This is important as it proves the benefit of limiting social interaction.
What's the timetable when America can reopen?? TBD by the American people -- THAT should be Trump's daily mantra -- "we the people" determine when it is safe to swim again.
Link: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/
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He was making shit up at today’s fox interview thing (doctors are “telling him to shut it down for two years” is a bald-faced lie). He needs to not be out front here.
And the notion that we could lift the restrictions by Easter (“packed churches”!) is just the next sign that a break between the public health pros and the White House is coming.
Trump tards will follow his advice and head to mass, I’m sure.
It's healthy and important to ask those questions. Just as we need to not re-open too soon, we also need to not re-open too late.
We can't let our solution to this problem waste precious weeks while bureaucrats slowly pass up good options waiting for a perfect one. They need some skin in the speed game.
I hope.
I don't think there is any realistic scenario that gets us out of this by Easter.
That's more realistic than Easter probably is.
Re Easter: Our diocese is out through Easter. Trump can't change that.
outbreak, i.e. its peak, its end and was even very accurate on its infected number at about 80k. His prediction was long before before others. His message on U.S. is very clear: “What we need is to control the panic, we’re going to be fine.”
Link: https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-03-22/coronavirus-outbreak-nobel-laureate
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Why this Nobel laureate predicts a quicker coronavirus recovery: ‘We’re going to be fine’
Michael Levitt, a Nobel laureate and Stanford biophysicist, began analyzing the number of COVID-19 cases worldwide in January and correctly calculated that China would get through the worst of its coronavirus outbreak long before many health experts had predicted.
Now he foresees a similar outcome in the United States and the rest of the world.
While many epidemiologists are warning of months, or even years, of massive social disruption and millions of deaths, Levitt says the data simply don’t support such a dire scenario — especially in areas where reasonable social distancing measures are in place.
“What we need is to control the panic,” he said. In the grand scheme, “we’re going to be fine.”
Here’s what Levitt noticed in China: On Jan. 31, the country had 46 new deaths due to the novel coronavirus, compared with 42 new deaths the day before.
Although the number of daily deaths had increased, the rate of that increase had begun to ease off. In his view, the fact that new cases were being identified at a slower rate was more telling than the number of new cases itself. It was an early sign that the trajectory of the outbreak had shifted.
Think of the outbreak as a car racing down an open highway, he said. Although the car is still gaining speed, it’s not accelerating as rapidly as before.
“This suggests that the rate of increase in the number of deaths will slow down even more over the next week,” Levitt wrote in a report he sent to friends Feb. 1 that was widely shared on Chinese social media. And soon, he predicted, the number of deaths would be decreasing every day.
Three weeks later, Levitt told the China Daily News that the virus’ rate of growth had peaked. He predicted that the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in China would end up around 80,000, with about 3,250 deaths.
This forecast turned out to be remarkably accurate: As of March 16, China had counted a total of 80,298 cases and 3,245 deaths — in a nation of nearly 1.4 billion people where roughly 10 million die every year. The number of newly diagnosed patients has dropped to around 25 a day, with no cases of community spread reported since Wednesday.
Now Levitt, who received the 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing complex models of chemical systems, is seeing similar turning points in other nations, even those that did not instill the draconian isolation measures that China did.
He analyzed data from 78 countries that reported more than 50 newcases of COVID-19 every day and sees “signs of recovery” in many of them. He’s not focusing on the total number ofcases in a country, but on the number of new cases identified every day — and, especially, on the change in that number from one day to the next.
In South Korea, for example, newly confirmed cases are being added to the country’s total each day, but the daily tally has dropped in recent weeks, remaining below 200. That suggests the outbreak there may be winding down.
In Iran, the number of newly confirmed COVID-19 cases per day remained relatively flat last week, going from 1,053 last Monday to 1,028 on Sunday. Although that’s still a lot of new cases, Levitt said, the pattern suggests the outbreak there “is past the halfway mark.”
Italy, on the other hand, looks like it’s still on the upswing. In that country, the number of newly confirmed cases increased on most days this past week.
In places that have managed to recover from an initial outbreak, officials must still contend with the fact that the coronavirus may return. China is now fighting to stop new waves of infection coming in from places where the virus is spreading out of control. Other countries are bound to face the same problem.
Getting vaccinated against the flu is important, too, because a coronavirus outbreak that strikes in the middle of a flu epidemic is much more likely to overwhelm hospitals and increases the odds that the coronavirus goes undetected. This was probably a factor in Italy, a country with a strong anti-vaccine movement, he said.
Levitt fears the public health measures that have shut down large swaths of the economy could cause their own health catastrophe, as lost jobs lead to poverty and hopelessness. Time and again, researchers have seen that suicide rates go up when the economy spirals down.
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Seriously, good. isolation is working.
I have some friends there who were taken to hospital and I haven't heard from them since.
Nervous for them. It's only been a week or so.