Hi, David, yes I have had lots of great butter recently.
Alas, I have also had lots of great carbs, so the keto diet is right now a long lost memory for me. I have been sick and stressed: we have had bushfires, floods, and now the Plague. Life has been pretty hard the last few months.
I hope that I am now back close to good health and I start again. I am doing an ADF regime right now. Hunger just gone.
Hope you are going well?
Cheers
A
One of the things we don’t know. How accurate is the testing? How many false positives, how many false negatives? We don’t know. All projections are based on total infections which are estimated from the results of testing. If we have a lot of false positives, then the conclusion that COVID-19 is more infectious than the flu, for instance, might be wrong. If we have a lot of false negatives, then the actual rate of infection is higher and means the fatal cases a smaller percentage of the overall total.
So the flu killed about 240 people in italy from oct to jan. corona virus has killed over 3400 in a matter of a couple weeks in the same place. Are those numbers made up? I agree that we shouldnt go to crazy but I also dont think anyone should be down playing this thing.
The infection rate numbers seem almost useless. You can’t count what you don’t test, and as testing increases, obviously infection rates will look like they are rising when the cases have been there already and just not counted.
To me, the numbers that matter are:
Beds used/available
Ventilators used/available
Patients waiting for beds
Patients waiting for ventilators
Healthcare workers sick/available
There is another way to estimate infections. By the number that die. For example yesterday 57 people in the US died. Assuming a death rate of 1% the 57 people who died suggest 5700 were infected. Estimates suggest about 20 days from infection to death so we can guesstimate 5700 in the US had the virus on Feb 28th. We weren’t doing anything then to slow the virus and the doubling time could have been 3 days but let’s pick 5 to be very conservative. So doublings on March 4th, 9th and 14th. Then we began to implement social distancing perhaps beginning to slow it down to maybe another doubling by today or tomorrow. Four doublings = 2**4 = 16, 16 * 5700 = 91,200 in the US with the virus today which would be more than 5 times the current reported number of cases of ~16500.
This calculation makes lots of assumptions so it could be significantly over or under estimating. But it does give a sense of the magnitude of the problem. Going forward watch the daily death rate. Track the doubling time for the death rate and we can start to get a sense of where we are headed.
Note, yesterday we had 57 deaths, the day before 41 and the day before 23. So that was a doubling time of less than 2 days when those people were getting infected back at the end of February. So it is possible maybe even likely my estimate falls short by a doubling or two or three. In a week or so it should be clearer what the doubling time really was back then.
Todd
Your logic is spot on… maybe a little conservative. I have seen the same logic applied with slightly different assumptions and you get to an actual current infected number 10x the current reported number.
Extreme social distancing needed and now.
I work in a big manufacturing company. There are people that have physical jobs that have to be at a certain place to be able to do their job. But there are also about a third of the workforce who can do their jobs at home (including me and my team).
I took the decision last Monday to tell all my staff to work from home starting Tuesday. For however long it takes. My forecast is we will be working from home for 3 months minimum (but it all depends on what other people do).
But there is some irony: I got authorisation from my boss to do this (in fact, he was stronger on us doing this than me!). But on Thursday I was told that this decision had not been authorised by the corporate crisis team and we might have to go back into the office. Corporate egomania gone mad!!!
Thus far, I have had no instruction to get my team back to the office (thank God!), so I have not had a difficult decision to make. But I am seriously considering saying no if they tell me to do this. I may not last the day. But we are talking people’s lives here. Playing corporate politics with people’s lives is just not on.
There are many corporate leaders in Australia who will not do more than what the govt tells them to do. Those people have utterly lost my respect. We need to be doing extreme measures and right now. I have been out of the house once in the last 5 days. This is what we need to do.
