dublinpilot wrote:
That leads me to the question: Is it feasible to genetically sequence a swab from everyone who reports to their doctor with a runny nose, cough, feeling unwell or anything else that we suspect is virus or bacteria related?
Short answer: No!
At least with the current technologies we have it is still an impossible task to find a virus we do not know from a random swab. There’s just too much “biochemical waste” in it to find something meaningful. It would be literally like searching for the needle in the haystack – just that we do not know if it is made of metal and not even if it is a needle we are looking for or something else. More like: Here’s the haystack – find something – but not just something but “the thing” …
Truth is that we actually have been kind of lucky that we had SARS/MERS just some years ago. it would have taken much longer to identify Covid if we did not test for SARS to figure out “it is not exactly SARS but something similar”.
Silvaire wrote:
Some might see it as narrow minded to believe that you can you can quarantine all others in your own self interest, at their expense, on the off chance that one them might have a hidden illness that you personally don’t want to contract.
And this is why we need a good balance.
Coming back to the property protection topic. We figured out over the last 30.000 years that society doesn’t work if we say: “Whoever is stronger than me can take my car”. But obviously it also doesn’t work if we say: “Nobody is allowed to leave their home because if they do so, they could potentially steal my car”. When it comes to cars, we have already found a well established middle ground: It is ok to look at someone else’s car but taking it for a ride w/o permission is not ok.
Same we need to establish for infections like Covid: It is ok to leave your home (obviously!) but it is not ok to travel into a region where the case numbers are beyond a certain theshold. It is okay to spend time in public places (doesn’t matter if for work or for leisure) but it’s not ok to do so without a mask.
SIlvaire’s post is one of the few notes of sanity in recent pages.
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The NHS have indeed started on the 65+s. I got a text this morning and was vaccinated within the hour :-)
Perhaps the ‘new normal’ for the 21st century is simply that infectious disease is a real concern for humankind again, rather than just something we read about in history books.
For quite some time I thought that would happen once we run out of working antibiotics, or something massive like the original SARS or Ebola – but I never thought about a middle-of-the-road virus…. so didn’t see that one coming at all. The most striking feature remains for me that this is not weak enough to ignore and not strong enough to justify the severity of some of the actions proposed here.
@Mooney_driver, I simply think lockdowns can’t eradicate the disease fully. China locked down Wubei and parts of the Wuhan province, it is still there. I don’t think there has been a pandemic disease in the history of mankind that was eradicated that way; SARS / MERS maybe came closest, but both never had widespread community transmission and, apparently, lacked transmissibility before symptoms so track & trace was enough. And all the isolation and track/tracing has not prevented Ebola outbreaks, because the virus reservoir remains.
In the past, either natural selection (mild/highly infective wins over severe) or vaccination have proven successful.
Cobalt wrote:
I simply think lockdowns can’t eradicate the disease fully. China locked down Wubei and parts of the Wuhan province, it is still there
Cobalt wrote:
And all the isolation and track/tracing has not prevented Ebola outbreaks, because the virus reservoir remains.
Absolutely sure – examples like Polio have shown that it takes highly effective vaccines and several decades to really irradiate a disease “fully”. But full irradiation is not what we need. What we need is enough control to keep infections low. And for that, a lockdown has proven to be an extremely effective measure. One can (and should) debate if it’s worth it, too expensive or even possible to lockdown an individual European country. But China, Australia, New Zeeland and others have proven that if we do it it would be effective.
The problem of all the countries we are coming from is not that the lockdown has not been effective – the problem is, that not a single country we life in (except perhaps Spain and Italy for some weeks last year) has ever tried a lockdown. The problem is, that all of us have been suffering for several months (some longer some shorter) from a “semi lockdown” that is significantly restriction our freedoms but not enough to substantially change the disease progression.
Restricting airport opening times and travel to business reasons is not a lockdown – grounding of the entire GA and air fleet would be a lockdown.
I think both of your assertions are true, in particular that
- a real lockdown can bring infection rates down to very low levels
- a semi-lockdown does not make enough of a difference
Trouble is, we have not found a level of ‘lockdown’ that is ‘good enough’ to keep R around 1.0 or slightly less, and I strongly suspect that we would find living under conditions would be intolerable. Because we know allowing people into pubs and restaurants, even with some distancing measures in place, was on the wrong side of 1.0; that’s what happened in the UK.
I made a back-of-the-envelope calculation several hundred posts ago which put the cost of the lockdown into perspective of the estimated life years saved, and it was in the right ballpark.
If we manage to get death rates and severe infections down by a factor of 10, there is absolutely no justification to lock down more, and all those who are not at risk anymore or never were will revolt.
Malibuflyer wrote:
Oh yes – from the point of view of the “I’ll manage my own risk” philosophy everybody who travels from A to B made the decision to risk bringing a disease from this A to this B. It is no excuse that these people might have been too narrow minded to realize that they took that risk for me.
I don’t understand why many focus on travelling as if it’s the primary source of all problems. There is nothing special about travelling that affects the spread of the virus. How do you define travelling? From the perspective of infecting others, it does not matter whether you travel to another country or another street in your town. It only matters with how many new people you contact and the closeness of this contact.
Airborne_Again wrote:
Generally speaking, conservatives prefer closed borders while liberals prefer open borders. Of course such basic political views affect how we view the pandemic.
I very much prefer open borders under normal circumstances. But NOT in cases of crisis. Anyway, Borders per se are simply one way of defining which area to keep open or shut. Much easier and less nationalistic would be to declare a full blown quarantine all over the place and keep it until no more cases turn up. 2 months or abouts shoudl suffice. Unfortunately, the time for that has passed as well by now.
Valentin wrote:
What I can’t understand, is that some people seem to be ready to live in the world like that to avoid a 1% risk of dying (probably even less than 1%). Is there a point in the life prolongation completely sacrificing its quality?
1% risk of dying plus a much higher percent of being permanently disabled by long Covid. It is simply frustrating to see that there are still people out there who think this is a flu.
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I know ad hominem attacks are frowned upon, but let me just say that I have now got quite good at not only ignoring everything he posts, but also the resulting futile discussion. If someone wants to believe that doom is nigh, the end of the world is upon us, etc, sure, have at it. Just please don’t bother the rest of us with it.
Peter (whose every word I do read, unless it is a refutation of something M_D says) mentions the extra vulnerability of those 60+/70+/whatever. But I can’t help wondering whether this isn’t just due to the generally deteriorating health as people get older. In other words, is someone who is 75 but in overall excellent health, significantly more vulnerable than someone who is 55 and healthy? Most people over 75 – certainly here in the US – are not in the greatest of general health – diabetes, obesity, cardiac issues, etc.
