Coronavirus (No Politics)

I recently ran across MedCram:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQ_IRFkDInv_zLVFTgXA8tW0Mf1iiuuM_

There are some really interesting lecture videos about COVID-19. Go to the bottom if you want the latest.

Well, New Zealand is essentially shutting down for four weeks, within 48 hours. We only have 102 known cases, but we're trying to get ahead of it.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/he...ern-to-give-update-on-coronavirus-alert-level

Kids are pretty excited (they'll be less so when they finmd they have to do school work remotely!).
Luckily my wife is a teacher/government employee, so she gets paid regardless of her hours, and my part time work is done remotely anyway. All good as long as the internet holds up.

joxer said:

COVID doesn't work like that, it spares youngsters. And it's not a so called superflu.

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Spares?? It isn't so likely to kill younger folks but a bad case can damage anyone's lungs no matter the age.

It is tough to compare the two. We travel a LOT further a LOT more now. Technology has improved a lot, too (thanks in no small part to that travelling, actually). People are still people, though. There's going to be plenty of similarities in how people react.

Shagnak said:

Well, New Zealand is essentially shutting down for four weeks, within 48 hours. We only have 102 known cases, but we're trying to get ahead of it.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/he...ern-to-give-update-on-coronavirus-alert-level

Kids are pretty excited (they'll be less so when they finmd they have to do school work remotely!).
Luckily my wife is a teacher/government employee, so she gets paid regardless of her hours, and my part time work is done remotely anyway. All good as long as the internet holds up.

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I'm stuck at home for 4 weeks already. Gaming backlog here I come!

What I meant was that the "Spanish Flu" also killed thousands of people and was also distributing very fast.

Actually, it killed millions.
It's odd nature, high lethality when young people were infected, is speculated to be a result of some previous "light" flu similar strain that wasn't as dangerous, where older people developed immunity while younger ones experienced it for the first time. Unlike such scenario, noone is immune to COVID.

Silver said:

I'm stuck at home for 4 weeks already. Gaming backlog here I come!

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4 weeks already? Why's that?
I enjoy solitude, so the hardest thing for me will be dealing with two bickering 13 year olds. Hard enough during the weekend, let alone 4 freakin weeks with no break. It'll do my head in.

Haven't left my flat for a week now. All cool so far. But at some point I will run out of food…and have to face the outside world again.

Scavenger run

Almost two weeks here…


Anybody played Silent Hill 4: The Room? Because I'm starting to feel like the main character in that game:

Shagnak said:

4 weeks already? Why's that?
I enjoy solitude, so the hardest thing for me will be dealing with two bickering 13 year olds. Hard enough during the weekend, let alone 4 freakin weeks with no break. It'll do my head in.

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My place of work is considered non-essential so I cannot go into work once the level 4 stage is declared. I work in an industry where human contact will likely happen and our systems cannot cope with remote work.

I will likely be climbing the walls and will have to work out a way to keep myself productive.

I have to say it doesn't feel so different, at least for now. Since the whole thing started during a timeframe where I was working from home 3-4 days a week anyways. It'll take a bit to sink in I guess.

joxer said:

Unlike such scenario, noone is immune to COVID.

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Probably not like in that spanish flu theory, but there still might be people who are immune. Who knows.

Two weeks now. Fortunately I have work that can be done from home for the most part. I manage 7 agile teams (ranging between 4 and 9 people), located in China, USA and The Netherlands. We have been working together for some time already, also online and it works quite well most of the time. I do have a lot of telco’s, more than normal, as everything needs to be discussed online now. We even have ‘coffee break’ telco’s for some of the teams, where people just check in if they have time and talk about other thing’s than work.

For now there is work enough to do from home, but we are in the Professional Healthcare research business and our customers are people in hospitals. Many of our contacts have better things to do at the moment than talking to us about performance improvements in their workflow, so I am not sure if we can manage until June, which is what our government said today would be the minimum duration of the current restrictions.

So we’ll have to see how that goes, but for now I’m quite busy and my backlog has no chance of decreasing one iota because of this virus

Our president just issued a decreee - from Thursday midnight we're in lockdown (whole country). Not sure how they will enforce it though. We have 275 confirmed cases, no deaths yet, but it only arrived here (officially) about 2 weeks ago. Been playing network games (4 player D:OS2 coop - always played single party before) with friends for first time in *years*....

Trying to get some hard facts, the best I could find was Italy's Wiki page on the topic:

Of their first 3,000 odd deaths, the death rate by age was:

90+ 26.6% chance
80-89 23.2%
70-79 15.3%
60-69 4.9%
50-59 1.2%
40-49 0.6%
30-39 0.4%
0-29 0%

Yes, not one single person under 30 died in the first 3,000 odd deaths in Italy, and those between 30 and 50 likely had underlying weaknesses [though this is speculation by me based on the only 45 year old to die in the UK so far, who was suffering from Motor neurone issues]

Hence the difficulty in proscribing the best solution for society as a whole, as so many people are likely to be completely unaffected while another batch of people are very seriously affected. The virus is an ageist bigot whom we are trying to cancel.

