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Covid 19 virus

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SiliconWizard:

--- Quote from: imo on March 22, 2020, 06:24:09 pm ---
--- Quote from: nctnico on March 22, 2020, 05:49:54 pm ---
--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on March 22, 2020, 05:06:41 pm ---If anything, this should teach us how fragile our whole society has become. Seeing how one small virus can wreak havoc, imagine anything worse than this (which is not at all unlikely)?

--- End quote ---
Actually I think society is better equiped than ever. Imagine the Corona outbreak happened 20 years ago with the internet still in it's infancy? It is our modern communication systems which keep things going right now. All the data to stop the outbreak is shared quickly without risk of actually spreading the infection. And the Corona virus isn't the first outbreak ever.

--- End quote ---

If this happened 40y back you would hardly notice it as a pandemic of this scale. A bit stronger seasonal flu. More fatalities would be "averaged" in the yearly flu statistics..

--- End quote ---

Yeah.
We may be better equipped these days, but the worldwide movement of people has literally exploded, and I'm not going to teach you that virus spreading is by nature exponential. Current technology certainly helps mitigate things in the current context, but I'd venture it doesn't make up for the (unreasonable) movement of people we have now.

SiliconWizard:

--- Quote from: vad on March 22, 2020, 09:53:01 pm ---
--- Quote from: Zero999 on March 22, 2020, 09:05:15 pm ---To be fair, whilst most of what he said was wrong, there are grains of truth here and there. For example, MRI scanners might have been on the market in 1980, but most hospitals wouldn't have had one back then,

--- End quote ---
Good old X-ray is equally capable in confirming pneumonia.

--- End quote ---

Yeah, and except in very specific cases, I'm pretty sure we still use that primarily in case of lung infection rather than costly MRI sessions.

nctnico:

--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on March 22, 2020, 09:54:52 pm ---We may be better equipped these days, but the worldwide movement of people has literally exploded, and I'm not going to teach you that virus spreading is by nature exponential. Current technology certainly helps mitigate things in the current context, but I'd venture it doesn't make up for the (unreasonable) movement of people we have now.

--- End quote ---
If that where true then explain how the Spanish flu made so many casualties world wide in 1918/1919. Or how the Blach Death spread all across Europe in the 1300's.

On the upside: I think we'll see a huge baby boom after 9 months from now.

Cerebus:

--- Quote from: Zero999 on March 22, 2020, 09:05:15 pm ---
--- Quote from: Cerebus on March 22, 2020, 08:23:27 pm ---
--- Quote from: imo on March 22, 2020, 07:44:44 pm ---Sure, the hospitals will be massively overrun in 1980.
No DNA/RNA technology at that time.     wrong
No advanced analytical methods and equipment at that time.      wrong first ELISA test 1971, HPLC, MS-GC, PAGE all common laboratory equipment in 1980
No pneumonia/flu test at that time.     wrong
No flu vaccination at that time.     wrong - flu vaccines were available in the 1940s!
No internet at that time.      right
No high-tech ventilators at that time.      wrong
No CT scans and MRI at that time.     wrong - first commercial CAT scanners 1972, first commercial MRI scanner 1980
No special antibiotics to cope with secondary infections at that time.      wrong
No quality respirators FFP2-3 grade at that time.      wrong
Fixed line telephones, sometimes a Fax.      right
No personal computers at that time.      wrong
Cold War [for GenZ and up - "Cold War" does not mean to "fight against  commond cold"]..      right

--- End quote ---

3 out of 12. You have failed your history of technology exam.

--- End quote ---
To be fair, whilst most of what he said was wrong, there are grains of truth here and there. For example, MRI scanners might have been on the market in 1980, but most hospitals wouldn't have had one back then, DNA sequencing was in its infancy, vaccines took much longer to develop, than they do today and personal computers were expensive and uncommon; I wasn't born until 1982 and I remember receptionists using typewriters, when I was a child: my mum used to have one and I had a toy one.

--- End quote ---

DNA sequencing was not "drop it in and let the machine do it" like it is today but I knew people doing PhDs on the "The DNA sequence of <name species/protein/whatever>" the hard way. The kind of laboratory DNA/RNA test (excluding the PCR bit which wasn't invented until 1983) being used to identify the presence of SARS-Cov-2 was one of the undergraduate labs for the biochemistry students I knew (restriction enzymes, PAGE, read the plate under UV light) just done manually rather than "drop it in the machine".

Two people in my undergraduate flat (5 of us) had commercial (as opposed to homebrew) personal computers in 1981. As to typewriters, sure still plenty around in lots of offices but in 1977 I knew a bookseller (client that was getting a computer order processing system from the software house I worked for) whose secretary used a (hugely expensive) word processor.

Vaccines? Sure, the development of genetically engineered vaccines was in its early days but most slowness in developing them for practical use was down to regulatory caution. But effective vaccines for most diseases were available. Smallpox was declared eradicated world wide on 9 Dec 1979 - a consequence of effective vaccination. All of the modern flu vaccines except for recombinant ones (which have only been in active use for less than 10 years) are made in exactly the way they were back then. The ability to make recombinant vaccines existed back then, but they were many years from use (for regulatory reasons).

The uptake of MRIs by hospitals was incredibly rapid, for good reason. I remember there being a massive charity drive to fund one for the hospital nearest my university. It was installed in the early 80s, though I can't remember the exact year.

You youngsters think we were living in the stone age.  :)

not1xor1:

--- Quote from: magic on March 22, 2020, 04:03:53 pm ---Speaking of Italian decision making:

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/18/europe/italy-coronavirus-lockdown-intl/

--- Quote ---He says the Italian government lagged at first. It was "lazy in the beginning... too much politics in Italy."

"There was a proposal to isolate people coming from the epicenter, coming from China," he said. "Then it became seen as racist, but they were people coming from the outbreak." That, he said, led to the current devastating situation.
--- End quote ---

 :-DD

--- End quote ---

that's a pile of bullshit... that guy is just a liar... and the proposals of the people he refers to were just pure madness (besides taking opposite directions every few days: not enough, too much... it is just flu, not enough, etc.)

People coming from China were checked and on the 31th of January the Italian government suspended all flights to and from China while the other European countries did nothing, so:


--- Quote ---It has been subsequently reported that the origin of these cases has a possible connection to the first European local transmission that occurred in Munich, Germany, on 19 January 2020, consistent with phylogenetic analysis of viral genome
--- End quote ---
see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_Italy

Italian government probably has done a few errors, but other governments have been even worse
they could have just looked at Italy without prejudices and see how fast this runs out of control and so act as fast as possible

but everybody just thinks he is smarter
just look at what Johnson, Trump, Rutte, Macron and so on said just few days ago and how slowly they are acting

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