News COVID-19 pandemic

What will happen after the Corona epidemic?

  • The population of Asia will be reduced, accelerating the sustainable development.

    Votes: 14 30.4%
  • The major civilizations will collapse.

    Votes: 12 26.1%
  • The human race will end.

    Votes: 20 43.5%

  • Total voters
    46
  • Poll closed .
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Thunder Chicken

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They apparently cancelled the pandemic due to lack of enthusiasm here, just in time for the Memorial Day weekend. Tried to get a walk in and people simply could not be bothered to step to one side of the walk to give a few feet of space - only two people on a 1/2 mile of street. I crossed the street to avoid some high schoolers, and one decided to cross to my side just to be "funny".


I wish we had a pandemic where the disease preferentially attacked those with the pre-existing condition called "lack of empathy".


I really am out of hope for humankind today.
 

Mister Kite

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I crossed the street to avoid some high schoolers, and one decided to cross to my side just to be "funny".

"Freedom is wasted on people who think that coughing on people is freedom".

[ame="https://twitter.com/AnandWrites/status/1263818537132531714"]Anand Giridharadas on Twitter: "A misbegotten, warped freedom obsession is killing us. https://t.co/KbYaTVtR0O"[/ame]
 
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jgrillo2002

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" it's a fairly normal virus leading to a disease which is potentially severe for the elderly, but for anyone under the age of 60 is no worse than other diseases which we accept as risk of life."

I agree in general but you can't simply consider the elderly as discardable.
Society needs people of all ages.
Indeed. I live with my dad and he is part of the risk list. we got hand sanitizers and we wear bandanas when we can except in our household. this pandemic according to CDC's Redfield is comparable to the 1957 flu pandemic


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957–1958_influenza_pandemic


Compare that to the coronavirus pandemic.
 

Evil_Onyx

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My Grandfather has died, 30min ago, Not directly from Covid-19 but its effects on his mental health and treatment of his conditions where effected. I currently can't tell the rest of the family due to them all being involved with my nieces 10th birthday Zoom party.

That is going to be one hell of a call i've got to make later.
 

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Condolences to you and yours.
Its going to be difficult, best wishes, George.
 

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You mean the Singapore, that just got into news because the illness was spreading completely untested and uncontrolled among lowest class workers?

Yes, that one.I cling to the notion that the progression of the disease in a patient once he contracted it (and hence the mortality) is quite independent of the political nature of the containment measures that tried to prevent him from contracting it in the first place.




Yeah, great example. Just ignore any event when the virus does not suit your theories.

Also, you seem to use numbers from early in the pandemic and claim all will stay like that. You use current IFR as final IFR, despite already CFR opposing your claims.

I'm not sure what event I ignore, but I'm happy to be corrected. You seemed happy enough to cite the Heinsberg study - till I did the numbers with it and they didn't back up your... shall I say... more dramatic assertions.

As for the numbers now - you can use the current number of dead divided by recovered in Singapore (I assume you don't dispute that the recovered and dead will both stay that way?) to get an upper bound on the mortality - as of today, that gives us 23 dead for 13882 recovered or a mortality of <0.165%.


4throck said:
I agree in general but you can't simply consider the elderly as discardable.
Society needs people of all ages.

I don't think I did that at any point.

My point is rather that a mortality rate based on e.g. a sample of people with an average age of 74 is a poor predictor for the actual danger a disease poses to the rest of the population. And age-differential mortality is a far better concept.

My second point is that the news focus on six of 4500 people is giving a biased perception of what the personal risk actually is. I don't think that it's necessary to keep everyone in holy terror for their own lifes (e.g. by media coverage on the rare severe cases among young people) to bring people to the realization that it's a good thing to be cautious for the sake of the elderly.

And my third point would be that I believe that asking an 18 year old to not go through all the usual coming of age rituals for the mid-future despite a low personal risk is also a tough thing to ask - and should not be discarded when weighing the risk for others.
 
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Urwumpe

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Your big problem is: You miss the point. Even if most people who die are pretty old, the illness also affects the working age population negatively. And that also by the plain fact that you don't need to die to be critically ill.

Of course more older people than younger die of the circumstances that being in intensive care alone can kill them - plus any effect of the disease. Technology is no good replacement for a working human body. But that does not mean, that those who get out of intensive care alive had a good life there and no negative effects remain. Also, by the nature HOW the illness kills, which we know already from peer reviewed studies, we can be sure, that there will be bad long-term effects. And even if people just need artificial ventilation in a normal hospital bed: They will have damages to the lung that won't cure themselves in years. Many of those will be unable to return to their jobs.

And even if you then go by saying: Who die are old and who needs old people anyway? Old people are humans too. Old people are parents. Grandparents. Teachers. People who are often important for other people. People who often contribute to their families, for example by helping raising children. Letting them die seven years earlier of COVID-19 on the average is a big loss. They are not half-dead when they get the disease.

THAT is the point.
 
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4throck

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asking an 18 year old to not go through all the usual coming of age rituals for the mid-future despite a low personal risk is also a tough thing to ask - and should not be discarded when weighing the risk for others.
Well, those rituals can be done latter, but the dead can't come back.

I don't think I did that at any point.

