in something like 10% of cases), and a further 7-14d for the patient to either recover or die. In China there were some patients who were in hospital for 4-5 weeks. Some of those 800 deaths per day could have been infected before the restrictions were put in place. Although there are many options for how they could have picked up the infection after that.
Never mind how we got here. 20/20 hindsight doesn't help. What would you do different now, if you were the government? What policies would you change now? What guidance would you change now? What steps would you take to improve the short and long term?
I would not want to be starting from here. But here is where we are. A complete change of government, medical and scientific advisers would not change that. I see no silver bullets. What do you see?
This is, of course, the perennial argument of people who have fucked up tremendously about why they shouldn't be held accountable for their fuck ups and why they should continue to do the job that they fucked up so badly despite a complete lack of evidence that they'd learned anything or changed in any way that would prevent them from fucking up again in exactly the same way.
There's been a lot of quite frankly racist ideas out the the old Orientalist school about how servile, obedient Asians are more willing to obey their governments and thus have a better handle on suppressing COVID-19. I'd like to suggest an alternative notion. Taiwan has a fairly robust democracy. So does South Korea, which recently impeached and removed its president for abuse of power. (Something an older democracy failed to do even more recently.) Maybe these country's success at containing COVID-19 isn't because their populations are all a bunch of obedient drones but because their governments know that they're not and that the people will hold their leaders to account for any fuck ups.
What really pi**es me off is that we Little Englanders can't (AFAICS) hold our 'government' to account for its fu*k-ups until God-knows-when - by which time most of us nithings, or nudniks, will be dead, anyway.
Except Them, of course. They'll be safe in their bunker, albeit possibly eating each other to stay alive...
I'm wondering if some of the batch sent home (and hence off statistics) we now we can keep in hospital. As it seems to have gone back up from 600 at the start of the week
The death rate hasn't gone up.
The way the figures are reported is misleading. Not intentionally so but they are. The number the media carries is the addition of a number of deaths reported in 24 hrs in people who tested positive. Not the number who died in said 24hr period. The point being is that some deaths are recorded same day, some take 3-4 days to filter through, especially at weekends. If you look here: https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-daily-deaths/ you only get the England figures but if you open up the Excel file you'll see there is absolutely a downward trend. I like the colour coding on the graph that makes this distinction clear. That's no reason to be complacent but we are on the right trajectory.
As to the lag, as well as the incubation period, most people who die do so several days to a couple of weeks after developing symptoms. And yes with a virus as infectious as this one there will also be some 'leak' too.
AFZ
P.s. @Doc Tor was totally and completely correct on the previous page. Criticism of the government is needed now, party because they SHOULD be accountable for the damage they've done but mostly because there is no hope of avoiding future similar mistakes without honesty about what has gone wrong so far.
Just reading another loony, on Richard North's blog, saying, why have we trashed the economy because of 30 000 deaths from covid? How much stupidity is out there? Why do right wing idiots not grasp the nature of exponential growth, so that 30 000 can mushroom to 100 000?
Also a point about civilization. I think the Toby Young thesis that we should let 250 000 old people die, to save the economy, is foul. Also, it probably wouldn't save the economy..
Just reading another loony, on Richard North's blog, saying, why have we trashed the economy because of 30 000 deaths from covid? How much stupidity is out there? Why do right wing idiots not grasp the nature of exponential growth, so that 30 000 can mushroom to 100 000?
Also a point about civilization. I think the Toby Young thesis that we should let 250 000 old people die, to save the economy, is foul. Also, it probably wouldn't save the economy..
I wonder why the fuckwits imagine that we locked down for the 20,000 who died, when it's actually for the unknown thousands who didn't .
Yes, it's amazing how many right wingers compare lockdown deaths with some other figure, e.g., deaths from last April, without making allowance for the lockdown? I think Toby Young keeps doing this.
An interesting point from Pete North's blog, that the public imposed the lockdown on the govt. Not strictly true, but I think people were voting with their feet before 23 March.
Yes, it's going to end up with "we locked down and 100,000 died ... which is quarter of a million less than would have died if we didn't lock down". And, possibly a lot more than a quarter million (it could also be more than 100,000 if the government doesn't start acting smart, and could have been a lot less than 100,000 if the government had been competent from the start)
I would be telling those members of my party agitating to 'get the economy moving' to get back in their box.
