Posted Sunday 29th of March, 2020 at 5:38:35 PM by Jeff
Every prediction you read about the size and duration of the coronavirus pandemic is based on epidemiological modelling. The underlying math is pretty simple. You don’t need to understand it, you just need to know this: once you set the values of a few basic parameters, predicting the timeline and magnitude of a pandemic can be done with a few lines of code.
Posted Sunday 29th of March, 2020 at 5:34:18 PM by Jeff
To tackle the COVID-19 crisis, there are five main things we need to do:
– Research to understand the disease and to develop new treatments and a vaccine.
– Determine the right policies, both for public health and the economic response.
– Increase healthcare capacity, especially for testing, ventilators, personal protective equipment, and critical care.
– Slow the spread through testing & isolating cases, as well as mass advocacy to promote social distancing and other key behaviours, buying us more time to do the above.
– We also need to keep society functioning through the progression of the pandemic.
via: If you want to #help the world tackle COVID-19, what should you do? – 80,000 Hours
Here’s a response to this video, saying there’s a lot of bad science represented.
Unless you are living under a rock or have already perished from COVID-19, you've likely seen a YouTube video making the rounds where a medical doctor (wearing scrubs!) purports to give COVID-19 advice. (1/33)
Posted Thursday 26th of March, 2020 at 8:56:07 AM by Jeff
Everyone has seen messages telling you we must “act today or people will die,” COVID-19 is basically just the flu, and/or that “flattening the curve is a deadly delusion.” These often have numbers, charts, citations, retroactively edited titles (“taksies backsies”), and data “science.”
Unfortunately, all of the above are signs of DKE-19, a highly contagious illness threatening the response against COVID-19. We must act today to flatten the curve of armchair epidemiology, or we will all be in peril. What is DKE-19?
Dunning-Kruger Effect (DKE) is a phenomenon where people lack the ability to understand their lack of ability. While strains of DKE typically circulate seasonally, a new and more virulent strain called DKE-19 is now reaching pandemic proportions.
Posted Thursday 26th of March, 2020 at 8:55:08 AM by Jeff
If we can name it, perhaps we can manage it. We turned to David Kessler for ideas on how to do that. Kessler is the world’s foremost expert on grief. He co-wrote with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief through the Five Stages of Loss. His new book adds another stage to the process, Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief. Kessler also has worked for a decade in a three-hospital system in Los Angeles. He served on their biohazards team. His volunteer work includes being an LAPD Specialist Reserve for traumatic events as well as having served on the Red Cross’s disaster services team. He is the founder of www.grief.com, which has over 5 million visits yearly from 167 countries.
Kessler shared his thoughts on why it’s important to acknowledge the grief you may be feeling, how to manage it, and how he believes we will find meaning in it. The conversation is lightly edited for clarity.
Posted Tuesday 24th of March, 2020 at 5:54:31 PM by Jeff
Like many densely populated metropolitan areas, the Bay Area is now on complete lockdown. All non-essential businesses are closed, gatherings of large groups of people are banned, and residents have been told to leave their houses only if necessary. Among the businesses still running—at least in limited capacity—are supermarkets and restaurants, the latter of which are solely allowed to operate as take-out and delivery venues. I expect more cities will follow suit in the coming days and weeks.
Even so, plenty of folks—myself included—have been confused or curious about the safety of allowing restaurants to continue preparing and serving food. Is it actually safe? Should I reheat the food when I get it home? Is it better to support local businesses by ordering food, or am I only putting workers and delivery people at risk? And if I’m cooking my own food, what guidelines should I follow?
Posted Tuesday 24th of March, 2020 at 5:53:33 PM by Jeff
In last 24 hrs there've been prominent US voices calling for a stop to social distancing, citing rationale that they're worse than impact of COVID itself. It’s worth looking very closely at that claim, where we are in US COVID epidemic and what happens if we stop. 1/x
Posted Tuesday 24th of March, 2020 at 8:38:33 AM by Jeff
You are your safest sex partner. Masturbation will not spread COVID-19, especially if you wash your hands (and any sex toys) with soap and water for at least 20 seconds before
and after #sex.
Even so, plenty of folks—myself included—have been confused or curious about the safety of allowing restaurants to continue preparing and serving food. Is it actually safe? Should I reheat the food when I get it home? Is it better to support local businesses by ordering food, or am I only putting workers and delivery people at risk? And if I’m cooking my own food, what guidelines should I follow?
To answer these questions, I referenced dozens of articles and scientific reports and enlisted the help of Ben Chapman, a food safety specialist from the North Carolina State University and cohost of Risky or Not and Food Safety Talk.