I fully support the effort to do everything we can to supress the bug over the next few weeks. However, from the long view, one can't help but worry that perhaps we are sacrificing a whole generation of young people to save a bunch of people who were kinda on the verge of death anyway. Those already hanging by a thread.

Only in the long view though. I'm sure our global systems can cope with a few weeks of downtime, heck, we get close to that in the summer holidays normally anyway, but if this remains the state of play for many months? That's a heck of an unemployment rate and associated drawbacks.

At this moment in time nothing is more important than trying to save as many lives as possible, and rightly so, but I do hope someone has properly weighed the benefits and drawbacks of any potential long-term downturns. Perhaps the long-game might well involve preparing people to make the tough call and admit the currently unthinkable, that some people are just too close to death already to be 'worth' sacrificing everything else for.

I really hope we don't get to that phase as it's a rock and a hard place decision, but then it's going to become a rock and a hard place situation at some point, particularly if those with the least threat from Corona are the ones who end up paying the highest price.

So fingers crossed this whole closure and martial law thing actually works!

I also hope testing capacities increase. If you could test complete communities, that would go a long way towards avoiding further lockdown.

Here's in the newspaper also an article that tacles on the question what the pressure on research might do with the people there … and that there is the danger that researchers / reserching firms might become careless because of the pressure to deliver products asap.

lackblogger said:

Trying to get some hard facts, the best I could find was Italy's Wiki page on the topic….

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What I understand is that the ICUs are filled for a large part with people under 60. Nobody leaves the ICU undamaged. Recovery of a patient once he/she left the ICU is about 7 weeks per week in the ICU (that is the number I remember, so forgive me if it is somewhat off). And even after that there are chances you are still not the same as before. Because of this I don’t think people over 60 often make it to the ICU.
I think the main reason for all the restrictions is that we don’t overload the ICUs and hospitals in general to provide for all those who have a good chance of survival. Without the restrictions, I expect the numbers to be heavily increasing also for those under 60.

Looking back, an immediate lockdown at the early beginning would have been far more efficient, both for the people and the economy.

Kordanor said:

Haven't left my flat for a week now. All cool so far. But at some point I will run out of food…and have to face the outside world again.

Scavenger run

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An outside world that might be empty at that moment.

Basically, an optimal path would have been for people to disrupt their habits the least possible while increasing their purchases by 5pc. This would have allowed to stock up in a way that could be digested by supply lines. This would also have reduced the lobby weight of suppliers as it is big days for them, lots of money channelled toward them.

This would have decreased the likelihood of supply lines breaking under stress.

With people keeping raiding day after day, it might be poor strategy to rely on runs each fortnight.
Once going out to light, there might be much less left to stock from. And the next fortnight even less.

Myrthos said:

Looking back, an immediate lockdown at the early beginning would have been far more efficient, both for the people and the economy.

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Perhaps, but what happens when the lockdown ends? The virus doesn't disappear even if we lock down the entire society? Once people start to move around again it will reappear. Should the country get back in quarantine every time a new case is found?

I do acknowledge it could be a good way to keep the spread at a minimum while the country prepares to be able to handle the increased number of people at the hospitals, but sooner or later the quarantine has to end for society to function?

Perhaps a vaccine could be the solution, but as I understand it that's a year away at best.

lackblogger said:

So fingers crossed this whole closure and martial law thing actually works!

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Nothing works without a purpose.

And it is quite unlikely they could impose martial law due to certain specificities to a certain system.

Credit is due to China: while they were hit first, they managed to buy time for the rest of the planet. And countries all around the world did not take advantage from it.
The result speaks by itself: so called western countries are for most of them caught in middle ages strategies like quarantines.
China is big data, they use it to curb the progression. They still are less big data than most countries in the west, that use big data for other purposes than diminishing the impact of a pandemia.

Those countries were given time to come up with cogent plans, balancing things out and they fail to take preemptive measures (only valuable for war projects)
They think after the occurrence. Problems are dealt with as they have materialized.
The same as UgoIgo cRPG players, which shows that what is happening in gaming is the expression of something larger. There is an underlying cause.
Incapacity to scout a situation and incapacity to plan ahead, it is all a mess, the RTwP mess except the mess is explained not because of an intrinsic property as UgoIgo players would like to claim, but by the inaptitude to take information on a incoming situation, plan accordingly and execute the plan.

A lot of UgoIgo cRpg players in western governments, not so many RTwP or RT gamers.

The containment policy had negative effects, when looking at the numbers of cases, they suggest causation for an increased contamination rate.
The announcement of the policy drove people to raid supermarkets or similar and an exodus from high density in population areas to low density in population areas.

Areas might have stabilized before the announcement and showed a steep increase in cases a few days after the announcement.

Martilal law would come with similar effects. The thing in the current system, top dog eat dog world of things, people who get coerced may not be the most dangerous.