13 ms·

Coronavirus: Germany infection rate rises as lockdown eases

overcast 6y ago
I'm in continued amazement that people act like we've beaten this things, when infection rates are shown leveling off. All that shows is that NOT opening, and staying quarantined are effective.
- CubsFan1060 6y ago
  And I'm in continued amazement that people don't seem to understand that "beating it" was never the goal. It was to flatten the curve, not eliminate it. Empty hospitals likely mean we went too far. Staying quarantined until a vaccine is available is likely not a sustainable plan.
  - SuoDuanDao 6y ago
    They hated CubsFan1060 because he told the truth.
  - umvi 6y ago
    > And I'm in continued amazement that people don't seem to understand that "beating it" was never the goal I've argued with many people who firmly believe it is worth burning the economy to the ground in order to "save lives". Eventually, the argument distills down to: "Do you care more about corporate profits and bankers and billionaires OR peoples' lives?"
    - maxerickson 6y ago
      It doesn't even boil down to that. Plenty (essentially all) of credible economists attribute much of the economic harm to the disease epidemic, and not just to the government response. People have to feel like eating at a restaurant is safe for being open to matter.
      - CubsFan1060 6y ago
        I think that's very true. That being said, the government response and the media has certainly ratcheted up the fear.
        umvi 6y ago
        > That being said, the government response and the media has certainly ratcheted up the fear. This is not brought up enough. There's a family of immigrants in my neighborhood from Sierra Leone, and the mom is so terrified of covid-19 that she won't let her kids go out and play, or even go to the local elementary school for free meals (they are on government assistance). We've delivered them food because of this fear. I've tried to explain that kids are at low risk and that it's probably worse to keep them locked inside for months vs. letting them play out side, but alas, the fear is too strong...
        paulgb 6y ago
        Depends which government and which media. People who were going to spring break in Florida in March apparently weren't scared enough, and messages from the government and Fox News that this would be over by Easter didn't help that.
    - pinkfoot 6y ago
      Value of a Statistical Life "VISCUSI: If you multiply the 1 million lives saved [Trump], and if the lives are worth $10 million each [OHSA], the result is $10 trillion. … Ten trillion dollars is half of the U.S. GDP, which means that in order to justify completely opening businesses back up, the economy would need to lose half of its value." [1] https://www.npr.org/transcripts/835571843 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/835571843
      - marcinzm 6y ago
        To be pedantic, Covid is far more fatal to the elderly whose statistical "worth" is significantly less.
        pinkfoot 6y ago
        Er no, as TFA mentions, when the USG they tried that American protested with signs saying "Granny for sale". Sufficiently that the USG dropped the 'pensioner discount'. You'd have to argue why its suddenly OK now. You can also argue to discount children - where I live, we make them by the dozen. It is less applicable to COVID-19 through. But VSL the correct framework because its based on the premium the average American at large puts on jobs to compensate for the risk of injury or death. What could be more democratic? But $10T is such a large envelope that even if you added the granny discount, you would still come out at an enormous fraction of USA and hence world GDP.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - pacala 6y ago
        The 'economy' is not some abstract entity. It is us, the people, going about our business every day. A hard lockdown is destroying all of the economy. No accounting tricks can mask that. We should not play accounting tricks to begin with. If we want to stoop at the article's level, note that the numbers are flawed, as they don't account for age distribution of the risk. https://twitter.com/AndyBiotech/status/1241741127205572609/photo/1 https://twitter.com/AndyBiotech/status/1241741127205572609/p...
    - Gwypaas 6y ago
      What makes that question even harder is when you take into account the huge body of people back in January which were right at the margin of famine. When supply chains stop how will the lowest of the lowest on the ladder cope? "About 265 million people around the world are forecast to be facing acute food insecurity by the end of this year, a doubling of the 130 million estimated to suffer severe food shortages last year." [0] Excess death because overrun hospitals should never happen, but the global perspective is horrifying and will never give any easy answers. [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/21/global-hunger-could-be-next-big-impact-of-coronavirus-pandemic https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/21/global-hunger-...
    - Johanx64 6y ago
      No, the argument doesn't distill down to "corporate profits and bankers". It goes down to - do you want to save lives of wealthy - usually old middle class people in 1st world countries who can "afford to quarantine" or do you want to save more lives of people who are going to starve, become homeless or die due to massive economic disruption this extended quarantine is going to bring upon. It's only middle class pencil pushers who can quarantine at will semi-indefinitely and work from home who think extended general quarantine is even a viable option in the first place.
  - arcticfox 6y ago
    There is, and was, a lot of confusion about what the goals were, although they all aligned in immediate massive action. 'Crushing' the curve and getting back to contact tracing levels is one. 'Flattening' and avoiding Lombardy is another. I was hoping we would have used the time to have massive testing programs by now in the US, to follow Korea's example, but that hasn't happened at all. Paul Romer's plan is my favorite but the country has seen little progress since he proposed it https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/paul-romer-on-how-to-survive-the-chaos-of-the-coronavirus https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/paul-romer-on-how-to-...
    - maxerickson 6y ago
