I french comedian I like very much (Coluche) said this:
What is the most important thing in the world: Money or the butt? Answer: The butt. Everyone has a butt... Few have money.This may explain the razzia of TP. ;)
To me the real question before things go Boom! everywhere, is which style of health care is going to be the most resilient against this threat?
Socialized medicine in Europe has made the populations highly dependent on the government for even the most basic medical care. With their systems being overrun with patients, even non-coronavirus malladies will soon turn into coronavirus cases once they step foot in the ER. Peoples conditioning is to seek medical aid for everything and thus even the paranoid uninfected will use up hospital resources (which are in shorter supply because of tighter budget constraints) and exacrebate the issue.
In Americas healthcare, the costs of treatment and the proportion of our economy dedicated to healthcare makes a larger portion of the population more medically qualified and thus more likely to provide self care and limit the systemic issues being seen in Italy. While at the same time, the mentality of medical cost avoidance will prevent many people from seeking medical care and potentially continuing the spread of the virus…
I guess time will tell which style is more effective and will be political fodder for a generation.
Given the community spread of the virus through areas that are equatorial or at least marginally warmer than regions like mine in Seattle. I’m afraid to tell people that the idea of a seasonal lull like the “flu season” is a myth.
The parameters for when it is most likely to spread are just the environmental factors that mitigate the risk, but the virus travelling from one 98.6 degree host to another 98.6 degree host is going to be as likely once beach weather returns for the one day in August here, as it will be in the rainy fall.
The real problem is social behaviors. People are still cramming into elevators and breathing directly into each others’ eyeballs here, so the notion of containment without a literal quarantine (40 days of isolation) is likely to keep this bug festering in the background even as the global community is starting to point fingers and without necessary resources that will exacerbate this problem.
I am not confident this virus will simply ‘go away’ as everyone seems to so unhelpfully claim. I think we are in it for the long haul.
Thanks for the article Phoenix1. Seeing as I am 61, have had asthma for 59 years and have a congenital right bundle branch block, basically I guess I am screwed. So do I stay home and lose my job so that if by some miracle I survive this, I can’t support myself or take my chances and go in to work. I guess a lot to think about this weekend. There are probably loads of people in the same boat. If only the bosses at work were PP members and understood what was going on I could convince them to allow me to work from home. My immediate boss says he grew up on a farm so he has a super strong immune system. When I ask him, well what about the rest of us?, he responds with a joke about being in his cone of immunity when I was meeting with him in his office. So hard to get people to take this seriously.
If the corona virus follows the behavior of H1N1, increased temperature and humidity will cause the droplets to fall out rapidly instead of spreading for large distances. This should drop the R0 for this virus in those areas substantially. If you combine this with widespread mask wearing, and frequent hand washing, that will drop R0 even more.
It is my belief this very condition is in evidence in various tropical Asian countries which, by the numbers, should be absolutely overrun with cases, but are not.
The virus itself won’t vanish, but under these conditions, this collection of factors will drop the R0 locally below 1, mostly, local transmission will fall off, and said locations will see the vast majority of infections imported from colder areas.
Just my best guess.
This article has some very interesting and well-done timeline with graphic depictions of the spread of Covid-19 over the past month.
Visualizing the spread of the coronavirus
“In less than a month, so many people have fallen ill from the coronavirus that they could fill concert halls and ballparks.”
This soothing not-as-bad-as paragraph preceded a graphic of exponential “hockey-stick” rise in US reported, confirmed Covid-19 cases and deaths.
“While the rapid rise in infections shows this virus’ remarkable capacity to spread, it’s important to note that the reported number of victims remains relatively low and the disease appears less deadly than SARS and other respiratory viruses.”
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/2020/02/18/coronavirus-visualizing-number-confirmed-cases/4759477002/
I’m in the same boat although younger but a T1 diabetic. We had a meeting yesterday with management and the outcome was to wipe down the door handles more often and still allow non-essential visits to the site, even though every company scheduled to come to the site have themselves canceled. I called the CEO myself today to talk to him, no use, business as usual on Monday with door handle wiping. I’m the EHS site leader and he won’t listen, it doesn’t matter what I put in front of him. I think his CEO/PhD mind won’t accept any one else’s opinion of what is going on. I think it rather obtuse IMO
I’ve lost faith in him and the company as a result, I have some decisions as well to make this weekend. I’m upset for myself but also for the nearly 12 employees in our 42 person company that are at increased risk for COVID-19. He made a decision based on sustaining cash flow at the risk of a lot of the human resources, many of whom are subject matter experts, that helped put this company together and get it where it is today.
This is really important. Flattening the curve is still not nearly enough to keep the healthcare system from overload.
https://medium.com/@joschabach/flattening-the-curve-is-a-deadly-delusion-eea324fe9727
(on my way to work and no time to summarize and put up pictures)
Eastern Shore of Maryland.
