COVID COVID-19 Coronavirus Containment Efforts

[atyy]

Saw this today on my Linked In feed:

Wow, I'm impressed but a little skeptical - did he really save all the 96 well plates he used?

I met a patch clamper who saved all the "pipettes" he'd used, but doesn't one usually just wash the plates and reuse them?

 

[PeroK]

I think this must be a simple piece of Maths and, if it is, then the situation is pretty scary.
R₀ can be looked upon as the number of other people an infected person will pass on the infection to. (It can be related to individual viruses but my worry still applies.)
If R₀ is greater than 0.5, in a population and the restrictions are lifted, just-like-that and with no extra technical help or some alternative restrictions then it's very likely that we (UK) will all, on average, have contact with at least twice as many other individuals. It seems to me that will imply R₀ will double to more than unity which will cause rapid growth in infection numbers. Will it be treated as a bit of bad luck and will the population be blamed, as usual?

Like all such data analysis it depends ultimately on the distribution: who is currently carrying the virus and how are they passing it on? It could be that currently almost all new infections are caused by a) people doing essential jobs - or otherwise not working from home; or b) people flagrantly breaking the rules. It could be that your average family in lockdown, who has no personal contact with people who are at work, have a very low risk of becoming infected and represent a very low percentage of the new cases.

Under this assumption, an opening up of social activities to those people may make little or no difference.

On the other and, if a significant percentage of new infections come from the large number of people having brief contact with others - shopping or passing in the street etc. - then any easing of the restrictions will push the R number up significantly.

My view, for what it's worth, is that the UK government(s) are working with a very broad brush of measures. That we have little or no idea how many people have been infected is, in my view, missing possibly the most vital piece if information. Without knowing the true infection rate - not just the number who get sick - we are effectively in the dark.

 

[sophiecentaur]

We get regular updates on the R factor in UK and we don’t need to know the value of a variable to make algebraic calculations. I have not read of it being steadily below 0.5 in any case.
As for operating “safely”, I don’t know of a method of carrying a fridge yet behind 1.5m apart. Then there is the puffing and blowing and touching (Shared touch) items with ungloved hands. The male half of the UK public, especially the young and old, have no culture of hand washing and I really doubt that it’s done by some sectors at all often. all those sloppy men, returning to high risk employment will soon change R unless it’s made the most important factor in Staff Training about Health and Safety. That must involve ‘dressing up’ to look the part (Village People made hard hats and gloves acceptable amongst the manual operatives all over the world).
But my main point is not about specifics. It’s Bayesian statistics. Change one probability and you need to respond with another change to maintain even just the same result.)
hopefully our “world beating” track and trace System will put those sloppy guys back home PDQ. And it is mostly guys who don’t wash hands.

 

[BillTre]

Wow, I'm impressed but a little skeptical - did he really save all the 96 well plates he used?

I met a patch clamper who saved all the "pipettes" he'd used, but doesn't one usually just wash the plates and reuse them?

My guess is he accumulated used plates from the lab after his project to make the picture based on the numbers he had.
In my experience used plates are not reused but pitched. It would be hard to clean them well.

Out of curiosity, I counted the number of plates in one of his stacks: ~130
8 stacks -> 1040 plates
96 wells/plate -> 99840 wells, almost 100,000.
That's a lot, but probably not all the wells were used.

He could have been using a robot to deal with some of the use of the plates.

I have been in fly labs where gallon jars of dead flies in alcohol were accumulated.
That would be millions of dead flies.

 

[kyphysics]

Big question for me is colleges (and the towns they exist in).

Colleges cannot social distance easily. Dorms are packed. Lecture halls are packed. Young people WANT to be around each other. College students also cannot just stop attending school. They are too old to be under parental control and support, yet too young and unqualified to work and live on their own.

They have to go back to school. So, what happens in these colleges and college towns? Fall/winter is also when a second wave could hit if following the trend of the 1918 Spanish flu. This could be an even more virulent strain.
Is mass infection inevitable from a return to school this fall?

 

[mfb]

That the ITER chief is worried about pandemic delays is a hoot. The project has already been severely compromised, delayed and financially overextended as to make any Covid related setbacks comparatively insignificant.

Not under his leadership. Why shouldn't he be worried about delays from a pandemic?

 

[sophiecentaur]

Is mass infection inevitable from a return to school this fall?

I fear it is.

The only thing simple is "it will be no smaller than it would be if we stayed locked down".

