Author Topic: The Crowne Grippe (COVID-19 Thread)  (Read 16287 times)

Jubal

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Re: The Crowne Grippe (COVID-19 Thread)
« Reply #30 on: March 29, 2020, 11:04:37 PM »
Lots of ways it could be tighter than here: regularising stop-and-searches or actual paperwork required to prove your right or reason to be outside, for example, ending or further restricting the permission to go outside for exercise (which has happened in lots of places in Lombardy).

Like, things are pretty rough here, but enforcement is fairly loose/sensitive to circumstance, and from what I've heard the police seem to be taking not too heavy handed an approach. Compare to the UK, where one police force has been trying to tell people from its official social media accounts that exercise time is limited to one hour a day, which... it isn't, that's not the law at all. Having the police heavily overstep their jurisdiction, needless to say, could cause a *lot* of problems.
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Caradìlis

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Re: The Crowne Grippe (COVID-19 Thread)
« Reply #31 on: March 29, 2020, 11:18:57 PM »
No, it can't get any worse, I miss my friend!!! I'm not allowed to go outside, and I'm stuck and alone...

And also, I'll say it again, the UK reacted waaaaaaaay too late! I know it sucks, this whole thing sucks, but they should have reacted much sooner... Like, people are mad at Tyrol, because a skiing resort only closed down like 3 weeks ago... the UK is only starting to do things now... US is still barely doing armadillo... Like, what the portugal people, what gives?
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Jubal

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Re: The Crowne Grippe (COVID-19 Thread)
« Reply #32 on: March 29, 2020, 11:40:08 PM »
Yeah, I'm not arguing with you about the UK being far too late acting! But I think that's a reason not to overdo the scale of the lockdown unless they absolutely have to, because they're going to have to keep some lockdown in place for a considerably longer period of time than I suspect e.g. Austria is. At the current rate of progress, Austria should be able to start easing off a little in a month or so, I think - the spread rate per day is down to an 11% increase from nearly 40% at the start, we're miles below the exponential curve now which is good news. Though the issue in Austria will partly be that it's been too effective, so Austria has near zero herd immunity against this thing: we can start relieving our own restrictions here in a few weeks, but we're going to be having to be very careful about the international borders for a lot, lot longer, it might easily be six months before international travel eases up.

America meanwhile is looking like it could be unbelievably bad. The extent to which the death rate there is accelerating is really, really scary, and I'm quite worried for my American friends and relatives. :(
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dubsartur

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Re: The Crowne Grippe (COVID-19 Thread)
« Reply #33 on: March 30, 2020, 10:06:01 AM »
Good luck Gmd.

Re needing documentation, Britain's lockdown sounds like it's rapidly becoming more illiberal than Austria's - I've seen reports of multiple UK police forces trying to go beyond the law and impose additional arbitrary restrictions (by suggesting that their daily exercise is limited to 1hr, which it isn't, or that they can't move so a more walkable location in a car in order to take it, which they can). I think that's a real problem, because the biggest challenge of the lockdowns is going to be holding them together for long enough. But then, the Austrian lockdown basically seems to be effective, I'm hearing very few reports of anyone breaking the rules here, whereas the UK seems to have more of a vocal minority who think it's all a conspiracy or something.
When I go for walks I see some groups of three or four teenagers along the river, and the Tiroler Tageszeitung reports a couple who crashed someone else's car in a village at 1.20 am and who were charged with violating the curfew as a group of more than one person.

I get the impression that civil society pushed back to get an acknowledgement that outside exercise alone or with members of your household is allowed, early on the messages were mixed.

What I remember reading in 2019 is that British police forces and the army have been cut so small that they don't think they could handle any disorder worse than the local team loosing at footie in a week one of the supermarkets unloads some discount cider.  And that is without a double-digit percentage of the force having to go home sick, and 20% of the sick needing long-term hospital care.  So aside from being confused by rapidly shifting policy, I would not be surprised if some British police forces are resorting to "bark orders and hope nobody notices that we can't actually enforce them against more than one person at a time."

Deaths attributed to coronavirus in Austria are still doubling every 3-4 days, but those are people who were infected about three weeks ago.  The mayor of Nembro in Lombardy has released an op-ed: "Nembro, one of the municipalities most affected by Covid-19, should have had - under normal conditions - about 35 deaths. 158 people were registered dead this year by the municipal offices. But the number of deaths officially attributed to Covid-19 is 31."

According to Wikipedia, the population of Nembro is around 12,000.
« Last Edit: March 30, 2020, 11:44:28 AM by dubsartur »

Gmd

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Re: The Crowne Grippe (COVID-19 Thread)
« Reply #34 on: March 30, 2020, 03:00:23 PM »
yeah it seems completely impossible for the police to enforce the lockdown, but from what i can see people are clever enough to stay at home anyway. Not like they have anywhere to go, everything is closed.

Also America is completely screwed from leadership down to the frontline medical staff. The fact that Trump is blatantly ignoring medical advice is horrible. Despite everyone telling him to enforce social distancing this is an image of him signing his "Coronavirus Bill":

Just to add to the Irony, the oval office was also packed full of reporters.
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Jubal

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Re: The Crowne Grippe (COVID-19 Thread)
« Reply #35 on: March 30, 2020, 04:09:11 PM »
Yeah, I think closing down shops etc is the biggest part of getting people to stay home.

