Only if you believe that crowded bars and similar things don’t have any effect on spreading.
In Norway, and I would guess it is similar in Denmark, 60 % has died in institutions. Only about 35 % died in hospitals. The rest at home.
That’s the nature of this disease. Age is the largest factor regarding chance of dying, while it spreads like wildfire in the rest of the population, except the young. It doesn’t attack the young, and therefore cannot multiply and cause further spread (at any rate worth considering).
LeSving wrote:
Only if you believe that crowded bars and similar things don’t have any effect on spreading.
I fail to see the connection. Please enlighten me.
It doesn’t attack the young, and therefore cannot multiply and cause further spread (at any rate worth considering).
AFAIK this is an unknown.
For sure the young don’t get ill and die anywhere near as much, but one hypothesis for why closing schools doesn’t do a lot is that an asymptomatic carrier is much less infectious than one who is coughing all over everybody.
Where this fails is when the young person goes home to the family and spends a lot of time with them. They will probably get it then, and the older ones may die.
The “spends a lot of time with” factor was prob99 big in the ski chalet business. Anyone who has done a chalet holiday will know how close everybody is. In terms of mixing, it isn’t anything like a normal hotel holiday (where you mix while eating) which in turn is (potentially) nothing like a self catering holiday (where you can avoid all close mixing). Heavy apres-ski is likely similar.
The other consideration in keeping schools open is the risk to teachers.
Personally I think a little diversity in approach is a good thing: gives us a chance to see what is effective and what is not.
It seems that Covid-19 is much less of a lung disease than we thought, and more of a systemic infection that affects the endothelial cells.
Paper from the University Hospital Zurich
Thinking about it this way might change how to treat the disease, and it also explains much of the differences in lethality between young/old and people with/without cardiovascular conditions. This would, as far as I understand, also mean that people who die of a heart attack or stroke may more often be dying “of” Sars-CoV-2 than just “with” the virus.
Peter wrote:
For sure the young don’t get ill and die anywhere near as much, but one hypothesis for why closing schools doesn’t do a lot is that an asymptomatic carrier is much less infectious than one who is coughing all over everybody.
Yes, especially one who never goes on to develop the disease.
In a viral disease, once the virus has entered the body, a race between the immune system and the virus starts. The virus has a head start, and at some point the immune system ‘overtakes’ it, and the infection recedes.
So I would not worry too much about asymptomatic carriers that never develop the disease, they may not even get to the stage where they ‘shed’ the virus in any significant way.
We are not looking for a guaranteed non-infection, just for a replication rate significantly below one.
skydriller wrote:
Hmmm…Am I the only person that wonders what happens if we have no economy left after this (ie money, jobs etc). I mean, does “the government” have a magic money tree I dont know about? I think that the train of thought is, that it doesnt really matter how many people are “saved” if none of them have a way to make a living afterwards – might we then be thinking it would have been better if a few less people had been “saved”? That is certainly not something I want to really think about too much…
No you aren’t. Language suggesting governments and politicians are sacrificing people is just unhelpful. There is a clear balance that must be struck between medical risk and economic risk. And at least in the UK even medical risk is complicated as it is clear that people are now dying as they are not going to hospital for heart attacks and strokes. It is just not feasible to keep the lockdown in place for too long. As with aviation, there must be an acceptable level of risk.
Looking at this in terms of control systems theory…
It is always very difficult to control a system which has a long time lag.
A classic example is controlling an oven. There is a long time delay from the heater element power level to the internal temperature. There are obvious ways to shorten this e.g. fan assistance and a thin heater element in front of the fan, and then you can get better control.
The primitive way is to tweak the system very slowly, on a timescale which is much longer than the delay. In this case we don’t have that luxury.
The smart way is (variously) called feedforward correction, where you know that tweak x will produce a result y. In this case we can’t do that because so little is known about the system.
As I said before, it’s such a shame we get no analysis on the media. Just the same banal patronising stuff. There must be data on who caught it where, etc.
Yes – I wouldn’t like to be a school teacher now. But I guess they can implement some spacing.
Peter wrote:
The “spends a lot of time with” factor was prob99 big in the ski chalet business. Anyone who has done a chalet holiday will know how close everybody is. In terms of mixing, it isn’t anything like a normal hotel holiday (where you mix while eating) which in turn is (potentially) nothing like a self catering holiday (where you can avoid all close mixing). Heavy apres-ski is likely similar.
I think the main issue of high transmission rates is getting in contact with people who you don’t get contact with usually, factors like bars parties, ski resorts, public transports, indoor games, retirement homes, hospitals, airports lounges, shopping malls…are the places where you have to worry, no one has the resources to trace & sort that out in terms of complexity
Factors like childrens to teachers, childrens to family, person to work place, person to home are slightly exaggerated as main drivers, while it does not stop infections it is easy to stop it when it hit school, workplace or house
If the goal is to keep it under control after a successful lockdown, it is clear where one would start but you can’t do that unless for each cluster everybody has enough protection and you have at least 1 test for each cluster.
JasonC wrote:
There is a clear balance that must be struck between medical risk and economic risk
Yes, there is balance but there is the right order and way to dog it,
Those who push for economy first while downplaying virus health risk are not doing anything good for economy long-term, even if it turns out they are right, it will hard to convince other people to buy airline tickets, go out for restaurants, go to work if there is a pile of infected bodies sitting next or if they risk sleeping on the ground in a hospital…those who accepted short-term economic risk and took the virus seriously, are now having it under control and they are opening their economies while other countries are still debating if economy/health or if this is “winter flu” or “Black Death”
Now matter how one play it, the economic pain will be proportional to spikes of virus infection rates
There will be no economy if lot of people get sick (this an economic fact, not a moral argument)
