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Post by Life on Mar 16, 2020 22:51:07 GMT 5
Learn all about coronavirus (COVID-19) from WHO - scientific and unbiased. LINK: www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirusGeneral instructions:- 1. Wash your hands and face with a (quality) soap on a regular basis. 2. Cook your meals properly. 3. Adopt healthy eating habits. Do not eat animals which can be potential carriers of numerous diseases, particularly Corona family of viruses (CoV). These include cats, bats, rodents, and snakes. 4. Buy stuff from trusted stores. 5. Avoid intimate contact with strangers, or anybody who is found to be coughing and sneezing. Wear a (medical) face mask when visiting a crowded place. 6. If you experience symptoms which match those of coronavirus, contact health officials on immediate basis. Stay safe and take care of yourself. |
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Post by theropod on Mar 16, 2020 23:48:30 GMT 5
Please be sure to avoid visiting crowded places alltogether. That is the single most important thing to do now, the only reliable way every one of us has to slow the spread of the virus. Maintain a distance of at least 1.5 to 2 m between yourself and others whenever possible (it goes without saying, especially if any person involved is showing symptoms). That includes not shaking hands (or, spaghettimonster forbid, hugging). Don’t put too much trust in face masks. Most masks are not a reliable way to avoid becoming infected. Those who do are not practical to wear in an everyday setting, and are already bought out in most places with active epidemics, which is a huge problem for medical professionals. So please be considerate and leave those masks to those who actually need them, i.e. doctors and nurses, and potentially high-risk groups. Recognize that the goal is not so much avoiding infection yourself (as most people here are probably in an age group that faces only a negligible risk even if infected) but to delay the spread of the disease to those who are more at risk and avoid overpowering the healthcare system wherever you are through an unmanageable number of new infections. Masks are primarily a tool to avoid spreading germs yourself. For that, any normal surgical mask (or probably even a paper towel) will work, it doesn’t have to be sealed completely to drastically reduce the amount of droplets you release into the air while speaking and breathing. Do wear that if you feel like it, but don’t let it give you any false sense of security, you can still infect others, especially if you use it improperly (e.g. touching it during use, mind WHO instructions below), and especially, you can still get infected yourself. www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/advice-for-public/when-and-how-to-use-masksIt goes without saying that if you have symptoms, at this point you shouldn’t be going out in public at all, mask or no mask. Regarding surface transmission, it is recommended to wash hands frequently, with soap and for at least 20 seconds. Coronaviruses have a lipid envelope, soap (or other surfactants) destroys it, but it needs time. Avoid touching surfaces you don’t absolutely have to touch, at least in public. There’s a preprint that showed SARS-CoV-2 can survive on steel or polypropylene surfaces for up to 3 days, similar to SARS-1. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033217v1.full.pdfThis was under lab conditions and does not quantify the real-life risk of infection from such surfaces, but at any rate it should be reason enough to minimize contact with all potentially contaminated objects. If you need to disinfect surfaces (or your hands if you cannot wash them) use at least 62% ethanol. There are alternatives (not all equally skin-friendly, e.g. bleach), see here: doi.org/10.1016/j.jhin.2020.01.022But the bottom line remains, just avoid all unneccessary social contacts, those are the main line of infection. Transmission through surfaces, let alone food is not currently thought to be a major cause, although they cannot be ruled out. Infection from animals is extremely unlikely, as the current pandemic clearly appears to have originated in Wuhan, exactly once, and not from various people independently eating certain species in different parts of the world (besides eating them was probably not the issue, handling animals, under the extremely poor hygienic conditions of a wet market probably was).
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Post by creature386 on Mar 17, 2020 0:11:45 GMT 5
You guys beat me to making this thread. I used to be rather careless about this myself, I confess, ("It's just another flu") before I saw these two forecasts. The first was posted by Lightning on Carnivora. Up to 100 million people could be infected worldwide by next winter: news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-worldwide-peak-will-come-next-winter-scientific-model-predicts-11954441In Germany specifically, about 70% might get the virus: www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51835856(Despite this, the German government is surprisingly lax by European standards. According to Lighting, the British government is even worse though.) I really, really hate that I had to start a job just before all of this hit the fan. Avoiding social contact is otherwise so easy for me. Quitting altogether would be rather frustrating, but I wonder if asking them to cut weekly hours to 20 would be a wise idea (I mean, I spend a lot of time there either way, so would it even make a difference?). |
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Post by theropod on Mar 17, 2020 1:46:17 GMT 5
Let’s put it this way: It’s not that the current outbreak-control measures are insufficient per se, but they came too late. Had we simply bothered to restrict international aviation a few weeks earlier and canceled the carnival, we probably wouldn’t be in this situation now.
