But China did a lot of things that we’re not doing.
LockerK
3235
I’m not feeling great about my employer’s response so far. On Monday they cancelled international travel and told people to wash their hands and wipe down work areas while they continued monitoring. Today, further travel restrictions, scaling back on vendor meetings and large company gatherings… which is good! However, the work from home policy is still “being developed” while we have thousands of employees shuffling through the cafeteria area daily.
It’s probably already too late, but I’ll be disappointed if there isn’t further instruction by the end of the day.
Yes. That is the point. And currently, only a tiny proportion of the populations in most countries are infected.
No one is saying they will. The point is to buy time with money, rather than lives.Time allows us (i.e., the world) to scale up health service capacity, gain more knowledge about the virus (keep in mind that our current knowledge of the virus is still woefully inadequate), develop more effective treatments, and with any luck - maybe even an effective vaccine. And yes - that may mean that some of these measures (not necessarily all) will be in place for quite a while.
In the best case, an effective treatment/vaccine is developed before the majority of the population is infected. In the worst case, where the virus grows out of control, you’ve bought time to scale up the health services, which will help keep the mortality rate down.
Here’s the thing - every other European country has exactly the same overall plan as the UK government - to build up healthcare capacity and to time the peak of the infected numbers in summer. The point of all these measures that are being implemented is to control the spread. The UK is the only government which believes that letting the virus run out of control now (and it will be out of control, since testing is going to be extremely limited) is a brilliant idea.
The justification given by the UK government for not implementing the same measures as the rest of Europe right now is “behavioral science suggests this will be ineffective” (people have made the sane argument in this thread, repeatedly); i.e., you can’t force people to limit spread, you need to coerce them to do it. That’s straight out of nudge theory.
Having 800K+ people in max 170K+ hospital beds over a 3 month period is?
Though, seeing how people in our countries are reacting to this pandemic, I’ve realized that our generation in the Western world has forgotten what an actual crisis is. I grew up in a country where school closures were frequent. Schools can be kept closed for a very long time, before society falls apart. The one constant in a crisis is that people adapt.
Sorry if this article has been posted, but it’s a top notch (and scary) analysis of the virus spread potential and impacts:
Awesome. We will FINALLY be able to answer the question “Can one man’s incompetence crater the economy two days running?”
Thrag
3239
Having a vast majority of ones workforce work from home does require some setup and planning. Hopefully companies are doing that in the background already. I got the other execs at my company to start planning recently. We’re making sure we have the technical capacity, bandwidth, VPN licenses, a softphone solution, excetera. However we found so far about 1/3 of our sales and other non technical workers don’t have a computer at home and a high proportion of those don’t even have an internet connection.
Jesus Christ I want to be home before 3 PM.
I know it’s Trump and I know he’s chaotic evil, but hoping he dies from this virus feels shitty to me. Wishing death on someone is all well and good when you’re talking shit, but when reality sets in, it makes me very uneasy. Karma, conscience, empathy, I dunno.
Besides the best rebuke to Trump and the GOP is an election victory. Him dying of this virus won’t do anything to purge these neofacists from office. It could be quite the opposite.
Really good, thanks. Please keep posting this stuff.
Love his point about social distance, and how people being socially minded is an important part about making it effective. One of the key elements in the containment efforts here in Norway is to focus on the spirit of dugnad (“communal support”), something which PM Frederiksen in Denmark also has had a huge focus on in her message to the Danish people. The government can make laws, but it is our communal responsibility to everyone that we follow those rules. And people respond to that appeal.
Here in America we rely more on the spirit of “fuck you, I have a gun” =/
LockerK
3247
You’re right and I agree completely. In my frustration I probably should have mentioned that most of us already have laptops and there is a standing policy of one day a week allowed to WFH in place already. So the biggest hurdle would likely be capacity.
The story in the Seattle Times I linked above said they defied the Feds to test for Coronavirus without permission. After they had a positive (the teenager in Mill Creek?) And reported it, the CDC told them to stop testing.
How much longer will that give?
A criticism upthread was that the UK plan is wrong in its core idea of accepting the entire population will be exposed before winter. Is the Danish government operating under a different assumption?
I will post EVERYTHING my institute makes public about covid-19. I think they’re one of the better news sources you’re going to get, as it’s a scientist to scientist communication with no politicians or reporters in the middle to fuck up the message.
draxen
3253
That is awesome - thank you so much :)
The way the WHO guys explains what China did in 2003. It’s basically something that could never happen in the US. Not in its current political state.
