Topic: Coronavirus outbreak

@ThanosReXXX I don't know how many of those deaths were 2019, but going by some random internet population clock, there's been about 12,600,000 deaths this year. 13,000 coronavirus deaths this year would make it responsible for 0.1% of all deaths currently.

@gcunit It's Corona virus related only, obviously, so it's definitely 12%, not 0.1%.

On a side note: I wouldn't have pegged you as one belittling this situation, to be honest.

@ThanosReXXX No, I'm not contesting your figures, I'm just observing the figures within the context of an approximate global death rate - not belittling, just interested in a wider perspective as well. That image I posted is just a moment I happened to come across whilst playing Hollow Knight this afternoon and it just struck a chord, tis all.

@gcunit Oh, okay. I do think it is sort of minimizing the impact of Corona, though.
And obviously, I figured you'd understand that, seeing as this is the Corona virus thread, that the numbers would be about that alone. And save for a few outliers, I think it's probably safe to say that nearly all diseases we have and had are only a relatively small percentage of the worldwide death toll, so in that regard, we can make anything seem to have a smaller impact than it actually has.

@gcunit

We never judge things based purely on how many people they kill though. We judge things more in terms of how easy they were to prevent.

If 1 random terrorist kills 100 people with a bomb, we treat it a lot worse than if 100 people killed themselves with lung cancer by smoking. That's because in the first scenario, we just had to stop 1 person in 1 time and place in order to prevent it. But in the second scenario, we have to stop 100 people over the span of decades in order to prevent it, and interfere with their individual rights in order to do so.

My city just announced a "stay at home" order that goes in effect Monday night. I don't think there's been any cases in our county yet (and only about 30 in the state), so they're trying to get out ahead of it, which is good.

I believe everyone in our household works in "necessary" jobs though, so we'll have to see how it affects us. I work as a receptionist at an independent living center, my brother at Burger King (as a restaurant it might be open, but they're already drive through & delivery only), my mother at a local grocery store (she works in the deli though, so hopefully that limits her exposure to people somewhat), and my father works for the billing department of the hospital (though in an office setting in a building in a different part of town than the hospital itself).

I'm mostly worried about the fact that I have to take a cab to work on most days, and you never know who was in it before.

My employer announced 67% revenue loss, laid off 2/3 of the workers across 3 plants, cut the 401k, cut the HSA deposits, stopped all merit increases, and are now just struggling not to go under. My company employs just over 500 people and has been around for over 100 years. And in the blink of an eye the company is dangerously close to going under. And if Wisconsin mandates all businesses close like many other states are doing, they very well might.

As for how serious things are, I agree it’s not an end of the world Mad Max scenario. People fighting over TP are going WAAAAY overboard. This will pass, eventually. And while the death rate is relatively low, mainly threatening seniors age 60 and over, younger people shouldn’t just brush it off. It’s been putting people age 20 to 45 in the ICU. There was a 34 year old who contracted the virus, and 12 days later was dead. Imagine that. One day you’re fine, and 12 days later you’re dead. So even though your odds of surviving are pretty good if you’re under 60, this is still NOT something you want to catch. There’s a good chance you’ll be hospitalized, and there’s still the lingering chance you die, like that 34 year old.

At this point my worries are more about the economic fallout more so than the virus itself. The choice is now between seeing peoples lives destroyed or their livelihoods destroyed. Keep working so people can maintain their livelihood, but put their lives at risk. Shut down plants to save peoples’ lives, but put their livelihoods at risk. Right now people are all for the shut downs. But this thing isn’t going to go away in a week or two. See how people feel about not working a month from now, or two months from now. It’s going to get to a point where people would rather risk catching the virus than continue not working.

The problem with the disease is that it’s just deadly enough and makes you sick enough, being highly contagious due to being not deadly enough to kill everyone before they spread it, that putting everything in jeopardy. But as I said, the real damage being done here is to the economy and peoples’ livelihoods. The entire world economy is coming to a grinding halt at record speed, and could see record numbers of small businesses go under because they simply don’t have the cash flow to ride it out.

And the exponential growth is extremely troubling. The power of exponents is such that a single drop of water, if it doubled every 5 minutes, would fill an entire football stadium. It goes from being negligible to overwhelming at breakneck speed. The yellow graph is the infection rate outside of China, while the orange is the infection rate inside China. Just one week ago we were less than China, now a week later we’re 3x higher. If the rate doesn’t slow down, things are going to get really bad very fast.

Also, I should add, the fear isn’t over the current number of deaths, but rather the future number of cumulative deaths if the current rate of infection isn’t stamped out. If the entire thing stopped tomorrow the death rate wouldn’t be that bad. Problem is it’s growing at an exponential rate. Already 1 in 25,000 people in the entire planet have contracted the disease. And that ratio is only getting higher by the day. Furthermore the economic damage could cause just as much if not more mayhem. Rampant unemployment and closures of businesses, massive debt and printing devaluing the dollar or whatever currency you use. There’s a whole host of problems that could come of it in an economic sense.

@JaxonH Yeah the elusiveness is the problem. Even if you tell everyone it’s okay to resume social activity in June, if 2 people have it all it takes is a short span of time to go to 1000 again and then we’re back to where we started. So it’s hard to see where it all ends. Things are back to pseudo-normal in China (businesses are open but everyone is still limiting social contact and wearing masks), but it’s almost 3 months now. New cases (though not many) are still cropping up and schools are still closed.

