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After 21 days, what happens? Do we lift the quarantine? Relax it a bit? Stay in quarantine indefinitely? What does the model look like for that? Without a ful
by crispyporkbites 7y ago
After 21 days, what happens?
Do we lift the quarantine? Relax it a bit? Stay in quarantine indefinitely?
What does the model look like for that? Without a full picture the initial strategy could make things worse in the long run.
- myko 7y agoAfter the first wave self quarantining should be able to start ramping down It just depends on the number of cases in your local area
- crispyporkbites 7y agoThis is calling for a full shutdown, not self quarantine. We’re talking checkpoints, military presence to ensure compliance, protected supply chains and rationing. The model has to account for a long term strategy (6-12 months) to keep the mortality rate down and the global economy operating, or we open ourselves to even greater risks.
- kmonsen 7y agoLets be clear, the economy will not survive anything like that for even one month. We are desperately hoping that after 2-3 weeks herd immunity, better medicine and first wave passing we can reopen.
- mcnamaratw 7y agoHerd immunity is what Italy is doing. I guess their economy is more severely impacted than South Korea's. I don't know.
- kmonsen 7y agoI agree we need to follow South Korea. I said this is what we are hoping for, not meaning it is in any way a smart thing to do. I don’t think the economy can survive 1-2 months in full lockdown. There are just too many vulnerable living paycheck to paycheck, and the financial system artificially boosted already and is ready to come crashing down. I think it is impossible to speculate what will happen after that, but it looks like the big money wants this thing to go down from what is happening in the UK and in the US senate. Could be in for scary times in the west.
- KaoruAoiShiho 7y agoWe can have a mandatory regulatory lockdown without draconian enforcement. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
- LifeLiverTransp 7y agoWe Pulse-Wide-Modulate a case rate that is just soo below what the strained public health system can take, prioritize the most important economic systems slowly back to life and hope that the vaccazines come just in time to end this nightmare. After that reforms. Lots of them.
- nullc 7y agoFortunately, as time goes on we'll improve our ICU capacity and it's likely that some anti-viral treatments will turn out to be effective, which should diminish the ICU load. We could within half a year-- given massive impact from deaths and shutdowns encouraging bypassing some amount of protocol-- have clonal antibody treatments that prevent hospitalization in a large portion of infections.
- ohazi 7y ago> as time goes on we'll improve our ICU capacity This seems unlikely. On what timescale do you think this will happen?
- dillonmckay 7y agoPrioritize ‘the most important economic systems’ is very subjective, unfortunately. Who decides the ‘winners’, as grotesque as that sounds?
- gpderetta 7y agoI don't know, maybe the bits that keep the population fed and the lights on. That seems a start.
- dillonmckay 7y agoOk, so restaurant supply companies, like Sysco, or the Krogers, Publix, etc.? Linemen for powerline infrastructure, HVAC and telecom techs to maintain the cell towers? Truck drivers to deliver chemicals needed for both water and waste-water treatment? Also, transporting the sludge afterwards? Garbage pickup? Doctors,nurses, police, firefighters, 911 dispatchers? What am I not thinking of?
- iso947 7y agoChina may be able to do regular lockdowns. I can’t see that happening in the west. Lockdown needs to be a one time shot at the right time, but getting the right time is painfully hard when there is no way to know how many have the virus but not yet testing positive or showing symptoms.
- gman83 7y agoI keep hearing this, but why though? If cases start rising again after the end of a quarantine, I'm sure that there will be support in the community to go back in quarantine if it will save lives.
- barry-cotter 7y agoDidn’t work that way in the 1918 flu pandemic. No city kept the public health interventions going long enough to avoid a second peak in deaths after they stopped them.
- zozbot234 7y agoGood point, and that's why you can't simply lift every restriction overnight. But the 1918 flu pandemic was literally over 100 years ago, I'd like to think we have learned something in the meantime about how to control disease outbreaks.
- rabidrat 7y agoWe did learn things and it caused us to develop a national health care infrastructure. Things have started to decay on that front over the last couple decades though, at least in places like the US which haven't had a SARS outbreak. It's almost like we have to relearn lessons every 4 generations or so, as the older generation dies off and we forget their experiences. Strauss-Howe Generational Theory, here might be our Crisis...
- anoncareer0212 7y agoNot sure there will be - I've been scared of this since the New Year, and even I'm all too aware that I'm trading off _having a life_ so people over 70 with pre-existing conditions don't have a couple of years shaved off. Right now, like literally starting this weekend, it turned hip to say you're staying home. We'll see how that looks in 6 weeks, when there's no end in sight and mass layoffs Please, for the love of God, give me the benefit of the doubt on this comment folks. I'm not saying it's right, only that I doubt this sedate state will persist, given the effects of said state.
