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This article is very bizarre to me. There is no way to completely avoid the coronavirus whilst interacting with other humans unless it's simply not prevalent i

This article is very bizarre to me. There is no way to completely avoid the coronavirus whilst interacting with other humans unless it's simply not prevalent in your area (e.g. Australia, NZ). Pretty much everyone has failed. Football teams, film studios, politicians, the lot. It's like trying to catch the wind. The way to eliminate it, if you want to, is to accept that it will infiltrate your group, slowly quarantine it out until there's none left, and then allow no-one into or out of the group. I don't understand how an intelligent person couldn't simply derive this from first principles, it's been eleven months or so now. Do they exist in a different world to the rest of us or what? Most people I know, unless they're barricaded inside, have pretty much accepted that they're going to get it, the last study I read indicated that 1 in 4 individuals in the UK have already been infected.

xvedejas 6y ago
I think you can avoid the virus without barricading yourself inside, if you understand its mechanisms correctly. There's a big difference in behavior between someone who mistakenly thinks the virus is primarily spread by surfaces, and someone else who realizes that dry, poorly ventilated enclosures are what to avoid based on the degree to which those places are dry and poorly ventilated/enclosed. Nobody is going to be 100% safe without choosing unreasonably cautious isolation. But there's a world of difference between being 10% safe and being 98% safe. I live in a group house and through shared risk concerns and a good understanding of the virus's mechanisms, I'm confident in saying we're successfully being 98% safe. (I think the larger group (30 people) in the article really makes this somewhat intractable though. They were closer to the 10% safe.)
- esotericn 6y ago
  Sure. You can wear a helmet, and you can cycle safely, but given enough years, you'll eventually end up falling off. That doesn't make helmets or cycling proficiency pointless, but it does mean not making wild claims that you're "immune" to accidents.
  - hatch_q 6y ago
    And if you add training wheels you'll be even less likely to fall off the bike. So why not make training wheels mandatory? Or maybe knee pads? Protective vests? Or just make cycling illegal. Just outright ban it, so people can't get hurt and can't hurt others. Where do you make this arbitrary line?
    - esotericn 6y ago
      I personally cycle inside a hamster wheel with no air holes. Avoids germs, you see.
  - baxtr 6y ago
    I think you need to define a safety margin first in order to have a serious discussion. If we consider a safety margin of 100% (no chance to get infected) then you're right, complete protective gear is all we have. If you allow let's say a margin of 98%, meeting people outdoors an keeping a distance will be ok. And so on.
otabdeveloper4 6y ago
> The way to eliminate it... Why? Let's just get this over with already. All these "cures" are turning out to be worse than the disease.
- esotericn 6y ago
  Well, you missed off my next bit. "if you want to". I personally couldn't give a toss; in the UK we're eleven months in to the sunk cost fallacy. But that's outside of the scope of this article.
- deleted 6y ago
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- deleted 6y ago
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- EdwardDiego 6y ago
  So, lockdowns are worse than nearly half a million people dying in the US alone? Interesting viewpoint, care to expand?
  - otabdeveloper4 6y ago
    Lockdowns didn't do squat to prevent those deaths. Maybe slowed down the timeline by two months, if that. There's no way you're going to put this genie back into the bottle, Covid is already endemic. What should have been done instead is to figure out what factors cause Covid complications, because for the vast majority of people Covid is harmless. One year in and we still haven't even started... (We spent so much time and effort on vaccines instead, even though there are several strains of Covid in the wild and people routinely get it twice...)
    - framecowbird 6y ago
      Of course. Slowing down the timeline was exactly the goal. There’s a massive difference between Covid cases coming all at once and the same number of cases being spread over two months, especially given everything you can learn in those two months.
kurthr 6y ago
Well, yeah as he says, if they had worn masks and/or socially distanced like normal people the incidence would have likely been much lower (in fact he says it was completely effective in the production staff). Wearing eye protection (even standard corrective eyeglasses) removes a significant secondary exposure mechanism. Certainly, there are hospital settings where doctors and nurses are around many highly infectious patients with regular high risk asperating events who do not become infected for many weeks or months. So it's not at all impossible it just takes effort and diligence. They are just viruses after all. I'd also say that they selected for who were less risk averse since those were the ones who showed up. And most of them flew and traversed public transport so really not that surprising they found what was likely a single superspreader.
alanfranz 6y ago
> Pretty much everyone has failed. Football teams, film studios, politicians, the lot. It's like trying to catch the wind. It did work for the NBA finals AFAIK. And it worked for the 2020 MotoGP season, even though it wasn't a "persistent" bubble and people were allowed to leave the venue between events. But I don't understand one thing from the article: were all the people locked into the venue? Or would they go out eating? If they were locked in, what about the staff which served meals and such? Was it actually a bubble?
YZF 6y ago
Why isn't it prevalent in Australia and NZ? Because it is possible to avoid the coronavirus whilst interacting with other people. It's not like they put every single person in the country in complete isolation for months. Even the newly sick people coming in "interact" with other people. I'm not barricaded anywhere like most other people where I live (BC, Canada) and about 1% of the population has had the virus. And this number is high (yes, high) because people feel like cramming hundreds of people in a small place and partying during a pandemic (or in this case 100 people together) is the right thing to do and in general people not willing to be put to the slightest inconvenience like reducing their social circle, doing stuff outdoors instead of indoors, wearing a mask, staying home when sick etc. Where did you get the 1 in 4 for the UK number from? No way it's so high and the UK is the second worst in the world in cases per capita. Vietnam? Taiwan? China? Japan? Finland? Norway? Greece? <rant> The problem is that in order to get each person on average to infect less than one person everyone has to do their bit. If 95% of the population is infecting 0.98 people at average but the remaining 5% are each infecting 20 people it's not going to work. Those 5% push the total reservoir for the virus up (more mutations, fun) and they keep increasing the odds of getting sick for each of the individuals in the 95%. And I'm being generous when I say 95% actually do their part. If there's a single sick person in BC and they transmit to 0.98 people then my odds of getting sick are essentially zero, but if there are 6000 that transmit to 1.02 people each that's a different story. </rant>
- esotericn 6y ago
  7% of the UK population has been tested positive via PCR so far via the official dashboard. Models indicate around 25% infected in the country, 37% in London. The rest of your post, well, I'm glad that you find it easy and have lots of compassion for people who don't find social isolation as trivial as you do.
  - YZF 6y ago
    Models ain't the truth. The point is you don't have to be isolated, you just need to infect less than one other person if you're sick. You can hang out with your friends on the lawn, sitting a little further apart, you can be closer with a smaller number of people, you can go for walks outdoors, you can take out at the restaurant instead of eating in. You might choose to buy something online instead of going to the store. Some of the people who are flaunting the rules aren't doing that because this is unworkable, they're doing it because they don't give a damn (well, some of them). I do realize some people are put in situations where they have no options (e.g. poor and works in a meet packing factory, that's not what I'm talking about here though that has solutions too).

