Derfel thread of Friday night: a second wave
Here’s Aaron Derfel’s fairly disturbing thread from Friday evening, and his article on bracing for a second wave.
Going around outside (carefully) I notice that many people are not maintaining distancing, and few are wearing masks. People near me are holding backyard gatherings that look perfectly 2019.
david11 17:31 on 2020-05-23 Permalink
A second wave could probably be avoided relatively easy by doing a much better job of protecting the vulnerable. In Canada and Quebec, something like 81% of the deaths are in nursing homes, which I think should probably inform our discourse on this whole pandemic more than, say, picnics in parks: http://archive.is/xMnvv
david11 17:32 on 2020-05-23 Permalink
Sorry, wrong link: https://archive.is/2jCx5
david11 17:42 on 2020-05-23 Permalink
(second wave of hospitalizations, that is, not infections)
EmilyG 17:59 on 2020-05-23 Permalink
Not everyone is physically able to wear masks. Though that wouldn’t account for a whole lot of people not wearing them.
But – is the rule that you only have to wear a mask if you can’t stay 6 feet away from others?
So much is confusing.
Kevin 18:05 on 2020-05-23 Permalink
Best prevention is stay 2 metres away and wash you hands often.
If you can’t stay 2 metres away, wear a mask, because it’s not great but is better than nothing. (And will protect others from you-not you from others)
Sharing a cigarette is right out.
So the restaurant where employees are shoulder to shoulder inside, then sharing a smoke outside? Don’t eat there.
Kate 18:06 on 2020-05-23 Permalink
It can’t be all that common not to be able to wear a mask, can it?
Kate 18:13 on 2020-05-23 Permalink
david11, the neighbourhoods where people live who look after your disposable old people are still hotbeds. Those people are working. They take transit, they shop for groceries, they will cross paths with you.
So far, the level of contagion has been held down only because most people were limiting their excursions outside, following the rules, wearing a mask when going inside to shop.
I said from the beginning, if the numbers were held down, there would be people who’d pipe up that we were overreacting. And it’s true.
Kate 20:07 on 2020-05-23 Permalink
Also: the Swedish policy, praised for its nerve, has resulted in Europe’s worst death rate.
You can’t play chicken with a virus.
Max 20:32 on 2020-05-23 Permalink
On the other hand, it’s likely that more Swedes (per capita) have been exposed to the thing by now. In the long run, as a result, they may put the pandemic behind them earlier. I suspect all humanity will be exposed to the virus at some point. It might turn out that all our efforts just spread the same number of deaths out over time. Who knows?
Chris 20:41 on 2020-05-23 Permalink
>Also: the Swedish policy, praised for its nerve, has resulted in Europe’s worst death rate.
So far. More meaningful is the deaths between the start and end of the pandemic. Which of course we won’t know until later. It could be that Sweden has front-loaded its deaths but may end up with the same, more, or less amount (per capita) as anywhere else.
And a second wave being inevitable, may be better during summer, while influenza and other things are low.
Kate 20:42 on 2020-05-23 Permalink
Max, the main point in all the lockdown and distancing is exactly that – spread the morbidity and mortality curve out so that hospitals don’t get overwhelmed. But the delay in spiking the curve also gives us a chance to work out either better treatments or a vaccine, although I don’t hold out much hope for the latter.
Chris 20:50 on 2020-05-23 Permalink
And BTW Sweden’s hospitals haven’t been overwhelmed.
Kate 20:54 on 2020-05-23 Permalink
Good! We’re clearing out the deadwood, then – old people, people with feeble immune systems. Bon débarras!
Douglas 22:38 on 2020-05-23 Permalink
Sorry Aaron,
We are opening whether he tweets more or not about how worried he is.
We are living with Corona until a vaccine comes. Its going to be like this for entire 2020. 1st wave. 2nd wave. 4th wave. Whatever.
We are opening to avoid an economic collapse. The sooner the better. People need to put food on the table.
mare 23:48 on 2020-05-23 Permalink
^ and without grandma there’s less mouths to feed.
Tee Owe 06:18 on 2020-05-24 Permalink
Re Sweden – recent tests show that no more than 7-8% of those tested in Stockholm have antibodies, so the hoped-for herd immunity hasn’t happened. Also, the Swedish economy has been hit just as hard as its locked-down neighbors (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/30/coronavirus-sweden-economy-to-contract-as-severely-as-the-rest-of-europe.html). So those deaths seem to have been for nothing.
Kate 09:26 on 2020-05-24 Permalink
Douglas, who died and left you in charge?
The former state epidemiologist of Sweden says the country was wrong not to shut down and its current epidemiologist admits the country is in a terrible situation.
qatzelok 09:48 on 2020-05-24 Permalink
“Tegnell,… conceded that the country was in a “terrible situation” but dismissed the idea that a lockdown would have helped.”
So even he says that a lockdown would have been useless in “defeating” this virus. How this squares with your bolded headline above is not clear, Kate.
Kate 10:19 on 2020-05-24 Permalink
The headline addresses what Sweden’s previous epidemiologist had to say, qatzelok.
Kevin 11:30 on 2020-05-24 Permalink
Unlike the USA we have a social safety net so everyone is putting food on the table.
Sweden has an extremely high death rate and only 7% of its population got Covid by the end of April. Think about that.
Brett 15:03 on 2020-05-24 Permalink
Our social safety net isn’t going to last forever, though. And there are lots of jobs, particularly in hospitality and tourism that just aren’t going to be there in the high season. It’s going to be disproportionately painful for the low income earners of our society.
We have to be careful to when saying “only x per cent of the population got the virus” with these antibody tests. Five isotypes, or classes, of antibodies (IgM, IgD, IgG, IgA, and IgE) exist, and the antibody tests are only checking for two or three of them (specifically IgM and IgG).
Also I’d like to see more analysis of viral RNA in sewage water as they are doing in europe – https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/countries-begin-large-scale-screening-for-sars-cov-2-in-sewage-67535 – this seems to give a pretty good idea of the current infection rate in the population and seems easier to scale than swabbing carloads of patients.
Tee Owe 15:41 on 2020-05-24 Permalink
Let’s not get into Immunology101, but a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Briefly, IgM and IgG are the (usually) protective isotypes, the others are way less likely to be (especially IgD whjich is not even secreted). The antibody tests have many problems and uncertainties but which isotype they measure is not among them. The 7-8% estimates reasonably accurately reflect the number of people who were exposed to the virus.
Alison Cummins 18:13 on 2020-05-24 Permalink
Max,
If you *expect* everyone to become infected with the covid virus you won’t try to stop it happening. The thing is, it could still be contained. That would be the best outcome: shut down, do contact tracing, open up when we’re reasonably confident that we know which individuals are infected, and then we can go on pretty much as before.
Our fatalities growth rate is currently below 1, which is fantastic. If it stays below 1 long enough, covid will disappear.
Except that the fatalities growth rate has been creeping up again. If the trend upwards continues we’ll be above 1 within the week. That means the virus will be spreading at an increasing rate, burdening the health care system, killing people of all ages, creating permanent disability in survivors and costing lots and lots of money.
Either way it’s going to cost. Personally I’d rather the money went to containment and not to losing a significant proportion of the contributions of our middle-aged population to scarred lungs and kidney failure.
Either way it costs money.
Chris 12:55 on 2020-05-25 Permalink
>The thing is, it could still be contained.
Oh? That’s contrary to just about everything I’ve read. Can you share some reading making a good argument for that assertion?
Perhaps it could have been contained back in Wuhan, but it’s on every continent now. I think the containment ship has sailed. Now it’s a question of mitigation, not containment.