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In the West the public have been discouraged from wearing face masks, and told they aren’t much help. This is mostly because they are “much help” and the front line docs and nurses really need them but no one in charge ordered enough in advance, and none of them had the honesty to say so. The daft push-me-pull-you messaging of how the useless masks are needed on the front line will go down as a case study in how not to communicate (or build trust). The truth is we do want people to wear masks in the street, because it almost certainly does slow transmission. (These Lancet authors think so too).
In high density East Asian nations, face masks are common. (And viral growth curves are generally slower, though for lots of reasons.) Possibly after Coronavirus has gone, masks in winter might be more common here too.
Things can change fast:
Kamil Chudačík, twitter:
In Czech Republic we went from: “Look at the idiot wearing a mask!” to “Look at the idiot not wearing a mask!” in 2 days. I can say the czechs are very conservative in terms of changes so I’m surprised by this behavior. The […]
Option three gathers wings
Finally the world is tossing out the pointless old Influenza Pandemic plan that called for six months of slow bleeding. Leaders are waking up to the high speed, hard and fast option. Tonight 20% of the worlds’ population are crushing that curve with a full lockdown because it’s the only option. 1.3 billion people in India are now in a three week home quarantine, joining France, Italy, China, Poland, Spain, Belgium, the United Kingdom, New York, California, South Africa, Colombia, Bolivia, Jordan and Tunisia and New Zealand. Sadly half a million people (at least) have caught Covid-19 and there will be another few doublings before the new lockdowns even start to show on the graphs.
Maybe stop feeding it fresh meat?
The Lucky Country Downunder, meanwhile, is copying the Italian-plan-that-failed with a bunch of wishy arbitrary rules that change by the day and are not remotely enough. We know the infection is spreading, but we’re still able to share our germs in Centerlink queues, at Kmart and while getting a haircut. We can’t have 6 people at a wedding, but we can have 600 at a school. Borders are closed but people are still going through […]
A High Stakes Game
If the trials of the anti-malarial chloroquine (or variants) work, Trump will get away with all the understatements he said in February.
On twitter the combination of Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin are known as #TrumpPills. The trials started Tuesday. We don’t know the results but doctors are buying up pharmacy stocks across the US — presumably to protect themselves (hopefully).
As the death tolls mounts, the Democrats are surely planning to put all the Trump quotes like “it’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle” on high rotation leading up to the election. But if the trials of anti-viral agents bring good news, he can reframe the past as if he was betting on that in February. (Perhaps he was?)
Though not many people spend two trillion dollars on a problem that’s disappearing.
Combo of existing drugs shows promise against COVID-19
Most patients treated with hydroxychloroquine alone cleared the virus in three to six days, compared to an average of 20 in China — …
The authors advise: “Use this treatment cocktail early, and don’t wait until a patient is on a ventilator in the intensive-care unit.” They also note that […]
Message to the young and immortal
A fully fit 28 year old who ran marathons tells what it was like for him to get Coronavirus. He ended up spending 13 days in ICU. His ongoing liver problems and weakness will take a month or two to get better.
His message to young people out at parties or on the beach: ” You might survive, but the old person that didn’t get that ventilator might not…”
But the spread of stories like this rule out some future paths.
Forget all the pussy-foot weak quarantines
This shows that the “Let it RIP” approach and the “Herd Immunity” approach were never even worth discussing. The community would not tolerate the risk or inhumanity of either. But this also shows that the Slow Bleed approach of weak Social Distancing for six months will be dumped like a hot rock asap (it’ll be rebadged and quietly wrapped in stronger stuff). As Italy found (and now Spain) weak quarantine doesn’t work very well. Only serious quarantine can solve this.
Speaking of solving this: Good to hear that cases are possibly slowing in Italy. Looks promising. What did Italy do 12 days ago — On March […]
For most people Coronavirus is like the flu or even a cold, but for 20% it’s something awful. Even in younger patients — a few seemingly fit and healthy 40 and 50 year olds are gasping for air as their lungs fill with blood and fluid and it’s “like a near death drowning” or “inhaling caustic gas”. Forgive the language in the headline — those were this docs exact words. He’s working at a New Orleans hospital and his whole attitude to the virus has changed dramatically.
h/t Analitik
A Medical Worker Describes Terrifying Lung Failure From COVID-19 — Even in His Young Patients
by Lixzzie Presser, ProPublica
“It first struck me how different it was when I saw my first coronavirus patient go bad. I was like, Holy shit, this is not the flu. Watching this relatively young guy, gasping for air, pink frothy secretions coming out of his tube and out of his mouth. The ventilator should have been doing the work of breathing but he was still gasping for air, moving his mouth, moving his body, struggling. We had to restrain him. With all the coronavirus patients, we’ve had to restrain them. They […]
Look at State by State outcomes: visit Covid Act Now
Its an excellent display of modeled outcomes across the US*. Click on each state in the US to find out predicted death tolls and the day hospitals will be overwhelmed with too little action.
