zuutroy wrote:
If you had a 10 day holiday booked in California at the end of the month, would you go (from Ireland) as things stand now? Genuinely don’t know what to do!
I would go. They won’t stop you coming back to Europe.
10% of the time it works 100% of the time…
My view is that if you want to divide the EU all you need to do is sit back, wait and watch.
I wonder if airfield’s will start to shut down a bit. Daydreaming, wouldn’t it be nice if they could now find a way to come and go with minimal interaction with people. If it was to stick after even better.
Off_Field wrote:
I don’t know how trustworthy the data from Russia
Probably on par with China, Iran and Iraq…
Zuutroy, I think by the day your holiday will come, the US will have blocked the rest of Europe too, so the choice won’t be an issue anymore 
Graphs show France is about 8 days behind Italy so I expect shutdown middle of next week. Our President just declared school shutdown but he just doesn’t want to be the first after Italy.
I find our nations quite arrogant with Italy, and with our own elders. The message from the elite is like « but we are not italians right ? ». And they think more about companies failing than people dying. Companies we can rebuild, we can’t resuscitate people, as Christian as I am.
Some italians say many of their victims are 40-50 years old. Be very cautious guys.
In Executive Orders, Iran sends a form of Ebola to the US. Jack Ryan as president deploys the National Guard to quarantine the states where cases appeared. Neither him nor Tom Clancy were liberals AFAIK.
Although there are no reported cases in Highland Region (Scotland) to date, the Inverness Courier reports the following this evening:
“She was leaving the hospital with my dad when the nursing manger caught up with her, and said she was sorry but due to the global pandemic being declared her operation had to be cancelled.”
He claims the nurse manager told his mum that “all general anaesthetic surgery at Raigmore had been cancelled”
(The cancer patient is said to be a dentist in her 50s, and in pain. Raigmore is the only major hospital within 100 miles of Inverness, and the only one in Highland Region.)
That’s unbelievable. Can they really be so crazy?
You still need a strong economy for healthcare systems to work? a short dip in the sock markets is not going hurt everybody in their life (probably those who want to cash in their pension?) but restricting normal life: travel, education, jobs… does even one month none-sense and will hurt everybody economy
At least on aviation, airliners those with solid balance sheet will go bust after 1month of travel ban (even if routes opens low appetite from tourism will dig a big hole), this is far more serious than 10bn from Volcanic Ash and it is now going toward 100bn from 9/11 Attacks
MedEwok wrote:
500% right now, as I possess the single most valuable skills in this crisis: The ability to treat severe cases of respiratory failure requiring artificial ventilation
Is it possible to single out a specific condition as cause of death (if patients die), i.e. viral pneumonia ? Which cannot be treated, only with general care and intubation ?
Overheard after the UK budget came out:
“How on earth will they fund all that?”
“Inheritance tax.”
But in Australia at least, there is no inheritance tax. Presumably a lot of countries will end up printing money. It is true that first world countries have recently been top heavy in terms of ageing populations, and a lower pension bill and healthcare costs will ease the burden. I say this as a statement of fact rather than as something to which we should aspire or have actively chosen.
That said, we have become all too ready to enforce a prolonged, uncomfortable, undignified, over-medicalised death on many of our very frail elderly, and for a proportion of them this pandemic will offer a natural way out. I am tired of sitting late at night on wards listening to ninety-somethings crying out over and over “Mummy! Where are you Mummy?! I miss you Mummy. I’m a good girl. Why won’t you come?” then filling them with antibiotics so that they can continue to do so indefinitely.
Aside from being a form of torture, this is extremely expensive. I hope that we will move away from prolonging life at all costs and spend our healthcare money more wisely. There are a lot of people who would be healthier, live longer and be out of pain if we could give them new hips – which we can’t currently afford to do at the rate we should. Modern medicine could devour the whole economy should we let it do so and I think we need to be more judicious in what we ask of it.
I do not see that there will be such a thing as a short sharp shock to deal with this. For example, China has put the lid on the outbreak for now, but it still has large populations without immunity. What I expect is that when countries have controlled their outbreaks they will then need to continue with less severe measures in order to keep it under control, otherwise their populations will simply be reinfected and they will find themselves back at square 1.
The question is whether there will be some economically and socially bearable level of restrictions, sufficient to either slow the rate of infections to a manageable level, or even keep R0 (the number of new cases each infected person infects) below 1. If so then we are likely to be subject to them for many months. If not, then I expect we may just need to take Silvaire’s approach and let everybody take their chances. But it will take a while to find out.
We may be swapping the costs of caring for elderly for the costs of caring for younger patients who may end up disabled in the long term, or who die. I think it is too soon to know how well people do when they are off the ventilators. Some will go back to a normal life, but it is likely that many will take months or years to get better, and may never recover fully. Lives lost of people of working age are economically valuable.
I suspect there will be long-term effects in how we live our lives, for example in terms of travel or socialising, or working from home, or our willingness to contemplate catastrophes such as environmental change, but I think it is too early to tell what they will be. And they will be choices rather than inevitabilities. However I wouldn’t invest in the cruise liner industry.
kwlf wrote:
I do not see that there will be such a thing as a short sharp shock to deal with this. For example, China has put the lid on the outbreak for now, but it still has large populations without immunity. What I expect is that when countries have controlled their outbreaks they will then need to continue with less severe measures in order to keep it under control, otherwise their populations will simply be reinfected and they will find themselves back at square 1.
Economies have a way of adjusting. In the short term this will be very messy. Over time I expect the impact will be more muted. But this is an economic view not a medical one.