- zozbot234 7y ago> Relax it a bit? Looks like it will work like that. This may lead to some undetected transmission, but hopefully the amount of more serious cases should be low enough that the healthcare system will be able to cope. More severe measures can be restored quickly in areas where community transmission is detected.
- vvillena 7y agoThe lockdown must be kept until the health system can cope with everyone's health problems. Then, you slowly lift it to ensure it doesn't saturate again, as that would mean a need for another full lockdown.
- normalnorm 7y agoHow do you "slowly lift it"?
- nullc 7y agoBy lifting the most adversely impacting parts, and monitoring infection on a wide-spread basis while maintaining measures that lower the how contagious it is without negative effects.
- jpster 7y ago> monitoring infection on a wide-spread basis Temperature checks in every commercial, retail and residential building and mode of public transportation? > maintaining measures that lower how contagious it is Masks for all? Expecting 20 sec handwashing vigilance to stay indefinitely? Restaurant tables and desks at work kept meters apart? I’m wondering what the new normal looks like and how well it will be implemented in western countries.
- RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 7y ago> Expecting 20 sec handwashing vigilance to stay indefinitely? This is not the same as the other two. People should wash their hands properly regardless. You shouldn't only call a cab after going out drinking, only because you know there'll be a checkpoint that night, right?
- jpster 7y agoThat may be true, but humans tend to get lax once the immediate crisis is over.
- astockwell 7y agoIt is a bit like comparing interest rates on your credit card balances while still spending more than you earn: we may not get much choice about what is done in 21 days, but we have to stop the bleeding now either way.
- KaoruAoiShiho 7y agoRelax and eventually lift yeah, because you would've "starved" the virus out by not giving them new non-immune hosts to jump to.
- cm2187 7y agoThat's the bit I don't understand. The virus jumped from a handful of infected people on a market in china to hundreds of thousands all around the world in a few weeks. Unless we eliminated 100.0000% of the virus, how will it not pop up again as soon as we lift the curfew?
- brokensegue 7y agoat some point enough people have had it that we can get some herd immunity kicking in
- cm2187 7y agoYes, but I don’t think this is what quarantine achieves.
- brokensegue 7y agoquarantine slows the spread to a level the hospitals can deal with
- hk__2 7y agoRight now we don’t know if immunity lasts long enough for herd immunity to work.
- KaoruAoiShiho 7y agoHerd immunity = aka giving up and killing millions globally. Fuck that shit and arrest everyone who suggests it on crimes against humanity.
- brokensegue 7y ago
- kmm 7y agoThat's what I'm asking myself too. It's way too early for any kind of herd immunity, and you only need a handful of people who have broken the rules (or simply due to delayed intrafamilial infection) to have a few infectious people back out in the wild, and we're back to square zero. Is the plan for a lockdown to completely eliminate the disease? Are we hoping the heat of the summer will stop it? Or does flatten the curve really mean that eventually 60-70% of the population will get infected. If so, we're in for a rough 2020.
- thaumaturgy 7y agoThe numbers I've seen so far are assuming 40% to 70% total infections over the next several months. The current efforts are just trying to take some energy out of the first wave of hospitalizations, to buy time for more supplies and staffing and to get the current infected out of health care as new cases come in. After a few weeks, it may turn out that hospital capacity and more widespread testing allows some restrictions to be lifted. Or, it may turn out that the situation in the US is far more severe than expected, and the restrictions will only worsen by then. I'm hoping for the former but betting on the latter.
- admax88q 7y agoFlatten the curve _does_ mean that 60-70% of the population will get it. But it also means that the peak will be lower do that hospitals are less overwhelmed. It also pushes more infections later in time, so that we have more time to develop and deploy a vaccine.
- thombat 7y agoNot back to square zero - you have the core of a new outbreak amidst wide-spread monitoring for it and a population that is generally practicing better infection control. So perhaps a few dozen are infected before the flames are doused again.
- atoav 7y agoThe difference between a slow and a fast outbrake is that the fast outbreak overwhelms the health system which has all sort of negative side effects, aside from more deads. I know humans usually have a hard time grasping exponential growth, but you need to grasp it to understand what is going on. Exponential growth means that on one day you say: "This is fine" and only two days later you have to introduce the triage and send people home to die, because there is no capacity for them. And even if you had enough beds — will you have enough healthy professionals to staff them? If they have kids will they be able to come? Who watches for them? Grandparents who have a ≥20% of dying once they got infected? The idea of quarantine is a numbers game: slow down the spread enough so the health system (and amthe rest of civilisation) can cope better If you have no vaccine the only way to deal with this is reducing the chances for the virus to transmit. And you do that by not having people cough in each other faces, touch everything, breath everything in etc. or even more effective: don't have them interact at all. If we all would manage to perfectly isolate for two weeks the thing would be gone after that two weeks. So until we will develope a cure at some point this is the only thing we can do.
- theseadroid 7y agosorry for spamming my own reply, but here's what 21 days after in China looks like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22587840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22587840