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I've seen comments here trying to play down the message or discredit the signatories of this letter. Don't. Please take it seriously. This is not sensationalis

I've seen comments here trying to play down the message or discredit the signatories of this letter. Don't. Please take it seriously. This is not sensationalism. What the letter means is that if your country is not there yet, you might be DAYS away from widespread panic and total lock down. I'm writing this from Barcelona, Spain. This last Sunday, 6 days ago, I went on a walk with my girlfriend, had a nice lunch, took beautiful pictures... The virus was just some nagging news.. A couple of hundred people infected somewhere far away. 6 days later, we're at over 6000 infections, the country is in total lock down. Same pattern as Italy (even faster), we're just a couple of days away before tens of thousands is reached. This is what exponential growth means.

rimliu 7y ago
We (Lithuania) are going into more or less total lockdown since coming midnight. With 8 active cases (first confirmed case recovered and was released home). I only wish government would be more aggressive with testing.
cl42 7y ago
I believe you’re correct. The SK approach has been more focused on individual quarantines and aggressive monitoring: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/03/italy-south-korea-differ-tackling-coronavirus-outbreak-200313062505781.html https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/03/italy-south-korea-dif...
baby 7y ago
Can we make sure we’re reading this kind of information when given by people who actually study and work in a relevant field? Now more than ever we should look at the source of every information. I know I'm going to get downvoted for saying this, but I think it is important enough.
- everybodyknows 7y ago
  It is fair to observe that the expertise here is math rather than medicine. However, epidemiologists have already made these predictions. Don't see any harm in signalling broader academic support. Particularly not since none of the signatories could plausibly be accused of exaggerating the danger, in order to extract grant money. As goes the usual cynical claim of innumerate science-deniers.
  - irq11 7y ago
    This article claims that “lockdown” is the best way to stop the virus, then says that South Korea and China are the examples to follow. It claims that Korea has made a lockdown. South Korea has, at no point, made anything close to the country-wide “lockdown” we’re seeing in parts of Europe. Korea’s reaction is amongst the most successful in the world, and involves contact tracing and isolation of the sick. When they have “locked down” anything, it’s been extremely small scale, on the order of a building or block. Similarly, Taiwan has had an immensely successful response, without resorting to these kinds of extreme measures. This article is designed to scare, not to inform.
    - freepor 7y ago
      There are basically two paths: act swiftly and decisively at the very beginning. Immediately close your borders. Find the infected and contact trace them. Dragnet test where necessary. Haul off the sick to quarantine locations run by the government. etc. Then you don't need to lock down the entire country. Path 2 is you fuck it up and Covid-19 is running rampant through your entire population. Of course at this point closing borders and contact tracing is 100% pointless. It's in this environment where lockdown is the only way you can accomplish anything.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - irq11 7y ago
        This is a false dichotomy. There is no particular reason to believe that China’s approach is the only correct path, other than it’s the one they used.
        freepor 7y ago
        China was certainly not an example of the first. They tried to cover up its existence in the beginning! The best examples are Japan and Singapore.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
troughway 7y ago
>6 days later, we're at over 6000 infections, the country is in total lock down. Similar anecdote here. My SO texted me earlier this week saying how she will be taking the train from Madrid to Barcelona to go back to her family. She figured it will be empty on Sunday at 6 am. I have been following the situation evolve in Italy and told her to get on the train right away and leave immediately before it gets worse. Luckily, the next day she was on the train. The lockdowns started happening shortly afterwards.
- joe_the_user 7y ago
  Shame on her People should stay where they are. Lockdown is not a disaster. People fleeing lockdown are literally the carriers of this disaster. Stay where you are, wait. Don't travel. Don't fight the locdown. Lockdown is the current, appropriate course of action. A very effective lockdown can eliminate the infection in, well, however long it took to eliminate it in Wuhan. Fleeing the lockdown now is just going to another area that is going to be on lockdown later on anyway.
  - warent 7y ago
    I didn't see them say anything about "fleeing a lockdown." She was fleeing a potentially life-threatening virus in a scary situation in order to be with her family. That isn't so hard to grok, and obviously she felt she was making the right decision. Shaming someone for looking for security and safety in a scary situation (i.e. for being human) is just absurd.
    - stan_rogers 7y ago
      Shaming somebody for potentially spreading a disease, on the other hand, is precisely the sort of thing that needs to happen in a situation like this. Epidemics don't give a tinker's damn for anyone's feelings.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
on_and_off 7y ago
I fear that the situation is already at that state in the USA. There are 1600 confirmed cases but the lack of tests hides how many real infections there are.
- pbourke 7y ago
  > There are 1600 confirmed cases but the lack of tests hides how many real infections there are. 2,695 at the moment, per the NYT tracker https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/coronavirus-maps.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/coronavirus-m...
  - eyegor 7y ago
    Last official update from cdc was 1629 [0]. NYT seems to be aggregating data from state reports, and even that is out of date. NYT reports 607 in WA, but the state itself reports 642 [1] (cdc reported 457 in WA on Friday). [0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-in-us.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-in-us.html [1] https://www.doh.wa.gov/Emergencies/Coronavirus https://www.doh.wa.gov/Emergencies/Coronavirus
    - dzdt 7y ago
      2969 right now at https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/ https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/. That site aggregates from news media reports and is the most real-time of the various sites I've seen. Plus it gives county-level breakdowns and links to reports with further details.
