Lockdown!

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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.

932 thoughts on “Lockdown!”

  1. petrushka,

    First I can tell you that there is virtually NO social distancing going on in China right now, and where I live there has been no new reported cases for quite some time. There is nothing secretive about this, because there is no advantage to hiding cases, it is in the countries interest to identify and quarantine them, not ignore them.

    Secondly:

    In middle of pandemic, Florida is hiding a list of deaths reported by medical examiners

    https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/4/29/1941318/-Deaths-from-COVID-19-are-being-highly-underreported-and-in-some-cases-that-appears-to-be-deliberate

  2. It is a bit too easy to just dismiss Chinese evidence (they have not always helped their own image in this regard). I was chatting to a neighbour about some evidence from Chinese research which supported a contention I was making, and her response – “well, China…” – was irritating. A lazy way to cling to assumptions: reverse cherry-picking.

  3. phoodoo: First I can tell you that there is virtually NO social distancing going on in China right now, and where I live there has been no new reported cases for quite some time.

    Are there limits on distance-travelling? Do people mix socially with those known to them and avoid strangers? Can you check each other’s Covid status with apps or certificates?

    What do you see as the key element that has eliminated new cases?

  4. Alan Fox,

    Every single person in the country has to log into the health app. You can’t go into an establishment without it. Also everyone who comes into the country now MUST quarantine for 14 days alone, no exceptions as far as I know. After that there are really no distance or social limitations anymore. The schools have now reopened. Before everyone also had to wear a mask to go anywhere, 100%. That is not as strict as before.

    I will say, in the small villages and countryside, although they also had their strict rules in place, and everyone was monitored, the old farmers didn’t seem to care much, and they just carried on life as usual in the fields. It was the only place in the whole country that looked sort of normal at that time. But if a foreign person showed up, they were suspicious. One old farmer outside playing cards remarked to me once about my mask not covering my whole face, but at the time he wasn’t wearing a mask at all. When I pointed that out, all his friends had a good laugh at him.

  6. My local MP just voiced his concerns about school reopening. All commenters except me disgusted at this prospect, most indicating they wouldn’t let their kids back till a vaccine was available. Which, I pointed out, could be 2-3 years down the line, if at all. As an intervention, lockdown has never been clinically trialled, we stick it out yet blindly grab the next thing that looks like a vaccine, two-fisted!

    Lockdown: not just a policy, more a state of mind.

  7. Allan Miller,

    I don’t think it is so bad for a country to wait two months to see how this pans out. It gives the hospitals time to catch up, for some new treatments to unfold, and I suspect there will be a vaccine much sooner than you are thinking right now. People can make it for two months. They have done much worse during times of war. A lot can improve in two months. For a while the sentiment here was about as bleak as it can get.

  8. phoodoo:
    Allan Miller,
    I don’t think it is so bad for a country to wait two months to see how this pans out.

    Yeah, they were talking “till there’s a vaccine” though.

    , and I suspect there will be a vaccine much sooner than you are thinking right now.

    Unproven technology though, in humans. And think how it would damage trust in science and vaccine in general if they rushed and made a catastrophic error. I want it to take a couple of years!

  9. I’m convinced that ease of international travel has exacerbated the spread of the disease. Cruise ships – no, I can’t talk of that, I lose the power of coherent speech.

    But air travel, especially budget airlines where space is at a minimum and costs are saved by recirculating air and not having adequate filtration. It was regarded as almost normal to end up with a cold or flu following a Ryanair trip in Winter in my social group prior to the pandemic.

    So is there a correlation between travel and level of Covid-19 infection? Someone should do the analysis!

  10. Alan Fox,

    Probably true, though there were no planes in 1918. Perhaps we should be using carrots and sticks to prevent people travelling ill. International conveyances serve to seed outbreaks, though don’t make much difference once it has taken hold, since they are linear additions to exponential curves.

    Metro systems, too – one of the factors I forgot to mention in my ‘compare and contrast’ with NZ.

  11. In its first report of the epidemic’s impact on Italy’s mortality rate, covering 86% of the population, ISTAT said that from 21 February, when the first Covid-19 deaths occurred, until 31 March, nationwide deaths were up 39% compared with the average of the previous five years.

    Seems there’s hugely more excess deaths than
    here

  12. Allan Miller: Probably true, though there were no planes in 1918.

    But there were field hospitals full of soldiers who went home with the flu virus.

  14. Hat-tip Joe Felsenstein at the Panda’s Thumb for publicising this article on cryptic transmission.

    …large-scale non-pharmaceutical interventions to create social distancing had a huge impact on the resulting epidemic. China averted many millions of infections through these intervention measures and cases there have declined substantially.

    here

  17. Alan Fox: Seems Germany has a similar indication of under-reporting

    Similar analysis here in Spain suggest the same result

  20. Allan Miller,

    You’re speaking as though it is a certainty that herd immunity will result if enough people are infected. However, we presently know very little about immunity to the new coronavirus. What we know about immunity to other coronaviruses is that it lasts only two-to-three years. Supposing that immunity works similarly for SARS-CoV-2, I don’t see how any population will, without an effective vaccination program, ever reach the point where 80 percent or more of its members are immune. What happens instead, I suspect, is that infections roll through the population indefinitely, as previously infected individuals are infected again. Do you know of modeling that indicates otherwise?