      The US has more testing capacity than South Korea relative to total population (so we've ramped up significantly), the problem is that our numbers of infected are too high to use that capacity for suppression.
  - djsumdog 6y ago
    Exactly! I am amazed at how many people have said, "Well we'll have a vaccine in 18 months." This is absolutely irresponsible of the big-pharma industry to push. Safe vaccines take years or decades to develop, and some of the techniques they're clinically trialing now have never created vaccines that made it through the approval process before. Could one of these magically work? Maybe, but it's still highly unlikely everything in these trials will go perfectly. Places like NZ are looking at total eradication, but the rest of the world will most like just have this spread through our populations before any effective treatment of vaccine is produced. Countries like NZ .. might not ever be able to open their boards again. If the antibodies don't last long, yes we could see reoccurances for the rest of our lives. It's in our environment. It took 20 years of very big vaccination efforts to eradicate smallpox. Sure we have better technology now, but to think we can eliminate this in less than a year is hubris. I wrote this post last week, about how we might just be in denial that our life expectancy might now be lower, and how we might need to just come to terms with that: https://battlepenguin.com/politics/this-is-not-a-time-of-honor/ https://battlepenguin.com/politics/this-is-not-a-time-of-hon...
  - corty 6y ago
    The plan is to almost beat it, get the new infections down to almost zero by strict lockdowns. Then commence contact tracing and quarantine for each new infection and all first, second and maybe third order contacts while general restrictions are eased. This continues until a vaccine or cure is found. If you want to know more, google Hammer and Dance. Flattening the curve just below hospital capacity is shown to be dangerous because you cannot control the infection rate with sufficient precision, causing slipups and second, third, fourth waves necessitating repeated longer lockdowns. All in all this damages the economy more because of the panic it periodically creates, repeated longer lockdowns (albeit maybe not as strict) and the uncertainty. There is always another lockdown looming just a few bad numbers ahead. Flattening the curve is sooo March 2020 ;)
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      Respectfully, that's the plan that you may have wanted, but it's not the plan that most governments have actually implemented. "Almost zero" is not generally considered feasible.
      - corty 6y ago
        That is unfortunately accurate.
  - IAmEveryone 6y ago
    Your perspective, i. e. "flatten the curve", is outdated. It's entirely obvious now that R can be pushed below 1.0. The data from Germany, for example, implies their (medium) level of lockdown came out to about 0.5. China, with harsher measures, did even better. Germany is now trying to feel its way to a best possible compromise of somewhat lesser/better targeted restrictions that still keep R<1.0 and, thus, the virus on track for elimination.
  - pvaldes 6y ago
    We know much more about the virus than before. Even without a vaccine, gaining as many time as possible until we catch it, can make a huge difference.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
  Infection rates in Germany have fallen from about 6,500/day at the peak to about 1,000/day now. The vast majority of the early countries in Europe and Asia has seen drastic successes. See, for example, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/coronavirus-maps.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage#cases https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/coronavirus-m... (scroll up slightly or search for "decreasing"). Among the richer countries, it's just the UK, US, and Sweden that are "levelling off".
drran 6y ago
Why not to relax restrictions for 2 days, then lockdown for 5 days, then repeat, but test all with symptoms first?
- kyriakos 6y ago
  5 days of lockdown won't be enough to keep for all people infected during the first 2 days to show symptoms - this means they may make it back to the society after the 5 days and spread the virus further.
  - drran 6y ago
    They will spread virus for 2 additional days instead of 7, so R0 will drop massively. Does anybody know an opensource epidemic simulator to test the idea?
- pvaldes 6y ago
  That would grant that the virus is spread to all the family unit, all for a benefit of 8 working days a month. A benefit that probably wouldn't be enough to sustain their families (or pay the additional healthcare bills) in any case.
  - drran 6y ago
    3 work/4 off (13 working days per month) may work too. It better to test idea on simulator. 40-60% of salary is much better than 0 in city on lockdown.
thepangolino 6y ago
How can infection rate already increase if lockdown measures only eased less than a week ago and the incubation time is about a week?
- maxerickson 6y ago
  Incubation time (from exposure to symptoms) can be 2 or 3 days and the median is probably closer to 5 days than 7.
- elliekelly 6y ago
  I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that government “lockdowns” and “reopenings” are lagging instructions for what many people had already been doing. By the time shelter in place orders were signed by governors many of us (who were fortunate enough to be able) had already been socially distancing. I remember seeing a thread on HN of MTA data that showed ridership dropping off significantly in the first and second week of March. At that point De Blasio was still encouraging NYC to go about business as usual. Likewise, by the time governments officially started easing restrictions many people had grown weary of long-term social distancing and the weather started getting nicer so people started venturing out more than they had been.
- skummetmaelk 6y ago
  Average incubation time is 5-6 days so one would expect the results of lifting restrictions last Monday to start showing about now.
- flohofwoe 6y ago
  People are already infectious much earlier (2..3 days I think?). Also people already started to take the restrictions less seriously quite a bit earlier than the official relaxations. And the lockdown was never very strict in Germany in the first place. Some types of businesses had to close, but people could go outside "for no particular reasons", just keep a distance to people not in your own household and if possible don't travel across Germany. And finally, AFAIK the RKI "infection rate computation" is based at least partly on predictive models. PS: The actual lockdown rules differed slightly across the German federal states. I think at least Bavaria had stricter rules then what I described, which makes sense because they've been hit harder.
