Share your experience, tips, advice, questions…
As it seems most communities world-wide are going into voluntary or enforced quarantine that involves staying at home and avoiding physical contact as much as possible, I thought we could have a thread where we could try a bit of mutual support by cheering each other up over the next few days, weeks, months… Who knows?
I don’t know: suggestions on films to watch, books to read, gardening tips, exercise ideas
Usual rules apply plus a guideline. Let’s be kind and supportive to each other.
I love the way the Netherlands are portrayed abroad. Sex clubs, coffee shops and happy cycling families. Can you picture it? 😃
Corneel,
Hard to cycle with clogs on and a gobful of tulips, I expect.
In fact, the Dutch have been pretty obedient to their government. Several people complained that we have been rather too docile about handing in our civil rights. Seeing that the virus will linger for months, we will have to see whether we are getting them back any time soon.
It’s not so bad if you are going down the dike.
Well, these things have a substantial positive impact on immune response, respiratory health, mental condition, domestic relations, obesity (hence diabetes) and the cardiovascular system. They make a lockdown more sustainable, and more bearable, for those that wish it, and create a diversion even for those normally disinclined. I don’t think it’s going to be ‘a couple of months’. Until we get vaccine at scale, we will need measures. Worst case scenario: several years. They have to be sustainable.
I’m confused. If the government measures are not compulsory there, how does that constitute a loss of civil rights? Of course that would be a good argument against harsher policies now that you mention it
The schools were closed, and there are bans on large gatherings. This touches on the right to education, freedom of association, and freedom of religion.
Looks like those in charge here tend to agree with you since they’re allowing outdoors exercising starting next Saturday, and kids can go out too with some restrictions already.
So (some) people there want the schools and churches (and presumably sports events and everything else) to reopen despite the risks involved?
Rather, some people worry that we may have trouble regaining those rights after the pandemic, once people get used to the new situation.
As an interesting aside, schools in NL were closed despite the preference of the government to keep them open, as children are known to be at reduced risk of transmitting the virus. Schools were closed anyway because of pressure from the public. Churces, likewise, were initially exempt from the ban on gatherings (we have two christian democrat parties in the government). Still, most religious gatherings proceed by teleconferencing.
The Dutch are harder on themselves than requested by their government. Must be the calvinist legacy 😉.
I thought dike was outdated.
Possibly. English is not my mother tongue.
I initially wrote “dyke” and than hesitated, worrying that “going down the dyke” had a hilariously different meaning.
What about a reliable antibody test – reliable enough and cheap enough to be generally available? Is this pie-in-the-sky? Is there any indication on the possibility of detecting immunity or even whether covid-19 results in antibodies that can both be detected and protect against further infection?
Some development would be welcome!
Corneel,
Sometimes it’s fun to play the innocent straight-man. 😉
PS, how are your windmills?
It’s great news to see that Spain is past the peak. The huddling inside seemed the most draconian of restrictions when sunshine, space and fresh air will counter infection. So long as people maintain distance, use masks appropriately; we’re not stupid. (caveats apply)
There’s a bright side:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/30/clean-air-in-europe-during-lockdown-leads-to-11000-fewer-deaths
Alan Fox,
Lowering property values for miles around. Ruining the world. The usual.
We’ll see, but I wouldn’t fret. To me that’s simply a sign of common sense and responsibility. Once this ordeal is over, all you guys need to do is to go back to your normal lives. You’re not relinquishing any rights i my book, just because you chose not to exercise some of them for a while.
We’re progressively relaxing those restrictions here. The government will monitor the progress and may backpedal if the situation starts to worsen again, but without enough testing, is that even possible? If people start to catch the virus again they won’t have a clue for a couple of weeks during the incubation process unless enough people get tested, and when symptoms start to appear it will be too late and back to square one, right?
Epidemiologically speaking, keeping the spread to less than one new person per spreader will eventually eliminate the virus, but the eventual elimination state is that everyone is either immune or dead. Which would take years.
So in practice, to get off square one we need both a cure and a vaccine, and both must be widely available and free. Otherwise, we are engaging in large scale human sacrifice to the economy, which might not even recover given that many sacrificees.
My main concern is that we might eventually go back to R0=2 or 3 if we don’t make enough tests. Isn’t that the only way to keep track of the number of new infections, without lagging 1 or 2 weeks behind the data? I really hope I’m missing something
Maybe we’re talking past each other. Testing (assuming wide scale accurate testing) will tell us the lengths we need to go, and where they’re needed, in order to cut viral blooms off at the pass. I suppose this might be a useful guide to what can be re-opened where. The main effect of this sort of testing regimen is to find ways to alleviate public pressure to get back to pre-virus habits and patterns. Yes, that’s valuable information.
