Octopus Overlords

Kurth wrote: ↑Tue Mar 24, 2020 12:56 pm

malchior wrote: ↑Mon Mar 23, 2020 9:02 pm

Anonymous Bosch wrote: ↑Mon Mar 23, 2020 8:54 pm

malchior wrote: ↑Mon Mar 23, 2020 8:41 pm

Anonymous Bosch wrote: ↑Mon Mar 23, 2020 8:28 pm

Daehawk wrote: ↑Mon Mar 23, 2020 8:12 pm That boy believes China? What a shitty laureate.

Yeah, I'm sure your forecast of Chinese coronavirus fatalities was much more accurate than that of a Nobel laureate and Stanford biophysicist "boy."

Biophysicist. Not a Medical Doctor. Not an epidemiologist. Not an expert in that field at all. Why listen to the experts when we can find an expert in something else that says what we want to believe and lean on those credentials. That is solid science.

So what? You're free to believe whatever you like. But Levitt's forecast of Chinese deaths from COVID-19 was pretty damn accurate, so one can but hope his prediction of slowed growth in other nations also holds up.

Hope away. It's pretty likely he just got lucky or the data was inaccurate. I'd love to see his model account for South Korea vs. Italy vs. France vs. the US which all used totally different controls.

Hope . . . malchior eats hope for breakfast!

stessier wrote: ↑Tue Mar 24, 2020 3:55 am

gameoverman wrote: ↑Mon Mar 23, 2020 7:21 pm The NFL had games even when they couldn't play with 'real' players or 'real' officials so I don't think they'll cancel the season. They'll want to leave the playoffs and Super Bowl schedule as is, so my bet is the season starts later than previously planned, possibly with no preseason or a drastically shortened one.

Didn't want to clutter up the NFL thread.

I agree that is what they want. We all want that. I don't think that is what they are going to get...

Kurth wrote: ↑Tue Mar 24, 2020 12:56 pm Hope . . . malchior eats hope for breakfast!

Unagi wrote: ↑Tue Mar 24, 2020 9:10 am

hitbyambulance wrote: ↑Mon Mar 23, 2020 8:32 pm Gov. (and former presidential candidate) Inslee just formalized the 'stay home' order for WA state

That took wayyyy too long

Anonymous Bosch wrote: ↑Tue Mar 24, 2020 2:42 pm

Kurth wrote: ↑Tue Mar 24, 2020 12:56 pm Hope . . . malchior eats hope for breakfast!

If memory serves, he resides in New Jersey. So it goes without saying that he's a misery guts. I probably would be too if I lived in such a hell-mouth.

malchior wrote: ↑Tue Mar 24, 2020 3:59 pm Also I've got a dune buggy roaming my neighborhood all of a sudden. I think the kid is just practicing for runs to ammo town.

WSJ.com wrote:BEIJING—U. S. and European leaders are looking at China’s progress in curbing the coronavirus pandemic to guide them on how to beat the virus within their own borders.

They may be drawing the wrong lessons, doctors and health experts say.

The cordon sanitaire that began around Wuhan and two nearby cities on Jan. 23 helped slow the virus’s transmission to other parts of China, but didn’t really stop it in Wuhan itself, these experts say. Instead, the virus kept spreading among family members in homes, in large part because hospitals were too overwhelmed to handle all the patients, according to doctors and patients there.

What really turned the tide in Wuhan was a shift after Feb. 2 to a more aggressive and systematic quarantine regime whereby suspected or mild cases—and even healthy close contacts of confirmed cases—were sent to makeshift hospitals and temporary quarantine centers.

The tactics required turning hundreds of hotels, schools and other places into quarantine centers, as well as building two new hospitals and creating 14 temporary ones in public buildings. It also underscored the importance of coronavirus testing capacity, which local authorities say was expanded from 200 tests a day in late January to 7,000 daily by mid-February.

The steps went beyond what’s envisioned in many hard-hit Western cities. As a result, many doctors and experts say the recent lockdowns in the U.S. and Europe may slow the rise in new infections—if properly enforced—but still won’t be enough to stop it or prevent many hospitals from being overwhelmed, as they were initially in Wuhan.

