Covid-19 #15 : It Ain't Over Until It's Over

[williamjm]

59 minutes ago, Zorral said:

How many photos have we seen from the US and the UK since Memorial Day of people chucked right up in masses with each other on beaches? How much surge in cases across the countries since?

The US figures have definitely surged but so far the UK figures have steadily declined since the late May bank holiday (same day as Memorial Day in the US), the daily average was 2160 then and is 560 now.

I agree with you people packing onto beaches does seem an unnecessary risk and people shouldn't do it, but so far it doesn't seem to have lead to a noticeable increase in cases in the UK.

3 minutes ago, Ormond said:

You seem not to realize that when people go to the beach for spring break they don't spend 24 hours a day on the beach itself. It is quite possible that the main transmission of the virus at that time was in bars and other indoor venues at night, not on the beach itself during the day.

I wonder if that could be why it doesn't seem to have caused an increase in cases in the UK, at the time of the packed beach pictures Zorral is referring to bars were not allowed to open so people couldn't gather indoors.

I'm more worried about the recent opening of bars in the UK last weekend and whether that leads to the number of cases going back up again.

[Zorral]

2 minutes ago, williamjm said:

bars were not allowed to open so people couldn't gather indoors.

Good point -- but the UK isn't doing well with infection rates.

[DaveSumm]

7 hours ago, williamjm said:

I agree with you people packing onto beaches does seem an unnecessary risk and people shouldn't do it, but so far it doesn't seem to have lead to a noticeable increase in cases in the UK.

I wonder if that could be why it doesn't seem to have caused an increase in cases in the UK, at the time of the packed beach pictures Zorral is referring to bars were not allowed to open so people couldn't gather indoors.

I still think that, as bad as the photos look of people packing out the beaches, it just doesn’t represent anywhere near enough of the population to show up in the stats. The other 99.999% of us were at home and that massively outweighs it. Which isn’t to say it’s ethical, if you infect anyone you’re still presenting a massive risk to them and subsequent people, but I was never expecting a sudden surge.

Can anyone more knowledgable about vaccines tell us what might go wrong with the Oxford one that’s in Phase III trials? I’ve tried looking up how many fail at Phase III, but so many of them don’t apply: lack of funding (not an issue), lack of suitable testing environments (they initially had to move from the UK due to the falling numbers, but in general, not an issue) and rivals beating them to market (probably not an issue and if it is, it’s good news). I feel like I’ve got overly optimistic with some reports saying they could know in August if it’s viable, and roll out very significant numbers by Christmas if it was.

[Heartofice]

In terms of the UK I suspect that people going to beaches or congregating outside will generally not lead to big spikes. As mentioned elsewhere there are some deceptive photos of beaches where people looked packed together like sardines but actually if you look properly most people are keeping their distance and stay away from people they don’t know.

We saw a recent outbreak in the UK in Leicester, which led to a ramping up of measures there. One prominent theory there is that it had something to do with Leicester’s clothing manufacturing industry which is notorious for pumping out cheap clothing by exploiting cheap labour working in poorly ventilated workhouses. There could be some validity to this. 
 

I suspect that a lot of the transmission was happening inside anyway, either at work or on public transport. People going back to pubs and restaurants would in that case cause a spike, though the question is how big, and can it be mitigated by social distancing measures there.

On a side note I realised i haven’t had a cold or flu this year at all, as I’ve not been working in an office since Dec last year. Whereas last year I probably caught something every couple of months. I’ve really noticed a difference in my health since I haven’t had to commute or work in the same building as a bunch of strangers.

[Hereward]

11 hours ago, Zorral said:

Good point -- but the UK isn't doing well with infection rates.

Isn’t it? The figures I found for yesterday show the US infection rate at 60,000 and the UK at 581. 

