Duke of Marmalade
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IT editorial today observes that the worst case scenario is that 80% of the population will contract the disease. So what's the big fuss about?
Coronavirus
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Duke of Marmalade
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Reports that John Travolta has been admitted to hospital with suspected COVID-19.
You forgot the punchline...
Doctors now confirm that it was only Saturday Night Fever, and they assure everyone that he is Staying Alive.
Duke of Marmalade
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Projections of 1.9m infected. This is either the greatest hoax since Y2K or we are in serious doodah.
I understood the Y2K premise and saw it always as a hoax. I am not a medical man so I can make no call at all on this COVID thing. My instinct though is that it is in the Y2K, Climate Change space of the human instinct to have a death wish.
I understood the Y2K premise and saw it always as a hoax. I am not a medical man so I can make no call at all on this COVID thing. My instinct though is that it is in the Y2K, Climate Change space of the human instinct to have a death wish.
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Y2K wasn't a hoax. It didn't turn into a problem becausee there were significant changes made in advance. But the core issue was valid.
The 1.9mm isn't, as far as I know, a "projection" in the sense of predicting the outcome. It is the upper end of what the models state. So it is a possibile outcome. If it doesn't happen it doesn't make it a hoax. These things will always have bands - nobody can accurately "project" what will happen.
The Spanish Flu was estimated to have hit 25% of the world's population at the time. It is still used as part of modelling what could happen - though not exclusively.
I think we sometimes read scientific or technical statements incorrectly which leads people to assume it was all a "hoax" when the outcome is different to some headline number
Some countries, like the UK, spent silly money on Y2K prep. Many others, notably China and Italy, spent very little. Outcomes were the same despite the differing spend.
A lot of the money spent wasn't just Y2K though... many organisations used it as a rationale for upgrading their IT systems.
They money wasn't just spent on Y2K and was far and above what would have been needed just to resolve Y2K.
What made the 1918 flu so dangerous was the fast rate at which it mutated. That also made it short lived. This virus doesn't seem to be mutating, yet anyway. That will make it easier to treat.
Simple, if only 1% of them require hospitalisation then its 40k + people needing a hospital bed
The function of self isolation, quarantine etc is to spread out the infection rate and so the hospitalisation rate.
In a normal flu season in Ireland between 3000 and 10000 people are hospitalised and 200-500 die.
It is also important to distinguish between those who die who have flu and those who die of flu.
The same is true of Covid19.
This is bad but it's not the start of the collapse of civilisation.
Duke of Marmalade
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I am of course speaking somewhat rhetorically. Ironically, China and Italy decided to ignore Y2K while the rest of us obsessed with simulated war rooms etc. China and Italy survived along with the rest of us. It was a "hoax" not so much as a deliberate attempt to scam people (though some do subscribe to that conspiracy theory). It was a group self hoax - we hoaxed ourselves.
michaelm I see you have already made similar points, though I have now added China to my post. Maybe all those Y2K preparations inadvertently protected against COVID-19
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Completely agree, it's not ebola or the plague
Even the 1918 flu became much less deadly as doctors got better at treating it.
A serious flu in a war zone with no medication, a shortage of food and a proliferation of other diseases would have a much higher mortality rate than it has here now.
We should also remember that we have a housing crisis and a looming pension crisis... every cloud and all that
About a quarter of the deaths during the First World War were due to disease, excluding Flu. It was the first major conflict in 100 years where the majority of deaths were not due to disease. In Crimea twice as many died from disease than were killed in action or died from wounds (wounds included infections from cuts etc).
The great statistician and key figure in the invention of epidemiology and modern nursing Florence Nightingale can be credited with much of that reduction. The fact that she is commonly (and totally incorrectly) remembered as a soft-hearted nurse and not a scientist and statistician is one of the greatest examples of sexism you will ever find.
I tell groups of young people that Florence Nightingale was a mathematician, expecting to get a "well I didn't know that" or a "that's interesting" reaction.
Recently I find that the most common reaction is "who was Florence Nightingale".
The feminists don't like her anymore, so she's not even lauded as an early woman pioneer in medicine...
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