Coronavirus Pandemic

[KlaxonCow]

.. in other words .. "WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE !!!" ... ...

No, in fairness, that's your modus operandi to be the doom-and-gloom monger around here, and I would not want to steal your job in these troubled times.

Problem is :

- trust of the government to do the right things < 0

- trust of the people to do the right things -> "Problem 2", SOME people will do, SOME MANY OTHERS WON'T ( because they are already NOT doing it ) and SOME people still believe "it's all over rated it's all manipulation we don't need all this".

Well, the real underlying problem is R. That rate of spread.

The problem being that, arithmetically, if you've got even a majority of people obeying this to the letter - and keeping R between 0.5 and 0.9, as the government claims we're doing right now - but then you've got a minority of idiots who're doing it all horribly wrong - so their R is returning back to the roughly 3.0 that this virus has uncontrolled in the wild - then just do the maths on that:

80% at an R of 0.9 + 20% at an R of 2.7 = an overall R of 1.26

In other words, the R heads back over 1.0 and that means one person is giving it to more than one other person, so the numbers will rise again. And the more people who have it, the more people they'll pass it onto, who'll pass it onto even more people and so forth - hence the exponential growth. And if every fucker's got this then no matter how good you personally are at hand washing and social distancing, it's eventually going to get to you at some point.

I actually believe that the majority of people will be sensible - because "self-preservation" is involved and, as I've mentioned, that typically trumps everything - but the problem is that, in terms of R, a unruly minority can far too easily fuck it up for everyone else.

It's like climate change, as the "honest ad" mentions. The problem with problems like climate change or pandemics is that it's not a thing where you can say "well, I'll do the right thing over here and I don't care what you're doing over there" - other people can very, very much fuck it up for us all, no matter how awesomely good the overwhelming majority of most people are in doing the right things themselves personally and individually.

It doesn't matter, when some other fucker is out there being a "super spreader" - like, you know, shaking hands with everyone at a Covid ward, as a purely illustrative example - and their R is through the bloody roof, dragging it all upwards. The rest of us are working hard to push 0.6 down to 0.5 - but there's some posse of buffoons wandering around raising it back to the wild 2.7-ish everywhere they go, undoing all that hard work.

This is the underlying arithmetical problem. With some problems you can legitimately say "okay, what someone else does is not my business" and you can leave them to eagerly earn their Darwin Awards (caution them against it, of course, but, ultimately, everyone is the captain of their own fate and master of their own soul). But some problems - vaccination / pandemics, climate change, etc. - are ones where, sorry, you have to be brought in line here, because you're going to fuck it up for everyone else and we do not give you consent to do that. It's not just you that suffers, so you simply don't have the right to force suffering on me that I never consented to.

Overall yes would be nice "not to stop all business at all" but at the same time "but has to be done properly" because "bombs are flying, people are dying, how are you ?".

Well, to be frank, it's not business I give a shit about. It's the sustainability of all this, so that we can continue doing what we need to do to stop people dying and kick this bloody virus into touch.

But that does, indeed, involve people doing their jobs, earning their keep, buying food and paying rent, etc. - but, equally, if you're an unemployed unpaid volunteer for some charity or whatever then, for me, that's the same thing. It's not the money I'm worried about directly, but the "we need to keep the world ticking over" angle. Construction workers house people. Manufacturing makes shit for people. Staying at home and not being able to do ordinary healthcare at hospitals will have a death toll to it as well.

Like I say, it needs to be made sustainable, or we just won't be able to sustain it. And, realistically, this is going on for a long time yet, so it must be sustained.

That naturally includes business and the economy - it plays a big role in all of that - but I give zero shits if rich people are annoyed that the speed at which they're getting richer and richer has stalled right now, as that, in the grand scheme of things, is, I feel, quite literally the least important thing in the whole entire universe.

[tufty]

in terms of R, a unruly minority can far too easily fuck it up for everyone else.