China was obviously impacted by this the hardest but I can imagine other countries having the same 4-5 month arc.

Well the thing I ordered from China finally made it to the UK sorting office. So basically exports from China are just taking about 4 days longer than planned, according to this.

@NotTelevision
And it’s not feasible to shut everything down for a month, much less 3 months, which is what it would take. And unless it’s synchronized with efforts around the world somebody else is bound to bring it back in.

This is why I think shutting down is a bad call by companies and governors, outside of this one time 2 week shut down. I think the present shut down was needed to stop the bleeding and so people would see how serious it is to change behavior, but after this, unless you’re going to shut down for several months which is not feasible, it’s best to not shut down at all. Otherwise the economic havoc is going to be far worse than anything the virus could do to us.

Once April 1 rolls around and the auto sector reopens, as long as everyone stays on high alert for the next 3 months, practices social distancing and washing their hands and using paper towels for the door knobs at work, etc, hopefully this thing can just fade away. But you can’t just grind the economy to a halt to stop it, because the economic damage will be catastrophic, and still won’t guarantee anything.

Update for Sunday, March 22nd

Corona virus MUST DIE !
To the HELL its Pandemic !
Everyday just getting worse and worse.
HOW DARE YOU INFECTING MY HOMETOWN SURABAYA !! 😠

Thankfully, our Mayor McCheese had an emergency council meeting today at the urging of 34 doctors in our community and did a nonessential closure for 14 days. Our town has one hospital, we have the largest county acreage in Georgia, and only 24 intensive beds. The doctors reached their boiling point. I saw four people go into a nail salon yesterday while I was in the Walmart parking lot (pulled in for a last minute conf call). So yeah, it’s needed here. People were still going to the small gyms, too. Not after midnight tonight! Maybe now they’ll have more time to learn hand washing.

Okay, I still want to believe it's just more testing but... I've been following the numbers and the number of infections seems to be rising faster each day. When I checked yesterday I saw the number globally at 308k and when I checked just now... 335k!

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

@HobbitGamer Same thing happened here today. Our province declared state of emergency today in response to people just not seeming to care, having large gatherings, amassing in public areas, hordes of people taking their entire family to get a handful of supplies and at-risk people who were told to self-quarantine not doing so.
Now there will be fines for gatherings of more than 5 people, both for the people and the business (if they are in one). Non-essential businesses shutting down. Hefty fines and possible jail time for those told to quarantine and don't (forced quarantine, I guess). There's even fines for people violating social distancing which seems crazy to read, but it's unbelievable how many people feel they need to be 4" from a retailers face to conduct a transaction.

We are way behind many other places for number of confirmed cases (though it's going up, quick. 3 to 28 in a few days), but taking this action long before many others did. They said with the declaration that they hope to flatten the curve for our province by taking this more extreme action sooner rather than later.

I'm no expert, but the reality is that even if we are dealing with this correctly now, those numbers are gonna get worse before they get better.

@kkslider5552000 Do you think there's any truth to the idea that we could see millions infected before this is over? I've seen some people claim we might see millions in America alone - but that seems... extreme.

shrugs

@Heavyarms55 This is - unfortunately - in line with the sort of exponential growth that arises with the spread of something like a virus.

If it has a growth rate of 33% (which is the trajectory a lot of countries are following) and on the first day there are 100 cases, then on the fifth day there will be 416 cases, on the tenth day 1732 cases, on the fifteen day 7207, on the twentieth day just under 30k, on the twenty fifth day around 125k and on the thirtieth day almost 520k cases. In the span of a month you’ve gone from a relatively benign 100 people (“not a big deal” territory) to over half a million (health services potentially at their limits). This is why charts are often presented on a logarithmic scale (i.e. the numbers on the side go up by multiples of a certain number), rather than a linear scale (going up in fixed units, the same way you’d count on your fingers). Linear scales make the growth look so explosive as to make it hard to work out what they mean or where they’re headed. They’re honest about the fact that the growth is explosive, but the data is often hard to put in context. The graph posted on the previous page was exponential, which you is why the numbers on the right get real big real fast.

@JaxonH Yeah that’s true. In terms of how things are right now though, I don’t know if they had a choice but to call it an emergency and force everyone to distance themselves for a while. The US is not even close to leveling off quite yet. There are going to be months in the summer where I’d expect to see new cases cropping up in the double digits, but businesses and factories operating again. Hopefully it doesn’t create a surge again, but it’ll just something people will have to live with for a while. I don’t think big public events should be happening for the entire summer, but you’re right that the workforce needs to get back while following precautions and regulations that would hopefully minimize the spread.

@Maxz
This is a great graph you shared.

As long as the log scale has the same exponential base as the infection rate, it should not only be linear but have a slope of exactly one. This makes it very easy to see if it’s deviating from the exponential model in either direction.

But it’s usually not feasible to use a log scale with the same exponential base as the infection rate because most log scales use a base of 2, 10 or e (2.718 for all you non math folk that get puzzled when you see letters instead of numbers 😁 ). Even so, any log scale should make it linear, just with a different slope- which will be the exponential base of the log scale used, raised to the power of the infection rate.

In either case, you’re looking for a straight line, and any deviation to the left means the infection rate is increasing, and any deviation to the right means the infection rate is decreasing. as long as the infection rate remains constant the line will continue with a constant slope, but the scale is logarithmic so every unit to the right results in an ever higher increase in the Y-axis.

Personally I prefer the normal XY scale so people can see just how big the numbers are ballooning, but I like the log scale for personal use.