As an aside; I think the reality of this is that Sunak's measures aren't as impressive as the media makes out and businesses are still going to the wall at a rapid clip. It's also an easy out to get out being responsible for the state of the economy; because they then won't need to prop up/bail out businesses even to the extent that they are currently.
This is, of course, the perennial argument of people who have fucked up tremendously about why they shouldn't be held accountable for their fuck ups and why they should continue to do the job that they fucked up so badly despite a complete lack of evidence that they'd learned anything or changed in any way that would prevent them from fucking up again in exactly the same way.
Absolutely. It’s time to let someone else fuck up in a completely different way!
What really pi**es me off is that we Little Englanders can't (AFAICS) hold our 'government' to account for its fu*k-ups until God-knows-when
I’m not God, but I think you’ll find the answer is no later than December 2024. Probably May 2024, just to get the election cycle back to a time of the year with better weather but avoiding the summer parliamentary recess.
It may, of course, be sooner than that if Parliament votes accordingly. How likely that is will depend on how things go over the next few years.
What date did your country, state or province have 1st infection, restrictions, lock down?
Saskatchewan: 1.1 million population.
12 March - 1st infection
14 March- closures ordered, tightened progressively
17 March - stay home order.
Staged re-open starts 04 May.
57 active cases. 347 total. 4 total deaths. 24,000 tests. 3 people in hospital, 2 of them in ICU. Capacity is 10k tests per day. We're doing considerably less than this.
My Taiwanese brother reports less cases than Sask with 30 million population. Nothing closed presently. Lots of precautions, distancing
Can some of you post dates etc for comparison? I'm thinking that if your country, state or province delayed this is the core of your problem managing. Also how willing the people are culturally willing to follow gov't orders. Taiwan is very obedient.
Our issues are late lockdown and struggling to get PPE We were in no position to emulate the German response because of underinvestment in health care and comparative under preparedness for a pandemic.
Did I actually post that? Maybe I should have clarified the obvious?
I hold the UK government accountable for
a) underinvestment in health care (compared with Germany)
b) poor preparedness for a pandemic (compared with Germany)
c) poor procurement and distribution policies for PPE.
I hold the government, Chief Scientific Adviser and Chief Medical Officer jointly accountable for the late lockdown. We had that discussion earlier.
I'm not an apologist for Tory governments. I've voted against them all my life. But I understand why the other parts of my post made me sound like an apologist for this government. My bad. It would have been better if I'd been clearer in my initial remarks.
(Also, I like living in Norfolk, at the present time I prefer it to anywhere in the USA. But for safety's sake, I'd rather be living in Germany.)
Doc Tor, I wouldn't waste whisky on this cabinet. From your other proposals, the one that might make a real difference to lifting restrictions eventually is 100% enforcement of lockdown now. I think that would require martial law. I wouldn't mind you in charge of that. Not Boris.
@NOprophet_NØprofit as you mentioned upthread I think Saskatchewan benefited from a combination of good luck and good planning. We shut down about the same time in Ontario, but our cases were well ahead of yours and I think it will be at least a month before we see any lifting of restrictions. We're not even talking dates yet.
A curious data point is that when the Superior Courts in Ontario shut down, they adjourned everything (except matters of immediate urgency)* to early June. I don't know whether that was just a best guess, or whether they had some behind-the-scenes discussions about when at the earliest things could get re-started. Since then they've decided no jury trials at least till September. No information yet on what's going to happen with judge-alone matters starting in June.
I think AFZ's argument re the UK statistics must also apply to Spain. There is a trending down when you look at the actual dates of deaths.
So far as new cases is concerned, I think both Italy and Spain are further down in their trends than the UK is. And that stat is the most significant for easing the pressure on health services. Also, seeing that figure get down to under 100 might make the vital tracing of contacts with those newly infected much more possible.
Doc Tor, I wouldn't waste whisky on this cabinet. From your other proposals, the one that might make a real difference to lifting restrictions eventually is 100% enforcement of lockdown now.
I would disagree somewhat. I think the extent to which the lockdown is being followed is fairly good - if you ignore the various photos that with owe much to depth of field.