A friend has 25 employees. Warehouse type business with food prep. Employees were surveyed --No prep from any. They bought a 2 week supply of food for each of them. They gave each employee the groceries as Maryland announced closing schools for 2 weeks.
We hear that in our area 65% of children at public schools get supplemental meals at school- Couldn’t run down those stats.
UK is going to pay a 10k bonus to healthcare workers to get infected… to impart immunity now…? but we dont know that does anything but kill you… _ are they nuts?
This is really important. Flattening the curve is still not nearly enough to keep the healthcare system from overload. https://medium.com/@joschabach/flattening-the-curve-is-a-deadly-delusion-eea324fe9727 (on my way to work and no time to summarize and put up pictures)Here it is sand puppy and its scary as $h!t Expect a national lockdown by the end of the month.
Electrical power outages. Power plant workers get sick too.
If we have a hurricane this summer, it will take forever to repair the electrical power lines. Linemen get sick too.
By no means to I want to sound glib, but those of us with a history of “prepping” are watching this all unfold with a touch of schadenfreude.
We have at least year’s worth of food that is shelf-stable, and an excess that we can sell. (Today, we’re busy pickling eggs and making cheese.)
Our major source of income, a regionally-famous Saturday Market, is likely to be shut down — BC Health has ordered the cancellation of all events with over 250 attendees — but people still need to eat, and many of them find the notion of a farm stand more attractive that being exposed to lots of people in a supermarket.
We’ve got three big bottles of bleach, and will disinfect the farm stand after each visitor. We’ll let their money sit for 24 hours. We’ll store change above the wood stove, since COVID-19 seems to be heat-sensitive. We’ve got 200 litres of our homemade pear cider vinegar for disinfecting after the bleach runs out. (It’s more valuable for preserving food, though!) But more importantly, I’m preparing signs to notify farm stand visitors of our disinfection procedures.
Our biggest expense is mortgage and hydro (electricity). I’m hoping that, should things get really tight, governments will declare moratoria on payments for essential services, as I believe Denmark has.
The first thing we might run out of is probably propane for our kitchen stove. We can cook on the wood stove if we have to. Coincidentally, we just filled the tanks on our two vehicles, and what little we drive, that’s normally a two-month supply — with greater self-isolation, perhaps six months!
If everybody (government, citizens, banks, industry) agrees to take a bit of a haircut, that means no one has to have their head shaved. I will voluntarily forego the meagre interest I am paid for my savings if the banks will do the same for mortgages! (Fat chance!)
I’ve never been happier to have gotten my vasectomy last fall.
SMILE… VIVA – Sager
Had one of the grown kids call and say “Mom, what else should I be doing”? Music to my ears?
Thanks Chris and Adam - Old Mom - got “people”!
Nairobi asks if the UK is nuts. I haven’t heard discussion (I may have missed it) as to whether some countries might think this virus is a solution to overpopulation. Not wanting to be paranoid, but it does look like a way to clear out older more dependent and medically expensive people, and leaving the country “cleansed” so to speak. Am I nuts?
It would explain the sluggishness in testing of most of the countries with an environmental conscience. Somehow China (+ Singapore, HK, SK), Russia, and small countries who until recently were intent on improving their population’s economic situation are the ones to close down fast.
Just putting it out there. The exponential function and the fact that it meant that we were inevitably reaching limits to growth is what started the Crash Course. I’m sure what is obvious to Chris actually didn’t escape our leadership.
I now have it through two trusted sources that have DC connections that a national quarantine or lockdown is being heavily considered. Possibly 48-72 hours notice to get where the heck you need to get and a 7-21 day lockdown quarantine.We got word mid-morning of the same, by way of a military connection.
I feel like that article is dangerously misrepresenting the virus and continuing to downplay the severity by making comparisons to less systemically dangerous illnesses. I suspect to try and save face if it all blows over so they don’t have to apologize for stoking fear, but still, irresponsible and dangerous.
Not trying to pick on you Sparky1, I appreciate you sharing that. It’s actually a decent representation, just the last line “SARS was worse” really got stuck in my craw.
A friend of mine works as an ICU nurse and he was also downplaying this, “ebola, AIDS, hepatitis are all worse.” “I’m not worried.” “Corona-what? LOL”… That was a couple weeks ago. Now he has three patients with COVID 19 in his ICU. He just went grocery shopping this morning to stock up. The concern is spreading, but the mainstream media is doing a severe dis-service to the country by downplaying it.
A co-worker of mine was trying to assuage the concerns of a few of the ladies who are getting stressed out about the virus. He is continuing to spread the misinformation of “the flu is worse”. This got me pretty heated because it is an abject denial of the reality. Fortunately these girls have stocked up a little bit per my advice. Bad advice for the sake of sparing someones feelings NOW is dooming them to suffer a worse fate later. I was absolutely appalled. The media is doing no one any favors, and the soft ball preppers aren’t helping either. Innoculate people against the fear by telling them what you know. They deserve the truth.
Thank you for the laugh.