For WHOm the Bell Tolls - Covid-19 #11

[Werthead]

1 hour ago, JoannaL said:

Do you not have compulsory quarantine for anyone who comes from outside? As far as I know the EU forbad all foreign arrivals. And if you are a citizen returning, you have to go into self-isolation for two weeks upon return. Even between the countries there are similar regulations in place. In Germany for example you can cross the border if you have a good reason (for example if you live in a border region and go to work in a diffretn country), but the moment you stay for a night somewhere else you have to go in the two week self-isolation.

We are no longer members of the EU and no, the UK is doing absolutely nothing to check, quarantine or test new arrivals.

[Jeor]

1 hour ago, ljkeane said:

Looking at the US it's notable how much worse it is in New York/New Jersey than all the other States. There are some other areas where it isn't great but it doesn't seem to be on the path to spiralling out of control like it has in New York anywhere else at the moment. I'd assumed that New York was just a little ahead of other places being a major international travel hub and we'd see other cities in similar straits but that doesn't seem to be the case at the moment. Sort of good news I suppose.

New York might have had a particularly tough time given the enormous population density.

A cursory search suggests that the other big American cities like LA and Chicago have less than half the population density that NYC does.

[BigFatCoward]

13 minutes ago, Jeor said:

New York might have had a particularly tough time given the enormous population density.

A cursory search suggests that the other big American cities like LA and Chicago have less than half the population density that NYC does.

Do Chicago and LA have subways? I'd have thought nothing would spread disease like Tube/Subway. 

[Rippounet]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/12/world/middleeast/coronavirus-israel-mossad.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article&fbclid=IwAR3R2ZWYo0-BGzQT6AuEGwo1ebVRCZlYK_95oKr63qZKpJOLFcKu7pqzb_E

The Mossad and the coronavirus...

[Heartofice]

10 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

Do Chicago and LA have subways? I'd have thought nothing would spread disease like Tube/Subway. 

I always suspected the London tube did more to spread the disease in the UK than anything else. It is always so crowded  and even after lockdown, with construction workers still crowding into reduced services it always looked like a Petri dish.

Stopping people going to parks is one thing but the real issue has to be public transport.

[mcbigski]

32 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

Do Chicago and LA have subways? I'd have thought nothing would spread disease like Tube/Subway. 

New York has a very high use of subway and mass transit.  Los Angeles has a subway system now i believe but it's very recent whereas New York and probably Chicago too have lines that predate the automobile.  

So a whole lot denser than LA, where most of the development came after the auto, so much more sprawal.  Sounds like there's probably a corrrealtion between daily mass rides per capita and Covid deaths across these three cities at least.  No idea where you d find those numbers though.

Even in New York City the US isnt seeing the sorts of capacity issues the Italian health system had.  It was important to keep the curve flat enough not to overwhelm.  When do we reach the point where the best policy becomes heightening the curve?  In my opinion locking down for two years or more waiting for a vaccine that is only speculative is frankly insane.  Flattening the curve wasn't about reducing total number of infected, mostly about staying below treatment capacity (at least that was the stated concern.)

 

Also interesting:

https://www.boston25news.com/news/cdc-reviewing-stunning-universal-testing-results-boston-homeless-shelter/Z253TFBO6RG4HCUAARBO4YWO64/

[Jeor]

21 minutes ago, mcbigski said:

Also interesting:

https://www.boston25news.com/news/cdc-reviewing-stunning-universal-testing-results-boston-homeless-shelter/Z253TFBO6RG4HCUAARBO4YWO64/

I think we all expect that there would be a high number of asymptomatic cases out there that we don't know about, but those numbers are crazy. Herd immunity might be a lot closer than we think.

That being said, I don't think we can reach too many conclusions until there's an easy, cheap antibody test that everyone can take pretty easily that will give us a much better indication of the population spread.

[Fragile Bird]

I heard a brief news story that Russian television was warning people to expect ‘Italian-like numbers of deaths’.

And boy oh boy, look at Singapore. On April 1 they had 1,000 cases, and now they have 5,050, 728 new cases yesterday and 623 today. At this rate they’ll be past Australia in a few days. Roughly the same population.

[Jeor]

8 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

I heard a brief news story that Russian television was warning people to expect ‘Italian-like numbers of deaths’.