Looking at indicators - like those released by Google - it is likely to be dwarfed by the effects of people who are travelling to work for their non-essential jobs because they can't work from home (and because lack of government support means that they fear they'll lose their jobs). Because the UK economy is so lopsided, the situation in the South East is likely to have a disproportionate effect on all figures.
This is the context in which the other proposals make a lot of sense. The problem is that the current party in power have spent 10 years shrinking the state, are ideologically against a larger role for government and don't want to do anything that might change the balance of power. Their central strategy is to push as much of the burden onto business as possible, however under neoliberalism the erosion of the states ability to plan and act has also been mirrored in the commercial sector.
Without wishing to create a basket case league (!) I would rather be here in Norfolk than anywhere in the USA.
Deaths in the county of Norfolk in East Anglia: 237
Population (from Wikipedia): about 904,000
Deaths in Los Angeles County, California: 540
Population: about 10,000,000
Deaths in Long Beach, California (where I live, within LA County): 29
Population: about 470,000
Norfolk's population density is about 440 people per square mile, about what it is in Santa Cruz County, California, in the Bay Area, near where we first saw cases in California. Here's how they're doing: 115 confirmed cases, 2 deaths.
What date did your country, state or province have 1st infection, restrictions, lock down?
...
Can some of you post dates etc for comparison?
If only you had access to data from all over the world, right at your fingertips ...
I'm thinking that if your country, state or province delayed this is the core of your problem managing. Also how willing the people are culturally willing to follow gov't orders.
Ya think? Didya also maybe think population density might have something to do with how well Saskatchewan is managing? Only 4.8 people per square mile in the whole province, 2,797 per square mile in Saskatoon. My little city averages 9,343 people per square mile and the population is only a bit under twice as big. And it's only the fifth-biggest city in the entire state.
Why do you think comparisons between completely unlike places would be useful?
Any data from me would be useless, as we have a very good county executive (he's a doctor, gee, wonder if that had any influence?) and a less-than-stellar governor who locked down late and plans to reopen soon. So total lockdown time for our county is almost certainly going to end up a month longer than the rest of the state, and if they go through with currently announced plans, two months, maybe even longer.
And yet...
Our county is much, much higher density than almost anywhere else in the state, which has a lot of rural area. We also have a huge freaking number of hospitals in our county (major Midwest medical destination), and of course anybody who dies in one of those hospitals is going to wind up in our stats. And then there are the nursing homes, all clustered in our county...
Which is all to say that our numbers look dreadful unless you compare them to what we could have been--and probably would have been, without the aggressive response we've been blessed with.
Doc Tor, I wouldn't waste whisky on this cabinet. From your other proposals, the one that might make a real difference to lifting restrictions eventually is 100% enforcement of lockdown now.
I would disagree somewhat. I think the extent to which the lockdown is being followed is fairly good - if you ignore the various photos that with owe much to depth of field.
... not to mention the fact that the streets are fairly empty, so the handful of people who aren't social distancing stand out like a sore thumb.
I think there's a danger that 'The lockdown has to be extended because of idiots sunbathing in the park' becomes the Covid equivalent of 'The national deficit has ballooned because of benefit scroungers and window-cleaners doing cash jobs'.
It's not so much the streets and the parks, as the private parties in gardens and the non-compliance at 'essential' work (some if it is clearly essential. Some of it... not). There is obviously ongoing transmission of the virus happening, and it's not small-scale. If there's any hope of reducing the death toll after lockdown, these vectors need to be traced and disrupted *anyway*. So we do it now, when it's easier.
It's not so much the streets and the parks, as the private parties in gardens and the non-compliance at 'essential' work (some if it is clearly essential. Some of it... not).
As above, the current guidance is that people who can't work from home can (and essentially should - given relative levels of government support) go to work -- and I'm not sure how easy it is to retro fit the necessary social distancing measures around shared facilities like toilets etc (not to mention doors).
United Arab Emirates - 10,349 (8,295 / 1,978 / 76)
Qatar - 10,287 (9,265 / 1,012 / 10)
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 eighteen of them would be on that list. New York would be ranked at #2, between "everywhere in the U.S. except New York" (#1) and Spain (#3). New Jersey would be between Turkey and Iran.
Belarus, Qatar, and the UAE have joined the 10,000 case club since the last compilation.
The measurements from one day are never significant. However, recorded global deaths were much reduced yesterday. Less than half the recent average. There was a big reduction in all of the worst affected countries - USA, Spain, Italy, France, UK.