mrfusion 6y ago
Are hospitals approaching capacity? That’s what we should be watching. This thing can certainly go up and down week by week.
- turbinerneiter 6y ago
  ~38 of intensive care beds are free in Germany right now.
  - s9w 6y ago
    It's orders of magnitude more
    - turbinerneiter 6y ago
      Yes, because I was missing a % sign. 38% Now I look like a fake news idiot :D
  - zvr 6y ago
    current number is: 12581 out of 32260 intensive care beds are free https://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/corona-deutschland-intensiv-betten-monitor-krankenhaus-auslastung/ https://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/corona-deutschland-intensiv...
- ivan_gammel 6y ago
  By now there’s a lot of empty beds and there’s more than sufficient capacity in testing. It totally makes sense to reopen a bit and try to find sustainable mode of quarantine.
  - mrfusion 6y ago
    I’d like to see a focused approach on protecting nursing homes and the elderly. This is no way for the world to live. Please don’t try to normalize this.
    - 6y ago
williesleg 6y ago
More fake news from the fascist elites. Wake up and go outside. Stop reading this shit. Enjoy life and be careful, you'll be ok. Most people already had it and didn't even know.
mrfusion 6y ago
> The reproduction rate has risen to 1.1 - that means that ten people will pass the virus on to 11 more people. To keep the pandemic in check this level should be below one. So Germany is going for total eradication of this virus? What makes them think that’s possible.
- m4rtink 6y ago
  New Zeland ?
  - mrfusion 6y ago
    Of course but that’s an island that has blocked off travel and stated that they don’t want to reopen borders anytime soon. They also have a lower population and density. Is the same thing realistic for an industrialized country in the middle of Europe?
    - m4rtink 6y ago
      We (the Czech Republic) and many neighboring countries did just that - the borders have been closed for everyone since middle of March, with police and army making sure this emergency meassure is observed. Only goods trains and trucks are let through and even they are often checked for compliance (driver has no fewer, etc.). Even cross border workers had to either stop commuting or arrange temporary accomodation on the other side of the border. So it is definitelly possible to "emullate an island" even in the middle of Europe, and it seems to have worked for the countriws that did it - daily case numbers are staying low, death toll is really low, so some of these restrictions are slowly being rolled back, with cross border bis and train lines resumming from 15th of May.
    - bengalister 6y ago
      It is actually 2 main islands only connected via ferry, so it is even easier to isolate people.
  - djsumdog 6y ago
    If the rest of the world doesn't have full eradication and we see this thing spread through our environment, NZ could be in the interesting position of not being able to open their borders to people for a very long time.
moduspol 6y ago
The infection rate is expected to rise as lockdowns are eased. The question is if treatment capacity is overwhelmed.
- oezi 6y ago
  If we are willing to accept 0.5% to 2% fatalities per infection, then we can let infection rates rise. Otherwise we should have tried to keep it in an acceptable very low level. I personally find it astonishing that we are accepting >100 deaths per day.
  - moduspol 6y ago
    You won't believe how many fatalities we accept to drive cars!
    - alexilliamson 6y ago
      Not 100 per day?
      - paulgb 6y ago
        100 per day in the US alone in 2018. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_...
        alexilliamson 6y ago
        The parent was talking about Germany. In the US we're currently at 2-3k coronavirus deaths so still much larger than auto deaths.
        paulgb 6y ago
        Ok, that's fair. I interpreted "we" from moduspol as "we as a society" but I agree that the German numbers are more relevant here. (Incidentally, using traffic death numbers as a baseline for a rate of fatalities we should accept is bad anyway because those numbers are also higher than we should tolerate, IMO.)
mrfusion 6y ago
Notice that there are no articles about the state of Georgia being down several weeks after opening up.
- greedo 6y ago
  Couldn't be because of the incubation period, no? I think that trying to determine how well a state is doing so shortly after re-opening is fraught due to limits on testing etc. If death counts are dropping at the 6 week mark, I think you could claim "success."
  - ls612 6y ago
    Incubation is median 5 days or so and Georgia opened up two weeks ago. I think it’s fair to start looking at the results now.
oezi 6y ago
It is not the eased lockdown that is causing the rise, but the changed behaviors of people. Many states were never really locked down (yes, shops and schools were closed through the country. But companies could continue to work in offices and factories). People are now meeting face to face much more. This is causing the increase.
fabian2k 6y ago
This headline is a bit misleading. The R factor calculation in Germany by the RKI is rather volatile. They explicitly stated in their report that this needs to be monitored carefully, but that it is too early to make strong conclusions from this data yet. There were also 2-3 larger clusters discovered this week. Looking at the nationwide numbers might be not as useful in this case. I'm not saying there is no case for concern here, but right now these are very few data points on a noisy curve, and a similar spike that turned out to be nothing happened a few weeks ago. We really have to wait a few days to actually get some reliable numbers.
- nil-sec 6y ago