[JoannaL]

Does wearing face masks help? There is a study about the one German city which introduced face masks (in public transport and shopping) 2 weeks earlier than the rest of the country. By comparing the development of their numbers with the development of comparable cities (avarage, "synthetic control group")  they got the result:

" Comparing the daily growth rate in the synthetic control group with the observed daily growth rate in Jena, the latter shrinks by around 60% due to the introduction of face masks."

full study: http://ftp.iza.org/dp13319.pdf

We are all part of a big science experiment here, it is great when it sometimes gets such clear results...

 

[A wilding]

Toilet facilities (or their absence) may have something to do with it, as I understand it is possible that the risk of transmission from using shared toilets may be fairly high. Toilets were kept closed when those people were visiting UK beaches recently (they seem mostly to have been using hedges instead ).

In general they would have stayed outdoors the whole time, so the risk may have been lower than we might think.

 

[VigoTheCarpathian]

14 minutes ago, A wilding said:

Toilet facilities (or their absence) may have something to do with it, as I understand it is possible that the risk of transmission from using shared toilets may be fairly high. Toilets were kept closed when those people were visiting UK beaches recently (they seem mostly to have been using hedges instead ).

In general they would have stayed outdoors the whole time, so the risk may have been lower than we might think.

 

I had the exact same thought.

I know DIsney could probably afford to deploy cleaning drones every 3 minutes to a bathroom and sterilize it with UV.  But the bathroom situation has kept us from doing day trips to beaches and parks - even if we travel contained, that’s the one shared public indoor space we have to use within an hour or two (or less, with the kids), regardless.  .

I am not sure about beaches in Florida/UK, and if public sanitation/parks have risen to the challenge, but public toilets/port-a-potties pre-COVID mostly warranted a hazmat suit, and that is without standing in line for them.  Not to mention trusting that everyone is washing/sanitizing hands well and you mind high-touch areas when done, like faucet handles and doors.

Our usual move was to buy something at a business and use their bathroom - still being forced to go indoors and use a common area.  We have taken one trip that would normally have been day trip, to the Oregon coast, But we opted to rent a hotel and stayed a night at the beach just to be sure we had our own clean place to toilet.

[Kalbear]

Beaches and parks that are crowded arent the specific cause, they're just an obvious indicator that people arent social distancing or taking precautions. They're also shopping or going to friends or going to weddings or eating in restaurants or going to bars. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

2 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Beaches and parks that are crowded arent the specific cause, they're just an obvious indicator that people arent social distancing or taking precautions. They're also shopping or going to friends or going to weddings or eating in restaurants or going to bars. 

Most people simply didn't care about any of this until they were shamed into it. And the moment they saw a window to get out of it, they jumped. I said the United States and Brazil would be the worst two countries at the jump, albeit for very different reasons. 

[Zorral]

Tomorrow it looks like the US will cross over again to + in death rates from the virus.

The rate of positive / infection / sick is so out of control.

Anyone in the UK congratulating themselves should see what the same way of dealing with it here has caused.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/09/coronavirus-live-updates-us/

 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

6 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Tomorrow it looks like the US will cross over again to + in death rates from the virus.

The rate of positive / infection / sick is so out of control.

Anyone in the UK congratulating themselves should see what the same way of dealing with it here has caused.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/09/coronavirus-live-updates-us/

 

Just wait until you have all those kids, playing with their masks, sticking their fingers everywhere, crammed together in rooms, running down hallways together, playing games at recess when you're not looking assuming they even get that, the lunchroom, gym, etc.

This is going to be a disaster in a lot of places.

[Heartofice]

5 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Just wait until you have all those kids, playing with their masks, sticking their fingers everywhere, crammed together in rooms, running down hallways together, playing games at recess when you're not looking assuming they even get that, the lunchroom, gym, etc.

This is going to be a disaster in a lot of places.

I don’t think there is enough evidence to make a firm conclusion yet but certainly some studies suggest transmission between children isn’t that great. 

