OT: Open for Business Until Everyone is Sick

It is sad that people believe such obvious misinformation in an engineering newsgroup.

If the virus is passed around "silently" we don't care do we? Contact trac ing and quarantine of anyone exposed is practical and required once the num bers drop. But the same sort of thinking that got Trump elected means once people feel better they stop taking their antibiotics even though they are n't cured.

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  Rick C. 

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0%, 900 workers tested positive for this disease. The plant closures are a dding up and meat is going to be in short supply soon. So it seems we are damned if we do, damned if we don't.

Some people think you are going to need guns to protect that freezer. If I were in your shoes I'd have a backup generator.

BTW, why is he slaughtering cows? We are pretty sure they aren't responsib le for the virus.

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  Rick C. 

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0%, 900 workers tested positive for this disease. The plant closures are a dding up and meat is going to be in short supply soon. So it seems we are damned if we do, damned if we don't.

tact that will spread the virus like wildfire will still result in many bus inesses closing because the people working there will get sick. Trying to shut down and not spread the virus isn't working, which we have to assume i s because people aren't following the orders.

s to test and isolate everyone who potentially was exposed and/or isolated everyone with stay at home orders. So why can't the US and the UK and othe r countries do the same thing?

tions-continue-915759

Interesting that you point to Musk rather than blind stupidity.

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  Rick C. 

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Without knowing what "some places" means, I'll suggest that's misinformation.

Lookie here for a little reality:

It's important to read past the introduction here; the second page is where the antibody-positive result has a lower bound computed; it's no less than zero, you'll be glad to hear. To claim much more than zero, like 30%, is ... extraordinary. We await evidence.

John Larkin wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

I was pretty sure that all the error bars were located in San Fran.

And what are you going to need to protect THAT? A cannon? Howitzer? :)

If the power goes out, the freezer will only last so long anyway. People need to get their priorities straight.

Generator, Fuel, Steaks, Freezer and then the guns.

No wait: Toilet Paper, Generator, Fuel..... :)

If nobody has ever had this, why all the panic?

You wouldn't believe anything I said.

google antibody tests new york

or antibody tests germany

or something.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

Science teaches us to doubt. 

  Claude Bernard

Talk is cheap. What can you submit to peer review? Results without reference to input data, and with incredible error estimates, are the only inputs you've offered, and rejection was for cause, not just attribution.

It's not just me; folk who deal in knowledge and understanding ALL apply similar peer review requirements.

No, assuming the lockdown works, they're exactly as likely to be infected once the lockdown ends. There's only exposure or not-exposure offered by lockdown. It's just delay.

This is only true after some other thing happens.

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Les Cargill

In reality it is a function of how often people get together for face-to-face interactions that last longer than about 15 minutes. Parties, family get-to-gethers, demonstrations and church services are responsible for most Covid-19 infections.

All happen more often when the population density is high, and keep on happening under lock-down amongst people who don't have enough sense to understand why they shouldn't do it.

Trump supporters do seem to be particularly dense.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Post some links to your peer-reviewed publications.

Or some of your electronic designs.

Or some cat pictures.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

Science teaches us to doubt. 

  Claude Bernard

That seems to be true in the US, but not in many other places. So, an intelligent person would, instead of just condemning the idea of lock down, ask what are we doing wrong and how can we improve it?

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  Rick C. 

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't even need to get the R0 number down to zero. We just have to get it eno ugh below 1.0 that the new infections drops more rapidly than it's doing no w.

It does seem to have happened in Australia, where the lock-down is being ob served well enough to produce a rapid fall in the number of new cases repor ted each day.

This should have been the start of our annual flu season - I got my annual flu jab yesterday - but we've had remarkably few cases of flu so far.

Bats aren't a reservoir of a virus that can infect us. Covid-19 is clearly descended from such a virus, but it probably mutated before it could infect wherever intermediate species it went through before it got around to acqu iring the modification that let it infect us.

I recently posted a link to a recent PNAS paper about potential sources of zoonoses - their conclusion was that it didn't matter much which species th e zoonose ancestor happened to infest - there just had to be enough of them for random variation of inherited characteristics to have a finite chance of throwing up something that could infect humans.

Getting rid of bats would get rid of just one of a multitude of potential r eservoirs.

cannot afford the level of healthcare we have, even remotely. Some day a plane from one of them might land and then everything will start all over a gain. In order to win we must try to fix the problem globally, which is not happening nowadays. Every single country pursues its own uniqu e attempts, sometimes they are even stealing the PPE belonging to their nei ghbours to supplement their own stock.