  In addition to this, the timing of these announcements in the last two weeks were suspiciously close to lockdown relaxation dates. I would not be surprised if the RKI is using these numbers as a tool to influence behaviour, even though they know that there is a rather large error bar on the R factor. A case in point is that before the lockdown restrictions were lifted the R factor was around 0.9, but the RKI said the uncertainties are so high that we cannot be certain it is even below 1 - and suggested delaying the opening. Also, internally leaked government documents a few weeks ago showed that there is an explicit strategy of the government, to generate fear in the population in order to make people comply.
  - corty 6y ago
    Also, their numbers, cases as well as R factor, show a strong weekly periodicity. Leading to hilarious press conferences on wednesdays where the spread panic because the cases from the weekend have finally been passed through bureaucracy... Only to announce improving case numbers on fridays. Their R calculation uses a 4day sliding window, so the increase is just the usual wednesday I guess.
  - pintxo 6y ago
    Sources please. Or it did not happen: > Also, internally leaked government documents a few weeks ago showed that there is an explicit strategy of the government, to generate fear in the population in order to make people comply.
beager 6y ago
I think a smart approach will be to deploy these “emergency brakes” as TFA mentions, but preferably far before it seems necessary, because of the cryptic transmission and long incubation period. And a lot of comments here talk about restrictions deployed simply to avoid an overwhelm of the healthcare system. While that’s important, the longer we can prevent the disease running through the population, the lower we can make the case severity and fatality rate due to advancements in treatment. A lot of commentary on COVID-19 recently presumed that we can’t control outcomes, only the rate of spread. That may be true at a point in time, but the longer we hold out, the better the outcomes will be on the tail end with advancements in treatment research.
anotheryou 6y ago
And my work wants me back on site in an open office... I calced a bit and saw about a 1% chance of getting infected within a month at the office. Maybe acceptable for a month, not for a year (>10% risk than).
- greedo 6y ago
  Yeah, that's my concern as well. We have the worst of both worlds in my office; cubicles that don't restrict anything, and we're walled in with glass walls (a NOC) that limits airflow. The cubicle pathways prevent us from following social distancing, and there's over 30 of us in the NOC. Good times. Hope I can continue to WFH forever.
roenxi 6y ago
Viruses have little ability to influence their spread; they depend entirely on human behaviours. It is physically possible to all-but eliminate the coronavirus worldwide in ~3 weeks if everyone magically knew when they were spreading the virus. Reproductive numbers are important, but I'm not sure governments have really stepped up to the plate to explain how the virus spreads and what people need to do to stop spreading the thing. "Social Distance", "wash your hands" and sometimes "wear a mask" really lacks lacks explanatory power. Given the vast costs the world has put up with so far to slow the coronavirus down, there is actually room in the conversation to have teams of people travel around and conduct some sort of training session on how not to spread this thing and have people actually act out simulations. There need to be finer grained tools than mass lockdowns and alternatives to tracking everyone with apps. I've seen a lot of basic confusion on HN about whether masks even help. This is pretty clear evidence of uncertainty in the broad community about how to deal with respiratory viruses. I don't believe that is due to a lack of research; engineers have had the practical tools to research droplets in airflows work for more than a century now. Even the fact that "SARS with a risk of asymptotic spread" didn't have world leaders slamming borders closed in Jan/Feb hints at a possible general misunderstanding of how virus spread works. There were other considerations at the time, but in retrospect more general education on the subject would have been well worth the time invested.
- oezi 6y ago
  Absolutely correct. We need better understanding of how the virus spreads, but this is not an engineering problem but an epidemiology question. Record every infection contact and determine highest risk activities so these can be reduced.
  - roenxi 6y ago
    Either or. I suspect the aeronautical engineers would be better people to ask than epidemiologists if it turns out the virus is mainly transported through the air. Turbulence and control thereof would be the most important factors. But these are exactly the sorts of things that shouldn't still be open for discussion after 4 months and global lockdowns. Even among the general public.
jaynetics 6y ago
This is just one data point so far, but with the party atmosphere that I see going on here at day and night, and school openings coming soon, I am pretty convinced personally that this will escalate quickly. I've rarely been more unhappy about the state of our politics. There was a lot of public discussion about easing the lockdown and regions randomly made their own decisions, affecting people's behavior even where no decision had been made yet and forcing Merkels hand in the end, who was much more in favor of playing it safe. We were on course to get the level of containment and traceability that several Asian countries have achieved, if we had only waited a little longer, maybe just a few weeks. To me it seems we might be letting the economy run itself into the ground. I hope I am wrong.
nkkollaw 6y ago
We don't know how many cases are out there. There is just not enough testing. We can only count deaths, but even that is tricky since people that were given 30 days to live are being counted as COVID-19 victims if they were infected. The only way to know what the impact of the virus is/has been, is to compare with deaths from the previous years.
KCUOJJQJ 6y ago
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1100823/coronavirus-cases-development-germany/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1100823/coronavirus-case... Is it possible that the C virus is (almost) over but there is a collective anxiety attack? And if this collective anxiety attack existed, is it possible that people are harmed by it? Apparently A & E departments in Germany have fewer patients with strokes and heart attacks: https://www.sr.de/sr/home/nachrichten/panorama/weniger_menschen_in_notaufnahmen_schlaganfall_herzinfarkt_100.html https://www.sr.de/sr/home/nachrichten/panorama/weniger_mensc... (in German)

