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Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

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We are aware of all internet traditions.

’Where will you hide, Roberts, the laws all being flat?’

We still have time to mess this up!

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

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So many bastards, so little time.

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

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You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 / COVID-19 Coronavirus Update – Tuesday / Wednesday, April 14/15

COVID-19 Coronavirus Update – Tuesday / Wednesday, April 14/15

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… Lifting social-distancing measures all at once could risk simply delaying the epidemic’s peak and potentially making it more severe, the scientists warned in an article published Tuesday in the journal Science.

The course of the pandemic will depend on questions not yet answered: Will the virus’s spread change with the seasons? What immunity will people have after they’re infected? And does exposure to coronaviruses that cause mild illnesses confer any protection against the pathogen that causes Covid-19?

The course of the pandemic will depend on questions not yet answered: Will the virus’s spread change with the seasons? What immunity will people have after they’re infected? And does exposure to coronaviruses that cause mild illnesses confer any protection against the pathogen that causes Covid-19?

Those questions are being weighed by government leaders who have seen economies around the globe come to a standstill because of the social-distancing measures. With millions of people out of work and staying home, pressure is growing to loosen restrictions in the U.S. and elsewhere. Doing so, experts have said, will depend on having in place measures to control the disease, such as widespread testing.

The Harvard researchers used computer models to simulate how the pandemic might play out. One possibility is that strict social distancing followed by intensive public-health detective work could chase down and eradicate the virus. That’s what happened with SARS-CoV-1, which caused a 2003 outbreak. But with confirmed cases of the new pathogen approaching 2 million globally, that outcome is seen as increasingly unlikely, the researchers wrote.

More likely is that the virus is here to stay like influenza, traveling the globe seasonally. In one model, 20 weeks of measures to limit spread were followed by an epidemic peak that was as great as an uncontrolled spread.

“The social distancing was so effective that virtually no population immunity was built,” the researchers said of that scenario. If the virus is more transmissible in colder months, delaying the peak into the autumn could exacerbate the strain on health-care systems, they wrote.

To avoid such outcomes, on-and-off social distancing measures might be needed until 2022, unless hospital capacity is increased, or effective vaccines or treatments are developed.

The authors don’t endorse a particular path forward but said they sought “to identify likely trajectories of the epidemic under alternative approaches.”

Another link to the Science article:


Goddess forgive me, when I first saw this link, I wondered if there was any connection to Trump’s recent phone calls with Putin — it seemed in character to pull a Look over there! Trump’s defunding WHO! stunt to distract the global media from taking public note of the difference between Russia’s official COVID-19 stats and the ‘rising influx’ of desperately ill patients. But that’s almost certainly too pat an explanation; Trump is more than capable of stunting for the spotlight without explicit instructions from the home office…

Reader Interactions

39Comments

  4. 4.

    Baud

    The Alain thread was moved up for the morning crowd.  Good move, since that’s when On The Road posts are published.

  5. 5.

    YY_Sima Qian

    China just dispatched a medical team to Russia to offer assistance. So far, Chinese medical teams have only been sent to the hardest hit nations (Italy, Spain, Iran, the UK) and those with weak medical infrastructure and capacity (Pakistan, Iraq, Kazakhstan), or those of significant geopolitical significance to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (Serbia). Russia might qualify for all three.

  8. 8.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Baud: Yeah, I think it’s pinned to the top for the next little while.

    Still can’t wrap my brain around the news.

  14. 14.

    Amir Khalid

    While I await the Director-General of Health Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah’s daily media conference, here is some disturbing news about zoos in Germany, reported by the BBC.

    Okay, the DG’s media conference is on. Dr Noor Hisham says, 85 new cases, total 5,072; one death, total 83. Today’s new cases number is half of yesterday’s 170. He adds that the spikes to above 200 new cases in recent dailt numbers were due to exhaustive testing in enhanced movement control zones. Meanwhile of the 5,072 cases, 2,647 patients (52%) have recovered leaving 2,342 active cases.

