From what I read in this article and other sources, performing more tests seems to be a very promising approach to get this pandemic under control.<p>The number of positive tests and death rates are published every day on all channels. I wish the number of performed tests would be also published daily. What gets measured gets managed.<p>I wonder what limits the number of tests that can be performed. How much would it cost to ramp up testing capabilities so that every person with symptoms can be tested? How much to increase it to a level that everyone can be tested?
This is bad. I've been graphing the exp curve for Italy, UK and USA and the USA curve is fearsomely steep. Italy has more cases now but the USA is growing fastest and <i>looks like</i> it will match Italy's on ~March 28th (looking at the most recent 10 points, see below)<p>The rate of growth in the USA, extrapolated, is just huge. Looking at the whole curve it does not match an exponential well, I think the early part is skewing it. If we take the last 10 data points, they fall very well onto the curves for all 3 countries, and that curve for the USA is horrific. I'm not an epidemiologist nor statistican so it would be irresponsible to put my predicted figures here, but christ, if I'm right the US is going to be reeling in just a few day.<p>Edit: @mnl below has pointed out that infection is not an exponential but on the whole a logistics curve (s-shaped curve <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function</a>). He is correct. However in early stages I believe an exponential MAY be a decent approximation (and I'm reading up on it now). However, the inflection in the 'S' (where new infections would start to slow down) would be expected to be at far higher figures than those I'm looking at - a few tens of thousands of reported infections per country currently - and it's not even close to that (populations of multiple millions in each country).
<i>Is there in any way a brighter side to this?</i><p>Something I talk about a fair amount: It's incredibly hard to measure what didn't happen but should have. Humans are really bad at that, and understandably so.<p>If we had adopted a lot of the practices being advocated currently and avoided the epidemic, no one would know or believe we had accomplished anything. Having a pandemic and defeating it is the only way humanity can know and understand with confidence that we need to make a lot of changes to make life work with so many billions of people on the planet.<p>I have a serious medical condition. I've gotten off all drugs. I know what my life is supposed to look like because I know what my condition is supposed to do. Other people have what I have. I know the typical prognosis.<p>Yet I have no credibility. I've been mocked and attacked and dismissed online for years because other people cannot see that I've done anything and don't believe I have. Other people can't see what I see and it makes me look to them like a loon suffering hallucinations, not a visionary that people ought to listen to.<p>I once had someone email me and tell me "I give my child the sea salt and coconut oil you've recommended, and he's in the ER less, but he's not on fewer drugs."<p>She meant he still was on the same amount of maintenance drugs as before. She wasn't really recognizing that fewer ER visits meant fewer rounds of antibiotics, steroids and similar.<p>The child was taking less medication, but the mother couldn't quite manage to count the drugs that weren't happening. In her mind, it would only count if her child could reduce his maintenance drugs.<p>There are a lot of things I hope we change. But the reality is that without a pandemic, no one would believe those changes actually provide germ control and actually matter to the functioning of the world. People would just find the restrictions annoying and pointless and would rebel against it.<p>You are only going to get compliance when enough people have been burned that change seems less onerous than not changing. That's basically how humans always handle things.<p>It's frustrating. I wish it weren't so.<p>But people don't change everything at great cost to avoid disaster based on predictions and models. We make those changes because we got burned in actual fact, not in theory, and we don't want to go back.<p>And then it's no longer hypothetical. Then it's actually real and we aren't running from Boogeymen. We're problem solving and dealing with actual reality.<p>Then you see real change.
Illiterate politicians can still survive if they keep competent people in their surrounding. Our president pushed out the relevant people from national security council, kept his own folks, and did not listen to anyone in January.<p>Four years of presidency tenure has it’s downsides.
Francois Balloux Computational biologist, director of Genetics Institute at UCL had interesting twitter post: <a href="https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1238837158007447558" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/12388371580074475...</a><p>> Predictions from any model are only as good as the data that parametrised it. There are two major unknowns at this stage. (1) We don't know to what extent covid-19 transmission will be seasonal. (2) We don’t know if covid-19 infection induces long-lasting immunity.<p>>How long immunity lasts for following covid-19 infection is the biggest unknown. Comparison with other Coronaviridae suggests it may be relatively short-lived (i.e. months). If this were to be confirmed, it would add to the challenge of managing the pandemic.<p>>Short-lived immunisation would defeat both ‘flattening the curve’ and ‘herd immunity’ approaches. Devising an effective strategy would be even more challenging under low seasonal forcing. It would also considerably complicate effective vaccination campaigns.
Most people (and most people who advice the public in the US) doesn't take this serious enough.<p>One of the foremost experts in epidemiology in the US Michael T. Osterholm said on Joe Rogan (AFAIKR) 6-12 months for the virus to go away, up to 5 years for a vaccine and that it would return in China when people start behaving normally again. This isn't something that will go away in a few weeks or months.<p>In "Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs" he also predicted a Corona virus coming from China.<p>In a months time the US will take the place of Italy and see the healthsystem crash.
Corona is killing a negligible % of the population, mostly very old and very sick people (checkout the official data from the Italian health ministary - average age of dead patiences is 79.5 years, all of them with severe background illness, in a part of the country where 29% of the population is at least 60 yeard old. Those are the facts.). If anyting, what we are experiencing is not a corona pandemic but a massive, global hysteria pandemic - much more dangerous.