I'm in continued amazement that people act like we've beaten this things, when infection rates are shown leveling off. All that shows is that NOT opening, and staying quarantined are effective.

CubsFan1060 6y ago
And I'm in continued amazement that people don't seem to understand that "beating it" was never the goal. It was to flatten the curve, not eliminate it. Empty hospitals likely mean we went too far. Staying quarantined until a vaccine is available is likely not a sustainable plan.
- SuoDuanDao 6y ago
  They hated CubsFan1060 because he told the truth.
- umvi 6y ago
  > And I'm in continued amazement that people don't seem to understand that "beating it" was never the goal I've argued with many people who firmly believe it is worth burning the economy to the ground in order to "save lives". Eventually, the argument distills down to: "Do you care more about corporate profits and bankers and billionaires OR peoples' lives?"
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    It doesn't even boil down to that. Plenty (essentially all) of credible economists attribute much of the economic harm to the disease epidemic, and not just to the government response. People have to feel like eating at a restaurant is safe for being open to matter.
    - CubsFan1060 6y ago
      I think that's very true. That being said, the government response and the media has certainly ratcheted up the fear.
      - umvi 6y ago
        > That being said, the government response and the media has certainly ratcheted up the fear. This is not brought up enough. There's a family of immigrants in my neighborhood from Sierra Leone, and the mom is so terrified of covid-19 that she won't let her kids go out and play, or even go to the local elementary school for free meals (they are on government assistance). We've delivered them food because of this fear. I've tried to explain that kids are at low risk and that it's probably worse to keep them locked inside for months vs. letting them play out side, but alas, the fear is too strong...
      - paulgb 6y ago
        Depends which government and which media. People who were going to spring break in Florida in March apparently weren't scared enough, and messages from the government and Fox News that this would be over by Easter didn't help that.
  - pinkfoot 6y ago
    Value of a Statistical Life "VISCUSI: If you multiply the 1 million lives saved [Trump], and if the lives are worth $10 million each [OHSA], the result is $10 trillion. … Ten trillion dollars is half of the U.S. GDP, which means that in order to justify completely opening businesses back up, the economy would need to lose half of its value." [1] https://www.npr.org/transcripts/835571843 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/835571843
    - marcinzm 6y ago
      To be pedantic, Covid is far more fatal to the elderly whose statistical "worth" is significantly less.
      - pinkfoot 6y ago
        Er no, as TFA mentions, when the USG they tried that American protested with signs saying "Granny for sale". Sufficiently that the USG dropped the 'pensioner discount'. You'd have to argue why its suddenly OK now. You can also argue to discount children - where I live, we make them by the dozen. It is less applicable to COVID-19 through. But VSL the correct framework because its based on the premium the average American at large puts on jobs to compensate for the risk of injury or death. What could be more democratic? But $10T is such a large envelope that even if you added the granny discount, you would still come out at an enormous fraction of USA and hence world GDP.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - pacala 6y ago
      The 'economy' is not some abstract entity. It is us, the people, going about our business every day. A hard lockdown is destroying all of the economy. No accounting tricks can mask that. We should not play accounting tricks to begin with. If we want to stoop at the article's level, note that the numbers are flawed, as they don't account for age distribution of the risk. https://twitter.com/AndyBiotech/status/1241741127205572609/photo/1 https://twitter.com/AndyBiotech/status/1241741127205572609/p...
  - Gwypaas 6y ago
    What makes that question even harder is when you take into account the huge body of people back in January which were right at the margin of famine. When supply chains stop how will the lowest of the lowest on the ladder cope? "About 265 million people around the world are forecast to be facing acute food insecurity by the end of this year, a doubling of the 130 million estimated to suffer severe food shortages last year." [0] Excess death because overrun hospitals should never happen, but the global perspective is horrifying and will never give any easy answers. [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/21/global-hunger-could-be-next-big-impact-of-coronavirus-pandemic https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/21/global-hunger-...
  - Johanx64 6y ago
    No, the argument doesn't distill down to "corporate profits and bankers". It goes down to - do you want to save lives of wealthy - usually old middle class people in 1st world countries who can "afford to quarantine" or do you want to save more lives of people who are going to starve, become homeless or die due to massive economic disruption this extended quarantine is going to bring upon. It's only middle class pencil pushers who can quarantine at will semi-indefinitely and work from home who think extended general quarantine is even a viable option in the first place.
- arcticfox 6y ago
  There is, and was, a lot of confusion about what the goals were, although they all aligned in immediate massive action. 'Crushing' the curve and getting back to contact tracing levels is one. 'Flattening' and avoiding Lombardy is another. I was hoping we would have used the time to have massive testing programs by now in the US, to follow Korea's example, but that hasn't happened at all. Paul Romer's plan is my favorite but the country has seen little progress since he proposed it https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/paul-romer-on-how-to-survive-the-chaos-of-the-coronavirus https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/paul-romer-on-how-to-...
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    The US has more testing capacity than South Korea relative to total population (so we've ramped up significantly), the problem is that our numbers of infected are too high to use that capacity for suppression.
- djsumdog 6y ago
  Exactly! I am amazed at how many people have said, "Well we'll have a vaccine in 18 months." This is absolutely irresponsible of the big-pharma industry to push. Safe vaccines take years or decades to develop, and some of the techniques they're clinically trialing now have never created vaccines that made it through the approval process before. Could one of these magically work? Maybe, but it's still highly unlikely everything in these trials will go perfectly. Places like NZ are looking at total eradication, but the rest of the world will most like just have this spread through our populations before any effective treatment of vaccine is produced. Countries like NZ .. might not ever be able to open their boards again. If the antibodies don't last long, yes we could see reoccurances for the rest of our lives. It's in our environment. It took 20 years of very big vaccination efforts to eradicate smallpox. Sure we have better technology now, but to think we can eliminate this in less than a year is hubris. I wrote this post last week, about how we might just be in denial that our life expectancy might now be lower, and how we might need to just come to terms with that: https://battlepenguin.com/politics/this-is-not-a-time-of-honor/ https://battlepenguin.com/politics/this-is-not-a-time-of-hon...
- corty 6y ago
  The plan is to almost beat it, get the new infections down to almost zero by strict lockdowns. Then commence contact tracing and quarantine for each new infection and all first, second and maybe third order contacts while general restrictions are eased. This continues until a vaccine or cure is found. If you want to know more, google Hammer and Dance. Flattening the curve just below hospital capacity is shown to be dangerous because you cannot control the infection rate with sufficient precision, causing slipups and second, third, fourth waves necessitating repeated longer lockdowns. All in all this damages the economy more because of the panic it periodically creates, repeated longer lockdowns (albeit maybe not as strict) and the uncertainty. There is always another lockdown looming just a few bad numbers ahead. Flattening the curve is sooo March 2020 ;)
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    Respectfully, that's the plan that you may have wanted, but it's not the plan that most governments have actually implemented. "Almost zero" is not generally considered feasible.
    - corty 6y ago
      That is unfortunately accurate.
- IAmEveryone 6y ago
  Your perspective, i. e. "flatten the curve", is outdated. It's entirely obvious now that R can be pushed below 1.0. The data from Germany, for example, implies their (medium) level of lockdown came out to about 0.5. China, with harsher measures, did even better. Germany is now trying to feel its way to a best possible compromise of somewhat lesser/better targeted restrictions that still keep R<1.0 and, thus, the virus on track for elimination.
- pvaldes 6y ago
  We know much more about the virus than before. Even without a vaccine, gaining as many time as possible until we catch it, can make a huge difference.
IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
Infection rates in Germany have fallen from about 6,500/day at the peak to about 1,000/day now. The vast majority of the early countries in Europe and Asia has seen drastic successes. See, for example, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/coronavirus-maps.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage#cases https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/coronavirus-m... (scroll up slightly or search for "decreasing"). Among the richer countries, it's just the UK, US, and Sweden that are "levelling off".