[Fragile Bird]

3 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

I don’t think there is enough evidence to make a firm conclusion yet but certainly some studies suggest transmission between children isn’t that great. 

It’s transmission to teachers that is more worrisome. That WaPo link in Zorral’s post above has a story about summer school in Arizona, where the teachers strictly followed guidelines on hand washing, masks, social distancing and everything else. All three teachers acquired Covid-19 and one has died. When the province of Quebec re-opened some schools (kindergarten and lower grades, iirc) in low infection areas outside the hot zone of Montreal, within 2 weeks 50 people, mainly teachers, tested positive.

[Heartofice]

7 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

It’s transmission to teachers that is more worrisome. That WaPo link in Zorral’s post above has a story about summer school in Arizona, where the teachers strictly followed guidelines on hand washing, masks, social distancing and everything else. All three teachers acquired Covid-19 and one has died. When the province of Quebec re-opened some schools (kindergarten and lower grades, iirc) in low infection areas outside the hot zone of Montreal, within 2 weeks 50 people, mainly teachers, tested positive.

Was that via the children or teacher to teacher though 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

14 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

I don’t think there is enough evidence to make a firm conclusion yet but certainly some studies suggest transmission between children isn’t that great. 

On top of what FB said, even if children spread it at lower rates, that's still a lot of kids crammed into small spaces where social distancing can't occur.

So what about HS? Most of the above applies, just take out the stuff you'd associate with children and insert teenagers hooking up. 

[Ran]

Sweden never closed its elementary schools, and in all this time only two elementary school teachers have died with Sars-CoV-2, and I think only one child has died (and I'm not sure they were found to have been infected in a school but rather by a family member).  One of the teachers was believed to have contracted it from other staff members at the school rather than from a student (may be the case with the second). Sweden actually published a paper two days ago comparing positive cases to Finland, which entirely shut down its schools for a time, and found no significant statistical differences in positive rates for children.

That said, this is about elementary children (and middle school children), and the fact that they are far less likely to transmit (they move less air volume, they appear to have drier exhalations with less aerosolization, and overall seem to be more resistant to the disease and less likely to develop large viral loads even when infected). High schools probably will need to remain closed in the US until things get much quieter.

The cases in Quebec are odd. They're nearly the only place I'm aware of that has found significant hotspots in daycares and schoolrooms. I don't know why that would be the case in one place, and not everywhere else. 

[Guest]

20 minutes ago, Ran said:

Sweden never closed its elementary schools, and in all this time only two elementary school teachers have died with Sars-CoV-2, and I think only one child has died (and I'm not sure they were found to have been infected in a school but rather by a family member).  One of the teachers was believed to have contracted it from other staff members at the school rather than from a student (may be the case with the second). Sweden actually published a paper two days ago comparing positive cases to Finland, which entirely shut down its schools for a time, and found no significant statistical differences in positive rates for children.

That said, this is about elementary children (and middle school children), and the fact that they are far less likely to transmit (they move less air volume, they appear to have drier exhalations with less aerosolization, and overall seem to be more resistant to the disease and less likely to develop large viral loads even when infected). High schools probably will need to remain closed in the US until things get much quieter.

The cases in Quebec are odd. They're nearly the only place I'm aware of that has found significant hotspots in daycares and schoolrooms. I don't know why that would be the case in one place, and not everywhere else. 

Texas found hotspots of coronavirus in daycares, including 441 infections among children.

[Ran]

5 minutes ago, The Great Unwashed said:

Texas found hotspots of coronavirus in daycares, including 441 infections among children.

Very interesting. I wonder if there's some substantial difference in how daycares in the Nordic countries are run compared to Canada and the US that might explain things.

[Guest]

7 minutes ago, Ran said:

Very interesting. I wonder if there's some substantial difference in how daycares in the Nordic countries are run compared to Canada and the US that might explain things.

Almost definitely. Unless you can afford to pay for it, most daycares here are shitshows.