    He notes with some concern that people are getting restless after a month of confinement and going out when they really shouldn’t, resulting in traffic jams here and there, and he appeals for our continued patience.

    My YouTube home page had a video of the pompous fool Peter Hitchens (yes, Christopher’s brother) arguing against the lockdown. I was going to link, but for the sake of my fellow jackals decided against it. All I’ll say about him is, when a person makes a libertarian argument against a public-health measure, you know he’s full of shit.

  18. 18.

    Ripley

    I work in IT at a small rural hospital in the Midwest.  We embraced ‘We’re not fucking around’ mode in mid-March – sending people to WFH, canceling all non-urgent Clinic appointments and surgeries, mandatory screening at Main and ER entrances, shutting down the cafeteria to staff only, and so many other things I can’t remember them all from day to day. We qualified for an SBA PPP loan of $6,600. For a staff of 450+.

    I can tell you that that the concern is palpable; not just fear of contagion, but worry over paychecks and bills and all the other shit that we took for granted two months ago. Neighboring counties are hot spots, and we are doing our best to shun the bastards, but… My ex-SO is an ER nurse; we’re still great friends and I’m scared shitless for her.

    Restaurants are doing their best to stay open with curbside; our favorite bars are closed. I miss my bar buddies and their jukebox selections. Life is not the same. I want to see people smile, but the masks… thank Dog for gallows humor. It’s tough to tell a Duchenne smile from a grimace, sometimes, and we can’t hug each other, either way.

    We’re hardy Midwestern folks. We’re OK, but we’re not OK.

  19. 19.

    Amir Khalid

    It must stick in the craw of would-be ruler of the world Vladimir Vladimirovich to have to take help from China.

  20. 20.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Amir Khalid: The foreign ambassadors of Russia are hard to distinguish from the US’s own RWNJ’s. Since Easter on the Orthodox calendar is this Sunday, the branches of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine are planning to hold in-person Easter services. In response, at least one local official has said NFW – the mayor of the city of Dnipro (formerly known as Dnipropetrovsk) has said he will shut off electricity and water to the church.

    In contrast, the other main denominations, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Kyiv Patriarchate) and the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church are following government quarantine measures that have been in place for some time.

  21. 21.

    Lacuna Synechdoche

    AC360 via Anne Laurie @ Top:

    NIH’s lead scientist for coronavirus vaccine research Kizzmekia Corbett lays out the government’s race to create a vaccine,

    Corbett mentions taking charge of the team 5 years ago.

    Which means, of course (since Trump is incapable of doing anything useful): the lead scientist on our pandemic response is an Obama hire.

    Thanks, Obama!

  23. 23.

    Amir Khalid

    @WereBear:

    Der Scheißgibbon seriously believes that, as POTUS, he owns the country. ETA: And that anything you get from the Government is out of his munificence.

  24. 24.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Amir Khalid: I think Putin knows Russia is in no position to rule the world, so his ambitions domestically appear to be staying in power and returning Russia to a position of strength, internationally it appears to be both returning Russia to relevance in world affairs and stirring up sh*t. So much of Russia’s propaganda and influencing efforts is not to burnish Russia’s international image (as the case with Chinese propaganda), but fomenting conflicts. I suppose Putin and his cohort strongly subscribe to the theory of “chaos is a ladder”.

  27. 27.

    p.a.

    Quite the pair: Putin’s covid ‘response’ could make the Russians look back fondly on Soviet Communism and drumpf makes the W era look almost rational.

    Paraphrasing Saruman: it’s some comfort that when you tore down my house, you doomed your own too.

  28. 28.

    mrmoshpotato

    “But Hillary’s a shrill, corporate whore who’s going to win anyway, so I don’t have to vote!” whined the selfish, shitstain children who decided to fail as citizens of the United States.

  30. 30.

    mrmoshpotato

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    Trump shows his ass on national TV.

    Every time he’s on national TV.  He also talks out of it.  Definitely explains his ‘resting butthole face’.

  31. 31.