New case rates are definitely trending down in Spain, Italy, France. Not sure about either the UK or the USA.
(Later edit. The global total of recorded cases just topped 3 million).
I've just watched this video of two doctors in California discussing the clinical reality they are seeing there, compared with the theory about COVID-19 spread. Very interesting and well worth watching.
I've just watched this video of two doctors in California discussing the clinical reality they are seeing there, compared with the theory about COVID-19 spread. Very interesting and well worth watching.
@cgichard that link seems to be to a video of what is (eventually) a White House press briefing.
I've just watched this video of two doctors in California discussing the clinical reality they are seeing there, compared with the theory about COVID-19 spread. Very interesting and well worth watching.
@cgichard that link seems to be to a video of what is (eventually) a White House press briefing.
Many apologies. I evidently picked the address of the video that followed on automatically. Try this instead. Of, for an abridged version, but with less good audio, this.
As above, the current guidance is that people who can't work from home can (and essentially should - given relative levels of government support) go to work -- and I'm not sure how easy it is to retro fit the necessary social distancing measures around shared facilities like toilets etc (not to mention doors).
Hopefully you're washing your hands after you use the toilet anyway. Wash them before as well. Try to space out visits so that nobody is in there with anyone else, or immediately following anyone else, and you've probably brought the added risk of a shared toilet down to match the simple fact that you're in a room with another person.
Mostly, "social distancing measures" aren't things, they are behaviours. You need a reduced population density, which means you can't do things like have everyone huddled in the staff canteen for lunch. Can 75% of your staff work from home? That probably leaves enough space for the remaining 25% to spread out. Otherwise, you'd need to stagger lunches over a longer time period, so you don't have everyone squashed in together, or have people eat in other places (conference/meeting rooms? Outside?) I'd say "eat at your desk" but if you have the kind of job that involves sitting at a desk that you could safely eat at, you almost certainly have the kind of job you could do from home, and so you should be at home.
I guess it's early days yet as far as 'the new normal' is concerned, but no doubt Humming Beans (being Ingenious Beans) will work it out.
The staggering of working/eating/travelling hours is probably no bad thing, despite the inconvenience it will undoubtedly cause to some. A friend of mine, working how quite happily from home, is quite prepared to visit the office (in London) once or twice a week, as and when required, but otherwise she's not missing the 60-mile round trip by train at all!
Comments
It depends on how often you'd like to see the PM look baleful and tell the honourable leader of the opposition/journalist/member of the public/foreign head of state to "just fuck off". Because that's what you'd be getting.
And also provided that you brush/comb your hair before appearing on TV.
Obligatory: Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who.
This is, of course, the perennial argument of people who have fucked up tremendously about why they shouldn't be held accountable for their fuck ups and why they should continue to do the job that they fucked up so badly despite a complete lack of evidence that they'd learned anything or changed in any way that would prevent them from fucking up again in exactly the same way.
There's been a lot of quite frankly racist ideas out the the old Orientalist school about how servile, obedient Asians are more willing to obey their governments and thus have a better handle on suppressing COVID-19. I'd like to suggest an alternative notion. Taiwan has a fairly robust democracy. So does South Korea, which recently impeached and removed its president for abuse of power. (Something an older democracy failed to do even more recently.) Maybe these country's success at containing COVID-19 isn't because their populations are all a bunch of obedient drones but because their governments know that they're not and that the people will hold their leaders to account for any fuck ups.
Except Them, of course. They'll be safe in their bunker, albeit possibly eating each other to stay alive...
The death rate hasn't gone up.
The way the figures are reported is misleading. Not intentionally so but they are. The number the media carries is the addition of a number of deaths reported in 24 hrs in people who tested positive. Not the number who died in said 24hr period. The point being is that some deaths are recorded same day, some take 3-4 days to filter through, especially at weekends. If you look here: https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-daily-deaths/ you only get the England figures but if you open up the Excel file you'll see there is absolutely a downward trend. I like the colour coding on the graph that makes this distinction clear. That's no reason to be complacent but we are on the right trajectory.
As to the lag, as well as the incubation period, most people who die do so several days to a couple of weeks after developing symptoms. And yes with a virus as infectious as this one there will also be some 'leak' too.