But there are some positives:
There are people who think the damage to the economy is too large for the likely benefit of saving a few more old geezers like me. No reason to feel guilty about that, I probably feel the same about them. The more concrete question is, will heath workers continue to come to work if government and the public abandons them? If they quit working there is no medical care. I’m in a perfect situation living alone in retirement mode, food in the frig, gym in the basement. I’ll do everything possible to avoid infection. I don’t miss the bars and restaurants, I don’t patronize them. What’s happened is now a whole lot of people are living like me. Hopefully they will drink less booze, eat better food, take a walk, and stop whining.
It now looks like chloroquine and/or hydroxycholorquine will become widely available, beginning in April; See this. Until then if you can’t get the stuff, probably the next best thing you can do to protect yourself is daily tonic water and a high dose zinc supplement. Zevia makes a zero carb tonic water with stevia. Other brands have diet tonic water using various artificial sweeteners. I have no idea how effective this would be, but I bet it’s better than doing nothing but sitting at home hoping you don’t have to leave the house/apt for anything. I’m starting this routine today because I’m back to work at Walmart tomorrow. I have also been breathing camphor vapor via a Vicks Inhaler with camphor. This irritates my throat but I think it is also helpful. I use Fishermans Friend Extra Strength (with eucalyptus) to sooth my throat.
No! It suggests that 5700 BECAME infected feb 28, not were infected total at that time!
Excellent point. Unfortunately it paints a somewhat grimmer picture and it was already too ugly for me.
on the bright side, in most places, this really seems to be much more prevalent than people thought in some analysis, up to half of people infected seem to have no symptoms whatsoever. If 80% of the symptomatic people have mild infection (which still technically includes mild pneumonia), 90% of cases are mild or Asymptomatic! This means herd immunity can have way earlier than many though.
It’s interesting Alec to see the bureaucrats, management and administration try to hold on to their presumed power.
The team I work in can work from home with some creative adjustments to workflow even though our jobs are face-to-face interaction base with clients.
We took the decision within our work team to transition to work from home. We didn’t wait for direction from management who were working ultimately from government advice. We nodded and thanked our overseers and ‘coordinators’ for their constant updates (but inaction). Our team of 3 full time workers and 7 casual support staff was independent and worked out a good communication method and stepwise changes to get all our work online and retain clients. It took 4 days from making the decision to be working in a new, creative way.
The thing we saw is the slow movement and indecision of the larger corporate body. They are just starting to respond in the same way we did as a smaller team. It is a week later. It’s called ‘turning the Titanic’. They are a lot slower as they negotiate with, and eventually direct other teams. They are working within a mire of process and protocol documents that have no capacity for a ‘natural’ pandemic. Being set up and working at home, we, our team, have become advisors to our managers in helping the whole business adjust.
Just like in nutrition it takes a grass roots movement of the participants and experimenters to instigate the changes needed when facing challenges. The bureaucracy and management have to realise they are built on top of a foundation of the people. If the people move to change the ice cream ball leaders up the pancake stack have to move with them; we who are the plate. At least momentarily. Until new leaders rise up from the popular movement and the circus starts again.
We have enough information to make an orderly change now before the elected leaders in our society start to see their power presumption slipping and respond by enacting stricter and tighter laws and controls on the people they are supposed to lead.
Maybe an optimistic scenario would be we already have 1.6 million infected and need to get to 50% of the population to see a significant herd immunity slow down. We’d be 1% of the way there. With 262 deaths so far. Maybe 26000 more deaths to see some herd immunity? Wouldn’t look too bad compared to the flu. Assuming hospitals keep up with demand… Hopefully useful drugs are widely available soon to bring that down to something easy for the system to bear.
At the Banzai Pipeline surf break on the north shore of Oahu it can be seconds between catching it and serious health problems. But riding the wave, especially if one can garner some style and grace, teaches the self a lot about life, health, joy and the forces outside of ourselves. 
Waving (interpreted as surfing) is appropriate social distancing behaviour.
Here is an excellent article examining various societal approaches to this virus.
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56
No great skill with charts/tables here and nothing more than ‘Google Docs’ (documents) to work with. Reckoned from the day when the countries were the closest to 150 reported cases.