drran 6y ago

Why not to relax restrictions for 2 days, then lockdown for 5 days, then repeat, but test all with symptoms first?

kyriakos 6y ago
5 days of lockdown won't be enough to keep for all people infected during the first 2 days to show symptoms - this means they may make it back to the society after the 5 days and spread the virus further.
- drran 6y ago
  They will spread virus for 2 additional days instead of 7, so R0 will drop massively. Does anybody know an opensource epidemic simulator to test the idea?
pvaldes 6y ago
That would grant that the virus is spread to all the family unit, all for a benefit of 8 working days a month. A benefit that probably wouldn't be enough to sustain their families (or pay the additional healthcare bills) in any case.
- drran 6y ago
  3 work/4 off (13 working days per month) may work too. It better to test idea on simulator. 40-60% of salary is much better than 0 in city on lockdown.

thepangolino 6y ago

How can infection rate already increase if lockdown measures only eased less than a week ago and the incubation time is about a week?

maxerickson 6y ago
Incubation time (from exposure to symptoms) can be 2 or 3 days and the median is probably closer to 5 days than 7.
elliekelly 6y ago
I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that government “lockdowns” and “reopenings” are lagging instructions for what many people had already been doing. By the time shelter in place orders were signed by governors many of us (who were fortunate enough to be able) had already been socially distancing. I remember seeing a thread on HN of MTA data that showed ridership dropping off significantly in the first and second week of March. At that point De Blasio was still encouraging NYC to go about business as usual. Likewise, by the time governments officially started easing restrictions many people had grown weary of long-term social distancing and the weather started getting nicer so people started venturing out more than they had been.
skummetmaelk 6y ago
Average incubation time is 5-6 days so one would expect the results of lifting restrictions last Monday to start showing about now.
flohofwoe 6y ago
People are already infectious much earlier (2..3 days I think?). Also people already started to take the restrictions less seriously quite a bit earlier than the official relaxations. And the lockdown was never very strict in Germany in the first place. Some types of businesses had to close, but people could go outside "for no particular reasons", just keep a distance to people not in your own household and if possible don't travel across Germany. And finally, AFAIK the RKI "infection rate computation" is based at least partly on predictive models. PS: The actual lockdown rules differed slightly across the German federal states. I think at least Bavaria had stricter rules then what I described, which makes sense because they've been hit harder.