AFZ
P.s. @Doc Tor was totally and completely correct on the previous page. Criticism of the government is needed now, party because they SHOULD be accountable for the damage they've done but mostly because there is no hope of avoiding future similar mistakes without honesty about what has gone wrong so far.
Yes and no. If you look at the charts, the death rate doesn't appear to be affected by the weekend but the reporting is...
Also a point about civilization. I think the Toby Young thesis that we should let 250 000 old people die, to save the economy, is foul. Also, it probably wouldn't save the economy..
I wonder why the fuckwits imagine that we locked down for the 20,000 who died, when it's actually for the unknown thousands who didn't .
An interesting point from Pete North's blog, that the public imposed the lockdown on the govt. Not strictly true, but I think people were voting with their feet before 23 March.
They are beyond belief.
I'd hand the entire cabinet a bottle of whisky and the mess Webley.
I suspect that more than one bottle of whisky, and more than one loaded pistol, would be required.
There's always nitro-glycerine.
As an aside; I think the reality of this is that Sunak's measures aren't as impressive as the media makes out and businesses are still going to the wall at a rapid clip. It's also an easy out to get out being responsible for the state of the economy; because they then won't need to prop up/bail out businesses even to the extent that they are currently.
Absolutely. It’s time to let someone else fuck up in a completely different way!
I’m not God, but I think you’ll find the answer is no later than December 2024. Probably May 2024, just to get the election cycle back to a time of the year with better weather but avoiding the summer parliamentary recess.
It may, of course, be sooner than that if Parliament votes accordingly. How likely that is will depend on how things go over the next few years.
Saskatchewan: 1.1 million population.
12 March - 1st infection
14 March- closures ordered, tightened progressively
17 March - stay home order.
Staged re-open starts 04 May.
57 active cases. 347 total. 4 total deaths. 24,000 tests. 3 people in hospital, 2 of them in ICU. Capacity is 10k tests per day. We're doing considerably less than this.
My Taiwanese brother reports less cases than Sask with 30 million population. Nothing closed presently. Lots of precautions, distancing
Can some of you post dates etc for comparison? I'm thinking that if your country, state or province delayed this is the core of your problem managing. Also how willing the people are culturally willing to follow gov't orders. Taiwan is very obedient.
I hold the UK government accountable for
a) underinvestment in health care (compared with Germany)
b) poor preparedness for a pandemic (compared with Germany)
c) poor procurement and distribution policies for PPE.
I hold the government, Chief Scientific Adviser and Chief Medical Officer jointly accountable for the late lockdown. We had that discussion earlier.
I'm not an apologist for Tory governments. I've voted against them all my life. But I understand why the other parts of my post made me sound like an apologist for this government. My bad. It would have been better if I'd been clearer in my initial remarks.
(Also, I like living in Norfolk, at the present time I prefer it to anywhere in the USA. But for safety's sake, I'd rather be living in Germany.)
Doc Tor, I wouldn't waste whisky on this cabinet. From your other proposals, the one that might make a real difference to lifting restrictions eventually is 100% enforcement of lockdown now. I think that would require martial law. I wouldn't mind you in charge of that. Not Boris.
A curious data point is that when the Superior Courts in Ontario shut down, they adjourned everything (except matters of immediate urgency)* to early June. I don't know whether that was just a best guess, or whether they had some behind-the-scenes discussions about when at the earliest things could get re-started. Since then they've decided no jury trials at least till September. No information yet on what's going to happen with judge-alone matters starting in June.
(*now heard only by video)
I think AFZ's argument re the UK statistics must also apply to Spain. There is a trending down when you look at the actual dates of deaths.
So far as new cases is concerned, I think both Italy and Spain are further down in their trends than the UK is. And that stat is the most significant for easing the pressure on health services. Also, seeing that figure get down to under 100 might make the vital tracing of contacts with those newly infected much more possible.
Don't worry. A bottle of Teachers will suffice.
I would disagree somewhat. I think the extent to which the lockdown is being followed is fairly good - if you ignore the various photos that with owe much to depth of field.
Looking at indicators - like those released by Google - it is likely to be dwarfed by the effects of people who are travelling to work for their non-essential jobs because they can't work from home (and because lack of government support means that they fear they'll lose their jobs). Because the UK economy is so lopsided, the situation in the South East is likely to have a disproportionate effect on all figures.