Yes, you didn't say it.
We are writing on a forum, our opinions are condensed to a few lines, we are using english, etc, etc.
All is cool, just exchanging ideas. Nothing of this is personal :thumbup:
 
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Thorsten

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Even if most people who die are pretty old, the illness also affects the working age population negatively.

I didn't miss that - they're on the graph in the lower right. Just not very many - about six of 4500 in a working age population get the severe form and need to be in an ICU.

Your statement lacks any quantitative part by the way - any illness affects the working age population negatively.


Who die are old and who needs old people anyway? Old people are humans too. Old people are parents. Grandparents. Teachers. People who are often important for other people. People who often contribute to their families, for example by helping raising children. Letting them die seven years earlier of COVID-19 on the average is a big loss.

THAT is the point.

So - if THAT is the point - isn't that a bit callous to people who happen to die of... a traffic accident, losing, say, 50 years of life? Why wasn't every effort made to save their life - say by hard speed limits? Harsh punishments for speeding? Why is their life somehow the price of the freedom to drive fast? Or the people who get severely injured and, say, lose a leg? Or what of the people who die of influenza? Are 25.000 dead not worth a lockdown? What of the people who die of a heart attack - isn't their life worth every effort - at least a much more dense net of qualified emergency response? Specialized units in every hospital rather than only a few? On-call specialists 24/7 instead of only during the day? Why is their life worth a smaller health insurance bill for everyone else?

What makes a potential death by the Coronavirus worth basically any sacrifice by society in your book while the same society shrugs off death by any other cause as 'it just happens'?

If we take the argument 'we need to go to any length to prevent people from dying' seriously (in actual fact, human history has shown clearly that it's not so much preventing but delaying...) - then why are - much cheaper - measures not passed which would have saved and would continue to save many lifes?

Isn't there something fundamentally wrong with the idea 'let's spend a few millions so that this person doesn't die of the Coronavirus, but let's not invest a few ten thousand to prevent him dying of a heart attack'?

It's a kind of poor man's moral philosophy to say 'we need to do everything' - the simple fact is that we as society simply can't. And it isn't fair focusing on one potential cause of death - it would be fair (at least in my humble opinion) to give every risk the same attention proportional to its severity and the same proportional effort to prevent it.

And in order to do that, we need to be able to assess the actual risk from different dangers. And for that, we need to look at numbers and statistics - which you seem to dislike so much.

Note that I've never been doing anything else here but collect numbers to try to realistically assess risks (in contrast to what the news media often seems to do, i.e. focusing on the most shocking and spectacular findings). That I find difficult enough to do properly - to turn that into a normative statement what a society *should* do ... is a question on a wholly different level which I'm not even attempting to tackle.

So you're quite out of line when you try to put 'sacrifice the elderly' into my mouth - this does not logically follow from the observation that the risk for young people is much smaller than usually assumed (and in fact, I stated that I had not said that right above your post).
 
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Urwumpe

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So - if THAT is the point - isn't that a bit callous to people who happen to die of... a traffic accident, losing, say, 50 years of life?


If you cause this traffic accident by driving 150 km/h at night in a city, what do you expect is the problem? That this traffic accident simply happened? Or that you did everything to make sure it will happen one day?


What if you are not dying in the traffic accident you caused, but somebody else, like driving over a child, because you had everything perfectly under control... not. Can you blame the child for ruining your day?
 

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Local media report:

The name X Æ A-12 was a bit crazy for California. Therefore, Elon Musk and Grimes had to change the name of their newborn son to X Æ A-XII. That reveals the 32-year-old singer on her Instagram page.

X Æ A-12, pronounced Ex Ash A Twelve, was banned because it contains numbers.
 

Urwumpe

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From monday on, schools in Hessia should go back to regular operations with masked children, even at elementary school.

Considering the latest news in Germany about how easily a new superspreader event can take place in closed spaces, I doubt this will be a good idea. But then, it is only a few weeks left until schools out for summer anyway.
 

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Here opening up had no major negative effect on the spread. Numbers have stabilized, but no major increase.

There's some highly localized transmission due to bad housing conditions for workers. They get infected where they live together in bunks, not at work or during transport.
Other than that, on most places there are almost no new cases.

I guess the challenge is to track down such events quickly and prevent spread.
That's not much of a problem in a school, where all students and workers are the same each day.

But it will be a problem with unrestricted air travel.
Can't understand how the EU has decided that a plane full of random people, sitting side by side for hours is no problem...
 

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Here opening up had no major negative effect on the spread. Numbers have stabilized, but no major increase.


We had two superspreader events in the past days: One was a restaurant in Leer, now with 20 confirmed cases and over 100 suspected cases, because people rented it for an event.


And a baptist church in Frankfurt, with now 107 confirmed cases and many more suspected in quarantine. The event was already two weeks ago and the people travelled to the church from multiple districts of Hessia, that is why people fear that much more new infections will come to light in the following days.
 

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Yes, that was on the news. But those cases are relatively localized, can be tracked and hopefully contained.
What I'm saying is that the fear of wild random contagion from taking a train or going to the supermarket is not happening so far.
 
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Urwumpe

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Yes, that was on the news. But those cases are relatively localized, can be tracked and hopefully contained.


No. The church had visitors from all over the state, but did not at least record who attended the mess. It was a full scale violation against disease protection laws.


We are now pretty much back to where we had been with Ischgl, just with better tests and a more aware population. But we have again fallen behind the virus and now have to catch it.
 
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