It's almost certain to be worse unless there is something to actively reduce the transmission during close contact. I can't understand that so little has been done to reverse the potential for an increase in R. It seems that the hope is that it won't increase too much. What sort of a strategy is that?
We can't hope for a vaccine to arrive for a long while (if ever) and optimism is not enough.
On a personal level, we live in semi-rural surroundings and we could survive perfectly well but would miss real contact with family. Other people's circumstances are not so cushy.

 

[hutchphd]

The one saving grace is that the young do not seem to have too much trouble with this disease. Personally at age 68 I am simply isolating myself (to an even greater degree than usual...). I believe my chance of contracting it is not large.
That being said I see the most rational course of action (in terms of the least cumulative suffering) is to encourage young folks to lick the doorknobs and work on herd immunity from the bottom up. A self-serving notion I suppose, but I don't see a better alternative...

 

[kyphysics]

LOL. Funny, but not entirely irrational.

Although, it'd be considered by some to be immoral, as even young people have died (albeit, at a much lower rate) from COVID.

I feel bad for the elderly living in or working at college towns. Some campuses like Berkeley, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and University of Texas-Austin have close to 50,000 students or more. Add faculty, staff/administrators and business workers serving those campus towns and it's a nightmare if just a few asymptomatic students catch the virus.

No one will know probably and it could spread like wildfire on those campuses. Michigan and Texas are huge sports towns too! So much money riding on their college sports programs!

I'd hate to be a 63 year old building janitor, 60 year old bus driver, or 64 year old department receptionist with diabetes or heart disease at one of these campuses.

 

[bob012345]

Not under his leadership. Why shouldn't he be worried about delays from a pandemic?

Of course he has to deal with the current crisis now and not the past mismanagement of the project but who knows if this project will ever make fusion practical.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Is mass infection inevitable from a return to school this fall?

But aren't you in favor of this?

As you said less than a week ago,

let it spread and kill off the weak

There is a discussion about the second wave here: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/what-have-educators-learned-about-distance-learning.988260/

On April 30th, I wrote:

Does it matter? Maybe instead of a second have there will be a new flu strain that hits in the fall instead. Is that any better?

There are good reasons for colleges to close, but student safety is not one of them. Do you know how many people aged 15-24 died of Covid in the US? 37. Total. Out of a population of 43M. Given a college full-time enrollment of 12M, that means 10 or 11 college students. Compare that to ~50 students murdered per year.

Now, protecting faculty and staff, that's another issue. Liability concerns? Sure. Reducing the spread of disease? Fine. But the argument should not be "think about the children!"

Updating the numbers gets us all the way to 16. Do you want to know the fraction of deaths from Covid in the 15-24 year old group? 1.2%. It's the 7th leading cause of death in that age group, just under "congenital abnormalities". The suicide rate alone is 15x higher.

 

[256bits]

when a second wave could hit if following the trend of the 1918 Spanish flu. This could be an even more virulent strain.

Certainly a possibility between 0 and 100% , so when should this become a concern.
We will never know, except by hindsight, what the correct course of action is to be.

 

[kyphysics]

But aren't you in favor of this?

As you said less than a week ago

YIKES!

How long would it take to develop herd immunity for COVID-19?

What if we just let it spread and kill off the weak. Everyone else who survives gets anti-bodies to protect them.

Could we achieve that within two to three years? When people talk of herd immunity, what is the time-frame for getting there? Thanks!

Let me first quote my original message in full.

It was poorly written in retrospect. The real question/focal point/purpose was to ask how long herd immunity would take.

I asked hypothetically what would happen if we just let it spread unchecked - it wasn't to imply that I was in favor of this. Rather, it was asking a what if question to get to my main question of how long herd immunity would take. I purposely wrote it in a way that would be shocking, I think, by saying "kill off the weak" in a kind of "I know you know I don't mean this as something I want to happen, but am saying it for shock and awe" mentality to get to my real question.

Now that you bring it up, I am embarrassed by how I wrote it.

Updating the numbers gets us all the way to 16. Do you want to know the fraction of deaths from Covid in the 15-24 year old group? 1.2%. It's the 7th leading cause of death in that age group, just under "congenital abnormalities". The suicide rate alone is 15x higher.

http://news.mit.edu/2020/pandemic-health-response-economic-recovery-0401
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive...ties-social-distancing-better-employment.html
Protecting lives and protecting the economy are intertwined.