“A lot of the lessons have been lost,” said Devi Sridhar, professor of global public health at the University of Edinburgh. “A lockdown helps buy time: The only way it will work is if you actually backtrack and start figuring out who has the virus.”

The U.S., Britain and some European countries will ultimately, like Wuhan, have to establish multiple makeshift hospitals and quarantine centers to isolate more cases if they are to bring the virus under control, she said.

“Absent of divine intervention, I don’t think there’s any other way out of it,” she said. “We’re heading in that direction: We’re just doing it too slow.”

In New York City, federal authorities plan to set up mobile hospitals, with a total capacity of 1,000 beds, at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan. New York has also been looking into converting entire hotels into hospitals, but it is unclear how many beds will be made available.

Zhang Jinnong, head of the emergency department at Wuhan’s Xiehe Hospital, said the most important thing was to separate the infected from the healthy, and recommended hotels as quarantine centers where people could be isolated in separate rooms.

“You just need to turn off the central air conditioning,” he said.

He writes that he is told about a patient who is receiving the maximum amount of oxygen but is still breathing fast.

He describes having "a long and honest discussion" with the patient and her family -- who are on the phone -- that she needs to go on life support before things get worse.

"You're notified of another really sick patient coming in. You rush over. They're also extremely sick, vomiting. They need to be put on life support as well. You bring them back. Two patients, in rooms right next to each other, both getting a breathing tube," he wrote. "It's not even 10 a.m. yet."

Formix wrote: ↑Tue Mar 24, 2020 12:48 pmAwesome. That's a good read, thanks Smoove. From reading that, it seems (and maybe I'm misunderstanding) that there is no good data to say that there is any mutation so far of a sort that would invalidate any herd immunity, but with mutation, you just never know, but for know it's looking promising.

A thread on #SARSCoV2 mutations and what they might mean for the #COVID19 vaccination and immunity, in which I predict it will take the virus a few years to mutate enough to significantly hinder a vaccine. 1/12

Smoove_B wrote: ↑Tue Mar 24, 2020 10:28 pm Correct - there's nothing stopping this from happening again in 3,5,7 or some other random set of years from now and we have the same problem all over again. I'd like to think whatever vaccine we develop will minimize the severity of a future outbreak, but even that remains to be seen. Until we can get a handle on how this new virus is just sorta hanging out with us on planet Earth from here on out, I think the best we can do is focus on the next ~12 weeks and hope a longer-term strategy emerges. Thankfully the big brains don't seem to think vaccine development will be an issue and I certainly hope that analysis holds true.

Odds: Pretty good. What we may be seeing “is the emergence of a new coronavirus … that could very well become another seasonal pathogen that causes pneumonia,” said infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota. It would be “more than a cold” and less than SARS: “The only other pathogen I can compare it to is seasonal influenza.”

malchior wrote: ↑Mon Mar 23, 2020 9:02 pm

Anonymous Bosch wrote: ↑Mon Mar 23, 2020 8:54 pm

malchior wrote: ↑Mon Mar 23, 2020 8:41 pm

Anonymous Bosch wrote: ↑Mon Mar 23, 2020 8:28 pm

Daehawk wrote: ↑Mon Mar 23, 2020 8:12 pm That boy believes China? What a shitty laureate.

Yeah, I'm sure your forecast of Chinese coronavirus fatalities was much more accurate than that of a Nobel laureate and Stanford biophysicist "boy."

Biophysicist. Not a Medical Doctor. Not an epidemiologist. Not an expert in that field at all. Why listen to the experts when we can find an expert in something else that says what we want to believe and lean on those credentials. That is solid science.

So what? You're free to believe whatever you like. But Levitt's forecast of Chinese deaths from COVID-19 was pretty damn accurate, so one can but hope his prediction of slowed growth in other nations also holds up.

Hope away. It's pretty likely he just got lucky or the data was inaccurate. I'd love to see his model account for South Korea vs. Italy vs. France vs. the US which all used totally different controls.

