obvert
Posts: 14050
Joined: 1/17/2011 From: PDX (and now) London, UK Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Canoerebel Nobody's making firm predictions, Erik. But the trends visible suggest bell-shaped-curves with less than a month - usually a lot less - to reach the peak (and usually around a month for the main rise and fall). That was the case in some Asian countries. Will it hold true in Europe/North America/etc? We don't know yet, but as we keep saying, Italy should provide the first indication. My instincts here are contrary to the vast majority of reporting. I'm aware of that. My reputation is important, so it feels strange to swim contrary to the flow and to very publicly give opinions that seem to be outliers. This past Saturday, the enormity really hit home. But taking fresh looks at all the underlying data, I remain pretty comfortable with the conclusions and estimates stated here - even going back to the early days of this thread. The USA is a big place. Some parts are already experiencing full-blown exponential increases; others are just getting started. But I'm confident (not positive, but confident) that most or all locales in the continental US will be at or past peak within a month, and some probably by the end of this month. More so for Western Europe. quote:
ORIGINAL: obvert quote:
ORIGINAL: Canoerebel People are panicking because the stream of news is currently 100% negative. As soon as some positive news comes in, the panic will settle down. Then it will gradually fade, as the situation stabilizes or improves in Italy, the rest of Europe and then the USA. We're not going to be in lock down for months. All recent studies suggest this will take more than a few months to get to the peak and past back to a sense of normalcy. It may not get normal at all if warmth doesn't slow it down until there is "herd immunity." Then we'll also have the economic and possibly the social unrest to deal with too. I'll again be very happy if you're right, but right now the situation is too fluid to know, so such firm predictions just aren't possible. Sure, and your optimism, as I've said before, is much appreciated. This report form Imperial College, London, by leading epidemiologists, seems to indicate that the curves will be long depending on mitigation attempts and severity, but the best case of a full quarantine still shows some difficult times ahead, and seemingly for quite some time. There is hope, but vaccine is the golden ticket here, and everything else is just trying to save lives in the meantime. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf This part is in the discussion section and really got me thinking. Disentangling the relative effectiveness of different interventions from the experience of countries to date is challenging because many have implemented multiple (or all) of these measures with varying degrees of success. Through the hospitalisation of all cases (not just those requiring hospital care), China in effect initiated a form of case isolation, reducing onward transmission from cases in the household and in other settings. At the same time, by implementing population-wide social distancing, the opportunity for onward transmission in all locations was rapidly reduced. Several studies have estimated that these interventions reduced R to below 1.15. In recent days, these measures have begun to be relaxed. Close monitoring of the situation in China in the coming weeks will therefore help to inform strategies in other countries. Overall, our results suggest that population-wide social distancing applied to the population as a whole would have the largest impact; and in combination with other interventions – notably home isolation of cases and school and university closure – has the potential to suppress transmission below the threshold of R=1 required to rapidly reduce case incidence. A minimum policy for effective suppression is therefore population-wide social distancing combined with home isolation of cases and school and university closure. To avoid a rebound in transmission, these policies will need to be maintained until large stocks of vaccine are available to immunise the population – which could be 18 months or more. Adaptive hospital surveillance-based triggers for switching on and off population-wide social distancing and school closure offer greater robustness to uncertainty than fixed duration interventions and can be adapted for regional use (e.g. at the state level in the US). Given local epidemics are not perfectly synchronised, local policies are also more efficient and can achieve comparable levels of suppression to national policies while being in force for a slightly smaller proportion of the time. However, we estimate that for a national GB policy, social distancing would need to be in force for at least 2/3 of the time (for R0=2.4, see Table 4) until a vaccine was available.
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< Message edited by obvert -- 3/17/2020 9:11:23 PM >
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"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm." - Winston Churchill
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