General > General Technical Chat
Covid 19 virus
Weston:
Universities in the USA started moving to online instruction last Wednesday. Today they started announcing that undergrads should not come back to campus after spring break, possibly not returning until next fall. I know that MIT, Stanford, and Harvard have implemented these policies, I assume other schools are also doing so.
Not that I really interact with the undergrads, but campus is going to be pretty quiet for the next few months and its going to be basically impossible for any lab or project based classes to be offered.
Given that this looks like its going to lead into an economic recession its a pretty good time to be a grad student. Guaranteed job security!
whalphen:
At the end of last month I took a look at the US case count to try to get an idea of how quickly this disease would be spreading. I just wanted to be able to make some plans regarding travel. So, I watched the numbers from the worldometer website. I found that the US case count doubled on a very regular pace. From March 1 I started recording the number each day and plotting it. It's amazing how predictible it has been. Since March 1 in the US it has been very tightly tracking an exponential growth pattern. The number of cases is doubling every 2.4 days. On this growth path, the number of US cases will reach over 420,000 by the end of March. However, in the US , bureaucratic and financial hurdles are resulting in very little testing being done. So the actual number of cases is likely much higher than the available numbers. If more extensive testing is done it will likely drive the numbers to go above the projection. If significant actions are taken to slow the spread, the data will track below the curve. So far, neither of these are seen in the data.
So, when will we see an inflection in the curve -- at the latest? Epidemiologists are saying to expect 60% to 80% infection rate before herd immunity takes effect. On the current growth path for the US, that will occur between April 21 and April 23. But, considering that the case count is likely higher than we know and that fear will probably grip the population and policy leaders before that prompting them to take some actions to slow the spread, I suspect we'll see an inflection point in the US in mid April. Unfortunately the inflection point will not be the peak. I think it's safe to say this epidemic will be with us for more than the next couple of months.
edy:
PANDEMIC!
Yes WHO finally shifted their stance from epidemic to pandemic. There were various reasons they held back but it is clearly a matter of mindset, political, social and economic strategies that motivated their decision along with the facts on the ground. Bottom line is, they don't want people to give up fighting since there was still "hope" when it was being treated as an epidemic. At this point, you might think resistance if futile, but even as a pandemic (which everyone already knew was where it was going), it is still good to fight it like an epidemic to slow down it's progression. This will be difficult in many liberal democracies but it may eventually come down to Italian-like lockdowns (I doubt we will ever allow Chinese-like lockdowns) which is going to be devastating either way.
Simon:
i have food for a month. They have been compelled to change their stance as governments have an eye and a half on their corporate bosses and the stock market and not enough on the pandemic.
Cerebus:
--- Quote from: edy on March 11, 2020, 05:15:30 pm ---PANDEMIC!
Yes WHO finally shifted their stance from epidemic to pandemic. There were various reasons they held back but it is clearly a matter of mindset, political, social and economic strategies that motivated their decision along with the facts on the ground. Bottom line is, they don't want people to give up fighting since there was still "hope" when it was being treated as an epidemic. At this point, you might think resistance if futile, but even as a pandemic (which everyone already knew was where it was going), it is still good to fight it like an epidemic to slow down it's progression. This will be difficult in many liberal democracies but it may eventually come down to Italian-like lockdowns (I doubt we will ever allow Chinese-like lockdowns) which is going to be devastating either way.
--- End quote ---
The prior H1N1 outbreak was officially classified as a pandemic by the WHO. Just because it has met the criteria to be labelled a pandemic rather than an epidemic means only one thing, that much/most of the world is involved. Being a 'pandemic' is not a necessarily a question of seriousness or scale, just of geographical spread. I'm being pernickety precisely because the word 'pandemic' makes people use 18pt type, exclamation marks and start running around in circles panicking. By definition, all of you (unless we have some 11 year old members) lived through the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic, and you're still here.
--- Quote ---There were various reasons they held back but it is clearly a matter of mindset, political, social and economic strategies that motivated their decision along with the facts on the ground.
--- End quote ---
Much more likely is that they have a set of formal criteria that have to be met before something moves along the scale of nomenclature from outbreak=>epidemic=>pandemic.
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