Dear readers, get out of the way of this virus. My advice is to stay home. Order online. Wear masks if you have to venture out. Keep kids home from school. Don’t visit anyone or allow visitors in to your home who have not strictly quarantined for the last two weeks. We started this last week.
h/t Bill in Oz.
Eg It’s too late now for New York State to avoid losing control of hospitals
But they could still Crush the Curve and save a lot of people, but even that action now will have far higher death tolls that it would if it had been started last week.
New York State has a population of 20 million. So the figures in the table below are directly comparable to Australian outcomes with a population of 25m (with the hope that lower population density, warmer weather, and two weeks warning could be an […]
The wave coming is not just a “bit bigger” than hospitals can handle
Western Australian specialists estimate that at present rate, in 45 days Coronavirus cases will fill up their entire state hospital system. Two weeks later Covid patients will also fill all the beds in the extra two copies of their entire state hospital network that haven’t been built yet.
Hospitals will need 20 times as many ventilators as they have.
“Peak need for ventilators will be over four thousands in a system where we have less than two hundred. Again, most of those needing a ventilator will die. “
Perhaps we are overreacting?
Western Australia is an example of what the rest of the West faces. There are 2.5m people here, but only 120 confirmed cases. In a state which took six years to build one hospital all we need to do is triple our hospital capacity in 6 weeks. Laughing…
The Doctors call for the immediate closure of borders. Which was impossible a few days ago, in a state that only has two sealed roads out, but is now happening on Tuesday “at 1:30pm”. (Presumably the new border guards have to drive out from […]
The first epicentre in Italy was Vò, a little town of 3,000. It was shut down, fully tested and twice and nine days apart. By testing, isolating, and tracking, they reduced the spread to almost nothing, and this is despite the extraordinary discovery that when the first death happened, already 3% of the town had the disease.
At that point surely the Italian government should have immediately closed everything?
https://www.livescience.com/small-italian-town-cuts-coronavirus-cases-testing.html
Italian village reports no new infections for days after blanket testing
Zoe Tidman, Independent
Mr Zaia, Veneto’s governor, said the trial was “criticised by most sides” but that isolating numbers of undetected positive cases has resulted in Vo Euganeo being today “the safest place in Italy”.
h/t Bill H
In one Italian town, we showed mass testing could eradicate the coronavirus
Andrea Crisanti and Antonio Cassone, The Guardian, March 20.
Our experiment came to be by chance. The Italian authorities had a strong emotional reaction to news of the country’s first death – which was in Vò. The whole town was put into quarantine and every inhabitant was tested.
In the first round of testing, 89 people tested positive. In […]
Traitors to the people?
Some in the Republican Party knew what was coming. At least four Senators in the US are being accused of insider trading, selling stocks before the crash, but not warning the public or making sure the US was prepared. Senator Richard Burr sold something like a million dollars in their own stocks on Feb 13th. At private briefings his message was that this virus was aggressive, more like the Spanish Flu, “the military might be mobilized”. Burr was probably more aware than most because he “helped to write the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA).”
On the other hand Senator Loeffer says she was not involved in choosing the stocks that were sold on her portfolio. But others say some of these blind trusts sold shares the same day the Senators were briefed in some cases as early as Jan 24th. The Senators claim they were only acting on public news services. Possibly, even if they knew, they may have been bound by some Party ruling not to contradict the President.
Rod Dreher, The American Conservative “They Knew, And Didn’t Tell Us”
Think about it: Trump certainly knew how bad it was going to […]
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Remember back in February when the mainstream media was telling us this was “just like the flu”?
They weren’t asking the Health Minister “how many Australians might die” or “why don’t we close the borders”. They didn’t want to know whether the PM had calculated the cost of leaving the borders open? They weren’t estimating how many weeks it would be before we ran out of ICU beds.