I'm not as negative as you are.

*If* the infrastructure is in place for testing, tracing and isolating, and infections can be picked up fast (think, for example, temperature checks on entry to, for example, supermarkets - this is a non-invasive and close to instant pre-testing protocol - with guaranteed follow-up, which is the hard bit), new infections can be stomped on, keeping effective R down, even if some people are being cocks about the social distancing that we should all be doing. It would even allow /everyone/ to be a bit lax from time to time. As long as the testing requirement, which is driven by the number of new infections, doesn't exceed testing capability, we're golden.

But, it requires a fair amount of change, not least of which is, if you show even the slightest symptoms, including being picked up as having a bit of a temperature, you *must* get tested. Tested *right now*, with *enforced* isolation between the point of testing and the point you get your hopefully negative result. Refusal to be tested *must* have a real consequence, and the police must be willing to carry out, and capable of, the enforcement of those consequences. Likewise social distancing rules.

A half-way-house doesn't fucking work. Saying "oh, go on, lock down, don't be cocks about it" is what has pushed the UK to the top of the table, deaths-wise.

(and yes, I'm aware that the UK is, per capita, still lower in terms of deaths than Italy and Spain, but it's still well ahead of France, whereas it should be the other way round, France having started their epidemic a week earlier)

[(o)(o)]

A few days after Boris declared lockdown, I woke up dripping with sweat - and, no, neither the room temperature nor the weather outside could otherwise explain this - and I had a bit of a dry coughing fit initially. I remember, at the time, thinking "oh, fuck, I've got it". I went to look in the bathroom mirror and my face was bright red..

Uncanny.

But the thing is that the cough soon went away after about five minutes. And I've not had anything like that ever since, over a month later. My chest remained warm for the rest of the morning, but it was not really hot anymore - it was not "dripping with sweat" levels of hot - and though, when I first woke up, I had evidence that, while I slept, I must have been running a temperature, this was also, like the cough, soon dissipating.

This is why I'm not entirely sure. Because, basically, the "classic symptoms" mostly happened overnight, while I was asleep. I only caught the "remnants" of things after I woke up.

Now, to be clear, I felt like shit for the next 4 or 5 days. Like a massive hangover. And I was so, so fatigued all the time. I spent most of this time just resting and sleeping in bed. I'd try to get up, but could only muster about five minutes before feeling that, no, I really needed to go lie back down again.

Then I felt better. Very slowly getting back to normal.

At this point, I was thinking that though it could be "mild symptoms" covid, it could just as equally have just been, like, a heavy flu or something. No reason to specifically suspect the coronavirus, besides that there's a temptation to do so right now for reasons of timing.

But then, about 10-ish days later, I started feeling awful again. Now, in comparison to the first time around, it was much weaker and milder. This time, it was more neurological and around the head / nose area - headaches, sinuses, cloudy mind, and I even initially had a nose bleed (though I'm not sure how relevant that is) - and the fatigue was back. But this wasn't so bad this time, and I could actually get up and do things - just, like, nothing too strenuous (indeed, this time around was very much like having a regular hangover).

And though this could potentially have been that I caught something else, this seems unlikely when, you know, I've been in lockdown throughout this. Plus, it internally felt like the same thing, just weaker. This lasted about 3 or 4 days.

Aside from a third incident, your description pretty closely mirrors my experience.

What had me doubting it's covid is how brief the cough / fever was.. (I also had slightly laboured breathing, but for just one evening).. but it just seemed well outside the scope and range of normal flus and colds I've experienced before.

I would like to know if I have had it and have antibodies. However I undersatnd the antibody test involves a cotton bud style swab being inserted very deeply up the nose hole, similar to the 'nail in the nose' trick those danger circuses performers do?

[gilesgoat]

Clarification when I say "business" I meant basically "work" I mean each one of us working is in some sort of "business".