    YY_Sima Qian

    The AP’s reporting and analysis of early Chinese actions, from the batch of official documents that they obtained, is very good! It actually explains some of the curious developments that I saw from mid-Jan. on.

    The reports confirm that the government at all levels was executing the “outwardly loose, inwardly tight” strategy, which the CCP regime often employs when facing developing crisis/emergencies. Outwardly loose to prevent mass panic and damage the image of the regime, inwardly tight to get the situation under control as soon as possible. Hence, raising the internal epidemic control and prevention response to the highest level, with instructions to all levels of bureaucracy to prepare for the worse, while also implement strict control protocols on release of information related to the outbreak.

    That partly explains why Dr. Li Wenliang and eight others were admonished for spreading rumors at the end of Dec., and why the lab in Shanghai was closed for “rectification” after publishing the gene sequence of SARS-CoV-2 without official authorization. It was not necessarily that the Chinese government specifically wanted to hide the outbreak and keep the genetic data to itself, it was because these doctors and institutions went outside of the established channels. Doctors who raise the alarm within the establishment were not punished, but were rewarded, and the Wuhan Virology Institute published the gene sequence a few hours after lab in Shanghai. However, these actions served to broadly intimidate medical workers from sharing information about the epidemic, especially in Wuhan, and made them much more vulnerable to pressure from local government to keep information from both the population and the central government. They ultimately proved extremely counterproductive.

    This also explains why other provinces in China actually escalated their epidemic prevention and control response to the highest level in advance of Wuhan and Hubei Province, including temperature checks at airports and train stations, restricting long distance transportation, mobilizing resources down to the grass root level. I thought it strained credulity that other regional governments would make such moves solely based information gleamed through the grapevine. Now it is clear that they were actually following directives from Beijing. It also explains why even common people from other provinces in China were more alert to the potential dangers of the outbreak, while people in Wuhan lived in ignorant bliss.

    I believe the crucial mistake was that the Wuhan and Hubei governments utterly failed at the “inwardly tight” part of the strategy. Retrospective investigation shows no significant actions were taken during the second and third weeks of Jan. in Wuhan, when the bureaucracy was busy with the party congresses. That is why the mass banquet an official New Year celebration activities went ahead. When I was staying at the hospital for internal bleed, I had two fellow patients in my room. One is a mid-level functionary in the Wuhan municipal Prosecutorate, and the other is a professor at one of the top universities in the city, both were delegates to the municipal Party congress. Both said that the developing outbreak was not a topic of discussion during the congress or the group meetings, and was not a topic of conversation even on the sidelines. The Wuhan and Hubei officials went so far as to pressure the staff of hospitals and local CDC and health commission to withhold critical case information and fact of nosocomial transmission from the second expert group (including from Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and WHO’s Beijing Office) sent from Beijing in mid-Jan.

    China had established a elaborate infectious disease tracking and reporting system following SARS in 2003, and the system worked well in face of the epidemics in the following decade plus (reemergence of SARS in 2004, H5N1, H7N9, H1N1, MERS). However, authorities in Wuhan and Hubei short circuited this system by setting overly tight requirements for reporting cases (requiring severe symptoms, contact history with Huanan Seafood Market, and positive PCR test at a time when testing was extremely limited and unreliable). They pressured doctors and CDC workers from sharing information on suspected cases, leading to an overly narrow view of the epidemic, and highly misleading to both the central government and the WHO. Thus, official claims of “no clear evidence of sustained human to human transmission” on Jan. 15 by both Chinese National Health Commission and the WHO. There was no clear evidence, based on the confirmed cases at the time, but a closer investigation of the suspect cases should have made it clear.

    While it is understandable that any government had strike a fine balance between alerting the public and preventing panic, that balance could have been struck by simply publishing the known confirmed and suspect case counts throughout the first half of January, and PSAs urging the public to wear masks and frequently wash their hands. When the case count was stuck at 47 for two weeks during the middle of Jan., it created a false sense of security. This is not just hindsight talking, either. When Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan triggered their public health responses in early Jan., they did not have any more insight into COVID-19 than the authorities on Mainland China. However, they executed their response plans and their populations were alerted. It would be very easy to place all of the blame on the local and regional officials at Wuhan and Hubei, but we have seen such behavior time and again during early phases of public health and safety incidents, and it points to a pathology in the bureaucratic culture of the CCP regime.