  22. Tom English,

    Curious, then, that we, and other populations not vaccinated for anything, aren’t permanently in the grip of a pandemic.

    It’s true that we can’t expect indefinite immunity. At the same time, I haven’t had ‘flu in 30 years, and most people don’t get it that often, so something is causing that. It’s either personal immunity or herd immunity, not sure what else it could be.

    As I mused above, when the survivors of 1918 started dying off, what kept the next generation from being picked off in similar proportions later? I think – I could be wrong – that we pick up ‘microdoses’ of circulating ailments from largely asymptomatic carriers, becoming such in our turn. One unintended consequence of extended lockdown of kids would be to interrupt this ‘dirt-eating’ phase of priming the immune system to deal with common circulating pathogens.

  23. Allan Miller: Curious, then, that we, and other populations not vaccinated for anything, aren’t permanently in the grip of a pandemic.

    Indeed, most people recover from covid-19. Maybe many more than are indicated by confirmed cases. How else can this happen other than by an immune response?

  25. To repeat another speculation: the natural immune system chucks a whole bunch of variant antibodies at the wall and amplifies those that stick. The protein coat of a pathogen has complex contours; each individual’s antibodies may be subtly different, targeting a slightly different contour. When the pathogen mutates, it may become ‘invisible’ to one set of antibodies, but remain targeted by another, so some people are still immune despite the mutation. Alternatively, it may be that the mutation simply reduces the effectiveness of the immune response, giving mild infection where a never-exposed individual might suffer more.

  26. dazz,

    The most important implication of these findings is that the number of infections is much greater than the reported number of cases.

    That is in line with other evidence. They also checked for false positives by testing on serum collected prior to the outbreak and got none (out of 30).

  27. Alan Fox,

    I’m not pessimistic regarding therapies, for the simple reason that we happen to have many good candidates. It’s amazing that we’ve already learned how to reduce the average hospital stay by three days.

  28. dazz,

    What do the local experts think about this study, please?

    You’d have to stick some nonlin-quotes round ‘expert’, I think! But yes, I can see the reservations in the critique. OTOH, the app I mention above had 2 million active cases estimated at the beginning of April, ie 3%, so same ballpark. This estimate is based on using the fraction who had a positive test to gain an estimate of positives for all users, and multiplying up to the whole population.

    The app will suffer from self-selection, like the Stanford study. People using it tend to be 20-60. There might be more inclination to use the app if you have symptoms. There is probably a drop-off when people become too unwell to bother (and of course when people stop using it altogether, for one reason or another ☹).

    This gives a very rough infection fatality rate of 0.14%, by assuming all deaths have now happened, and no new infections since. But it under-reports the cohort with the most deaths, so that’s only for youngsters.

  29. They seem to recognize the bias issues in their method. Although I suspect only a truly random sample can get rid of those, right?

    This study had several limitations. First, our sampling strategy selected for members of Santa Clara County with access to Facebook and a car to attend drive-through testing sites. This resulted in an overrepresentation of white women between the ages of 19 and 64, and an under-representation of Hispanic and Asian populations, relative to our community. Those imbalances were partly addressed by weighting our sample population by zip code, race, and sex to match the county. We did not account for age imbalance in our sample, and could not ascertain representativeness of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in
    homeless populations. Other biases, such as bias favoring individuals in good health capable of attending our testing sites, or bias favoring those with prior COVID-like illnesses seeking antibody confirmation are also possible. The overall effect of such biases is hard to ascertain.

  30. dazz,

    Well, the critique is overly long-winded, and agonizes a lot over the stratification that the Stanford team did do.
    The two primary complaints are valid:
    1) The observed false-positive rate of (0/30 + 2/371 = 2/401) is consistent with a specificity as low as 98.5%; in which case all their positives could be false positives.
    2) Recruitment may have enriched for people who had Covid-like symptoms recently.
    So, need a larger sample size to validate the assay’s specificity, and a sneakier recruitment technique…
    OTOH I do think that many more people have been infected than have tested positive. Three-fold, five-fold, maybe ten-fold, who knows?. I just hope that this translates into at least partial immunity for a coupla years…
    Fecking RNA viruses, they’re the worst.

  32. Allan Miller,

    What do you think about the virus burning out due to mutation. The mutation rates on these RNA viruses is very high. How do you account for the aggressive reductions in Spain and Italy recently?

  33. colewd:
    Allan Miller,

    What do you think about the virus burning out due to mutation.The mutation rates on these RNA viruses is very high.How do you account for the aggressive reductions in Spain and Italy recently?

    The lockdown, perhaps?

  34. colewd:
    Allan Miller,
    What do you think about the virus burning out due to mutation.The mutation rates on these RNA viruses is very high.How do you account for the aggressive reductions in Spain and Italy recently?

    Yes, as dazz says, the lockdown. I’d also expect a contribution from seasonal effects, as spring moves on. By shoving people hard indoors, that latter contribution isn’t as great as it could be, though.

