Pandemic: How will you continue to enjoy your hobbies?

[generic]

Technology in business is often called "knowledge capital" which is a good way to look at it in engineering to get things done as well. They were simply able to harness resources available, such as massive testing, then creating computer models to attack the vectors. Did they lock everything down? Yes, but they also effectively mobilized.

True, very true. I spoke in terms of medical technology, but, I should have considered the technology which precedes treatment and quarantine, the technology which identifies threats and targets them.

The response of the U.S. seems pitiful by comparison.

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

Not sure how I'll keep enjoying my hobbies through this pandemic. As it happens, it caught me off guard. I left my job and apartment a couple months ago to start a long multi-state roadtrip/search for a new city to live in, and based myself with family in the hinterlands. With this thing threatening to lock everything down, though, I'm precariously close to stuck in a little rural town where I don't know anyone, living out of a suitcase in a guestroom, looking forward to the recession that will complicate the home and job hunt. And of course all my belongings are in a storage shed hundreds of miles away, so I don't even have my RPG books and other fun stuff! Guess I'll look into VTTs, take a crack at PBP, or just work on random game or writing ideas.

That said, I'm very fortunate to have a place to crash, and am grateful no one in my family or this town have gotten sick so far. But boy was this inconvenient timing for a pandemic!

Oh well. It'll work out in the end, I suppose. Life finds a way.

 

[HarbingerX]

Also you might want to check your math there buddy. Even if it does turn out to be a 3% fatality rate, which it wont. But if it does 22,000 X 6 isnt 1 million. Its 120,000. So your only off by a factor of 9.

I don't think you're reading the math right. If coronavirus infects as many people as the flu, ie. 31M, and the fatality rate is 3.4%, then that's 1M people. What might be off is the 0.5% flu rate I used, as that's 155K dead. So the flu rate is lower.

H1N1 was not as infectious as expected. So it didn't transmit easily.

As coronavirus spreads in a population, it takes a while for the death rate to rise. It's 2-7 days to start showing symptoms and 14 days after symptoms to then die. And while it is certainly old people who are dying, there are younger people who have to enter acute care and then recover. What happened in Italy is that they ran out of acute care facilities - so then people died who would have other wise recovered.

Since you wrote this, cases are now 6500 and 111 deaths. Tomorrow it will be 8700 cases, and the next day 12000. Self-isolating has no effect on new cases for a good 2 weeks.

 

[HarbingerX]

No thats false. firstly the average flu is .2 percent, not .1 fatality. Conona isnt a 3% either. We have 2k cases and 48 deaths. Thats 0.024%. Just about the same as the average flu.

Second It has a 10% hospitalization rate, not a 20%.

What does the coronavirus mean for the U.S. health care system? Some simple math offers alarming answers

At a 10% hospitalization rate, all hospital beds in the U.S. will be filled by about May 10. As #Covid19 cases saturate nearly every state and county, health care workers would burn through the national stockpile of N95 masks in two days.

www.statnews.com

You have to remember when your looking at those global numbers that its badly skewed by countries like china and iran where people have poor hygiene habits, less sanitization and crap medical systems and lower survival rates from everything in general. Their regular flu deaths and hospitalizations each year are much higher then ours too.

You can't calculate the death rate as 'current cases/deaths'. It takes 2 weeks for people to die after they start showing acute symptoms. There are currently 111 deaths; 2 weeks ago there were 994 cases. So that's a death rate of 11%. There are currently 6500 cases, in 2 weeks time we'll know how many of those people died.

And of course it's messier than that at figuring it out - the 2 weeks is a rough figure. Normally epidemiologist backtrack deaths to the date the person became infected to get accurate numbers.

 

[Umbran]

Last time he visited the US recently, he found it to look dirty and poor, and judging by the pictures of Shanghai he sends, I have a tendency to agree.

Sure, they tested like crazy. That's not a matter of superior technology - we have the technology to test. What we don't have is sufficient resources applied to build testing inrastructure.

And, you realize we have this virus now because of really bad sanitary and husbandry practices in their markets, right? Cleanliness is not a great claim.

 

[HarbingerX]

Sure, they tested like crazy. That's not a matter of superior technology - we have the technology to test. What we don't have is sufficient resources applied to build testing inrastructure.

And, you realize we have this virus now because of really bad sanitary and husbandry practices in their markets, right? Cleanliness is not a great claim.

Actually what was lacking was 1) working tests, so all the early test kits were garbage and the chance to track while there were few cases was lost and 2) the political will to take the early stages of the outbreak seriously. Now it's all catchup, but it's too late at this point to do any containment.

 

[Umbran]

Actually what was lacking was 1) working tests, so all the early test kits were garbage and the chance to track while there were few cases was lost and

The failure in the initial text kits was a quality control issue, yes, in large part driven by not taking the issue seriously. But, with respect, even if those early test kits were up to snuff, there were not enough of them, and there was (and is) not an infrastructure to process them in the numbers required. The test kits are not independent - you still need a lab to process them.

2) the political will to take the early stages of the outbreak seriously. Now it's all catchup, but it's too late at this point to do any containment.

Yes, well, if you were looking to the US to enact measures like China (which still ended up with over 80,000 cases and over 3000 deaths), you have to remember that their governmental form is different - they can do things that we cannot.

 

[pogre]

Back on topic:
We are running sessions at home with my boys. We have others joining us via the teleconferencing app Zoom. I have two extra phones pointed at the gaming table so everyone can see the terrain and minis. Not quite face-to-face, but not bad considering the situation.

 

[dragoner]

And, you realize we have this virus now because of really bad sanitary and husbandry practices in their markets, right? Cleanliness is not a great claim.

This is incorrect: The original source of viral transmission to humans remains unclear. The rumors in China say it's a US bio-weapon. So the prejudice goes both ways.

 

[Sacrosanct]

It’s looking like for millions of Americans, mostly in the service industry, will be out of work for months. Forget about wondering how they will continue hobbies, they’re wondering how they will keep their place to live.