How do you feel about spreading bald-face lies and propaganda? Will you apologize? (we know the answer!)
CDC head with some interesting comments: This last comment is very interesting. I do know that the Gates Foundation has stepped up with test kits. I wonder what additional help the CDC was looking to get from the private sector?
Harvard University moving all classes online and tells students not to return to campus after spring break: https://www.harvard.edu/covid-19-moving-classes-online-other-updates
From the Bossert op-ed, just very simple logic. (It's behind a paywall, so I'm sharing the end of the essay basically.) Do we want to be more like Italy or more like Hong Kong and Singapore? I'm afraid the answer is becoming obvious. --- Consider the actions taken in Italy. On Feb. 20, Italy reported three instances of infection and no known deaths. On Feb. 21, Italy had 20 cases and its first attributed death. Officials implemented interventions, including school closures, the following day and instituted a cordon sanitaire affecting 50,000 people. That’s aggressive, but it was too late. On Feb. 22, Italy reported 63 cases and a second death. A little more than a week later, there were 2,036 cases, with 140 patients in serious condition and 52 deaths. Today, the numbers continue to climb, with more than 9,100 cases and 460 dead, and on Monday the government expanded travel restrictions to the entire country. By contrast, Hong Kong and Singapore acted immediately and are still holding the line, literally. Through isolation, quarantines, contact tracing, canceled gatherings and widespread surveillance, they have achieved linear growth of the virus, meaning a reproduction number close to one. What they are doing is working. Working parents without child care have a legitimate concern, and we must find ways to help one another. But school closings can be the single most effective intervention. Amid an influenza pandemic, schools would be closed to protect the students themselves. Because children are not among the groups most vulnerable to coronavirus, schools should be closed in an effort to reduce community transmission and to protect the children’s parents and grandparents. How long? Epidemiologists suggest eight weeks might be needed to arrest this outbreak. Administrators, students, teachers and parents need to get busy figuring out how to continue the education of our children while contributing to this community-wide public health effort. The United States and other liberal societies must mount a significant, coordinated response with public buy-in. Panic must, of course, be avoided. Most people who become infected are likely to get what feels like a mild case of seasonal flu. Many will not develop symptoms. But the elderly and otherwise infirm are at risk, and the number of Americans likely to be hospitalized and the subset of those who will require some form of critical care could still be significant.
I'm not sure I understand this. It sounds like Italy acted quickly too from what you posted. School closures 2 days after the first infection?
That's nationwide school closings, but I'm assuming they started smaller in various places? But I'm just referencing the article B-Bob posted: Consider the actions taken in Italy. On Feb. 20, Italy reported three instances of infection and no known deaths. On Feb. 21, Italy had 20 cases and its first attributed death. Officials implemented interventions, including school closures, the following day and instituted a cordon sanitaire affecting 50,000 people. That’s aggressive, but it was too late. On Feb. 22, Italy reported 63 cases and a second death. A little more than a week later, there were 2,036 cases, with 140 patients in serious condition and 52 deaths. Today, the numbers continue to climb, with more than 9,100 cases and 460 dead, and on Monday the government expanded travel restrictions to the entire country. I'm just not sure what the expectation is if that response is accurate and those actions were taken within 2 days? Seems like everyone has missed the boat already if that's the standard?
I heard an interview 5 days ago with a researcher in Italy. Their problem was peak flu season + lack of testing. What he basically said was that unfortunately cases were not detected because symptoms were similar to the flu. By the time they detected a case (critically ill tested return positive) with no direct link to known source or travel, they did an extensive tracing and that's when they realize they had local sustained transmission - that's when they closed down the schools. It was too late. Not too different from Seattle (transmission likely been going on for weeks since the first positive with no known source or travel). I believe Singapore and HK didn't wait and shut things down prior to any known spread in community. The problem in the US is we now know there is community spread in one region but it's still not known to be how extensive due to lack of test + less aggressive actions to stop transmission. More concerning, we are still very vulnerable to these community transmission going undetected EVERY where within the country, again due to lack of testing and testing that are still limited to known travel or contact. By the time a new city detect them, they might be in the same shoe as Seattle. ps. SK may be a model where you don't need to lock down everything and still can slow this down even with community transmission. However, i doubt the US has the efficiency and speed of SK.
Gotcha - that makes sense. Singapore and HK are small city-states - I can't imagine the US or other places could ever be that aggressive. Can you imagine the US shutting down schools or big events nationwide 3 weeks ago when we had virtually no cases here? People would have revolted.
No, but now... I'm okay with shutting down until we have a good ideas on what's going on. Gov Inslee: "The problem is, is that we really need to as leaders make decisions looking forward to where this is going, rather than where it is today," Inslee said. "We might have 1,000 people infected today in Washington but this doubles every week in an epidemic like this, and so seven weeks from now we may have 60,000 people plus infected." 60k is basically Wuhan. Can the State handle that load? Should we isolate the State or not? Hard decisions.
Meanwhile, we aren't adequately testing people for the virus, which means it is spreading like wildfire throughout the country. Trump's response now is criminal. His inaction and the dysfunction in the government is going to result in the US being the worst outbreak of the virus in the world in a matter of a week.
Senior Italy health official - like a bomb went off. Overwhelmed, have to make decision on if patient can benefit from ICU - if not, no ICU. Doing this interview so that others understand that if you are not careful in controlling this, this disease will overwhelm your system no matter how eff and modern your health care system is.
Probably the biggest lesson we can learn from Italy is not to say, "We're going to initiate a quarantine........in a couple of days (in case anyone needs time to escape)."