But as things stand, the only “cure” we have is to try to keep infected people alive long enough for their immune systems to defeat the virus, or die in the process. And that’s frankly a lousy cure. “Flattening the curve” translates as keeping the RATE of serious new cases low enough so as not to run out of PPE and ventilators at hospitals. Testing will help with this, but apparently the virus is capable of hanging around and infecting all those not immune, indefinitely. The X axis for the flattened curve stretches out for years.
It’s also being written on various news sites that we do not yet know if recovered victims can still be infectious, or can become re-infected. So we MUST have a cure and a vaccine, or watch newly infected people join the statistics for a very long time. I hold out little hope for a decent version of either one this year.
An app has been developed here by a couple of universities based on self reporting. They have extended data on symptoms reported by people with positive tests to cover all reports, to provide an estimate of current infection. The app has been downloaded nearly 3m times, and is being pushed by the regional governments. It is throwing up some interesting and useful data on current trends, and will prove an invaluable early warning provided people keep logging. Totals have dropped from 2m to 300,000 over April, and regional hotspots have flattened.
Unfortunately, rather than support this, the English are pushing their own app, related to contact tracing. Phones in proximity exchange and log data, in the hope that it can help to trace back contacts. Our government asked if the data could be de-anonymised, which severely undermines usage. They are generally tainted in the data department – Cambridge Analytica had heavy involvement in the Brexit campaign, and key players in some shady data mining are now unelected government ‘advisers’ with considerable power. Another firm, Palantir, has become involved in this app, and anyone familiar with their Lord of the Rings lore will recognise the sinister undertones of the name in that context.
Flint,
Good summary. Still too many unknowns!
I’d never have guessed.
Allan Miller,
Other places use temperature monitoring. I don’t see that happening here or in UK. Is it at all effective? Also Anosmia seems to be much less discussed
The first app I mentioned puts anosmia above cough/fever as a predictor of a positive test. This should be much better known.
From Scientific American (April 10):
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-immunity-to-covid-19-really-means/
Tom English,
Thanks, Tom. The article is not hugely reassuring, I have to say. 🙁 Maybe time for “Intelligent Design” proponents to step in and design that magic bullet neutralising antibody.
Alan Fox,
On the bright side, we don’t get flu every year. I haven’t had it since 1988, and I’ve never been offered a vaccine. It reoccurs, and kills, every year, but not in horrendous numbers.
I suspect that there may be an element of variation as to what your antibodies are actually targeting. If you’ve had the actual infection, antibodies may arise to various motifs on the pathogen, such that even if it mutates in one part there may be some level of protection against another. This is one small concern regarding achieving herd immunity*** through vaccination alone, if that vaccine is based upon a specific antigen rather than whole-cell.
***(As an aside, whenever I say ‘herd immunity’ I get people down on me like a ton of bricks, because they associate the term with anti vaxxers or a mooted Tory policy from early in the epidemic. I only mean the proportion of the population with antibodies, however gained).
The particular dialect I have mastered is academic English, which is a mishmash of American, British and Australian English sprinkled with idiom introduced by various non-native speakers. It enables one to converse fluently about highly technical topics, but leaves one oblivious of what a “bib” is.
Two-thirds of them are thrilled at the prospect of it being an incurable pestilence. I just entered
Is coronavirus a si
into the Chrome browser, and got the completion
Is coronavirus a sign of the end times
That, I would say, is a sign of the times.
Corneel,
It embarrasses me that I cannot, and probably never will, pronounce the name of my favorite painter correctly. I think I handle “Vincent” and “Willem” and “van” well enough. But what the fuck are those sounds at the end!? (The initial and final phones in [ɣɔx] don’t exist in American English.)
Definitely my fault, sorry.
I see what you mean. Let’s hope there’s a readily available vaccine before the next flu season
Allan Miller,
That graph looks very promising for the UK, doesn’t it? Great stuff.
That’s been proposed here too, and the government passed a law to prepare to gather aggregated, anonymous data, but they’ve been harshly criticized for that. But then again, the opposition will take any opportunity to attack the government, whether it’s justified or not
My immunity experts tell me that while antibodies are the easiest indicator to test, they are a small part of the immunity picture.
Vaccines can be failures from the point of view of an individual, but still contribute significantly to herd immunity.