Because yes , some lucky ones like us can work from home "KINDA like nothing happened" .. but it's "kinda" because then "what about all the others into trouble that maybe don't have any more money to spend ?" If they are in trouble we too are in trouble !

I did not say "the mega corp" or "the super rich people" but even just "the small local pub" is "business".

I actually believe that the majority of people will be sensible - because "self-preservation" is involved and, as I've mentioned, that typically trumps everything - but the problem is that, in terms of R, a unruly minority can far too easily fuck it up for everyone else.

Possibly, because nobody wants to die too soon/badly .. BUT as you say "an unruly minorty CAN fuck it up for everyone".

The government IMHO does not seems to spread well the message that "this is not a joke, this is a matter of life and death".

Certainy Boris does not look like "the best person for anything" he's not the person I'd listen advice from !

[gilesgoat]

.. I was editing that post adding this :

[edit] - what worries me is that in UK "it appears" that the government has no real will/power to enforce anything ( except when it's directly beneficial to them, not the people ) and the people I see around here "are taking it quite lightly".

You hardly see anyone wearing masks or using gloves or even washing hands after being in a shop, most people I see around here - in shops - seems to have a quite "casual" attitude.

THE BEST I've seen around here is the .. sheep food shop .. they implemented some "safe protocols could not be safer than this" and yet they are in full business ! "They are GENIUSES" compared to what places like Tesco / Morrisons / etc. do !

That worries me , that fundamentally "there's a lockdown that looks almost fake", or at least "going to shops is a MEGA risk" !

Pharmacies I've seen around are OK, they do have pretty good safety standards, but especially food shops seems to be "INCREDIBILY SHITTY" at it !

[F-ZeroOne]

"Rolling Stone" report on factors that contributed to the situation in the US.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... er-995930/

[(o)(o)]

[merman]

Boris's briefing was worse than useless.

He is definitely not good on details. Even in a pre-recorded speech there was waffle, pointless graphs, a useless equation that doesn't make sense and the new "alert scale".

To be clear, on a five-point scale we are somewhere between three and four.


The only true thing he said was that we haven't met the "five tests" set to reopen safely.
So why go ahead with the back to work?

Because Boris saw the prediction of the "worst ever recession" from the Bank of England last week, and doesn't want to be remembered as the PM in charge for it.

[KlaxonCow]

Because Boris saw the prediction of the "worst ever recession" from the Bank of England last week, and doesn't want to be remembered as the PM in charge for it.

But, as I've mentioned, it really doesn't work like that.

Because if everyone goes back to work and fills up the offices, then it only takes one person walking in with the virus - remember, possibly completely asymptomatically, at that time - and then it spreads around the office. And, soon enough, everyone's off sick. So your office is empty again, but with no-one doing any work at all (at least with "work from home", some work was getting done remotely). And, you know, there's a chance that Karen who does the accounts will never come back ever again.

"Health vs. the economy" is a false dichotomy.

If everyone's sick and dying, and folks are not going out and spending money, and there's no point opening your business until your support businesses or other business you do work for aren't also firing on all cylinders either, then the economy is not going to remotely do this magical leap in vast profits out of nowhere.

Indeed, let us recall tufty's hypothetical about the cinema owner. Furloughing ends, so you've got to start paying your staff. But you need an income to do so. You've got to pay distributors and advertisers and all that stuff to get your business going again. You throw open your doors and, oh, 3 people walk in.

Sorry, selling 3 movie tickets is not going to pay for all that expense. Indeed, if you force thousands and thousands of businesses into that position, then you could be WORSENING the economic situation and making the coming recession WORSE.

Because you're forcing these businesses into a position where they're losing money, not making profit, and for many small and medium sized businesses, you can do that for a month or two, but then the business is bankrupt.