- jerf 7y ago
  Like China, "the USA" is very large and probably not something that can be treated as an atomic entity. Even much-smaller Italy is probably too large for that. While there may be hot spots that develop in the US, I can tell you from personal experience that there states that have taken strong measures when there are still single-digit numbers of infected in them. The state I'm in is not in a mandatory full lockdown per se, but pretty much every vector the virus has to spread by the dozens/hundreds/thousands at a time has been eliminated; what few are still left are fading fast. I don't know what will happen, but a full on r0-2.3 (or whatever the latest number is) spread isn't going to happen here under these conditions. (I highlight those last three words.)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
hatenberg 7y ago
There is really no excuse for this happening in Europe. There was ample warning and no, not just from China. The math was very clear by early/mid February. We have to face the truth that the quality of people we vote for government is not where it needs to be and that science has too long been discredited and ignored. Some of asia learned from SARS but that's it. Madrid was hosting marches, political rallies and soccer games with 10.000-100.000 people a week ago because people did not want to make the hard choices needed even as Korea was burning and Italy started to. Excuses that China is authoritarian do not cut it - this was a huge fail of governance and doing what people are elected to do
- jacquesm 7y ago
  The post-mortem (for want of a better term) on this will be pretty bad for some people in leadership positions. Assuming they survive. Very precious time was squandered with half-assed measures and uninformed decisions.
  - hatenberg 7y ago
    I don't share your optimism. We already seeing not acting recast as strategy. At least German politicians had the sense to step aside and hand the mess they made to the scientific experts to clean up.
    - gvjddbnvdrbv 7y ago
      The UK's moronic lack of response?
  - alisonatwork 7y ago
    I am not holding out much hope for the people responsible for this to face consequences for their mismanagement. Here in China Xi Jinping has already been recast as the man who led the country to victory in the "people's war", mere weeks after widespread condemnation of his administration's disastrous failure to respond. Once the media switches their focus from outrage at the politicians to feel-good stories of community solidarity, people will forget how angry they were. The political elite will weather the storm, even as thousands die on their watch.
joe_the_user 7y ago
What the letter means is that if your country is not there yet, you might be DAYS away from widespread panic and total lock down. I gotta say this but I don't think we should put forward the position that total lockdown is an irrational position. Total lockdown seems fully rational, not a product of mere panic at all. Total lockdown worked in Wuhan. Absolute and complete isolation inherently results in exponential decline in the fashion that exposure result in exponential growh. It's a drag but it doesn't seem as much of a drag as millions of dead people. And that is the bizarre thing I'm saying and hearing in the US - "Uh, just let it infect everyone" - "you know that promises to the largest loss of life on US soil ever" - "well, try to slow it down a bit". Jeesh.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  > "you know that promises to the largest loss of life on US soil ever" From what I'm aware, if hospitals are able to handle the patients, it shouldn't be up to that level. And the "slow it down" plan is primarily about not overwhelming hospitals.
  - joe_the_user 7y ago
    You understand wrong and these common arguments can be easily seen to have incorrect arithmetic. There are no countries with mass infections where the fatality rate is plausibly below 1%. Of course, when the health system is overwhelmed, the fatality rate can be 4-5%. But let's just look at a 1% fatality rate to start with. The US population is 327,000,000. Seventy percent of that is 228,900,000. One percent of that 2,289,000; A little more than two million people if we assume 70% infection and an orderly health care system. But that horrible figure isn't plausible. Because there's more. Claims you can avoid the overwhelming of the health care system are clearly false. Dividing, assuming, unrealistically that the event could be divided evenly through a year, that means that, that many people dying in a year (365) involves 6271 people dying per day and ten times that many people, ~62,000 people, arriving very sick at hospitals, per day throughout the year. And that is far, far more than could be handled by the US health care system. Moreover, spreading the deaths evenly is inherently unrealistic, the situation of "flattening the curve" (a good thing in itself), can't stop exponential growth as such. If you decrease the doubling time of a exponential curve, you still have a situation where most of the area, most of the deaths in this case, is in the last double. So the even supposedly flattened curve won't let things go smoothly IF we assume "everyone will get this". And that promises not just 2 million but 10 millions (at the 5% death rate). If assume the US current has 10,000 infections, we approximately 12 "doublings" away from 228,900,000 infections (70% of the population). If we slow the progression to year, half the infection will still happen in the last month, with 10% of those "serious", that 763,000 needing attention per day. We're now talking corpses in the streets levels of horror. And we'd have further deaths from this breakdown situation. And back to the lockdown scenario. My answer is that Lockdowns are absolutely necessary and thankfully it seems likely in most situations they are coming. The figures above should show that alternative is effectively going to be complete breakdown of the health care system and effectively society.
eyegor 7y ago
Despite governments mostly making slow policy decisions, it's amazing how fast news spreads about this. Tons of planes bound for Spain were turned around mid-flight today after a message sent out to air traffic controllers. Absolutely nuts. https://www.euronews.com/2020/03/14/coronavirus-spain-bound-planes-turn-around-mid-air-as-covid-19-cases-soar https://www.euronews.com/2020/03/14/coronavirus-spain-bound-...
newtoday 7y ago
Thank you. Same here in the US. If you are in the US and still shrugging this off, please head all the warnings. The time to act was two weeks ago, and we won't make up that lost opportunity of effort for prevention and precaution.
MaximumYComb 7y ago
Thank you for sharing. Your comment has highlighted the importance of making sure my household is prepared