Nor were they demanding to know whether Australians could make more medical masks, had enough ventilators, or should be stocking up with weeks to go, so we could avoid last minute shopper panic. Australians were still booking holidays on cruise ships and flights to Bali instead of putting spare toilet paper in the shed.
While the tidal wave was weeks away the media was more concerned about protecting the image of China, not calling this the Wuhan-Flu, and making sure we know how wrong it was to make jokes about not shaking hands of Chinese-Australian doctors. Which is poor taste but hardly a national prime time event. The irony being that now we’re not supposed to shake anyone’s hands anyway.
Australians were blindsided by the incompetent media. That’s why they are panic […]
Australian Medical Association WA President Andrew Miller said Western Australia was headed for a situation like Italy and are 8 – 10 days behind Sydney. Read his scathing comments below.
The tally in Australia is now about 900, the same as Italy had on Feb 28th, just three weeks ago. Now Italy has 41,000 cases and 3,405 people have died. Their population is three times larger than Australia and slightly older, it’s colder and packed in closer. At a guess, with the present SlowMo/SlowState response, maybe only 10-20,000 Australians will catch this in the next three weeks? “Great”.
UPDATE: Hospitals in Italy are no longer intubating anyone over 60 years old. h/t nezy
Italian politicians could have been better prepared, but there’s no excuse for the rest of the world now.
Coronavirus crisis: Australian Medical Association WA President Andrew Miller slams WA Government response to COVID-19 pandemic
John Flint The West Australian
[Miller said:] …“And we’re not doing any of the things that the countries that are being successful are doing like Hong Kong.
“They are using fever monitoring in public, they lock people down away from their families if they’re positive, whereas here we send […]
There is a third way — Why are we so fatalistic?
It’s not a choice between Let It Rip and the slow bleed of “Flatten the Curve”. It’s not a choice of health versus money. The third option no one is mentioning is to Crush The Curve: we go hard, fast, and do a major short sharp quarantine. It’s not radical, it’s just textbook epidemiology, it saves more lives and it saves the economy too.
SlowMo, Boris and Trump are still two weeks behind the virus. It’s time to get the Third Option on the table.
Flattening the Curve is a fatalistic slow bleed that must last months. It rescues us from the demolition derby that the Let It Rip disaster is cursing on Italian hospitals, but it’s deadly for the economy. All leaders who are keeping schools open while turning student dorms into triage units are locked into this limited thinking. It’s the Influenza-plan rejigged.
There is another way — (as I’ve been saying) — we stop dithering and acting two-weeks-late, and jump ahead of this inanimate code. We aim for extinction — hunt every infection down, keep most people at home, reduce the spread, then finish by following […]
I’ve said from the start that anti-virals were always going to be more useful to us this year than vaccines, which take so long to test and be ready for use. What we really need are anti-virals which also happen to be preapproved and tested and hopefully in mass production. Chloroquine is cheap too, though I doubt Australian stocks of the drug are very high, or that our genius rulers have arranged more. This may be a godsend in Africa where chloroquine use is already high and may reduce the spread of Covid-19 somewhat.
The UK banned export of chloroquine a few weeks ago. Clearly someone there thought it might be useful.
Wang et al reported on Feb 4th that Chloroquine (anti-Malarial) and Remdesivir (anti HIV) may be useful against Coronavirus. They used lab experiments on cells in glass, which had promise. But “in vitro” doesn’t always mean “in vivo”. So I’ve been waiting for some results on people. Early reports were ambiguous. Recently this was hyped as an “Australian cure” which really just meant the start of a proper trial.
There are links to papers and discussion below but I can’t beat this great description explaining how inside the […]
Australia has only one mask factory, and the Army was only sent in yesterday to start helping to ramp up production?
Six weeks after this disaster was obvious to bloggers-watching-twitter-feeds, the entirely predictable shortage of masks is only just starting to be addressed? Why weren’t they doing this a month ago?
Australian Defence Force soldiers have been deployed to help Australia’s only mask manufacturer, Med-Con, near Shepparton.
The Federal Government confirmed on Tuesday about a dozen ADF personnel would be called out under the Defence Assistance to the Civil Community rules to help Med-Con ramp up production of personal protective equipment.
Three army trucks were seen heading north on Old Dookie Rd about 7.20 am Wednesday morning.
