Covid-19 #16: Not Waving, Loop-de-Looping

[Fragile Bird]

On the bright side of things, the WH Task Force’s modeler has now reduced the number of deaths predicted to occur by the end of September by 5,000., because of all the businesses and states now requiring masks to be worn

[Altherion]

On 7/21/2020 at 11:54 AM, maarsen said:

A vaccine just needs to provide immunity for long enough that the virus, which needs a human host to survive, to be essentially removed from the environment. From what I have read so far, the virus does not mutate as fast as an influenza strain does. As has been done with smallpox, and polio soon I hope, once there is no human host to live in, the virus will be essentially extinct. If I need a booster shot every 6 months to ensure immunity, I will put up with that to eradicate this virus.

In theory, this is true. However, there's a reason smallpox took so long to eradicate and polio is still around in the wild today: eradicating it requires somebody to go into every corner of every active war zone and every failed state and vaccinate everyone. That said, a short-term vaccine is still useful because it buy us time to develop the long-term vaccine.

[The Anti-Targ]

19 minutes ago, Altherion said:

In theory, this is true. However, there's a reason smallpox took so long to eradicate and polio is still around in the wild today: eradicating it requires somebody to go into every corner of every active war zone and every failed state and vaccinate everyone. That said, a short-term vaccine is still useful because it buy us time to develop the long-term vaccine.

 It's also very useful for opening borders, since you only need to confirm immunity at the time of travel and during travel until you reach your destination, and a vaccine with as low as 3 months immunity will achieve that. Though I doubt a 3 month immunity vaccine would be approved to go into commercial release.

Interesting stats I hadn't really paid attention to with Brazil. According to Worldometer Brazil has only done ~5 million tests and it has 2.2 million confirmed cases. That is a very high confirmation rate, which means testing is only being done on likely cases. So it's an even worse indicator of the size of the outbreak in Brazil than in most other countries.

CDC is saying they think confirmed cases is only 10% of the actual in the USA. For Brazil confirmed cases might be more like 5%.

[Guest]

2 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

On the bright side of things, the WH Task Force’s modeler has now reduced the number of deaths predicted to occur by the end of September by 5,000., because of all the businesses and states now requiring masks to be worn

That might change pretty quickly when schools open here; last I checked, many of the religious private schools in my area are going all classroom, all the time.

I saw a billboard for a church around here saying something like "The only mask we need is Jesus" or some crazy shit like that. I'll have to take a pic of it the next time I'm out that way.

[A True Kaniggit]

3 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

CDC is saying they think confirmed cases is only 10% of the actual in the USA. For Brazil confirmed cases might be more like 5%.

So for my state (Louisiana) with 99,000 confirmed cases and a population of around 4.65 million we get about 21% of the state infected.

It's like the general attitude around here of, "I'm not scared of the 'Rona!" is terrible when you want to limit the spread of a virus.

[Gertrude]

Well, Iowa continues to be shitty. One of the early Tyson processing outbreaks reported like 225 cases. It's now known that there was more like 550 (over 40% of workers). Tyson reported the numbers, it was the Iowa Dept. of Public Health that fudged it up. And our governor is doing that thing that other asshats are doing - countermanding local mask ordinances. We're not getting press, but rest assured, Covid Kim Is just as awful as some of the other hard R governors doing their level best to spread this plague.

[RhaenysBee]

We still have unrealistically low numbers as we test ridiculously little since we declared victory over the first wave. Oh well, I guess the public morale is positive at least. 

I was at the mall today to go to the “big grocery store”. I barely got anything because I realized that I can’t actually carry several kilograms of fruits and vegetables, a bottle of oil, boxes of milk AND a 20 kgs pack of plant soil. I’m not sure I didn’t just order everything... the point is though that there’s a face mask vending machine in the mall. It’s morbidly adorable.
Just two weeks ago I was pulling my mouth that there isn’t a sanitizing station at the entrance and now they set up a mask vending machine. Yes, the oceans and rainforests weep for the plastic pollution and it would be so much better though not significantly more expensive to sell reusable masks, but one’s got to appreciate the effort. 

[Fez]

I hadn't realized things had gotten quite this out of hand in Israel. And interesting that it was due to students spreading the virus.

 

[Kalbear]

Yeah, one of the really annoying myths that keeps around is that kids dont catch it or spread it, based on the study from Sweden and Finland. It may be they spread it less, but it is still a major risk - especially to the teachers. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

2 hours ago, RhaenysBee said:

We still have unrealistically low numbers as we test ridiculously little since we declared victory over the first wave. Oh well, I guess the public morale is positive at least. 

I was at the mall today to go to the “big grocery store”. I barely got anything because I realized that I can’t actually carry several kilograms of fruits and vegetables, a bottle of oil, boxes of milk AND a 20 kgs pack of plant soil. I’m not sure I didn’t just order everything... the point is though that there’s a face mask vending machine in the mall. It’s morbidly adorable.
Just two weeks ago I was pulling my mouth that there isn’t a sanitizing station at the entrance and now they set up a mask vending machine. Yes, the oceans and rainforests weep for the plastic pollution and it would be so much better though not significantly more expensive to sell reusable masks, but one’s got to appreciate the effort. 

But is there a place to wash your hands by it? Otherwise, the purpose has kind of been defeated.

[Ran]

This is a misunderstanding of the Swedish and Finnish evidence. The Israeli problem was outbreak in secondary schools. Sweden and Finland both only had open primary schools, and their paper really deals only with primary schooling. Both Sweden and Finland believe that post-pubescent children are likelier to spread than pre-pubescent children for various physiologically-related reasons. Sweden, in particular, never closed primary schools (Finland did for a time) and a study aggregating PCr results across different occupations had teachers among the occupations with a below average likelihood of reported infection (the highest likelihood occupation was taxi drivers, who were more than double the average).