But people are never willing to take drastic (as in "require even a moderate sacrifice from individual people") measures before it’s already to late, one knows that in my line of activism, and it is a key problem our society has in dealing with any crisis. People won’t give up any luxury (e.g. going on vacation in some corona-infested skiing village) in the present, even if it means giving up on basic needs (e.g. going to work or outside, letting your children go to school) in the future. How hard would it have been to avoid going skiing or sightseeing just this one time and stay home instead, if in return we could all have avoided what is quickly seeming to become a complete lockdown?
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Post by creature386 on Mar 17, 2020 3:14:21 GMT 5
EDIT: If you, dear reader, are prone to panicking or irrational fears, you might want to skip the guesstimates and subject matter below altogether. Panic damages the immune system, after all. Not trying to turn this thread in a fear-mongering contest, but is anyone willing to estimate a kill-count for your country? I've just seen a twitter poll about the number of corona deaths in Germany 2020 and it's kinda interesting, especially with everything that's being posted on Carnivora right now. For Germany, I have this guesstimate: The disease is "critical" 5% of the time: link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00063-020-00674-3I'll translate this into a mortality rate of 4%, assuming that the healthcare system collapses and only 20% of these can survive (that's a bit higher than the present global lethality rate of 3.4%). Assuming the article I linked above is correct with its 70% infection rate, that would make kill count of 80,000,000 * 0.7 * 0.04 = 2.24 million. Of course, this is an absolute worst-case scenario and some countries like South Korea have already managed to decrease the number of corona infections now. South Korea has less than a hundred infections daily, despite being plagued by the virus far longer than Europe. Plus, there are many caveats to this lethality estimate. It is possible that people whose corona symptoms don't go beyond the common cold never seek help and thus fly under the radar, pushing the number of lethal cases higher. A few hundred thousand deaths might be a more realistic worst-case scenario. Even in a best-case scenario (where the infection rate is quickly mitigated), I'm still expecting thousands of deaths at least. That's gonna leave records for future demographers. |
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Post by Life on Mar 18, 2020 4:06:39 GMT 5
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Post by theropod on Mar 18, 2020 16:09:18 GMT 5
That figure is a bit misleading though.
Of those currently infected, only 6% are in serious or critical condition, and of course not all of those people will die either.
Total number of deaths is heavily skewed by the high death counts in Hubei (~3100), Italy (~2500) and Iran (~1000), all places where the number of infections completely overwhelmed (or still overwhelms) the healthcare system, and where there may be or have also been a considerable number of unrecognized (mild) infections due to this, which were not counted.
Take individual countries (or chinese provinces) and you can find far lower case fatality rates. E.g. South Korea stands at over 8400 infected, a number that hasn’t been growing much during the last few days, but has 1540 recoveries and only 84 deaths, so even merely counting the concluded cases the fatality rate is 5% there, which is likely going to decrease further with the spread having seemingly been slowed down a lot. Anhui has just 6 deaths but 984 recoveries. So clearly this disease has the potential to have a far lower lethality under the right circumstances.
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Post by elosha11 on Mar 19, 2020 8:32:59 GMT 5
Excellent points by all. Life, and other admins, may I suggest putting this thread on a sticky somewhere the main page for more views and traffic. Good for a public service to our members, our visitors, and frankly the world at large. It might very well get lost to most of our viewers in the general discussion section.
I'd rarely suggest such a non-topical thread be put permanently on our front page, but this is a world-wide crisis, and every little thing we do to educate and raise awareness can help.
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Post by creature386 on Mar 19, 2020 22:58:02 GMT 5
Excellent summary by Kurzgesagt, spread the word!