Smoove_B wrote: ↑Mon Mar 23, 2020 8:32 pm As you can imagine, I've been doing quite a bit of reading in the last few weeks. I have seen neither one of those two names coming up in my circles, so I'll take a look. What I have noticed is that professional epidemiologists (of which I am not) are starting to get genuinely angry at all the armchair epidemiology happening and the fact that people in related or public-health adjacent fields (or sometimes with just a Dr. in front of their name) are giving interviews or articles to major news organizations about epidemiological principles as they relate to outbreaks and population-level disease control.

EDIT: One of the people I do follow (Dr. Ali Khan) had this to say about the article earlier today on social media:

It is easy to get in an echo chamber of perspective that is self-reinforcing. Plus I am a fan of Fringe. Here is a view from a Nobel Laureate without comment. Although I look forward to reading yours.

I'm actually waiting for Dr. Khan to write something as he's been rather vocal in his general frustration as to how this is being reported on

raydude wrote: ↑Wed Mar 25, 2020 8:03 am

Smoove_B wrote: ↑Mon Mar 23, 2020 8:32 pm As you can imagine, I've been doing quite a bit of reading in the last few weeks. I have seen neither one of those two names coming up in my circles, so I'll take a look. What I have noticed is that professional epidemiologists (of which I am not) are starting to get genuinely angry at all the armchair epidemiology happening and the fact that people in related or public-health adjacent fields (or sometimes with just a Dr. in front of their name) are giving interviews or articles to major news organizations about epidemiological principles as they relate to outbreaks and population-level disease control.

EDIT: One of the people I do follow (Dr. Ali Khan) had this to say about the article earlier today on social media:

It is easy to get in an echo chamber of perspective that is self-reinforcing. Plus I am a fan of Fringe. Here is a view from a Nobel Laureate without comment. Although I look forward to reading yours.

I'm actually waiting for Dr. Khan to write something as he's been rather vocal in his general frustration as to how this is being reported on

I've just started following Dr. Ali Khan on twitter. He posted this on March 24. Is it me or are we trending towards 10k deaths in 14 days?

dbt1949 wrote: ↑Wed Mar 25, 2020 8:22 am Prince Charles has tested positive. So he is self isolating.
Just him and 200 staff.

Kasey Chang wrote: ↑Wed Mar 25, 2020 1:47 pm San Francisco county (which is basically the city) is showing 178 cases, yikes. Santa Clara is ahead because it got to a senior center there, but there are a LOT of seniors in San Francisco.

noxiousdog wrote: ↑Wed Mar 25, 2020 3:25 pm The fact that we don't have tests everywhere is criminal. Until we have good tracking data nearly everything we are doing is worthless.

dbt1949 wrote: ↑Wed Mar 25, 2020 4:23 pm Chances are if I caught it I wouldn't do anything about it either. Just tough it thru or die.
They can't do anything about it now except try to ease the symptoms and make you comfortable.
My wife would catch it too and we'd do the same thing for her except stop her care nurse from coming over.

dbt1949 wrote: ↑Wed Mar 25, 2020 4:23 pm Chances are if I caught it I wouldn't do anything about it either. Just tough it thru or die.
They can't do anything about it now except try to ease the symptoms and make you comfortable.
My wife would catch it too and we'd do the same thing for her except stop her care nurse from coming over.

Daehawk wrote: ↑Wed Mar 25, 2020 4:58 pm
Theres now 26 known. 1 person from the county has died. Another died too but was from somewhere else but in our hospitals so they dont count him here. They also broke down the percentages by ages but I cant remember that at all.

Unagi wrote: ↑Wed Mar 25, 2020 5:02 pm

Daehawk wrote: ↑Wed Mar 25, 2020 4:58 pm
Theres now 26 known. 1 person from the county has died. Another died too but was from somewhere else but in our hospitals so they dont count him here. They also broke down the percentages by ages but I cant remember that at all.

I don't know who your 'they' is, but he is counted as 1 of 2 that's died. While your article articulates that one county resident died , nowhere does it say about that other person that 'they don't count him here'.

As far as I know, deaths and cases are counted by hospital and not just by the person's home town.