rimliu 7y ago

We (Lithuania) are going into more or less total lockdown since coming midnight. With 8 active cases (first confirmed case recovered and was released home). I only wish government would be more aggressive with testing.

cl42 7y ago

I believe you’re correct. The SK approach has been more focused on individual quarantines and aggressive monitoring: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/03/italy-south-korea-differ-tackling-coronavirus-outbreak-200313062505781.html https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/03/italy-south-korea-dif...

baby 7y ago

Can we make sure we’re reading this kind of information when given by people who actually study and work in a relevant field? Now more than ever we should look at the source of every information. I know I'm going to get downvoted for saying this, but I think it is important enough.

everybodyknows 7y ago
It is fair to observe that the expertise here is math rather than medicine. However, epidemiologists have already made these predictions. Don't see any harm in signalling broader academic support. Particularly not since none of the signatories could plausibly be accused of exaggerating the danger, in order to extract grant money. As goes the usual cynical claim of innumerate science-deniers.
- irq11 7y ago
  This article claims that “lockdown” is the best way to stop the virus, then says that South Korea and China are the examples to follow. It claims that Korea has made a lockdown. South Korea has, at no point, made anything close to the country-wide “lockdown” we’re seeing in parts of Europe. Korea’s reaction is amongst the most successful in the world, and involves contact tracing and isolation of the sick. When they have “locked down” anything, it’s been extremely small scale, on the order of a building or block. Similarly, Taiwan has had an immensely successful response, without resorting to these kinds of extreme measures. This article is designed to scare, not to inform.
  - freepor 7y ago
    There are basically two paths: act swiftly and decisively at the very beginning. Immediately close your borders. Find the infected and contact trace them. Dragnet test where necessary. Haul off the sick to quarantine locations run by the government. etc. Then you don't need to lock down the entire country. Path 2 is you fuck it up and Covid-19 is running rampant through your entire population. Of course at this point closing borders and contact tracing is 100% pointless. It's in this environment where lockdown is the only way you can accomplish anything.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - irq11 7y ago
      This is a false dichotomy. There is no particular reason to believe that China’s approach is the only correct path, other than it’s the one they used.
      - freepor 7y ago
        China was certainly not an example of the first. They tried to cover up its existence in the beginning! The best examples are Japan and Singapore.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