Austria is apparently going to give free masks out at supermarkets and require people to wear them from Wednesday onwards. Not sure how much that'll help, but we'll see.
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dubsartur

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Re: The Crowne Grippe (COVID-19 Thread)
« Reply #36 on: March 30, 2020, 05:52:30 PM »
I think that social media is buzzing with East Asians + Czechs screaming "everyone should wear a mask" and Anglos + the rest of Europe saying "at best it makes the sick slightly less infectious, and medical personnel need the medical-grade masks."

Maskenpflicht? *clangs*

All openings are guaranteed smaller than a Turkish arrow or a Cologne poignard which in microns is ...*advisor whispers in my ear* new plan, to the sewing room!

Jubal

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Re: The Crowne Grippe (COVID-19 Thread)
« Reply #37 on: March 30, 2020, 06:29:44 PM »
Yeah, it's elfshot you need the holes smaller than in this case ;)

But yes - I guess it may be that Austria feels under control enough that the marginal gain from masks in supermarkets is seen as worthwhile and not taking anything away from medical staff. Still, it's going to be weird and pretty horrible, it's the sort of thing that makes me panicky which is going to make shopping a nightmare from now on.
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dubsartur

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Re: The Crowne Grippe (COVID-19 Thread)
« Reply #38 on: March 30, 2020, 10:24:06 PM »
I don't handle the unusual well either, but let me see what I can come up with in masks with an appropriate inscription embroidered on.

Skimming the Tageszeitung, they seem to be still assuming a base replication number/Replikationsfaktor of 2-3, but I have read specialists who think the true number in China was around 4 (https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.18.20024315 seasonal flu is in the 1.3-1.5 range). 

dubsartur

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Re: The Crowne Grippe (COVID-19 Thread)
« Reply #39 on: March 30, 2020, 10:43:56 PM »
All I can find in the tablets is the words of Ea the Wise:

Quote
Abandon riches, seek survival!
Spurn property, save life!

(Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, XI.25-26)

dubsartur

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Re: The Crowne Grippe (COVID-19 Thread)
« Reply #40 on: April 01, 2020, 12:52:14 PM »
Austria plans to test a random sample (Stichprobe) of 2,000 residents starting today.  I will be interested to see whether there are more like 20 or 200 positive.

If the number of confirmed cases, 10,000 in a population around 9 million, represented the state of the pandemic, we would expect about 2 people to test positive (plus a few false positives).  If you believe that, I have a nice rug merchant in Isfahan who I would like to introduce you to.

Jubal

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Re: The Crowne Grippe (COVID-19 Thread)
« Reply #41 on: April 01, 2020, 01:28:30 PM »
If more people test postive, it's not necessarily a bad thing, though - because it may mean that a lower percentage of cases are symptomatic than we thought, and we're thus building a certain degree of herd immunity faster than espected.
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Glaurung

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Re: The Crowne Grippe (COVID-19 Thread)
« Reply #42 on: April 01, 2020, 01:29:37 PM »
Indeed. If I'm not mistaken, the number of confirmed cases in the UK is in the low tens of thousands, but given the continuing reports of 20-30% of staff in various sectors off work, the true total must surely be several orders of magnitude higher. I'm a good example myself: I caught something that seems suspiciously like covid-19 nearly a fortnight before the UK lockdown, and I know at least three other people who've probably had it too. None of us has had a test or been included in the official statistics.

dubsartur

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Re: The Crowne Grippe (COVID-19 Thread)
« Reply #43 on: April 01, 2020, 03:17:56 PM »
I had what was probably a bad flu in late February and early March, a lot of people I know have or had flu-like symptoms.  It would be interesting to know whether one kind of dreaded lurgie makes you more vulnerable to the other.

So some of the people who are out sick will just have colds/flu/stress-related symptoms, but people with public-facing jobs are exposed to a lot of respiratory ailments- and its easier to deal with a cold or a flu when you are sure its something not so dangerous and that your job will still exist when you recover.

dubsartur

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Re: The Crowne Grippe (COVID-19 Thread)
« Reply #44 on: April 02, 2020, 02:46:11 PM »
El País in Madrid reports the same thing as the mayor from Lombardy: official death figures show coronavirus doubling the normal death rate, but three to five more deaths from all causes are being registered than in the same region last year.

https://elpais.com/sociedad/2020-03-27/el-coronavirus-causa-mas-muertes-de-las-detectadas.html

The situation is so unusual that Americans are actually acknowledging sources written outside their country in a language other than English during their lifetime!

Meanwhile, the curve in British Columbia continues to flatten.  And patreon pledges are up 13%, and amount pledged up 16%, over the previous month for the first time since they finished shooting themselves in the foot in 2018.

Update: Random sample of 1.161 people in key occupations (care homes, hospitals, supermarkets) in Austria on 29/30 March: 6 tested positive for covid-19 (0.5%)  That is similar to Iceland's results earlier in March, and lower than I expected.
« Last Edit: April 02, 2020, 08:41:16 PM by dubsartur »