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They don’t need an understanding of exponential growth, they only need to look at examples: China, extreme measures and barely contained it; Italy delayed measu
by drclau 7y ago
They don’t need an understanding of exponential growth, they only need to look at examples: China, extreme measures and barely contained it; Italy delayed measures, turning fast into a disaster. How many examples do we need?
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoIn Denmark yesterday a couple of kids in the same class in a school were tested positive, they closed the classroom - not even the school. I would certainly like to see the example of a country able to learn from the mistakes of others.
- voqv 7y agoIn Germany a friend of mine refused to go to a meeting at a client's office where someone tested positive and HR threatened him because he was violating his employment contract.
- rorykoehler 7y agoAm in Germany. Everyone is acting like nothing is happening. It's infuriating.
- hef19898 7y agoWell, in Bavaria at least, people are forced to self-quarantine for two weeks if they had contact to people from o where in high risk areas. Same goes for children in schools and kindergardens. Some schools are closed already. Corporate travel came more or less to a halt and soccer games are most likely taking place without spectators. So yes, just business as usual.
- rorykoehler 7y agoI'm in Berlin and people are making zero effort to alter their usual patterns.
- hef19898 7y agoAs of yesterday, Berlin is no way a risk zone as of now. So why should they? Doesnt mean you can't change your behaviour, so.
- rorykoehler 7y agoThat is an incredibly short sighted view. We need to be proactive not reactive. This virus is here and it's here in a big way. Positive cases are not the full picture. Median incubation period is 5 days. Italy is a warning and we're not taking it. We should all be in quarantine now so this doesn't get out of hand rather than wait for it to become uncontrollable and then trying to de-escalate it.
- hef19898 7y agoOk, so you suggest every single person in Germany to be quarantined. Whether they have symptoms or not. Now that's what I call an over reaction.
- cylinder 7y agoFive employees of DB now have it so maybe they'll pay attention now?
- hef19898 7y agoBelieve it or not, they paid attention already before that.
- chefkoch 7y agoMy neighbor is a teacher and her school is closed dir the next 2 weeks
- silvester23 7y agoI have a very different experience. I see lots of hand sanitizer everywhere, people are washing their hands constantly, my employer has relaxed rules for working from home (i.e. do it as much as you feel is feasible and reasonable), some schools are closed, people generally avoid crowded trains and buses. This is in NRW, however, where we have by far the most confirmed cases in Germany. Might be different in other places.
- rambojazz 7y agoThe entire world seems to be acting like that, it's not unique to Germany. Nobody pays attention because the numbers are low, and it's not worth stopping human activities. Then you wake up one day with thousands of cases.
- camillomiller 7y agoItalian living in Berlin here. Same same.
- hef19898 7y agoWell, if they did that is more or less ground for legal action. Managers have something "Fürsorgepflicht", meaning htey have to take care employees are safe. Usually things go the other way round, your employer would not allow you to travel. depending on how long friend is employed by this company, the resulting leal case could be rather expensive for the employer. Your friend would still have to look for another job, so...
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoIf they closed the office, cleaned it, and tested everyone else, it would be reasonable. But I guess they didn't do this. Which really our society is not set up for. Actually Covid-19 cleaning solutions would be a temporary business to get into.
- stOneskull 7y agoi think the focus should be on keeping immune systems up. having supplies of water and vitamin c available. stress-reduction is good for the immune system too. i think it's time to assume we're all going to get it and how best to ride through it.
- majewsky 7y agoCounter-datapoint: My employer (SAP) has had one case of COVID-19 among their German workforce. The entire office building has been closed down for disinfection and the employees there are asked to work from home for the quarantine period. All other employees (worldwide afaik) can work from home without informing their manager beforehand (as is the usual policy). All non-essential business travel is prohibited, with exceptions requiring high-tier management approval. Only two examples for exceptions were given: travelling to a data center to access physical hardware, and travelling to a customer site to access intranet services. EDIT: I realize that this response is easier to do for SAP than for the average company since we are all working in front of computers anyway the entire time, with only 1-2% of tasks tied to physical objects (paper forms, server hardware etc.).
