1. 3DDRR edged down to 1.12, and 1.14 outside of New York. I will comment on Tuesday.
those who carried the disease into Europe must have gone from Wuhan to Europe for reasons of leisure or work. And if for work related reasons, their behaviour (hand shaking, hugging long time colleagues, being together for long hours in closed environments) would be very different from what you would expect from tourists.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. I wonder what the data for airline passenger traffic shows for each week from the end of February to the end of March. My guess is that if we see a sharp decline, that would be followed by a slowdown in the spread rate. Although this virus does have a formidable ability to spread once it is in a community.
3. That same Tyler Cowen post also points to Christopher Phelan.
The number of times humankind has created an effective vaccine against any coronavirus currently stands at zero. While some antiviral treatments have shown promise, hopes that a “magic bullet” treatment is soon forthcoming are exactly that — hopes.
I think that one of the reasons that Americans spend so much on health care is that we place a high value on hope. We always hope that another test will identify the cause of the pain, another type of treatment will solve the problem, and so on. We don’t admire a doctor who says, “You just have to accept your condition.”
The idea of letting the virus runs its course cuts against that culture of hope. Such a policy would be an admission of defeat. But some of us see the lockdown as a form of futile care. When I introduced Anti-fragile Arnold, I pointed out that those of us who seek to avoid getting the virus as long as we can should not be dictating the behavior of everyone else.
“The idea of letting the virus runs its course cuts against that culture of hope. Such a policy would be an admission of defeat. But some of us see the lockdown as a form of futile care.”
Indeed, well stated. There is a strong cultural norm at work here. Question it or violate it at you own risk.
And, notice how significantly those cultural norms have evolved over time. In the 1940s, we were willing to sacrifice roughly 400k young men in WWII without blinking an eye.
(And, I’m not implying that we got it right in the 1940s…just noting the stark contrast).
3. People are going to have to protect themselves and it looks like with little help from experts. Besides monitoring your temperature and oxygen, there is a good chance resolving a zinc deficiency is helpful as well: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/11/9/2078/htm. Addressed more closely in another odd corner of the internet: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/zinc_the_missing_element_in_the_hcqcovid19_debate.html
There is not only a culture of hope. I think there’s also a culture of toughness. The implication of the existence of a tough people is that we should allow herd immunity to be established while protecting an at-risk sub-population. I don’t know which cultural view is more accurate and perhaps I’m misreading the culture but I was surprised to read that there may be a “culture of hope”. I think high spending on health care is the result of effective marketing.
There is a report that 96% of infected are asymptomatic in a 4 prison test. If we assume the virus is very easy to catch in a prison and yet most are asymptomatic does this suggest the upper respiratory tract defenses are very effective in the prison population? That is, upper respiratory tract defenses are so effective that the virus is prevented from moving down to the lungs and causing pneumonia.
https://www.axios.com/coronavirus-prisons-asymptomatic-8daaaa08-b53e-4368-adb7-88b7d93efece.html
Perhaps some of these prisoners will develop into worsening cases later but consider a few things we know about prisoners: they have plenty of time to sleep and they have no reason to miss a meal. To me this suggests avoiding the feeling of being physically taxed and eating to support the mucous membrane may be especially good ideas at this time.
Interesting blogging, as always. I am in the group that contends lockdowns are futile.
However, lockdowns of virology labs might be a worthy proposition.
I will observe that the “faith in medicine” effect is hugely magnified by some of its astounding triumphs, and lack of exposure to its limits.
We rightfully look upon the erdication of smallpox, and think “do THAT again! right now!” – which is missing that it was a very very hard task that took centuries.
While at the same time, at least in the US, we don’t encounter malaria on a frequent basis, and there are few cases of TB in the country. The fact that smallpox and TB ravaged populations for centuries is forgotten.
A lot of public attention has been directed to the 1918 flu, how destructive it was, and how it just “went away”. And not nearly enough attention to the ongoing mayhem from TB and smallpox that was the norm for centuries.
We should stop expecting the covid-19 story to be like the 1918 flu, and instead expect it to look more like TB or smallpox.
Talking about futile care, here is an article on the Minnesota tracking program that Phelan praises: https://m.startribune.com/as-covid-19-spreads-across-minnesota-contact-tracers-are-in-demand/569954702/
How does this accomplish anything? Utterly redundant and superfluous. Well OK, maybe there are some towns that don’t have instacart, so offering a grocery delivery service might have some benefit (but given the evidence on grocery store transmissions, it is at best minimal. Giving people a thermometer who don’t have one is probably marginally helpful. Calling everyone to tell them they may have been exposed is pretty much pointless, we all could have been exposed given the general prevalence. Telling people not to go to work is redundant as well: is there an employer anywhere without a policy telling infected employees to stay home?
It is basically everyone’s personal responsibility to practice defensive living to protect themself. Nothing the government is doing is of much relevance.
Speaking of airlines, do we have any idea of numbers of cases where spread might have taken place on a plane. We obviously know that planes helped to spread the virus by ferrying infected individuals to new locations, but were they themselves conducive to spreading the disease? If not, that would be an important piece of information about transmission.
Christopher Phelan: “The number of times humankind has created an effective vaccine against any coronavirus currently stands at zero.”
What does an effective vaccine look like? Virtual immunity is what we get with a vaccine. Natural immunity is what we get when 60 to 70% of us have got the disease, right? And more than half of that 60 to 70% will not have experienced any symptoms. So the alternative is just as effective as a vaccine, with the additional benefit of existing, and not being imaginary.
Christopher Phelan: “Absent a vaccine, the epidemiology models governments currently use predict that unless we take extreme mitigation measures forever, at least 60 to 70% of us will eventually get this disease. Long-term shutdowns can change how high a fraction above this 60 to 70% eventually get infected, but not the fact that the majority of us will get infected.”
Absent a vaccine, we get natural immunity. With or without a vaccine we get the same result. Natural immunity looks like virtual immunity, but later. 60 to 70% is natural immunity, right? Phelan says shutdowns “can change how high a fraction above this 60 to 70% eventually get infected.” With four out of the other six coronaviruses we’ve been coping with, the fraction is much higher. Something like 100%, I guess. That’s why it’s called the common cold. 100% is pretty common.
Christopher Phelan: “Are these benefits of a continued shutdown sufficient to justify the horrific costs it imposes, especially on the young? I believe not, and instead see continuing our current policies for much longer as generational theft.”
Then again, “generational theft” describes a lot of existing policies.
On point 3, there are coronavirus vaccines for dogs, https://tinyurl.com/ycg2wh4a and cows, https://tinyurl.com/yacqnyun. So, it would be more accurate to say there have been zero human coronavirus vaccines. The fact that canine and bovine coronavirus vaccines have been developed is encouraging.
There is no vaccine for feline coronavirus, despite the fact that it can mutate in some cats into FIP, a fatal disease with no treatment. There would be a big market for such a vaccine because FeCov is ubiquitous and it would be great to protect young cats from the risk of dying young from FIP. One reason given for the lack of vaccine is because FeCov infections confer limited immunity. Not impossible we could find a vaccine for covid. But we should resist assuming that science can always find a way.
I note that those are both for enteric (intestinal) coronaviruses, not respiratory coronaviruses like COVID. I’ll also note that trials of a vaccine for SARS-1 made the infection worse, not better. The combination of permanent lung damage, significant mutation already observed raising the likelihood that you can get this disease multiple times, doing permanent and perhaps increasing lung damage each time, has caused me to shift away from Antifragile Arnold’s tough-it-out approach over the past two months.