And boy oh boy, look at Singapore. On April 1 they had 1,000 cases, and now they have 5,050, 728 new cases yesterday and 623 today. At this rate they’ll be past Australia in a few days. Roughly the same population.

Actually, Australia has five times the population of Singapore (25m to 5m). Sydney to Singapore is about the same though, 5m each.

Australia has been helped by the fact that we have extremely low population density nationwide, and even in the highly urbanised big state capital cities, there's been massive urban sprawl. Sydney is one of the geographically largest cities in the world - e.g. the same area as Greater Los Angeles - but we've "only" got 5 million people to LA's 20m.

Google tells me that Singapore has 8358 people per square kilometre, whereas Sydney, which is probably the densest part of the country, has only 430 people per square kilometre.

[JoannaL]

so all over the world, remdesivir is tested. but now first results are public by a chicago hospital. They look very promising. (Unfortunately again just a prepublication, and so on ... so not 100% sure results)

https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/16/early-peek-at-data-on-gilead-coronavirus-drug-suggests-patients-are-responding-to-treatment/

 

[Fragile Bird]

1 hour ago, Jeor said:

Actually, Australia has five times the population of Singapore (25m to 5m). Sydney to Singapore is about the same though, 5m each.

Australia has been helped by the fact that we have extremely low population density nationwide, and even in the highly urbanised big state capital cities, there's been massive urban sprawl. Sydney is one of the geographically largest cities in the world - e.g. the same area as Greater Los Angeles - but we've "only" got 5 million people to LA's 20m.

Google tells me that Singapore has 8358 people per square kilometre, whereas Sydney, which is probably the densest part of the country, has only 430 people per square kilometre.

Argh, yes of course! I was thinking of Taiwan, population 23.8 M.

[Fez]

4 hours ago, Jeor said:

An American boarder would probably know better, I'm guessing governors might be able to close their own borders, but a nationally coordinated plan would be more or less impossible.

It's complicated. The Fifth Amendment in the US Constitution guarantees citizens the same freedom of movement across and between states that they have in their own state. You could interpret that to mean that if your state was locked down, than the state borders could also close down. But if your state is no longer locked down within its borders, than the borders cannot be closed either.

However, enforcement of the various Amendments (with exceptions like the 1st, 2nd, and 4th that get ruled on a lot) is a tricky thing, and there's not a lot of precedent on it. If a state did close their borders, the Supreme Court would have to make a ruling on whether the Court or the President/Congress even has the power to force the state to re-open (and even if they have that power; whether a public health emergency can override that).

2 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

Do Chicago and LA have subways? I'd have thought nothing would spread disease like Tube/Subway. 

Most major US cities have a subway system, but its usually very small and not used much. For example, the greater Atlanta population is 4.6 million people. Their subway system has 38 stations and an average daily ridership of 230,000 people. The greater New York City population is certainly larger (by some definitions its over 20 million), but it has 472 stations and an average daily ridership of 5.8 million people.

No other subway system in the US compares to NYC. I saw a stat a few years ago that NYC accounts for well over half of daily subway rides in the US.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

4 hours ago, ljkeane said:

Looking at the US it's notable how much worse it is in New York/New Jersey than all the other States. There are some other areas where it isn't great but it doesn't seem to be on the path to spiralling out of control like it has in New York anywhere else at the moment. I'd assumed that New York was just a little ahead of other places being a major international travel hub and we'd see other cities in similar straits but that doesn't seem to be the case at the moment. Sort of good news I suppose.

Perhaps, but they're also testing at higher rates compared to other places. I still remain in the camp that places all over the country, and the world. are vastly under-reporting. I keep going back to the places I've traveled to in the developing world and wonder how their numbers are not exploding. 
 

2 hours ago, mcbigski said:

New York has a very high use of subway and mass transit.  Los Angeles has a subway system now i believe but it's very recent whereas New York and probably Chicago too have lines that predate the automobile.  

So a whole lot denser than LA, where most of the development came after the auto, so much more sprawal.  Sounds like there's probably a corrrealtion between daily mass rides per capita and Covid deaths across these three cities at least.  No idea where you d find those numbers though.

Even in New York City the US isnt seeing the sorts of capacity issues the Italian health system had.  It was important to keep the curve flat enough not to overwhelm.  When do we reach the point where the best policy becomes heightening the curve?  In my opinion locking down for two years or more waiting for a vaccine that is only speculative is frankly insane.  Flattening the curve wasn't about reducing total number of infected, mostly about staying below treatment capacity (at least that was the stated concern.)