Epidemics are going to be with us for quite a while yet. The trick we need to find is a way of detecting them early. We know how to stop them spreadin g once we've recognised them as an epidemic - though the US does seem to be woefully inept at actually doing it.

New Scientist claimed that vigorous contact racing and rigorous isolation o f anybody who might have got infected for 14 days from the contact was what actually made the difference. Lock down helped by limitng the number of co ntacts that had to be traced.

They are now relaxing their lockdown - we've had on-site reports of more tr affic on the streets and in railway stations.

d throughout Europe.

Lock down just makes contact tracing easier. You can impose lock down by fi at.

Getting contact tracing going takes more work.

Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and other have done better.

There will eventually be a vaccine. Places that can do contact tracing and quarantine won't have infected people running around infecting other people before we get the vaccine. Some countries are too incompetent to do that w ell.

If you have the bad luck to live in a country that can't manage epidemic co ntrol. More fortunate places can wait until there is a vaccine.

There's nothing particularly probable about that factor of three.

What reliable evidence there is suggests that perhaps one third or fewer of all cases of Covid-19 infection are are asymptomatic. Some new and not all that reliable tests for antibodies to Covid-19 have suggested higher numbe rs, but one has to suspect that that they are detecting antibodies to other corona viruses - perhaps the one that is responsibly for about a quater of the cases of the common cold.

Sorry.

The US has been appallingly inept in trying to contain the epidemic.

The number of new cases per day has been more or less steady at about 30,00

0 per day for a month now. Italy did a poor job of containing the epidemic, but at least their new case per day numbers did start decreasing, even if rather slowly.

The US could have done worse, and sustained the exponential increase for ev en longer, but their claim to be an advanced industrial country looks very dubious.

Trump may be part of the explanation, but the fact that they don't have uni versal health care may reflect a more fundamental - and more important - de fect in the way their society works.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

n't even need to get the R0 number down to zero. We just have to get it en ough below 1.0 that the new infections drops more rapidly than it's doing n ow.

Actually that seems most unlikely. Typhoid Mary was a silent carrier for th e typhoid bacterium that lived in her gut. If you get Covid-19 you either d ie of it, or your immune system gets rid if it.

As many as 30% of Covid-19 infections may be asymptomatic. The antibody tes ts that seem to be saying otherwise are almost certainly wrong - probably r eacting to antibodies to the corona virus that cause a quarter of the cases of the common cold.

But is it practical to test everybody who presents with Covid-19 like infec tion, and contact trace where it came from and isolate all the people who m ight have caught it from them for 14 days from that contact. New seeds can be stopped from germinating into a new epidemic.

The US health system isn't well suited to doing this, but now might be a go od time to clean it up and remove a few other of its obvious defects.

nd throughout Europe.

Places where lock down has been done right - and backed up by aggressive co ntact tracing - needed about six weeks. South Korea relied on contact traci ng alone and that worked equally quickly.

According to some very dubious antibody tests, which seems to be getting a huge number of false positives. I suspect that it is also reacting to antio bodues to the corona virus that causes a quarter of the caes of the common cold.

And the antibody test being used is extremely dubious.

And the antibody test being used is extremely dubious.

The antibody test may in fact be telling you about the past years winter co lds - or at least the 25% caused by a different corona virus.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

It shocks me that this kind of ignorant exaggeration doesn't get shot down in an engineering newsgroup.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Of course John Larkin is one of the people most in need of correct explanations, while remaining impervious to any correction of his own - decidedly imperfect - attempts at explanation.

He is an exponent of climate change denial, which is of a piece with his delusions about the Covid19 epidemic.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

If there was one at Tulane when John Larkin was studying there, he must have skipped most of the lectures.

He does seem to have studied hard in the course that taught him how to be a thoroughly gullible twit, or he may just have a natural aptitude.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

John Larkin getting shorn of his sillier ideas? If only.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

A better question, is if you noted the referenced article, didn't you notice the sentence that starts "The point is not that..." which addresses that issue?

I tell you a fifth time (three previous postings by me, one by another) that error estimates are a critical omission; others concur, that's NOT just from me.

If your pet theory needs the protection of repeated falsehoods, science offers a solution: euthanize that pet.