mrfusion 6y ago

Are hospitals approaching capacity? That’s what we should be watching. This thing can certainly go up and down week by week.

turbinerneiter 6y ago
~38 of intensive care beds are free in Germany right now.
- s9w 6y ago
  It's orders of magnitude more
  - turbinerneiter 6y ago
    Yes, because I was missing a % sign. 38% Now I look like a fake news idiot :D
- zvr 6y ago
  current number is: 12581 out of 32260 intensive care beds are free https://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/corona-deutschland-intensiv-betten-monitor-krankenhaus-auslastung/ https://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/corona-deutschland-intensiv...
ivan_gammel 6y ago
By now there’s a lot of empty beds and there’s more than sufficient capacity in testing. It totally makes sense to reopen a bit and try to find sustainable mode of quarantine.
- mrfusion 6y ago
  I’d like to see a focused approach on protecting nursing homes and the elderly. This is no way for the world to live. Please don’t try to normalize this.
  - 6y ago

williesleg 6y ago

More fake news from the fascist elites. Wake up and go outside. Stop reading this shit. Enjoy life and be careful, you'll be ok. Most people already had it and didn't even know.

mrfusion 6y ago

> The reproduction rate has risen to 1.1 - that means that ten people will pass the virus on to 11 more people. To keep the pandemic in check this level should be below one. So Germany is going for total eradication of this virus? What makes them think that’s possible.

m4rtink 6y ago
New Zeland ?
- mrfusion 6y ago
  Of course but that’s an island that has blocked off travel and stated that they don’t want to reopen borders anytime soon. They also have a lower population and density. Is the same thing realistic for an industrialized country in the middle of Europe?
  - m4rtink 6y ago
    We (the Czech Republic) and many neighboring countries did just that - the borders have been closed for everyone since middle of March, with police and army making sure this emergency meassure is observed. Only goods trains and trucks are let through and even they are often checked for compliance (driver has no fewer, etc.). Even cross border workers had to either stop commuting or arrange temporary accomodation on the other side of the border. So it is definitelly possible to "emullate an island" even in the middle of Europe, and it seems to have worked for the countriws that did it - daily case numbers are staying low, death toll is really low, so some of these restrictions are slowly being rolled back, with cross border bis and train lines resumming from 15th of May.
  - bengalister 6y ago
    It is actually 2 main islands only connected via ferry, so it is even easier to isolate people.
- djsumdog 6y ago
  If the rest of the world doesn't have full eradication and we see this thing spread through our environment, NZ could be in the interesting position of not being able to open their borders to people for a very long time.

moduspol 6y ago

The infection rate is expected to rise as lockdowns are eased. The question is if treatment capacity is overwhelmed.

oezi 6y ago
If we are willing to accept 0.5% to 2% fatalities per infection, then we can let infection rates rise. Otherwise we should have tried to keep it in an acceptable very low level. I personally find it astonishing that we are accepting >100 deaths per day.
- moduspol 6y ago
  You won't believe how many fatalities we accept to drive cars!
  - alexilliamson 6y ago
    Not 100 per day?
    - paulgb 6y ago
      100 per day in the US alone in 2018. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_...
      - alexilliamson 6y ago
        The parent was talking about Germany. In the US we're currently at 2-3k coronavirus deaths so still much larger than auto deaths.
        paulgb 6y ago
        Ok, that's fair. I interpreted "we" from moduspol as "we as a society" but I agree that the German numbers are more relevant here. (Incidentally, using traffic death numbers as a baseline for a rate of fatalities we should accept is bad anyway because those numbers are also higher than we should tolerate, IMO.)

mrfusion 6y ago

Notice that there are no articles about the state of Georgia being down several weeks after opening up.

greedo 6y ago
Couldn't be because of the incubation period, no? I think that trying to determine how well a state is doing so shortly after re-opening is fraught due to limits on testing etc. If death counts are dropping at the 6 week mark, I think you could claim "success."
- ls612 6y ago
  Incubation is median 5 days or so and Georgia opened up two weeks ago. I think it’s fair to start looking at the results now.

oezi 6y ago

It is not the eased lockdown that is causing the rise, but the changed behaviors of people. Many states were never really locked down (yes, shops and schools were closed through the country. But companies could continue to work in offices and factories). People are now meeting face to face much more. This is causing the increase.

fabian2k 6y ago

This headline is a bit misleading. The R factor calculation in Germany by the RKI is rather volatile. They explicitly stated in their report that this needs to be monitored carefully, but that it is too early to make strong conclusions from this data yet. There were also 2-3 larger clusters discovered this week. Looking at the nationwide numbers might be not as useful in this case. I'm not saying there is no case for concern here, but right now these are very few data points on a noisy curve, and a similar spike that turned out to be nothing happened a few weeks ago. We really have to wait a few days to actually get some reliable numbers.