    The government at all levels also underestimated COVID-19. As of mid-Jan., even in internal deliberations at the central level, COVID-19 was deemed the most significant public heath challenge since SARS, they did not appreciate that it would be orders of magnitude worse. Understandable in those early days, when no one knew about 80% of patients with mild symptoms, R0 > 2.5, 14 day incubation period, asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission, etc.

    It appears six crucial days were wasted in mid-Jan., and that was enough to cause the otherwise robust health care system in Wuhan to collapse. Any further delays in decisive actions would likely have created multiple Wuhans across China. Fortunately, the CCP regime recovered decisively, vigorously and effectively from Jan. 23 on, and the population (especially in Wuhan and Hubei) demonstrated incredible fortitude and discipline throughout the ordeal.

    I do disagree that the more authoritarian style of Xi Jinping made the local governments more fearful to act effectively. After all, many provinces other than Hubei were fairly proactive. Furthermore, local and central government in China hid the SARS outbreak for five months in 2002 – 2003, during the leadership transition from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao. For some reason many western commentators wax nostalgic about those “more open” days in China, and it was only three years after the CCP crushed the Falungong cult with a lot of inhumane methods.

    As I write the above, I realize that most governments (from hard authoritarians regimes to liberal democracies) in the rest of the world have repeated many of the same mistakes and oversights made by the Chinese government, weeks and months later, even with the clear warnings from China (actions, if not words) and exhortations from the WHO. Many of them have not recovered as decisively, vigorously and effectively as China. Those most proactive had experience with SARS and/or MERS. Interestingly, some of the Eastern European countries seem to be doing well: Czech Republic, Slovenia, Greece.

    I have to say that, as the COVID-19 pandemic wash across world, and many western governments having failed miserably in response, western MSM’s coverage of China has become markedly more objective and nuanced.

  34. 34.

    Sab

    @YY_Sima Qian: I really like reading your perspective on all this. My very American sister married into a Chinese medical family about twenty years ago. Her family has taken it very seriously for months.

    It has been really frustrating for me to be in the American Midwest and see this freight train barrelling down on us while everyone local was oblivious

    ETA I am a staunch Democrat but I really have to commend Gov Mike deWine who locked us down so early, to the outrage of his political party.

  35. 35.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Sab: Thank you! There is a reason Chinese communities in Italy and Spain (with large percentage of first generation immigrants) have very low infection rates…

  36. 36.

    Sab

    @YY_Sima Qian: Yes. Trump tried to demonize Chinese when they were the ones trying to save us. My sister sent me and my husband an email about Chinese hygiene practices. He sent it around to his Irish Catholic family and everyone is now following its suggestions. Weeks later our government chimed in.

  37. 37.

    Sab

    @YY_Sima Qian: I have posted this before. My sister has a not Chinese friend  in upstate New York whose city has a serious problem with lack of masks. Friend asked my sister about how to connect with local Chinese community. Result was 17 thousand masks that various Chinese Americans had sitting around in closets went to the local medical community.

  39. 39.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Sab: Yeah, in late Jan. and throughout Feb. the Chinese diaspora across the world rushed to vacuum up PPEs from stores and from distributors, to send to Wuhan and to their home towns. Since late Mar., the flow has been reversing, with the diaspora rushing to secure supplies from China to sent to their residing countries and regions. There is a joke on Chinese social media that China played in the first half of the COVID-19 epidemic, the world is playing the second half, the Chinese diaspora is playing the entire game.

    Unfortunate, the diaspora is suffering in both phases of the pandemic. While the epidemic was concentrated in China, the overseas community encountered discrimination and harassment. Now that the pandemic is sweeping across the world, members of the diaspora (especially students studying overseas) have come under criticism within China for bringing the disease back home, as some attempt to flee to safety.

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