    Mutations would be a mix of favourable, neutral and detrimental (from the virus’s perspective). I wouldn’t expect an excess of detrimental mutations, causing attenuation, from first principles. I’d expect the virus to get better at spreading, not worse, which might involve killing less, or being asymptomatic for longer.

    Of course to the extent it has adapted to a lockdown situation, reducing measures could favour different strains.

  35. colewd: What do you think about the virus burning out due to mutation. The mutation rates on these RNA viruses is very high. How do you account for the aggressive reductions in Spain and Italy recently?

    dazz and Allan have answered this question. I am just puzzled that you thought it worth asking, given all the epidemiology data available and the sequencing data that Joe Linked to…

  36. DNA_Jock,

    dazz and Allan have answered this question. I am just puzzled that you thought it worth asking, given all the epidemiology data available and the sequencing data that Joe Linked to…

    Did not see this. Thanks for citing it.

  38. I hope that when they ran through samples 4, 5, 6 and 7 (2,213 negative results) they sprinkled a few blinded positives in to keep the validation tech honest…
    Also, the demographically adjusted result is rather sensitive to the under-representation of Hispanics.
    And for all their protesting otherwise, the Facebook recruiting is still pretty iffy. What was the nature of the inaccurate information about the study purpose that was shared on a listserv without their knowledge or consent?

  39. DNA_Jock,

    Yeah, it seems strange to use a Facebook add to recruit participants. Are this guys related to the Hoover Institution? I know Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has been interviewed in their youtube channel a couple of times recently.

    DNA_Jock: What was the nature of the inaccurate information about the study purpose that was shared on a listserv without their knowledge or consent?

    That’s a good question. I’ll see if I can find anything online

    ETA: Also, someone commented that they haven’t released the raw data and code they used to analyze it, is that’s common practice?

  40. correlation does not mean causality, but it’s awfully implausible to have causality without correlation.

  41. I’ve watched countries also, and while I haven’t plotted their ranks,I haven’t seen any big changes in rank.

    There are odd facts. Japan has few cases, but there are reports their hospitals are overwhelmed.

    The US has tons of cases, but our hospitals are nearly empty. And NY was able ro donate ventilators to other states.

    All in all, it has been a bad season for predictions.

  43. phoodoo: Are you going to eventually condemn all the US government secrecy about the virus?

    What would be the point?

    We pretty much know already, that whenever Trump accuses someone else, he is actually doing the same thing himself. So he accuses China of hiding information, while he himself hides information.

  44. petrushka,

    el gato malo may be the stupidest person on the internet.
    Let’s be clear: he plotted the cumulative deaths per capita by state on 5/8 as a function of the same metric as of 4/11. He sees a correlation and concludes that social distancing policy was no effect.
    First time around, he makes it even worse by just plotting the ranking.
    I am sure that there is interesting data out there, but this cat ain’t providing it.
    gtjay’s critque is on point: “New York could have had more deaths than anyone, locked down, had no new deaths, and still have the highest rank.”.
    The main effect on the demographics is the major ports of entry.

  46. Going stir-crazy here, especially as the offspring has descended (lockdown has temporarily limited her residency choices) and is bonding with mother rather than father.

    But she has introduced me to Carlo Rovelli’s writing, so that’s a plus!

  47. You can wriggle all you want, but CV is concentrated where population density is high and international traffic is high. And adjoining communities.

    It has resurfaced in South Korea. Not a huge outbreak yet, but why at all?

    I don’t really have any recommendations to pontificate about. I merely note that lockdowns cannot eradicate the disease as long as people travel. I don’t think it can be eradicated, unless the reinfection rate drops, and I doubt that will happen due to lockdowns.

    Might happen due to distancing, masks, and hand washing. Those can be sustained without killing the world economy.

  48. petrushka,

    I don’t think anybody at this point is claiming social distancing / lockdown are supposed to eradicate the virus. It’s just to prevent hospitals getting collapsed and buy some time

  49. petrushka,

    I am thinking of writing an OP on lockdown and its pros and cons. Having put this thought out there might incentivise me to pull my finger out!

  50. petrushka:
    You can wriggle all you want, but CV is concentrated where population density is high and international traffic is high. And adjoining communities.

    Areas which by those facts make it harder to socially distance. However if you work in a meat processing plant in Nebraska, chance are pretty good will be infected. Inflection requires coming in contact with the virus.

    It has resurfaced in South Korea. Not a huge outbreak yet, but why at all?

    They opened the bars.

    I don’t really have any recommendations to pontificate about. I merely note that lockdowns cannot eradicate the disease as long as people travel.

    True enough, the flu is still around despite vaccines.

    I don’t think it can be eradicated, unless the reinfection rate drops, and I doubt that will happen due to lockdowns.

    True as well. Though certainly those who are careful might be able to buy enough time for treatments to be developed to increase to odds of survival.

    Might happen due to distancing, masks, and hand washing.

    Some find even that onerous imposition.

    Those can be sustained without killing the world economy.

    I am sure that is some comfort for those whose loved ones who perish working at minimum wage jobs , they died for the world economy which never gave a shit about them while they were alive but finds value in their death.

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