Search results

This is wrong in several respects. There aren't exactly cures for most viruses, although there's a known treatment that cures HIV now, it's just not available to most people because it relies on genetics. (Bone marrow transplants from a compatible donor who's immune.) But there's lots of...

I really worry for the people whose local leaders or the people they look up to told them this was No Big Deal, and now they're finding out that maybe that wasn't totally accurate. One guy who was saying it was all media hype is now dead from it, which has got to be a source of concern for all...

Reagents for test kits does indeed seem essential.

Side note: the "7M" number for the Great Depression seems to come from Pravda, so I'd take it with a salt lake.

I think a lot of people miss the subtle point that the people who die never come back to work, necromancy not being reliably available to us. Epidemiologists aren't idiots. They're aware that lockdowns are expensive, but they're also the only chance you get to slow things down enough to either...

Exponential growth starts with some number, and our starting number is probably larger than theirs, because we have more people to begin with, so more of our citizens returning from elsewhere probably had the virus. Similarly, our upper bound is significantly larger; we can double our number of...

We're huge, which means that 14k for us is significantly earlier in the curve than 14k for a country with 1/5 the population or less, which means earlier in the epidemic, and people take time to die.

Possibly ironically, a lot of Africa is better prepared than, say, the US, because they've had Ebola outbreaks and they are actively maintaining resources, training, and practice in dealing with and shutting down epidemics.

If we required sober judgement for people to vote, we would have very very few voters.

I haven't seen that one from any epidemiologists. I've seen that reported as one possible outcome, but given how much more lethal it is than the flu, and that immunity to it wears off a lot faster than chickenpox (probably), I'm guessing there will be a lot of work on getting rid of it.

Could be 1.5-2 years, could be sooner if the researchers working on coronavirus vaccines get lucky, who the heck knows.

As I understand it, by the time the symptoms are getting better, you're probably no longer contagious, but don't rely on my vague memory/understanding.

Research so far says 6-10 days, after which you may still be shedding virus but researchers have been unable to get the resulting virus to infect anything or grow in cultures. So two weeks already has some safety margin.

The basic strategy is (1) go out, (2) get enough food for 2 weeks, (3) don't go out for two weeks. If you get infected, by two weeks you're no longer contagious again.

Not really. Their funding got badly cut, and there was a different group specifically focused on this kind of situation (but I think under the NSC, not the CDC) that got fired a while back because, as long as they do their job, it doesn't look important because we don't have so many pandemics.

Yeah, and specifically, having a pandemic response team that, until a couple of years ago, was specifically monitoring for things like this in a lot more countries, including China, so they could be on top of things and possibly even help those countries catch stuff like this before it spread in...

Yes. But they've been working on doing it for a tiny subset of workers, so a lot of workers still don't have paid sick leave, and if they don't get paid, some of them will die, because we don't really do functional social safety nets around here. I'm cautiously optimistic that the various...

Turns out that this kills people too, and perhaps more directly, creates strong incentives for people to not "notice" that they're sick, or to engage in motivated reasoning to conclude that it's nothing, and that means... people die. Turns out paid sick leave is a huge win from a public health...

It's not always an all-or-nothing thing, but the epidemiologists I've seen advocating things have definitely strongly favored "don't go out in public if you can easily avoid it right now" over "oh don't worry about it". Young and healthy people may not be at much risk of dying, but they're at...

I'm not talking about the virus being intentional. I'm talking about things like: Wherein the Department of Justice orders signs warning people about the virus and advising on basic precautions to mitigate risk taken down. Why? Well, that is an open question. But they didn't accidentally...