[Gertrude]

Yeah - it's frustrating that the conversation is not framed around the difference in ages for schools. It's all or nothing because otherwise it's just so hard. wah. China bad.

[Liv Stark]

About Israel, schools were just one part of the problem, a lot of things went wrong: weddings halls were opened (even after a outbreaks at a couple of schools), there wasn't (and still) isn't enough people that do epidemiologic surveys (last i hear it's around 40 nurses for 2000 sick people a day, it sometimes takes a couple of days until they can call a "new sick"), and people didn't care enough to put masks on (and still don't).

It's very frustrating because we did almost everything right the first wave, and in less than 2 weeks we completely lost control

 

One thing that i didn't realise is that israel curve is growing faster than the US, kind of depressing

[Fragile Bird]

I also heard about Israel this morning. The other two countries in the news are Japan and Egypt. Tokyo had the highest number of new cases today, but for the whole country the number was 567, about the same as Canada but with 90 M more people, so let’s hope it doesn’t spread. Somehow I doubt it.

The other country is Egypt, where there are about 90 k cases, 4,440 deaths and 667 new cases, and a population of 102 M. Their testing rate is 1,318 per million, so you know the numbers are not reliable. When COVID-19 came to Canada, I would read the origin details every day (when travelers were the major source) and there were quite a few from Egypt. No way are there only 4,440 deaths - 121 doctors alone have died. No doctors and only 1 nurse have died in Canada. From the beginning Egyptian doctors complained about the lack of PPE. Now at least 7 doctors have been arrested for doing so and charged with spreading false news and being members of a terrorist organization. Lawyers can’t even see the evidence against them. As bad as things are in the US, at least Trump hasn’t started arresting doctors.

[Kalbear]

1 hour ago, Ran said:

This is a misunderstanding of the Swedish and Finnish evidence. The Israeli problem was outbreak in secondary schools. Sweden and Finland both only had open primary schools, and their paper really deals only with primary schooling. Both Sweden and Finland believe that post-pubescent children are likelier to spread than pre-pubescent children for various physiologically-related reasons. Sweden, in particular, never closed primary schools (Finland did for a time) and a study aggregating PCr results across different occupations had teachers among the occupations with a below average likelihood of reported infection (the highest likelihood occupation was taxi drivers, who were more than double the average).

Sure - but that's not at all how it has been taken, probably because 'primary schools' in the US means K-12, and it means, like, K-6 or something in Sweden. 

But it was also not a very  good study to begin with, as the SK article pointed out.

[Guy Kilmore]

13 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Sure - but that's not at all how it has been taken, probably because 'primary schools' in the US means K-12, and it means, like, K-6 or something in Sweden. 

But it was also not a very  good study to begin with, as the SK article pointed out.

Maybe it is a regional thing.  I have always understood Primary Schools as like k-6 and secondary schools as 7-12th.

[Fragile Bird]

11 minutes ago, Guy Kilmore said:

Maybe it is a regional thing.  I have always understood Primary Schools as like k-6 and secondary schools as 7-12th.

In Canada primary schools are k to 8 and high school is 9 to 12. Some schools split 1 to 6 and 7-8, but high school is 9-12.

[RhaenysBee]

2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

But is there a place to wash your hands by it? Otherwise, the purpose has kind of been defeated.

It also had hand sanitizer. Or you can buy a mask, go to the rest rooms, open the packaging, wash your hands, carefully pull out the mask without touching the packaging and put it on.

After living with reusable face masks for almost two months, I can’t say there’s a safe and hygienic way to wear them. Unless you put it on at home and don’t take it off until you get back. I’ve found that if I wanted to have an uncontaminated mask on my face each time I go into a store or get on a tram (masks are mandatory in nearly all stores, public transport, health institutions, post office, pharmacies, etc), I should have ten masks with me at least, a plastic bag to store them, another to store the contaminated ones and that’s just not something I find realistic. Well people say the purpose of masks is to protect others not yourself anyway. You are supposed to be protected by others’ wearing a mask. 

[Guy Kilmore]

25 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

In Canada primary schools are k to 8 and high school is 9 to 12. Some schools split 1 to 6 and 7-8, but high school is 9-12.

Yeah, the 6-8 is hazy here too, sometimes they are also split off as well.

[rotting sea cow]

2 hours ago, Liv Stark said:

About Israel, schools were just one part of the problem, a lot of things went wrong: weddings halls were opened (even after a outbreaks at a couple of schools), there wasn't (and still) isn't enough people that do epidemiologic surveys (last i hear it's around 40 nurses for 2000 sick people a day, it sometimes takes a couple of days until they can call a "new sick"), and people didn't care enough to put masks on (and still don't).

It's very frustrating because we did almost everything right the first wave, and in less than 2 weeks we completely lost control

Are you from Israel? I think that the Israeli experience is very important for the rest of the World. Unfortunately. I'd have more questions about that. For example, how many students are per class? How many students is typical for a school? Did they take *any* measure to slow the spread (like splitting classes, breaks, etc)?  How prevalent is the use of air conditioning in schools? Did they try to detect outbreaks and react to them quickly? Etc.

To understand this we need more than raw numbers.

ETA: Doh! The link answer at least one of my questions. Yes, besides stopping using masks, schools did use a lot of AC.

ETA2: . They report 35-38 students per class at the school. OECD average is 23.

 

Quote

One thing that i didn't realise is that israel curve is growing faster than the US, kind of depressing

I think you need to compare them directly to the states that are having sizable outbreaks, because the situation is very dissimilar. Also testing capabilities plays a huge role in the curves.