And - to bring in my point about "support businesses" - there's the other major problem that, well, what fucking movies will you be showing? Because Hollywood's postponed all the blockbusters until later in the year. There are no big movies - the sort that'll bring the punters back in sufficient numbers to stand some chance of breaking even, let alone profit - out right now, because Hollywood doesn't want to release projects that, after all, cost them many hundreds of millions to make, to a handful of cinemas that attempt to open and then sell, ooh, 20 tickets and go bankrupt.

It's simplistic thinking: "Businesses open = economy making money". But, no, there's a missing step there, as it's actually "businesses open = costs and investments = if we can sell enough shit, eventually profit".

Opening businesses costs money. But one hopes, if they're able to do enough trade, then they get a return on that investment and then go into profit, once you deduct costs.

Opening businesses, unto itself, does not generate money. It actually costs money. But then, in doing sufficient trade, they earn enough to cover those costs and then the economy flourishes in profit.

And what I'm getting at here is that the government saying "back to work" is incurring those costs. But as to whether profits follow is a much more dicey and circumstantial and multi-layered thing. My work does lots of work for other businesses. Simply, until they're all back on their feet, we won't get many jobs. We never technically closed and the boss still goes into the office to wait by the phone for new work (and the odd thing is still coming through, but nowhere near our usual levels).

An economy is an interdependent thing. For example, you can say "get construction workers back to work" but unless, you know, you've also got all the building supply companies back up first, then how long is that going to last? Before bricklayers can lay bricks, the brick-making factory needs to be up and running first. They need bricks to lay bricks, obviously. You can't send the construction workers back, if all their suppliers are still closed. They'll run out of building materials and then be forced to stop again. Construction workers might be able to "socially distance outside" but can the brick makers? And, for the brick makers, they'll need the folks who dig up the raw resources - clay pits, quarries, mines, etc. - to be up and running as well, before they'll be able to order in the stuff they need to make those bricks.

You get the gist. The governments of the world have ridiculously - dangerously - simplistic thinking here and show no fucking understanding of the pragmatics of how businesses actually operate. You can't run a business without customers. You can't run a business without your suppliers. Businesses cost money - the trick is to try to bring in more income than you spend, but if you can't bring in the money, because your customers / suppliers just aren't there, then an open business, that cannot trade, is just a loss-making engine.

If you fire up that engine, when it can't actually run anywhere, then it'll just burn through its remaining fuel (the remaining money the business has) and if money cannot be brought in, in sufficient amounts, to make up those losses then the business will actually die.

The whole point of furlough, as they seem to have instantly forgot, was to keep people in jobs that would otherwise have to be sacked, as the business can't afford to keep them, while there's zero income coming in. Business grants and loans were there for paying for the temporary "mothballing" of business - cover rent, fuel and all the other costs - while the economy was dead, so that the businesses are still there on the other side.

If you pull this all away before there's the capacity to get back into profits for all these businesses, then they will all die off. That's why we did this shit to protect them and workers in the first place, lest we forget.

If you think lockdown has been bad for the economy and will cause a recession, then just watch what happens when half the country's businesses drop dead, as there's not the capacity to return to profit yet and, in fact, your "the country is open for business" declaration doesn't make the money magically start flowing again, it actually ends up being a death sentence to businesses up and down the country.

Solve the health issue first. Then there's no impediment to the economy getting back to full tilt once more, as things can get "back to normal".

But if you push on trying to get the economy moving, while the health issue is still looming large, then many businesses won't be able to operate properly. You'll be putting all the costs back on them, before there's a clear path for them to be returning to previous incomes to be able to afford that.

I've always found that a ridiculous irony that when you listen to these supposedly "business-friendly" Tories, then they often seem to have zero pragmatical sense whatsoever about how businesses actually function. They think they're just magical "money trees" that spring up out of nowhere.

"Turn the machine back on", they say. But there was a reason why the machine was turned off in the first place and, right now, that reason ain't gone away and, at this time, the numbers ain't telling us it's safe to turn it back on yet. And, even when you do turn it on, there's a "boot sequence" you need to follow. Construction can't continue, if we haven't got the building supplies infrastructure back up first - or the brick layers have no bricks to lay.