xvedejas 6y ago

I think you can avoid the virus without barricading yourself inside, if you understand its mechanisms correctly. There's a big difference in behavior between someone who mistakenly thinks the virus is primarily spread by surfaces, and someone else who realizes that dry, poorly ventilated enclosures are what to avoid based on the degree to which those places are dry and poorly ventilated/enclosed. Nobody is going to be 100% safe without choosing unreasonably cautious isolation. But there's a world of difference between being 10% safe and being 98% safe. I live in a group house and through shared risk concerns and a good understanding of the virus's mechanisms, I'm confident in saying we're successfully being 98% safe. (I think the larger group (30 people) in the article really makes this somewhat intractable though. They were closer to the 10% safe.)

esotericn 6y ago
Sure. You can wear a helmet, and you can cycle safely, but given enough years, you'll eventually end up falling off. That doesn't make helmets or cycling proficiency pointless, but it does mean not making wild claims that you're "immune" to accidents.
- hatch_q 6y ago
  And if you add training wheels you'll be even less likely to fall off the bike. So why not make training wheels mandatory? Or maybe knee pads? Protective vests? Or just make cycling illegal. Just outright ban it, so people can't get hurt and can't hurt others. Where do you make this arbitrary line?
  - esotericn 6y ago
    I personally cycle inside a hamster wheel with no air holes. Avoids germs, you see.
- baxtr 6y ago
  I think you need to define a safety margin first in order to have a serious discussion. If we consider a safety margin of 100% (no chance to get infected) then you're right, complete protective gear is all we have. If you allow let's say a margin of 98%, meeting people outdoors an keeping a distance will be ok. And so on.

otabdeveloper4 6y ago

> The way to eliminate it... Why? Let's just get this over with already. All these "cures" are turning out to be worse than the disease.