troughway 7y ago

>6 days later, we're at over 6000 infections, the country is in total lock down. Similar anecdote here. My SO texted me earlier this week saying how she will be taking the train from Madrid to Barcelona to go back to her family. She figured it will be empty on Sunday at 6 am. I have been following the situation evolve in Italy and told her to get on the train right away and leave immediately before it gets worse. Luckily, the next day she was on the train. The lockdowns started happening shortly afterwards.

joe_the_user 7y ago
Shame on her People should stay where they are. Lockdown is not a disaster. People fleeing lockdown are literally the carriers of this disaster. Stay where you are, wait. Don't travel. Don't fight the locdown. Lockdown is the current, appropriate course of action. A very effective lockdown can eliminate the infection in, well, however long it took to eliminate it in Wuhan. Fleeing the lockdown now is just going to another area that is going to be on lockdown later on anyway.
- warent 7y ago
  I didn't see them say anything about "fleeing a lockdown." She was fleeing a potentially life-threatening virus in a scary situation in order to be with her family. That isn't so hard to grok, and obviously she felt she was making the right decision. Shaming someone for looking for security and safety in a scary situation (i.e. for being human) is just absurd.
  - stan_rogers 7y ago
    Shaming somebody for potentially spreading a disease, on the other hand, is precisely the sort of thing that needs to happen in a situation like this. Epidemics don't give a tinker's damn for anyone's feelings.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]

on_and_off 7y ago

I fear that the situation is already at that state in the USA. There are 1600 confirmed cases but the lack of tests hides how many real infections there are.

pbourke 7y ago
> There are 1600 confirmed cases but the lack of tests hides how many real infections there are. 2,695 at the moment, per the NYT tracker https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/coronavirus-maps.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/coronavirus-m...
- eyegor 7y ago
  Last official update from cdc was 1629 [0]. NYT seems to be aggregating data from state reports, and even that is out of date. NYT reports 607 in WA, but the state itself reports 642 [1] (cdc reported 457 in WA on Friday). [0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-in-us.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-in-us.html [1] https://www.doh.wa.gov/Emergencies/Coronavirus https://www.doh.wa.gov/Emergencies/Coronavirus
  - dzdt 7y ago
    2969 right now at https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/ https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/. That site aggregates from news media reports and is the most real-time of the various sites I've seen. Plus it gives county-level breakdowns and links to reports with further details.
jerf 7y ago
Like China, "the USA" is very large and probably not something that can be treated as an atomic entity. Even much-smaller Italy is probably too large for that. While there may be hot spots that develop in the US, I can tell you from personal experience that there states that have taken strong measures when there are still single-digit numbers of infected in them. The state I'm in is not in a mandatory full lockdown per se, but pretty much every vector the virus has to spread by the dozens/hundreds/thousands at a time has been eliminated; what few are still left are fading fast. I don't know what will happen, but a full on r0-2.3 (or whatever the latest number is) spread isn't going to happen here under these conditions. (I highlight those last three words.)

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

hatenberg 7y ago

There is really no excuse for this happening in Europe. There was ample warning and no, not just from China. The math was very clear by early/mid February. We have to face the truth that the quality of people we vote for government is not where it needs to be and that science has too long been discredited and ignored. Some of asia learned from SARS but that's it. Madrid was hosting marches, political rallies and soccer games with 10.000-100.000 people a week ago because people did not want to make the hard choices needed even as Korea was burning and Italy started to. Excuses that China is authoritarian do not cut it - this was a huge fail of governance and doing what people are elected to do