It really doesn't work that way. And being too keen to push on this - for fear of the coming recession - could actually very easily make that coming recession MUCH WORSE.

[KlaxonCow]

I'm not as negative as you are.

Well, I'm only being negative about the government's idiotic approach so far.

I've actually been banging the "test, trace, isolate" drum from the very beginning of this thread.

As I've said, I have greater trust in people and business, on the ground, to manage themselves vastly more responsibly than the government is managing this crisis. I'll mention it again - "mass gatherings" cancelled and postponed themselves, for the fundamental infeasibility of making a profit when no-one's showing up to your events, even while Boris was insisting that "this is fine" while the room around him was burning. They understand how their own businesses function, even if government is clearly totally fucking clueless.

There's two types of positivity. There's superficially "smiley face" positivity, where you go around smiling and telling everyone that "this is fine" and being all happy about things. Though this is comforting, it doesn't, unto itself, fix anything.

Then there's pragmatic positivity - telling people "this is how it works, this is what we need to do" and providing an actual functioning route - a plan of action - out of this fire. And, no, there might not be smiles and folks projecting "positive mental attitude" into the mirror - not least because that's really not at all appropriate while people are dying, for pity's sake - but this is a genuine and honest positivity, because you're saying "there's the light at the end of the tunnel and that's where we need to be heading". And if we get there, then all - gradually, in an unfolding way - goes back to some normality again.

I'm criticising the government for doing it wrong. Because we need to do it right, in order to see this off, as quickly as it can be done, with the least unnecessary deaths.

I'm being negative about the negative things and the wrong things, in the hope to steer people towards the positive and better things. In other words, two negatives make a positive, right?

[Ollie]

To be clear, on a five-point scale we are somewhere between three and four.

Or somewhere approaching 200,000 according to the formula Boris Johnson posted on twitter:



Also, just to make it more confusing, the point between levels 3 and 4 is labelled "1":

[KlaxonCow]

I had to do the "what if?" to know.

What if BoJo had not wasted a week before issuing the lockdown and it'd happened on March 16th rather than March 23rd?



I took the actual number of cases (in red) and then, for my hypothetical scenario (in green), I declared my lockdown a week earlier. The daily differences are the same as the actual numbers, but proportionally scaled, according to the ratio of actual vs. a week earlier).

Note that the green does actually hit zero a few times and, arguably, this really should mean that the numbers thereafter are drastically cut - because when you have no new domestic cases, there cannot be a spread from nobody to somebody. But I left it still following the actual daily numbers anyway. Well, it has a two week incubation period and folks might have caught it a fortnight earlier. Also, by now, we'd be over a week with zeroes, heading towards the full fortnight and being able to declare that we'd actually eliminated the first wave domestically, moving - as with China or South Korea - to focusing efforts on avoiding "imports" from other countries.

Taking the same ratio as the actual numbers of deaths to total cases, the hypothetical death toll of the green would have been 5,010 people, in comparison to the actual death toll of 32,065.

This would been about the same (slightly better) than the Netherlands or just slightly worse than China.

Yes, of course, I'm playing a "what if?" with the numbers. It's a model - a prediction - and not a reality.

But I wanted to illustrate the mathematical point I've mentioned before that, when dealing with exponential growth, every second matters. You have to jump on it early and can't afford to be fucking around boasting about shaking hands with all the COVID-19 patients, and dithering and delaying over whether to ban mass gatherings or not (which was irrelevant, as they banned themselves the very next day anyway!).

When the sequence keeps doubling: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, ...

Then jumping in earlier in the sequence to crush it down to linear, not exponential growth, makes a genuinely massive difference to the final numbers. If you jump in at 16, rather than 512, then it would really have crushed the numbers right down.