esotericn 6y ago
Well, you missed off my next bit. "if you want to". I personally couldn't give a toss; in the UK we're eleven months in to the sunk cost fallacy. But that's outside of the scope of this article.
deleted 6y ago
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deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
EdwardDiego 6y ago
So, lockdowns are worse than nearly half a million people dying in the US alone? Interesting viewpoint, care to expand?
- otabdeveloper4 6y ago
  Lockdowns didn't do squat to prevent those deaths. Maybe slowed down the timeline by two months, if that. There's no way you're going to put this genie back into the bottle, Covid is already endemic. What should have been done instead is to figure out what factors cause Covid complications, because for the vast majority of people Covid is harmless. One year in and we still haven't even started... (We spent so much time and effort on vaccines instead, even though there are several strains of Covid in the wild and people routinely get it twice...)
  - framecowbird 6y ago
    Of course. Slowing down the timeline was exactly the goal. There’s a massive difference between Covid cases coming all at once and the same number of cases being spread over two months, especially given everything you can learn in those two months.

kurthr 6y ago

Well, yeah as he says, if they had worn masks and/or socially distanced like normal people the incidence would have likely been much lower (in fact he says it was completely effective in the production staff). Wearing eye protection (even standard corrective eyeglasses) removes a significant secondary exposure mechanism. Certainly, there are hospital settings where doctors and nurses are around many highly infectious patients with regular high risk asperating events who do not become infected for many weeks or months. So it's not at all impossible it just takes effort and diligence. They are just viruses after all. I'd also say that they selected for who were less risk averse since those were the ones who showed up. And most of them flew and traversed public transport so really not that surprising they found what was likely a single superspreader.

alanfranz 6y ago

> Pretty much everyone has failed. Football teams, film studios, politicians, the lot. It's like trying to catch the wind. It did work for the NBA finals AFAIK. And it worked for the 2020 MotoGP season, even though it wasn't a "persistent" bubble and people were allowed to leave the venue between events. But I don't understand one thing from the article: were all the people locked into the venue? Or would they go out eating? If they were locked in, what about the staff which served meals and such? Was it actually a bubble?

YZF 6y ago

Why isn't it prevalent in Australia and NZ? Because it is possible to avoid the coronavirus whilst interacting with other people. It's not like they put every single person in the country in complete isolation for months. Even the newly sick people coming in "interact" with other people. I'm not barricaded anywhere like most other people where I live (BC, Canada) and about 1% of the population has had the virus. And this number is high (yes, high) because people feel like cramming hundreds of people in a small place and partying during a pandemic (or in this case 100 people together) is the right thing to do and in general people not willing to be put to the slightest inconvenience like reducing their social circle, doing stuff outdoors instead of indoors, wearing a mask, staying home when sick etc. Where did you get the 1 in 4 for the UK number from? No way it's so high and the UK is the second worst in the world in cases per capita. Vietnam? Taiwan? China? Japan? Finland? Norway? Greece? <rant> The problem is that in order to get each person on average to infect less than one person everyone has to do their bit. If 95% of the population is infecting 0.98 people at average but the remaining 5% are each infecting 20 people it's not going to work. Those 5% push the total reservoir for the virus up (more mutations, fun) and they keep increasing the odds of getting sick for each of the individuals in the 95%. And I'm being generous when I say 95% actually do their part. If there's a single sick person in BC and they transmit to 0.98 people then my odds of getting sick are essentially zero, but if there are 6000 that transmit to 1.02 people each that's a different story. </rant>

esotericn 6y ago
7% of the UK population has been tested positive via PCR so far via the official dashboard. Models indicate around 25% infected in the country, 37% in London. The rest of your post, well, I'm glad that you find it easy and have lots of compassion for people who don't find social isolation as trivial as you do.
- YZF 6y ago
  Models ain't the truth. The point is you don't have to be isolated, you just need to infect less than one other person if you're sick. You can hang out with your friends on the lawn, sitting a little further apart, you can be closer with a smaller number of people, you can go for walks outdoors, you can take out at the restaurant instead of eating in. You might choose to buy something online instead of going to the store. Some of the people who are flaunting the rules aren't doing that because this is unworkable, they're doing it because they don't give a damn (well, some of them). I do realize some people are put in situations where they have no options (e.g. poor and works in a meet packing factory, that's not what I'm talking about here though that has solutions too).