Australians are panic buying because the sheer incompetence of our medical advice and management is obvious to everyone. It didn’t occur to me to suggest the government get local mask production running because any sensible ten year old would have seen that coming.
The Greg Hunt mantra on Jan 31: WHO declares emergency. “We are prepared.”
March 5th: Dental practices face closure because of shortage of surgical masks.
March 18th: doctors are warning a promised influx […]
Dithering politicians push the fatality from 0.5% toward 5%
A gritty analysis by Tomas Pueyo shows how leaders inertia is killing people every day. Some of the victims of tomorrows Virus Get-Togethers won’t die for a few weeks, but the next batch starts tomorrow (and every day until the nation self-isolates, stops the pox-parties, the cough-shopping, and pneumonia-planes. ). And each day there are more than the day before. Sounds macabre, but at this point in an exponential epidemic, it’s just how it is. Since we didn’t stop the Airbussed virus, we’re going to have to shut everything down anyhow, the later we do it, the larger the cost, and the longer it takes. We have to get ahead of this virus.
Meanwhile in Australia, the average punter seems to realize this and the mood is hitting feverish notes with tramplings in supermarkets — The government is calling for calm, but doctors are calling for borders to close, and schools to go online, they’re standing outside schools with signs telling parents not to send their children to school. Doctors are warning that we are the next “Italy” if we don’t get our act together. But the government says it’s too […]
I seem to have the uncanny ability to predict what frontline experts will recommend days in advance. It’s not genius. Just medical training and that the solution to this is so Bleeding Obvious, and politicians are still 2 to 3 weeks behind an exploding epidemic of an inanimate nucleic acid code.
WA hospitals call for state border closures to deal with coronavirus fears (COVID-19)
Top doctors across WA’s biggest hospitals are sensationally calling for the state to effectively close its borders to protect West Australians from the coronavirus pandemic.
In a remarkable letter obtained by The West Live to be discussed exclusively on this morning’s show, it can be revealed the Combined Medical Leads Advisory Group has raised concerns about the “extremely limited” availability of testing infrastructure and supplies in WA.
The group, which includes senior medicos from FSH, RPH and SCGH, also warns there is “limited evidence of effective anti-viral treatment”, “no effective vaccine” and that rationing is already in place at hospitals.
It recommends that to “flatten the curve” that attention should be paid to “extending isolation restrictions to all personal interstate travel”.
Just to spell this out, all states […]
Scuttlebutt that crossed my desk today says “”US to have nationwide quarantine for 14 days’”. h/t Scott.
I hope this is correct. My reply:”Brilliant”. Finally, a hint of an attitude determined to beat this. It’s so refreshing after all the defeatist fatalism telling us this is a disease we have to have. I predict if the US does this, other countries will follow. This is the fastest way to get borders open, and people back to work, and reduce the death toll. Flights will be able to reopen among countries that have done this and done this well.
UPDATE: Officially denied already? The Whitehouse has been forced to deny national shutdown rumours.(A search for “Rumor US two week lockdown” turns up almost no news items?) Don’t believe anything til it is officially denied… but don’t believe the rumours. The fact is there are no facts.
Forgive me if I repeat: A virus is just an inanimate chemical code. It can’t reproduce and it can’t repair itself. To beat it, all we have to do is out-wait it. Without machinery to copy the code it will degrade into foodsafe ingredients. Air, oxygen, time and light will crack the […]
BREAKING NEWS: Since writing this Scott Morrison has finally moved to quarantine all arrivals including planes and ships. He’s still two weeks behind the virus, and playing catch up with Jacinda Ardern, the real leader. But finally the bleeding obvious has dawned.
He won’t close schools, and perhaps, suddenly that will now be a viable option, though Sydney still needs short sharp major action to save lives. Could they bear doing no sport or social events for two weeks?
The big risk to most states are now flights from Sydney. Will NSW aim for the “slow bleed” eking out infections over months, hoping none accidentally go wild, or will it aim to wipe this out in three weeks so life gets back to normal, and Australia can play sport again against New Zealand, asap?
With this news, just in the nick of time, the future is now looking better. My prediction: Watch as leaders all round the world pick this up. This is a good boost for nation states and sovereign borders. All eyes are on the EU now where the open border policy has been disastrous — Spain (6,300), Germany (4500) […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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