COVID-19 Links, facts and discussion. Politics and hyperbole welcome.

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Luca Lorini, the head of anaesthesia and intensive care at a northern Italian hospital believes the type of coronavirus patient is changing.

He said: "They are a bit younger, between 40 to 45 years old and the cases are more complicated.”

inews.co.uk

The type of coronavirus patient in Italy is now younger as the pandemic worsens

Younger people with lots of social contact are more at risk of contracting the disease if they do not stick to social distancing rules
inews.co.uk inews.co.uk
 
I just read on a news feed that 368 people died in Italy on Sunday. Forgive me if that has already been covered, but that is a sobering statistic.
 
Quackillr said:
86% of cases are undetected.

AAAS

science.sciencemag.org science.sciencemag.org
Click to expand...

For those of you that don't know, Science is a top tier research journal with few peers (the journals Nature and Cell also have similar impact factors). I am not in this field so I can't offer any technical comments. Due to the pressing need for information I bet the review process was expedited. You just don't have Science articles, or articles for other journals, approved this quickly. With that being said, this is some of the most solid and important information in this thread.
 
Yea I am a crabby old man that yells at kids. Was out in the driveway rotating tires and the guy down the road walk down with his 3 kids. I told him to just keep them 6 feet away. He gets a phone call and while he is yapping 3 kids from across the street come running out and start mingling with the others. I yelled "get out of here and stay away from anyone that is not your family" They looked at me like I was the grim reaper... I get it, they don't understand this. The guy gets off the phone and apologizes. I point at his 3 kids, on the grass in a pile rolling around laughing. and say "gee, wonder why they closed the schools" True story. I read a good article from a mother in Italy on her regrets of the last 3 weeks and she talked about how they did not control their stir crazy teens and let them run in the streets and others houses because they don't get sick. Understand it now, they don't get sick but they will make the older people sick.
 
schmalts said:
I read a good article from a mother in Italy on her regrets of the last 3 weeks and she talked about how they did not control their stir crazy teens and let them run in the streets and others houses because they don't get sick. Understand it now, they don't get sick but they will make the older people sick.
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A link to that article would be great if you can find it, my youngest is pretty cranky about the lockdown, might give her some context.
 

I'm not sure what the hold up is in some states as far as testing but this mobile testing center is in a town of about 30K people in southern Ohio...hardly an urban hub for Ohio. I've heard of another in Cleveland, one in Dayton, and one in Cincinnati being up and ready this week. My wife had to stop in to the local SOMC branch pharmacy/urgent care the other day to get her prescriptions and they were performing a test on a guy who had called ahead there. They isolated him out in the parking log, came to his car, pulled the sample. The samples are being analyzed by commercial labs from what my nephews (one a pharmacist, one a life flight doctor in training) are telling me.
 
Hunting Wife said:
There are two problems with testing that I think are being conflated. There is the availability of test kits, and then there’s the availability of lab capacity to process them. In some places the bottleneck is one, in some places it’s been the other from what I’ve read. Not saying you’re wrong, just pointing out a distinction, depending on where people are.
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Thank you. You are spot on with that clarification. It’s a mess. There also appears to be a shortage of reagents as well, limiting running full viral panels that could at least tell people if they don’t have something else.
 
Something I am thinking about. Not meant to generate argument:

I am already seeing quite a few people arguing that we should just expose those who aren't in the "at risk" population, let herd immunity develop, and then when the "at risk" folks enter back into the world the virus won't exist in the population in a high enough prevalence for it to be a major concern. This is from Tyler Cowen's blog:

marginalrevolution.com

"Herd immunity," time consistency, and the epidemic yoyo - Marginal REVOLUTION

Saloni has long and detailed arguments against herd immunity. Here is Caplan on Hanson. Here is Kling on Hanson. Here is the Taleb critique. Here is the underlying Imperial College paper everyone is talking about. The bottom line is that “locking everyone up to bend the hospital admissions...
marginalrevolution.com marginalrevolution.com

Let’s say we expose lots of people to the virus rather quickly, to build up herd immunity. Furthermore, we would let commerce and gdp continue to thrive.
Even if that were the very best policy on utilitarian grounds, it might not be time consistent. Once the hospitals start looking like Lombardy, we don’t say “tough tiddlywinks, hail Jeremy Bentham!” Instead we crumble like the complacent softies you always knew we were. We institute quarantines and social distancing and shutdowns and end up with the worst of both worlds.
Alternatively, let’s say we start off being really strict with shutdowns, quarantines, and social distancing. Super-strict, everything closed. For how long can we tolerate the bankruptcies, the unemployment, and the cabin fever? At what point do the small businesspeople, one way or another, violate the orders and resume some form of commercial activity? What about “mitigation fatigue“?
Again, I fear we might switch course and, again, end up with the worst of both worlds. We would take a big hit to gdp but not really stop the spread of the virus.
I also can imagine that we keep switching back and forth. The epidemic yoyo. Because in fact we find none of the scenarios tolerable. Because they are not.

A couple reasons to be skeptical of the "just get herd immunity over with" approach comes from Arnold Kling. http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/herd-immunity-and-exposure-policy/

Two reasons to hesitate about doing this. One is that it is not certain that people who have had the virus are immune. There are anecdotes about people re-acquiring the disease. Perhaps there are multiple strains, rather than “the” virus.
A second reason to hesitate is the high rate of death among health care providers, many of whom are young with healthy immune systems. This suggests that there are some other factors that affect risk, and you want to know more about those other factors before you try this approach.

It is true that we are early on in this, but I think it is also true that this, whatever this is, is not sustainable for months on end, and months on end is what I am more frequently reading this may require. Mainly I am thinking of economic reasons. From a utilitarian perspective there will come a point where the economic ruin of tens of millions, or a hundred million, will be viewed as worse than the deaths of 2 million. We are still trying to stave off a wave that could overwhelm our medical system. Seeing as how we reacted so slowly, and the draconian measures that have worked in places like China are off the table for us, the long game is hard to envision.

I don't know the answer, but I anticipate very tough decisions will have to be made within a few weeks.
 
Well we had a two and a half hour meeting last night with all of the church leadership to discuss short term and long term plans. Rescheduling conferences and events, throwing out ideas for helping those in the church who may need assistance, restricting all church spending due to uncertainties, and how to keep a sense of fellowship and community while not gathering in one setting. Hopefully this is a short term deal, but I feel confident that we've got adequate contingencies in case it stretches long into the summer.
 
Well, a week after my employer made me attend an in-person meeting about COVID-19 I have developed a sore throat and hacking cough.
 
VikingsGuy said:
A link to that article would be great if you can find it, my youngest is pretty cranky about the lockdown, might give her some context.
Click to expand...
www.google.com

I'm an Italian mom under coronavirus lockdown. Here's what I wish I had done differently before things got bad.

Katherine Wilson, a mom of two in Rome, said she wished Italians had listened to warnings about the coronavirus before the situation turned dire.
www.google.com www.google.com

Basically tell her not to be selfish if it gets to that point. They need to understand this is not about them.
 
I have a question. I have seen in MN and ND that the media has said something to the effect of "although we have X confirmed cases, there is no evidence of it spreading yet here". Why would they say that? Do they think it won't spread?
 
MNElkNut said:
I have a question. I have seen in MN and ND that the media has said something to the effect of "although we have X confirmed cases, there is no evidence of it spreading yet here". Why would they say that? Do they think it won't spread?
Click to expand...
Governor Burgum said in both his press conference that although cases are low, we are assuming it is here and spreading. Which is why we are following Minnesota's measures.
 
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