This is the context in which the other proposals make a lot of sense. The problem is that the current party in power have spent 10 years shrinking the state, are ideologically against a larger role for government and don't want to do anything that might change the balance of power. Their central strategy is to push as much of the burden onto business as possible, however under neoliberalism the erosion of the states ability to plan and act has also been mirrored in the commercial sector.
Nice ring to it.
Then I read he was proposing to administer Teacher's ...
Population (from Wikipedia): about 904,000
Deaths in Los Angeles County, California: 540
Population: about 10,000,000
Deaths in Long Beach, California (where I live, within LA County): 29
Population: about 470,000
Norfolk's population density is about 440 people per square mile, about what it is in Santa Cruz County, California, in the Bay Area, near where we first saw cases in California. Here's how they're doing: 115 confirmed cases, 2 deaths.
I am sick of the concern trolling about the US.
Ya think? Didya also maybe think population density might have something to do with how well Saskatchewan is managing? Only 4.8 people per square mile in the whole province, 2,797 per square mile in Saskatoon. My little city averages 9,343 people per square mile and the population is only a bit under twice as big. And it's only the fifth-biggest city in the entire state.
Why do you think comparisons between completely unlike places would be useful?
Sorry to single you out. There's been a lot of this, and it's tiresome.
I do appreciate the frustration. Normally I avoid that kind of generalisation. Today has not been one of my better days here. Take care.
And yet...
Our county is much, much higher density than almost anywhere else in the state, which has a lot of rural area. We also have a huge freaking number of hospitals in our county (major Midwest medical destination), and of course anybody who dies in one of those hospitals is going to wind up in our stats. And then there are the nursing homes, all clustered in our county...
Which is all to say that our numbers look dreadful unless you compare them to what we could have been--and probably would have been, without the aggressive response we've been blessed with.
... not to mention the fact that the streets are fairly empty, so the handful of people who aren't social distancing stand out like a sore thumb.
I think there's a danger that 'The lockdown has to be extended because of idiots sunbathing in the park' becomes the Covid equivalent of 'The national deficit has ballooned because of benefit scroungers and window-cleaners doing cash jobs'.
As above, the current guidance is that people who can't work from home can (and essentially should - given relative levels of government support) go to work -- and I'm not sure how easy it is to retro fit the necessary social distancing measures around shared facilities like toilets etc (not to mention doors).
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 eighteen of them would be on that list. New York would be ranked at #2, between "everywhere in the U.S. except New York" (#1) and Spain (#3). New Jersey would be between Turkey and Iran.
Belarus, Qatar, and the UAE have joined the 10,000 case club since the last compilation.
New case rates are definitely trending down in Spain, Italy, France. Not sure about either the UK or the USA.
(Later edit. The global total of recorded cases just topped 3 million).
Not sure. I did look at dips on the last two Sundays and they weren't on the same scale. I'm sure there is a weekend recording factor in play.
Whatever, that's a level of decline we'd all like to see sustained. And AFZ has it right about trends and the recorded daily numbers.
@cgichard that link seems to be to a video of what is (eventually) a White House press briefing.
More seriously, good news from New Zealand. Their prompt, very strict, very early action seems to have saved them a lot of grief.
Hopefully you're washing your hands after you use the toilet anyway. Wash them before as well. Try to space out visits so that nobody is in there with anyone else, or immediately following anyone else, and you've probably brought the added risk of a shared toilet down to match the simple fact that you're in a room with another person.
Mostly, "social distancing measures" aren't things, they are behaviours. You need a reduced population density, which means you can't do things like have everyone huddled in the staff canteen for lunch. Can 75% of your staff work from home? That probably leaves enough space for the remaining 25% to spread out. Otherwise, you'd need to stagger lunches over a longer time period, so you don't have everyone squashed in together, or have people eat in other places (conference/meeting rooms? Outside?) I'd say "eat at your desk" but if you have the kind of job that involves sitting at a desk that you could safely eat at, you almost certainly have the kind of job you could do from home, and so you should be at home.
The staggering of working/eating/travelling hours is probably no bad thing, despite the inconvenience it will undoubtedly cause to some. A friend of mine, working how quite happily from home, is quite prepared to visit the office (in London) once or twice a week, as and when required, but otherwise she's not missing the 60-mile round trip by train at all!