 

Also interesting:

https://www.boston25news.com/news/cdc-reviewing-stunning-universal-testing-results-boston-homeless-shelter/Z253TFBO6RG4HCUAARBO4YWO64/

L.A. transportation isn't comparable to NYC. There is a lot of mass transit, to be clear, but many in L.A. or who work in the city have their own wheels. That's less the case in NYC. The latter reminds me a lot of Buenos Aires. Public transit is just a fact of life in some places.

Chicago, from my experiences living a bit there part time as a kid, is more like L.A. than NYC. There's still lots of public transportation, but a lot of people still have their own ride. @Iskaral Pust, I haven't lived there in a long time though. Is that still true?

[Kalbear]

From what I saw of NYC's breakout map it had little to do with subway usage and far more to do with economic status. The hardest hit areas were ones with the least affluent people, and they weren't taking the subway. Chances are good that it had little to do with public transport and far more to do with being made to work in essential services or otherwise needing the money. 

 

I'll see if I can find the map, but it was pretty eye opening. 

[BigFatCoward]

New York/New Jersey by itself is second only to Italy for corona deaths.

 That's fucking insane. 

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, Jeor said:

I think we all expect that there would be a high number of asymptomatic cases out there that we don't know about, but those numbers are crazy. Herd immunity might be a lot closer than we think.

That being said, I don't think we can reach too many conclusions until there's an easy, cheap antibody test that everyone can take pretty easily that will give us a much better indication of the population spread.

These figures are very dubious. They seem to be taking what they've seen in an isolated case in Boston and coming to some very odd conclusions. This is the same problem as the early Chinese study suggesting 50-75% of cases being asymptomatic, but in that study a large number of the people in their group subsequently developed symptoms (the outlier being 30 days after first testing positive for the virus and after the initial study was published).

If anything, these figures may be suggesting that the number of people developing symptoms later on may be significantly higher than was initially thought, and the virus takes longer to clear the system that originally thought.

Another German and Chinese study based on a longer study period seemed to suggest that the real number of asymptomatic cases is closer to 30%.

[BigFatCoward]

It really wouldn't surprise me if someone somewhere was deliberately letting it run wild through an enclosed population. Just to ascertain the true level of people who are not symptomatic.

Death row inmates in america should watch out.  

[Iskaral Pust]

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

Chicago, from my experiences living a bit there part time as a kid, is more like L.A. than NYC. There's still lots of public transportation, but a lot of people still have their own ride. @Iskaral Pust, I haven't lived there in a long time though. Is that still true?

The L-train system in Chicago generally feels almost as heavily trafficked as the NYC subway, in terms of crowding in the cars/carriages and on platforms.  But the overall capacity and ridership is much lower, even scaling to population size.  Same applies to suburban rail systems. 

Lots of Chicagoans don’t own cars, especially Millenials in the good neighborhoods.  But the car ownership rate is probably still much higher than NYC.

Also Chicago has wider sidewalks, and the stores and restaurants are less cramped than NYC.  And very few people are out walking in Chicago in February and March.  These things will probably affect transmission rates. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

24 minutes ago, Iskaral Pust said:

The L-train system in Chicago generally feels almost as heavily trafficked as the NYC subway, in terms of crowding in the cars/carriages and on platforms.  But the overall capacity and ridership is much lower, even scaling to population size.  Same applies to suburban rail systems. 

Lots of Chicagoans don’t own cars, especially Millenials in the good neighborhoods.  But the car ownership rate is probably still much higher than NYC.

Also Chicago has wider sidewalks, and the stores and restaurants are less cramped than NYC.  And very few people are out walking in Chicago in February and March.  These things will probably affect transmission rates. 

Not sure the weather is much better in NYC than in Chicago, but I had never stopped and considered the width of the sidewalks.

And for a point of reference, most of my time with my dad there was during the second Jordan's threepeat in the mid to late 90's, when I was like 8-10. Things understandably have changed.

[Kalbear]

Ah, here we go - here's that map I mentioned.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/nyc-map-shows-neighborhoods-hit-hardest-coronavirus/story?id=69918823

"Some of the hardest-hit neighborhoods include Elmhurst and Kew Gardens Hills in Queens, the South Bronx, and East New York in Brooklyn."

That is emphatically NOT about subway ridership.