- koliber 7y agoThe German ratio of infections to deaths is very low compared to other countries. It may be too early to judge, but given how it's unfolding, this speaks positively about how Germany is responding to the epidemic.
- camillomiller 7y agoIt’s a point of discussion in Europe. They might be skewing the data because they are willfully not testing dead patients with comorbidities. e.g. a late stage cancer patient dies with a respiratory syndrome? Italy tests the body and that person counts against the total coronavirus death toll if the result is positive. Germany doesn’t make the test.
- chalst 7y agoI can report the same behaviour of an office of a pharmaceutical firm here in Berlin.
- yosoyubik 7y agoThis is terrible. Was it Rysensteen Gymnasium? Edited: Just found the article (Malling Skole i Østjylland) https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/skole-sender-klasse-i-karantaene-efter-smitte-med-coronavirus https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/skole-sender-klasse-i-kara...
- Shivetya 7y agoState of Georgia closed a school and quarantined the firemen who were sent to the school all on the account of a teacher being diagnosed. Quarantines of mass amounts of the population are not going to help, what needs to be done is isolate those most at risk from the general population
- wongarsu 7y agoThis is exactly the kind of measures that should be taken in the beginning. Italy is far past that: With 9000 confirmed cases they would need to isolate hundreds of thousands of people. For comparison: Italy's entire prison population is 60,000 people. At that point it's just logistically easier to suspend public life over the entire country for a few weeks.
- ergothus 7y agoQuarantine isnt just about preventing the illness in the most vulnerable, it's about keeping the explosion if cases at a level that doesn't swamp the healthcare system. Absolute containment is highly unlikely, but delay can help a ton.
- krisoft 7y agoBut if you don’t understand exponential growth and you look at China’s example you might think (mistakenly): “they had this illness and over reacted. Look how much it hurt their economy, and it wasn’t even anything big as it turns out!” This is obviously wrong, but you can’t recognise the precipice they pulled themselves back from without understanding exponential growth itself.
- hef19898 7y agoOr you could look at it, say "it looks like exponential, but I am no expert on diseases, so I don't know what I am looking at."
- greedo 7y agoOr you could listen to the experts on disease, and not let your innate optimism to blind you to the reality: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus
- hef19898 7y agoI haven't heard any expert (doctor, epidemiologist, virologist,...) making the claim that epidemics can be extrapolated until the number of infected people equals the total number of people. Pandemics burn out eventually by their own way before that.
- rthomas6 7y agoIt's a virus. The infection grew exponentially like virus infections do. We could be wrong, but we're probably not.
- hef19898 7y agoEpidemics don't follow exponential functions. You are aware of that?
- 7y ago
- pjc50 7y agoThat relies on looking at what's actually happening. Modern right-wing politics has no interest in facts. For them, Coronavirus is just another left-wing attack on the President: https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1237174846355841024 https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/123717484635584102...
- bluGill 7y agoModern left wing politics has no interest in facts except the ones they can cherry pick to attack the president... Get your political blinders off. Both sides will twist any fact to attack the other.
- hef19898 7y agoA couple of weeks ago it was "China was slow and it turned into a disaster". Now China was fast and Italy is turining into a disaster. Someties it seems that people want to be that a disaster, so they push that narrative. Same thing happens with the deniers, so.
- chaosite 7y agoChina was slow, and it turned into a disaster, then they got their act together. Italy was slower than that.
- dckr 7y agoI don't think we're actually slow. Yes, the risk was clear from the beginning, but the government had to take care of the economic situation too, which was (and is) rapidly collapsing. Some choices are maybe arguable, but when compared to other EU countries Italians were quite fast to converge to some decisions.
- CaptainZapp 7y agoForeign Policy, which has pretty good corona virus reporting, strongly disagrees with your opinion.[1] [1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/09/italy-covid19-coronavirus-conte-salvini-epidemic-politicians-are-making-crisis-worse/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/09/italy-covid19-coronavir...
- coldtea 7y agoOr you know, both narratives are right. China was slower than it should, it turned into a disaster, but they did a 360o and bounced back with strict measures quite fast. Italy was slow, and is already a nightmare.