These two statements are not intended to be connected.
Tom English,
My wife cheffed for a Dutch couple running a chateau as a wedding venue for a while. The son-in-law was in day-to-day charge of the business. He said his name was Stewart. My wife expressed surprise and he confessed it was an Anglicism. People couldn’t pronounce his real name, Sjoerd. She was determined to get it right and found several on-line guides to pronunciation. Sjoerd agreed her attempt was not bad!
petrushka,
I can see that. Can you expand your point?
Not feeding through to reflection in daily test/death stats yet. 😕 It does support one of my contentions though: following lockdown, caseload initially went up, which I reckon is due to putting people in closer proximity for longer, and further argues against a ‘no-time-out’ approach. If it gets in, from shopping or whatever, increased time together increases transmission likelihood in the home (the amount of haughty crap I’ve got from Lockdown Believers for that, but I think it sound).
I think this particular app gains by being disassociated from both government and shady data-mining firms. It grew out of a twin-study app. They’re also doing well communicating the rationale and the findings, increasing the engagement factor for geeks like me.
Sadly so, same here. I think Johnson is a useless arse, but it doesn’t mean (as some would have it) that everything he does is wrong. My Leftist friends are slagging him for things that have happened everywhere. Their political bias (which I share) seems to blind them to objectivity.
Allan Miller,
But Allan, I think you have to look at what China has done. They had the most strict knockdown measures, and you are not allowed to go anywhere in the entire country without a mask, and they have shut down domestic cases almost entirely.
Ultimately their plan, once it began was very very effective.
That’s true. Unfortunately, it did get out. For a new pathogen, there are only two futures: extinction (of the pathogen) or herd immunity (however gained). If you hit it hard and early, the first is possible. But in a leaky world you need every country to sign up to that. Measures effective early cease to be ideal later.
People here, lockdown enthusiasts, keep quoting New Zealand as an example of a democratic country that succeeded, but they have the massive advantage of isolation, and 2/3 ports of entry. And now they sit, with no herd immunity, as the brushfire rages globally. They need a vaccine.
I’m certainly not saying ‘no lockdown’. Like a cartoon where Roadrunner turns into an imaginary roast, people picture me with a baseball cap, AK47 and ‘I Need a Haircut’ sign if I question any aspect. I’m aligned with some pretty strange bedfellows on the Right, and the lunatic fringe. But, there are consequences, and not merely those cashed in dollar terms, whichever way you look.
This has, unfortunately, become a massive tangle of politics and pseudoscience. You’re on the Right? Lockdown is a plot by the Left to take away personal freedoms. You’re on the Left? Opponents of hard lockdown care more about money than PEOPLE’S LIVES!!! (Will No-one Think Of The Elderly?). Your preferred party is in opposition presently? The Government is to blame! You’re a climate change denier? It’s a plot by the Greens to reduce carbon emissions – based on MATHEMATICAL MODELLING, yet!! You’re an anti vaxxer? It’s a plot to inject us all with poison. You’re a misanthrope? All your countrymen are #Covidiots!
Allan Miller,
People on the whole are such binarists (mistyped bynartists – tempted to go with that): right, wrong, black, white, good, evil… It’s great folks have strong opinions but would be better if they looked at facts first and have some basis for those opinions.
You have this knack of cheering me up. One of my nieces got locked down in New Zealand!
Allan Miller,
I know a thing or two about that. I don’t believe in random accidents multiplying up and causing intelligent sophistication, and I get grouped in with all kinds of crazies.
I certainly would hate to think I have the same politics as Nonlin, or Mung, or heaven forbid Cordova!
Of course, with the whole world looking at the US and saying, “Gee, the country fucking this whole thing up bigger than any other is the US, who can they blame now” I can’t imagine anyone being on THAT side of politics.
“Us Death Tolls Very Very Strong.”
Dumbest infant on the planet. Country that elected him to lead them, dumbest electorate in world history.
On the other hand, I don’t think evolutionary biologists or those that are persuaded by their ideas believe in random accidents either. Niche!
Alan Fox,
I don’t either. But they keep saying they do.
Found myself emptying drawers and came across an old Kindle that I had replaced because the old one had frozen. I thought I’d just see if it would charge before throwing it out. Bingo! Just scrolling through, I noticed a book I had downloaded and completely forgot about, Sapiens by Yuval Harari. I guess someone (Kantian Naturalist, perhaps) had recommended it. Started reading it without preconceptions. Heavy going but rewarding.
phoodoo,
They must stop at once!