Posted Monday 23rd of March, 2020 at 7:32:26 PM by Jeff
Originally posted on Reddit — reprinted in full, in case it disappears.
Q: There’s been a lot of confusion regarding the UK government policy re Herd Immunity and being contradicted by different officials. Was this ever part of the administrations plan, or was it just a miscommunication from BoJo? I understand if you don’t have details and are the wrong person to ask.
A: I’m sad to say that I do have the details, and there has been intense discussion about this over the past weeks. To answer your question: “herd immunity” would have been a beneficial outcome to slowing virus growth to a prolonged period of time. It was not a primary outcome.
That said, the official policy was wholly wrong and when all the dust has settled, when all the costs and lives have been counted, people have to make their governments accountable.
Posted Monday 23rd of March, 2020 at 7:27:58 PM by Jeff
#Spain “Doctors in #España with tears in their eyes tell how people over 65 must have their respirators removed to give it to the younger people suffering . Seniors are sedated so they don’t suffer. ” #CoronavirusPandemic#CoronaVirusUpdates
Posted Monday 23rd of March, 2020 at 10:53:26 AM by Jeff
I spoke to a respiratory therapist there, whose job is to ensure that patients are breathing well. He works in a medium-sized city hospital’s intensive care unit. (We are withholding his name and employer, as he fears retaliation.) Before the virus came to New Orleans, his days were pretty relaxed, nebulizing patients with asthma, adjusting oxygen tubes that run through the nose or, in the most severe cases, setting up and managing ventilators. His patients were usually older, with chronic health conditions and bad lungs.
Since last week, he’s been running ventilators for the sickest COVID-19 patients. Many are relatively young, in their 40s and 50s, and have minimal, if any, preexisting conditions in their charts. He is overwhelmed, stunned by the manifestation of the infection, both its speed and intensity. The ICU where he works has essentially become a coronavirus unit. He estimates that his hospital has admitted dozens of confirmed or presumptive coronavirus patients. About a third have ended up on ventilators.
Posted Monday 23rd of March, 2020 at 10:10:57 AM by Jeff
Your help in making masks for our care team will help to ensure the safety of our health care professionals and allow them to provide extraordinary care to our patients.
These masks will be used for those in health care spaces who are not directly at risk for Coronavirus (COVID-19) exposure but still may want additional protection. This will allow the professional protective gear to be used exclusively for health care professionals who are at higher risk of exposure.
If you’d like to help, we would ask you to sew masks with the following specifications and have provided written and video instructions.
Posted Sunday 22nd of March, 2020 at 7:29:36 PM by Jeff
Number of days between doubling of deaths is the one stat to watch to see if we are flattening the curve.
None of those percentages matter right now. Focus on one thing: The doubling rate for the total deaths chart. This has nothing to do with testing, cases opened, etc. Only has to do with result. Note many days it takes for deaths to double, now about 3 days. pic.twitter.com/LV0p3Yo8Nd
Social distancing has become the rallying cry of the coronavirus pandemic—a guideline from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that has blown up into a social-media hashtag and even a line of Etsy attire. It’s an alluring prospect: Just cancel those plans with friends and stay six feet away from everyone, and we should be able to stave off a Contagion-style lockdown. But California, New York, and Illinois have now taken it a step further, compelling their residents to stay at home.
Posted Friday 20th of March, 2020 at 9:48:20 PM by Jeff
Great.
A snapshot of what some people are doing amidst the pandemic. "Some people are realizing that After will be very different from Before." https://t.co/xviIkkGrxv
Posted Friday 20th of March, 2020 at 7:25:27 PM by Jeff
LARRY BRILLIANT SAYS he doesn’t have a crystal ball. But 14 years ago, Brilliant, the epidemiologist who helped eradicate smallpox, spoke to a TED audience and described what the next pandemic would look like. At the time, it sounded almost too horrible to take seriously. “A billion people would get sick,” he said. “As many as 165 million people would die. There would be a global recession and depression, and the cost to our economy of $1 to $3 trillion would be far worse for everyone than merely 100 million people dying, because so many more people would lose their jobs and their health care benefits, that the consequences are almost unthinkable.”
Posted Friday 20th of March, 2020 at 7:23:42 PM by Jeff
When you text “hi” to +41 79 893 1892 over WhatsApp, you’ll receive back a text from the WHO that includes a variety of menu items for the latest information, like novel coronavirus infection rates around the world, travel advisories, and misinformation that should be debunked. Think of it like a hotline: Text 1 for the latest statistics, 4 for mythbusters, that type of thing. The WHO can also send out proactive alerts as needed to everyone who’s signed up.