MIT and Federal Reserve economists, Verner, Luck and Correia, who did a study of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic found that those cities that went into full virus control mode fared better in both saving more lives and recovering faster economically:

In 1918, cities that committed earlier and longer to interventions like banning public gatherings and closing schools didn’t fare worse for disrupting their economies for longer. Many of those cities actually had relatively larger gains in manufacturing employment, manufacturing output and bank assets in 1919 and into the next few years, according to a new study from researchers at the Federal Reserve and M.I.T. This is particularly clear among Western cities that had more time to prepare for a pandemic that hit the East Coast first.

For cities with the most aggressive interventions, there’s no trade-off apparent in this data between saving lives and hurting the economy.

“If anything, these places do better,” said Emil Verner, an economist at M.I.T., who wrote the paper with Sergio Correia and Stephan Luck of the Fed.

Letting the economy open up too fast could hurt both the economy and public health. That is what history tells us. Cities that locked down and social distanced aggressive in the 1918 pandemic recovered economically faster than those that did not.

If we just think about it, the virus was going to cause a shutdown of the economy regardless of whether it was official or not. If people start seeing their friends and family members hospitalized and dying around them from the virus at a noticeably significant rate, they would have stopped going out on their own. Furthermore, you'd have had business shocks naturally from workers getting sick and not being able to open up that mom and pop store or show up to the law office, etc. Supply and demand shocks would have inevitably happened if we did not lock down the economy. It's fallacious to think the lockdowns are what hurt the economy. That blow would have happened ANYWAYS and naturally if the virus were to spread unchecked naturally. Officially or unofficially, the economy was going to shut down on its own.

Some argue it's scale of the economic harm that may not be worth it to save lives and protect people's health. But, the evidence from Verner, Luck, and Correia suggest that saving lives and protecting health may actually be the BEST WAY to protect the economy.

It makes sense. When people feel safe, they will go out. When they don't, they'll take precautions to avoid their pre-virus activities (which could contract the economy).

 

[kyphysics]

Certainly a possibility between 0 and 100% , so when should this become a concern.
We will never know, except by hindsight, what the correct course of action is to be.

article: https://www.businessinsider.com/second-wave-of-coronavirus-infections-may-peak-in-fall-2020-5
research study: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/sites/default/files/public/downloads/cidrap-covid19-viewpoint-part1_0.pdf

Not that it is the gospel, but there are some who think a stronger second wave this fall/winter is the most likely of three scenarios for how the virus plays out:

i.) stronger second wave this fall/winter
ii.) repeating small waves of infections
iii.) slowburn of ongoing transmission

This is the view of the collaborative research (professors from multiple universities) released recently from the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. Scenario i.) is the most probable, according to them.

But, who knows?

 

[jedishrfu]

AN important announcement from the mentors:

Lets not get too excited about fusion technology in a COVID-19 thread discussion as this will quickly derail the thread. Create you own thread to discuss this topic.

And now back to our regularly scheduled thread...

 

[kadiot]

I just learned that it takes the Philippine government an average of 13 days to do Contact Tracing. I find it a bit slow. What is the advisable number of days to find all exposed individuals?

 

[sophiecentaur]

I am a bit surprised at the range of answers and comments here. No one seems to be thinking in terms of using Technology to lessen the probability of infection. Waiting for a vaccine that may never come is not a solution. Accepting that many 'old people' will die is hardly ethical and the young people in favour of this strategy will be old themselves one day (if something else hasn't;t got to them by then).

The term 'herd immunity' has been mis-used ever since the virus arrived; it assumes we accept a total change in demographic in the near future and that doesn't get my vote.

R could instantly be reduced of we all walked round in 'Space Suits' but, for some reason, that is not considered. Perhaps because we would 'look silly'?? There must be an appropriate régime that involves more than Washing Hands and never going to the Pub. It's not as if the Economy doesn't matter so where are all the ideas?

 

[Vanadium 50]

No one seems to be thinking in terms of using Technology to lessen the probability of infection.

That seems ton be better suited (get it...suited...?) for the larger COVID-19 Coronavirus Containment Efforts thread. After all, it's a containment effort.

As far as the original question, "How will the Reproduction Number be affected as restrictions are eased?" We don't know. We don't know what it is - at best we can only tell what it was (and even that is dodgy). What we know is:

1. Post-peak, everyone is on more or less the same curve.
2. We have not seen a huge rise associated with lockdown easing anywhere. Some data has been posted on the other thread.
3. Two-thirds of the new cases in New York were people sheltering-in-place. If 70% of the work is "essential" (consistent with a 30% unemployment rate) that says that sheltering-in-place reduces your odds by about 15%. Obviously if the effect is small, the effect on easing it will be small.
   1. If you say, "70% is too big", fine, but if you make it larger, the 15% becomes smaller.
   2. If you say, "70% is too small", again fine, but the number of people subject to the relaxation and thus its impact gets smaller.
      