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Post by creature386 on Mar 20, 2020 23:59:23 GMT 5
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Post by Life on Mar 24, 2020 12:55:57 GMT 5
Excellent points by all. Life, and other admins, may I suggest putting this thread on a sticky somewhere the main page for more views and traffic. Good for a public service to our members, our visitors, and frankly the world at large. It might very well get lost to most of our viewers in the general discussion section. I'd rarely suggest such a non-topical thread be put permanently on our front page, but this is a world-wide crisis, and every little thing we do to educate and raise awareness can help. Done. Thread sticked and turned into anouncement. That figure is a bit misleading though. Of those currently infected, only 6% are in serious or critical condition, and of course not all of those people will die either. Total number of deaths is heavily skewed by the high death counts in Hubei (~3100), Italy (~2500) and Iran (~1000), all places where the number of infections completely overwhelmed (or still overwhelms) the healthcare system, and where there may be or have also been a considerable number of unrecognized (mild) infections due to this, which were not counted. Take individual countries (or chinese provinces) and you can find far lower case fatality rates. E.g. South Korea stands at over 8400 infected, a number that hasn’t been growing much during the last few days, but has 1540 recoveries and only 84 deaths, so even merely counting the concluded cases the fatality rate is 5% there, which is likely going to decrease further with the spread having seemingly been slowed down a lot. Anhui has just 6 deaths but 984 recoveries. So clearly this disease has the potential to have a far lower lethality under the right circumstances. Mortality rate global average is getting worse by the day (closed cases). Although, it vary from country to country subject to different factors and conditions. Nevertheless, effective medical services and administrative measures will make difference by stopping further spread of infections. |
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Post by DonaldCengXiongAzuma on Mar 24, 2020 13:34:31 GMT 5
Sydney, Australia is like a ghost town now. We are not allowed to sit on public places.
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Post by Infinity Blade on Mar 24, 2020 16:57:54 GMT 5
My spring break was extended by an additional week, and now we have to take classes online remotely, likely for the rest of the semester. Yesterday it sunk in how much this coronavirus has logistically affected studying and learning.
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Post by dinosauria101 on Mar 24, 2020 19:48:41 GMT 5
Everywhere is locked down where I am. Like, literally.
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Post by theropod on Mar 24, 2020 23:16:30 GMT 5
Life: An important (probably the most important) thing to consider in the mortality calculations is the number of undiagnosed cases. Merely looking at confirmed recoveries and fatalities doesn’t tell us the whole story. A person who dies from corona will almost certainly go on record and be counted (at least in Europe and the US). But many people who catch corona have no or very mild symptoms, and it is almost impossible to test and count all of those. Essentially, many people will get this virus, never notice, never get tested (but hopefully stay home, thinking they have a cold but not wanting to take any chances), and therefore never get counted in the statistics. Example: Germany has a case-fatality of just 0.5% as of now (Hopkins figures, RKI suggests 0.4%), while the worldwide case-fatality stands at 4.5%. This cannot merely be explained by the quality of care and similar factors, because the healthcare system is not that different from the one for example in northern Italy, which has a far higher apparent case-fatality, and because the vast majority of patients do not even require such care to begin with. There is a smaller number of serious cases, that do. Their mortality is certainly affected by the quality of healthcare they receive (bound to get worse as hospitals are getting crowded, but not enough to hike up a 0.5% lethality to a 15% lethality). That the apparent lethality of closed cases is so high, and that it is rising is not unexpected, because there is a heavy bias towards the more serious cases in counting those. To be clear I am not saying the German case-fatality will stay that low or that it reflects the actual lethality of the virus, it is too early to say that since most cases have no outcome yet. As we get more infections, two things will or can happen: A: There will be too many to count them accurately, making it look like more of those infected die while in truth there are simply more infected people and B: The healthcare system will be overrun and be unable to provide them all with the best possible care (as it happened in Italy). But only the latter is increasing the actual mortality rate of the virus, and it is not because the virus is more deadly than we thought either. And the former is certainly heavily at play in places like Italy or the US, that presumably have several times the number of infected people that the official count would suggest. So let’s all not panic for now, although the situation is nonetheless very serious. Assuming all of us get infected, that doesn’t mean 15% of us will die. coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.htmlexperience.arcgis.com/experience/478220a4c454480e823b17327b2bf1d4
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