nil-sec 6y ago
In addition to this, the timing of these announcements in the last two weeks were suspiciously close to lockdown relaxation dates. I would not be surprised if the RKI is using these numbers as a tool to influence behaviour, even though they know that there is a rather large error bar on the R factor. A case in point is that before the lockdown restrictions were lifted the R factor was around 0.9, but the RKI said the uncertainties are so high that we cannot be certain it is even below 1 - and suggested delaying the opening. Also, internally leaked government documents a few weeks ago showed that there is an explicit strategy of the government, to generate fear in the population in order to make people comply.
- corty 6y ago
  Also, their numbers, cases as well as R factor, show a strong weekly periodicity. Leading to hilarious press conferences on wednesdays where the spread panic because the cases from the weekend have finally been passed through bureaucracy... Only to announce improving case numbers on fridays. Their R calculation uses a 4day sliding window, so the increase is just the usual wednesday I guess.
- pintxo 6y ago
  Sources please. Or it did not happen: > Also, internally leaked government documents a few weeks ago showed that there is an explicit strategy of the government, to generate fear in the population in order to make people comply.

beager 6y ago

I think a smart approach will be to deploy these “emergency brakes” as TFA mentions, but preferably far before it seems necessary, because of the cryptic transmission and long incubation period. And a lot of comments here talk about restrictions deployed simply to avoid an overwhelm of the healthcare system. While that’s important, the longer we can prevent the disease running through the population, the lower we can make the case severity and fatality rate due to advancements in treatment. A lot of commentary on COVID-19 recently presumed that we can’t control outcomes, only the rate of spread. That may be true at a point in time, but the longer we hold out, the better the outcomes will be on the tail end with advancements in treatment research.

anotheryou 6y ago

And my work wants me back on site in an open office... I calced a bit and saw about a 1% chance of getting infected within a month at the office. Maybe acceptable for a month, not for a year (>10% risk than).

greedo 6y ago
Yeah, that's my concern as well. We have the worst of both worlds in my office; cubicles that don't restrict anything, and we're walled in with glass walls (a NOC) that limits airflow. The cubicle pathways prevent us from following social distancing, and there's over 30 of us in the NOC. Good times. Hope I can continue to WFH forever.

roenxi 6y ago

Viruses have little ability to influence their spread; they depend entirely on human behaviours. It is physically possible to all-but eliminate the coronavirus worldwide in ~3 weeks if everyone magically knew when they were spreading the virus. Reproductive numbers are important, but I'm not sure governments have really stepped up to the plate to explain how the virus spreads and what people need to do to stop spreading the thing. "Social Distance", "wash your hands" and sometimes "wear a mask" really lacks lacks explanatory power. Given the vast costs the world has put up with so far to slow the coronavirus down, there is actually room in the conversation to have teams of people travel around and conduct some sort of training session on how not to spread this thing and have people actually act out simulations. There need to be finer grained tools than mass lockdowns and alternatives to tracking everyone with apps. I've seen a lot of basic confusion on HN about whether masks even help. This is pretty clear evidence of uncertainty in the broad community about how to deal with respiratory viruses. I don't believe that is due to a lack of research; engineers have had the practical tools to research droplets in airflows work for more than a century now. Even the fact that "SARS with a risk of asymptotic spread" didn't have world leaders slamming borders closed in Jan/Feb hints at a possible general misunderstanding of how virus spread works. There were other considerations at the time, but in retrospect more general education on the subject would have been well worth the time invested.

oezi 6y ago
Absolutely correct. We need better understanding of how the virus spreads, but this is not an engineering problem but an epidemiology question. Record every infection contact and determine highest risk activities so these can be reduced.
- roenxi 6y ago
  Either or. I suspect the aeronautical engineers would be better people to ask than epidemiologists if it turns out the virus is mainly transported through the air. Turbulence and control thereof would be the most important factors. But these are exactly the sorts of things that shouldn't still be open for discussion after 4 months and global lockdowns. Even among the general public.

jaynetics 6y ago

This is just one data point so far, but with the party atmosphere that I see going on here at day and night, and school openings coming soon, I am pretty convinced personally that this will escalate quickly. I've rarely been more unhappy about the state of our politics. There was a lot of public discussion about easing the lockdown and regions randomly made their own decisions, affecting people's behavior even where no decision had been made yet and forcing Merkels hand in the end, who was much more in favor of playing it safe. We were on course to get the level of containment and traceability that several Asian countries have achieved, if we had only waited a little longer, maybe just a few weeks. To me it seems we might be letting the economy run itself into the ground. I hope I am wrong.

nkkollaw 6y ago

We don't know how many cases are out there. There is just not enough testing. We can only count deaths, but even that is tricky since people that were given 30 days to live are being counted as COVID-19 victims if they were infected. The only way to know what the impact of the virus is/has been, is to compare with deaths from the previous years.

KCUOJJQJ 6y ago

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1100823/coronavirus-cases-development-germany/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1100823/coronavirus-case... Is it possible that the C virus is (almost) over but there is a collective anxiety attack? And if this collective anxiety attack existed, is it possible that people are harmed by it? Apparently A & E departments in Germany have fewer patients with strokes and heart attacks: https://www.sr.de/sr/home/nachrichten/panorama/weniger_menschen_in_notaufnahmen_schlaganfall_herzinfarkt_100.html https://www.sr.de/sr/home/nachrichten/panorama/weniger_mensc... (in German)