General > General Technical Chat
Working From Home - Impacts of Coronavirus
EEVblog:
--- Quote from: cdev on May 08, 2020, 02:10:01 am ---Culture and also living density make a lot of difference. People in NYC live in tiny places. They travel by public transport where lots of people are crammed together. You are lucky if you can find a seat. Lots and lots of people all moving very fast. Workplaces are almost always crowded there. If you want quiet you either have to get a meeting room to talk, or leave, go outside. If youre lucky there is some open space... on the roof. So basically in places like NYC, when people are not under lockdown, "social distancing" is literally impossible. Its impossible to go about your daily business without getting physically close to people because you get crammed next to people everywhere. For example, when you wait to cross the street. A lot of the time in NYC when I want to get somewhere fast, and I am not going that far, say from a subway stop to whatever building I a going to, I will step off the curb and walk in the street instead of on the sidewalk against the traffic, so I can see it. Its faster because the people clog the sidewalk.
--- End quote ---
It's nuts compared to Sydney.
1.6M people live in Manhatten (59sqkm), compared to Sydney that isn't even on the list.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population_density
But compared to say Inner Western Sydney that has 200,000 for 35sqkm, so scaling that to match Manhatten would be 337,000, or around 1/5th the population density here in our of our most densely populated parts of Sydney.
https://profile.id.com.au/inner-west/about
DrG:
--- Quote from: EEVblog on May 08, 2020, 01:35:01 am ---
--- Quote from: james_s on May 08, 2020, 01:11:30 am ---
--- Quote from: EEVblog on May 07, 2020, 11:32:01 pm ---Sure, but how much? How much is due to the lockdown, and how much was simple hygiene, awareness, and staying home when you are sick?
It would be be incredibly foolish (indeed, demonstrably wrong) to say there is no contribution from the later things.
It's easy and logical to assume that the lock down is the thing that did all the wonders, but where is the direct A/B comparison data to actually prove it? (and no, don't compare different countries)
--- End quote ---
Absolutely, the same applies to all of those things, how do you really know which action contributed by how much? It stands to reason that if someone is isolated then they will not contract a virus or spread it to someone else, but how much do less drastic methods help? It's very difficult to know, it's not like we can really have a large control group that does nothing, and various groups that try different methods.
No matter what we do to slow the spread, if it works, it will appear to many that it was not necessary. I certainly don't have all the answers, I thought the whole thing was hype until I saw the dramatically increasing infection numbers.
--- End quote ---
Also let's not forget that something like >40% of the population were not isolated and in lockdown (I've seen numbers up to 50%). Everyone might feel like the entire country/city is in lockdown and no one is going out, but there are massive amounts of "essential" workers who's lives didn't change apart from increased hygiene and "social distancing".
It's a shame we may never have real concrete numbers on this because I fear that governments will do lock downs again at the drop of a hat, and if that's based on incomplete or just assumed data, then that's bad.
--- End quote ---
You will get no argument from me on the challenges that need to be met. We do know how to answer many of those questions with regard to what works and doesn't work, but we can't ever run those experiments because they are immoral, unethical and illegal - and we all know that.
I don't know what "assumed data" are. The data are the data and the data, so long as they are not simply faked, are always right- I so believe. Our analyses, understanding and interpretation of the data, however, are frequently wrong.
Data we are collecting now will be analyzed for decades and by many people. What I think I can ask is for Governments to make evidence-based decisions - and obviously with consultation with scientists. When it is clear that the evidence is insufficient for some desirable / acceptable level of confidence, there is still the burden of making a decision, even if it is to do nothing. Since none of these decisions are without cost (including doing nothing), they will be scrutinized for many years. Hopefully, correct consequences can be attributed to the decisions, but as pointed out already, that is not so easy in many cases. Still, we need to try.
Well into Covid-19 we were being told that there was no point in wearing face masks - even to the extent that some said you would actually enhance your chance of infection wearing one (apparently because you were more likely to touch your face). How do you think that "decision" will be scored? Admittedly, I have not seen irrefutable evidence that wearing the typical cheap face mask has any significant effect on the likelihood of infection. Once we know, however, that the virus can spread through droplets (cough / sneeze / say and spray), do we need to run the experiment to have some level of confidence that if you are infected (symptomatic or asymptomatic) it is beneficial to wear a face mask to mitigate spreading your virus-filled droplets?
I know that some have said that the early decision to not recommend wearing masks was for other reasons (i.e., leaving no masks for critical workers), but that is hardly being truthful and it made little or no sense or, was downright disingenuous and hiding a different problem.
Then, it all changed and many places in the US that are open, now do not allow entry without a face covering. I think it is the correct decision and delaying that decision was costly - but I can't prove that, at least not yet.
I was scrolling through this list of the top 20 epidemics / pandemics https://www.livescience.com/worst-epidemics-and-pandemics-in-history.html and thinking about where we stand in regard to handling them.
I am afraid that we don't always seem to do so well, but we are getting better as we learn more and more.
