COVID-19 updates comments and concerns

[griffin]

So many events are now being cancelled, here and overseas... and I feel really bad for those who have their event cancelled at the last minute, particularly if they have already spent a lot of money to get to it, or can't get refunds if they aren't yet there.

It's such a difficult decision, closing down social events, businesses, recreational places and schools/universities for up to several weeks, as no one wants to be the politician or CEO who was in charge during a virus cluster, so are taking early preventative measures... but it's not going to kill of the virus, as I think it's only just going to delay the inevitable.
This is a flu-like virus, so it isn't going to ever go away, unless you have every human on the planet avoid contact with every other human for about 3-4 weeks. It will be like measles - even if there is a vaccine developed (which is at least 6 months away), not everyone will get the vaccine, so the virus will continue to exist... until most people catch it or get vaccinated.

Basically what I'm saying, is that I think closing down everything now while the infection numbers are quite low, might look to be the right thing to do if this was a short-lived, low contamination virus like SARS, but COVID-19 is a lot more contagious, and it sounds like it is very contagious for the 2-3 days before you have any symptoms or a fever (for those temperature scanning devices). As such, I think the people making the decision to close down everything now, are going to have a much tougher decision in a few weeks time to not be the first to re-open when the virus is still popping up in new cities and countries around the world. This is because it's spread now will be a lot slower, but it won't kill it off globally, so infection rates will go back up when people make the difficult decision to re-open things, just to keep the country going.
I mean, how long can schools, businesses, themeparks, sporting events, etc, stay closed for? And how long can countries have travel bans in place for? This virus isn't going to disappear off the planet in the next 2 weeks... or even 2 months... because it is still only in a very small number of places (even in Australia it hasn't hit plague proportions yet), so how are they going to decide when to re-open things if the virus still exists? Even if it suddenly drops down to being just a few cases in one country and everything is opened back up again, we will be back at this point two months later, because that's what it was like just two months ago when the first cases appeared outside of Wuhan. All this is just after 2-3 months of virus spreading... how is it going to disappear in just a few weeks for these events, schools and businesses to say it is "safe to re-open"... but how many can survive more than a few weeks being closed? (and more importantly, how many countries will see total collapse of their society if most of their economy is shut down for a month or two... or more - considering our economy is said to be one of the best of the developed world despite no budget surplus or trade surplus for most of the last 20 years, how are countries with worse credit ratings going to afford this)

Maybe slowing down it's spread could even be a bad thing for society and the economy, as it won't stop spreading until most people have caught it (to have the anti-bodies in their system or they died from it), or a vaccine is created (which will also take several months to develop and administer)... all of which I can't see happening until at least this time next year. Can we as a society survive with most things being closed for several months, knowing that if they re-open while the virus still exists somewhere in the world, no matter how much it disappears within our country, the contamination rates will just go back up again.

And what if it behaves like the flu virus and mutates from time to time, requiring constant vaccines every year and never being eradicated. We would then just have to live as a society with new flu-like viruses that get spread around like the flu, but have a higher mortality rate (quite a few people die of the flu each year too, but the percentage isn't as high as the corona virus).

[Paulbot]

Have a read of this case for the isolation approach:
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coron...e-f4d3d9cd99ca

[Ralph Wiggum]

Plus there's the approach of Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan:

https://time.com/5802293/coronavirus...g-kong-taiwan/

A strong isolation/quarantine policy is about keeping the virus growth significantly contained so that medical services can cope, essential services continuing to function and general day-to-day life to continue. All of this prevents a culture of fear and panic within the general population, and avoids panic buying/hoarding of goods. I dare say most Western countries, including Australia, have a lot to learn and reflect from Covid19 when things settle down. Our "she'll be right" attitude cost us valuable time we didn't have in containing the virus. Our aversion to short term pain is going to cost us in the long run.

[griffin]

Watching Planet America and The Late Show last night, they both talked about how these shut down and travel ban measures are not for the containment or elimination of the virus, but is to mitigate (slow down) its spread because no country has the hospital resources to cope with even the best estimates of infection. Most western countries only have intensive care resources to cover 0.1 to 0.5 % of the population and this virus will give about 20% of infected people serious to fatal symptoms (80% will experience little more than cold symptoms). And most of those beds/resources are always in use from other medical conditions which means less available for a plague. So even if agencies know they can't stop the spread of the virus, they know that we need to spread out the infection rate over a longer period of time so that our hospitals can keep up. Already in Italy, hospitals are forced to triage - which is to decide who is being treated because they don't have enough resources and beds to treat everyone. Not to mention all of the non-virus issues needing intensive care that may not survive if they are full of virus patients.

Its just better to lie to the general public to prevent a panic from the over paranoid or less educated (or misinformed through social media).

Just stay safe everyone and be vigilant with limited contact with others and wash hands often.

[Trent]

Its just better to lie to the general public to prevent a panic from the over paranoid or less educated (or misinformed through social media).

Ok Trump.

[1AZRAEL1]

The economy is going to take a hit, so are people who's livelihoods depend on entertainment (bands, promoters, etc) because I'm seeing alot of bands having to cancel their tours atm, and that's where they make bulk of their money.

We're in uncharted waters in our generation for a plague of these proportions.

[SMHFConvoy]

I just called a potential employer about a job and they were unsure that the position is being advertised at the moment with a downturn in trade they experienced this weekend.

[gamblor916]

The Johns Hopkins University Tracker gives a bit of scale to this thing. Make of that what you will.

[GoktimusPrime]

How the Chinese city of Nanjing, with a population of over 8.3 million people, has managed to reduce their number of COVID-19 cases down to zero.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfsdJGj3-jM

[DELTAprime]

Am I the only person not panicking over this stupid virus? I have family members that seem to think the world is ending.