jacquesm 7y ago
The post-mortem (for want of a better term) on this will be pretty bad for some people in leadership positions. Assuming they survive. Very precious time was squandered with half-assed measures and uninformed decisions.
- hatenberg 7y ago
  I don't share your optimism. We already seeing not acting recast as strategy. At least German politicians had the sense to step aside and hand the mess they made to the scientific experts to clean up.
  - gvjddbnvdrbv 7y ago
    The UK's moronic lack of response?
- alisonatwork 7y ago
  I am not holding out much hope for the people responsible for this to face consequences for their mismanagement. Here in China Xi Jinping has already been recast as the man who led the country to victory in the "people's war", mere weeks after widespread condemnation of his administration's disastrous failure to respond. Once the media switches their focus from outrage at the politicians to feel-good stories of community solidarity, people will forget how angry they were. The political elite will weather the storm, even as thousands die on their watch.

joe_the_user 7y ago

What the letter means is that if your country is not there yet, you might be DAYS away from widespread panic and total lock down. I gotta say this but I don't think we should put forward the position that total lockdown is an irrational position. Total lockdown seems fully rational, not a product of mere panic at all. Total lockdown worked in Wuhan. Absolute and complete isolation inherently results in exponential decline in the fashion that exposure result in exponential growh. It's a drag but it doesn't seem as much of a drag as millions of dead people. And that is the bizarre thing I'm saying and hearing in the US - "Uh, just let it infect everyone" - "you know that promises to the largest loss of life on US soil ever" - "well, try to slow it down a bit". Jeesh.

Dylan16807 7y ago
> "you know that promises to the largest loss of life on US soil ever" From what I'm aware, if hospitals are able to handle the patients, it shouldn't be up to that level. And the "slow it down" plan is primarily about not overwhelming hospitals.
- joe_the_user 7y ago
  You understand wrong and these common arguments can be easily seen to have incorrect arithmetic. There are no countries with mass infections where the fatality rate is plausibly below 1%. Of course, when the health system is overwhelmed, the fatality rate can be 4-5%. But let's just look at a 1% fatality rate to start with. The US population is 327,000,000. Seventy percent of that is 228,900,000. One percent of that 2,289,000; A little more than two million people if we assume 70% infection and an orderly health care system. But that horrible figure isn't plausible. Because there's more. Claims you can avoid the overwhelming of the health care system are clearly false. Dividing, assuming, unrealistically that the event could be divided evenly through a year, that means that, that many people dying in a year (365) involves 6271 people dying per day and ten times that many people, ~62,000 people, arriving very sick at hospitals, per day throughout the year. And that is far, far more than could be handled by the US health care system. Moreover, spreading the deaths evenly is inherently unrealistic, the situation of "flattening the curve" (a good thing in itself), can't stop exponential growth as such. If you decrease the doubling time of a exponential curve, you still have a situation where most of the area, most of the deaths in this case, is in the last double. So the even supposedly flattened curve won't let things go smoothly IF we assume "everyone will get this". And that promises not just 2 million but 10 millions (at the 5% death rate). If assume the US current has 10,000 infections, we approximately 12 "doublings" away from 228,900,000 infections (70% of the population). If we slow the progression to year, half the infection will still happen in the last month, with 10% of those "serious", that 763,000 needing attention per day. We're now talking corpses in the streets levels of horror. And we'd have further deaths from this breakdown situation. And back to the lockdown scenario. My answer is that Lockdowns are absolutely necessary and thankfully it seems likely in most situations they are coming. The figures above should show that alternative is effectively going to be complete breakdown of the health care system and effectively society.

eyegor 7y ago

Despite governments mostly making slow policy decisions, it's amazing how fast news spreads about this. Tons of planes bound for Spain were turned around mid-flight today after a message sent out to air traffic controllers. Absolutely nuts. https://www.euronews.com/2020/03/14/coronavirus-spain-bound-planes-turn-around-mid-air-as-covid-19-cases-soar https://www.euronews.com/2020/03/14/coronavirus-spain-bound-...

newtoday 7y ago

Thank you. Same here in the US. If you are in the US and still shrugging this off, please head all the warnings. The time to act was two weeks ago, and we won't make up that lost opportunity of effort for prevention and precaution.

MaximumYComb 7y ago

Thank you for sharing. Your comment has highlighted the importance of making sure my household is prepared