HIV/AIDS is a good example. Today, people with AIDS do not have to die from AIDS. For quite a while, that was simply not true. But, it has taken many years to advance our knowledge to that point. Progress is painfully slow. Slower if we abandon the pursuit of knowledge.
cdev:
Re: AIDS. Bill Haddad died recently, he was that rare person, a pharma company exec who tried to do what he could to improve the world.
About Bill Haddad
William F. Haddad: Chairman/CEO, Biogenerics, Inc., has been a pharmaceutical executive since 1986. As Chairman of the generic trade association, he initiated and negotiated Hatch-Waxman, the legislation that opened the door to generics in the United States. He was CEO of a major generic manufacturing company. Earlier he worked with Jack and Robert Kennedy and Senator Estes Kefauver. He was one of the founders of both the U.S. Peace Corps and the Office of Economic Opportunity (poverty program) and served as the Inspector General or both organizations. As a newsman at the NY Herald Tribune and the NY Post, he won a dozen awards for investigative reporting. He also learned about the wiretapping of Watergate three weeks before the break-in and reported it to the Democratic leadership. He exposed the worldwide tetracycline cartel by locating secret cartel minutes in two Latin American countries, destroying the cartel and leading to a $200,000,000 fine for Pfizer. He also found the secret minutes of the Uranium cartel that led to Congressional hearings conducted by then Congressman Albert Gore and Haddad. Using New York State’s subpoena he uncovered of the role of the New York banks in profiting from the collapse of the City’s financial system; located and exposed secret state police files that contained the names of a million citizens almost all had neither been accused of or committed a crime; he investigated organized crime’s role in sports; and he subpoenaed the major television networks to explain covert arrangements with advertisers in advertising to children. As a volunteer, he worked with Cipla to remove the barriers to the use of generic AIDS medicines. He has published several books. He was a merchant marine officer at sea when he was sixteen.
http://billhaddad.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html
If you dig a bit there (its the only other story on his blog) there is also what seems to be his description of the AIDS crisis and the US pharmaceutical industry. Some of it is about the events that were depicted in the film "Fire in the Blood".
http://billhaddad.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-aids-story-you-may-not-have-heard.html?view=sidebar
What a mess..
They should be investigating approaches more like resveratrol because they may make us more resistant to viruses in a general way,
(See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=resveratrol+virus )
while vaccines only give you immunity against a very narrow number of potential viruses and are likely to be expensive and quite possibly useless eventually due to viruses mutating making the immunity less effective.
This is worth reading too:
Sirtuins Are Evolutionarily Conserved Viral Restriction Factors
https://mbio.asm.org/content/mbio/5/6/e02249-14.full.pdf
Unless we do the research we won't know if it helps, even though there seems to be a good chance that it does.
rodpp:
Regarding the effects of the lock downs, social distance, etc, if that is really necessary or not, we need to check the numbers.
Its almost concensus that herd immunity occurs when around 70% of the population get the virus.
The mortality rate of covid19 is being estimated between 0.5% and 1% (one of the best guess we have is the city of NY, where is estimated that 25% of population were infected and they have around 14 K deaths). Let's consider a mortality rate of 0.7%.
Then, the number of expected deaths is 0.5% of the population.
If nothing is done, all that deaths will occur in 2 to 5 months. With social distancing measures we extend this period. But at the end the deaths number will be the same 0.5% of the population.
Why extend this period:
1- to not collapse the health system, otherwise the mortality rate increases significantly, and more than 0.5% of the population will die;
2- a vaccine can be found before we reach the herd immunity, and less people will die;
3- a treatment that reduces the mortality rate can be found, and less people will die.
The first point is more important because its impacts are immediate, so the social distancing measures should be guided by the health system capabilities.
The later two are our best desires, but it's hard to justify the economic loss of a long lock down waiting for a vaccine or treatment that we don't know if is viable or how long it will take.
EEVblog:
--- Quote from: rodpp on May 08, 2020, 06:21:30 am ---The later two are our best desires, but it's hard to justify the economic loss of a long lock down waiting for a vaccine or treatment that we don't know if is viable or how long it will take.
--- End quote ---
Many governments (including ours) were literally saying "These lockdown laws will stay in effect until a vaccine is found", until a week or two later when the reality dawned on them that's the dumbest idea in history.
Protect and isolate both the vulnerable and infected, educate everyone and get most of society back on track as quickly as possible.
The thing with the 0.X% mortality rate is that it disproportionally impacts the elderly and other certain at risk people, so one could rightly argue that forced lockdowns for otherwise very low risk people maybe wasn't the best idea, especially given that circa 40% of the population weren't locked down anyway because they were too busy keeping society going.
But again, forced lockdowns were probably the most sensible option at the time given we knew very little about it, this could change next time around. I don't think the governments will get the same leeway they did this time when they have to lock down again (and you can bet it's going to happen again, because it's the "new normal"), and governments get drunk on power like that.
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