      The conclusion is driven by the two-thirds, not the 70%.

From that, I would include R will go up (because it can't go down), but not by a huge factor (because of the above, but predominantly because we don't see it going up even if you squint at the curves).

 

[sophiecentaur]

That seems ton be better suited (get it...suited...?) for the larger COVID-19 Coronavirus Containment Efforts thread. After all, it's a containment effort.

I'll have a look. Thanks
It seems that the Maths that I asked for has really been dealt with - sort of. It scares me that the political decisions are made before the figures are scrutinised and then the scrutinising is selective.

 

[sophiecentaur]

Did you mean 1-2%? That's what I thought that study has concluded.

Your message may not have got across there. It would have been wise to ask "did you mean 1-2% or 0.1 - 0.2%?"
I'm still not sure what he meant. (Post was only a week ago)

 

[sophiecentaur]

Why shouldn't he be worried about delays from a pandemic?

It's the difference between Importance and Urgency. We've waited a long time for Fusion without too many disasters or deaths but we really can't wait for a solution to Covid -19.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Political decisions have to be made before the numbers are scrutinized. There's a mulktiweek lag time between a change in conditions and being able to see it. Back in mid-April people we're saying three weeks wasn't long enough and it had to be four. By the time you know what you should have done in May, it's June.

This is nothing new. At the time of the lockdown, the estimate was 510,000 deaths in the UK. We now know that this was never going to happen.

 

[PeroK]

At the time of the lockdown, the estimate was 510,000 deaths in the UK. We now know that this was never going to happen.

The best estimate I have seen is that about 7% of the UK population may have had the virus so far. That's about 4-5 million people, and points to an overall fatality rate of about 1%. In any case, if the virus had been allowed to spread then 500,000 deaths direct from COVID-19 seems about right. However, given that such an outbreak would have overwhelmed the health service, there would have been many indirectly related deaths from other causes. Also, under those circumstances widespread civil panic could have broken out.

 

[Vanadium 50]

I don't think anyone is using 1% any more. More like a third or a quarter. (CDC is 0.27%). But my larger point stands - even at the beginning people were using estimates because it takes several weeks to find out what the reproduction rate was, when we really want to know what it is.

 

[hmmm27]

We've waited a long time for Fusion without too many disasters or deaths

And when it finally gets here we can say it's 20 years ahead of its time.

 

[mfb]

I just learned that it takes the Philippine government an average of 13 days to do Contact Tracing. I find it a bit slow. What is the advisable number of days to find all exposed individuals?

With a median incubation period of 5 days and people getting infectious ~2 days before they show symptoms: As early as possible, ideally within 3 days or so. Are the 13 days the average time when they find contacts, or the average time when they end a contact tracing campaign? These are very different options.

9 days without new case in New Zealand.

 

[PeroK]

I don't think anyone is using 1% any more. More like a third or a quarter. (CDC is 0.27%).

There are some big numbers out there that take some explaining at 0.27%. For example:

1) South Korea had 11,500 cases and 270 deaths. At 0.27% they should have had about 100,000 cases. They only found 1 case in 10?

2) The UK has had at least 40,000 deaths. This implies about 15,000,000 cases.

 

[dlgoff]

I met a patch clamper who saved all the "pipettes" he'd used, but doesn't one usually just wash the plates and reuse them?

When working for the usda new plates where always used. Think about it, how absorptive are plastic? A few molecules can really screw tests up.

 

[kadiot]

With a median incubation period of 5 days and people getting infectious ~2 days before they show symptoms: As early as possible, ideally within 3 days or so. Are the 13 days the average time when they find contacts, or the average time when they end a contact tracing campaign? These are very different options.

9 days without new case in New Zealand.

After the 3 days that person then becomes infectious. The system is so slow (and in those 13 days) , that infected person could spread the infection to another 30 person. See chart below.

This may be the reason why other professionals are suggesting that contact tracing starts as soon a patient shows up and not when the tests come back

 

[Vanadium 50]

We have drifted way off the topic of this thread, and into the topic of the other thread. (And even the OP says that's what he wants to discuss) I have asked the Mentors to merge the two; we shall see what they do. I don't want to discuss the same things here as over there.