That passing thought - to just give up and surrender to wild "herd immunity", because "this is only an extended flu season" - put hesitation into ramping up testing, into going in hard on "test, trace, isolate", into dithering and delaying a lockdown, into failing to stockpile PPE, etc.

I believe it to be a massively lethal error and I await the public inquiry afterwards, where experts will do even better modelling than I've done here to demonstrate the same conclusion - with exponential growth, you cannot afford to delay and they fucked about, spouting nonsense at their podiums, for a week or two.

When, indeed, if you work it out from when Boris and Hancock et al must have caught it - some 5 days to two weeks earlier - they were standing there saying "this is fine" while Whitehall was ablaze with the virus spreading in all directions, and all of them actually had it already.


Meanwhile, at Downing Street, on March 16th, Boris issues his public statement:

[Dio]

Sorry, wrong read.

[gilesgoat]

@KC : I am a BIG movie fan BUT "I would not waste go to the cinema to watch an unworty movie" .. and this is one problem because a good 70% of movies for my taste are "unworthy".

But apart that "everyone knows" that the cinema industry is nearly on its knees already, "people just don't go that much in cinemas" and this is going since YEARS not because of Covid .. nowadays "it's all streaming and rental" to be honest I can't see Hollywood losing much on Covid if they'd keep stuff like <streaming exclusive> pay-me-to-watch for a while, also some of those rental costs are quite "par" with certain cinema prices.

Ask probably 9 people out of 10 would tell you "they don't go to cinema anyway", especially if they are families, because with the cost of one rental the whole family can see it instead of paying N times a price.

Nowadays 50 inches TV costs less than 1000 pounds, if you don't want "huge quality" even lot less than that.

Cinemas are a bit like bookshops, in quite some troubles since long times.

[edit] - also they can tell me about social distancing and whatever .. BUT .. "would you go in a CLOSED ROOM FULL OF POTENTIALLY SICK PEOPLE WHERE ONE OF THEM COULD BE SUFFICIENT TO FUCK YOU UP ?"

NO if I really ABSOLUTELY HAVE to and a cinema to see a movie is FAR from "absolutely necessary" !

[KlaxonCow]

Well, coronavirus has likely spelt the end for cinemas. Things have already happened on that front during this pandemic:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/a ... a-releases

Due to the pandemic, Universal Pictures broke the "pact" in which they allow cinemas to screen movies first, before going to streaming services. They simply released "Trolls World Tour" entirely digitally, without bothering with a cinema release at all.

And the big problem for cinemas is that this animated sequel has now made more cash in three weeks than the original movie made in 5 months at the cinemas. Universal "experimented" with this movie and their experiment didn't just succeed, it blew the original movie clean out of the water.

So then Universal said that, actually, even when the pandemic is over, they're going to be doing more of this and announced that their future policy is going to be simultaneous release across all platforms. That cinemas will no longer get movies ahead of other platforms, but will get them at the same time.

In response to this, cinema owners - like the Odeon above - have threatened to boycott Universal completely. Thing is, though, if the success they had with "Troll World Tour" - a sequel doing massively better revenues than the original is unheard of - then Universal simply won't give a shit.

If other movie studios follow suit - because if it works out this well for Universal, they'll all be tempted - then the cinemas are doomed. As they weren't, as you rightly said, doing too brilliantly already before all this, but the pandemic pushed Universal to "experiment" and just release this movie digitally, instead of postponing it (likely because, I mean, it's an animated movie - and a sequel at that - based on the "Trolls" franchise, so this was not so vitally important). And the massive problem for the cinemas is that the movie ended up doing unbelievably well. To the point that Universal felt that, screw it, they're going to break the "tradition" and not give cinemas any favours any more.

If this war escalates - and other studios are tempted to follow Universal, if this works out so well for them - then the cinemas, which were barely alive as it is, might well never come back from this at all, I'm afraid.