Where's the petri dish thread?

[CrimsonNBlue]

The American people look forward to the day when a "...resurgence in virus cases throughout the country..." approximates "...166 new cases in Tokyo on Sunday, bringing the total there to more than 2,000", in our nation's largest city.

Japan's numbers are garbage.

[Shirley]

The American people look forward to the day when a "...resurgence in virus cases throughout the country..." approximates "...166 new cases in Tokyo on Sunday, bringing the total there to more than 2,000", in our nation's largest city.

Japan's numbers are garbage.

^^^

"The American people look forward to the day when" our numbers are "garbage" for reasons other than incompetence.

[Shirley]

Fellow Americans, we're being misled and lied to over and over again during a pandemic. A PANDEMIC! Every public health expert's nightmare.

We

DESERVE

BETTER!

i.e., The TRUTH:

[seahawk]

Read somewhere that George W. Bush read a book about pandemics and insisted that his people develop plans for one. So, not even a partisan thing--Bush could have done better.

[ousdahl]

[PhDhawk]

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump would be on ANY president's council to re-open America.

[HouseDivided]

Well crap. Nobody who’s going to pretend like keeping the economy shut down for two or three or twelve more months is “no big deal”? Color me disappointed.

[PhDhawk]

Well crap. Nobody who’s going to pretend like keeping the economy shut down for two or three or twelve more months is “no big deal”? Color me disappointed.

In a perfect world, you'd have different people representing different points of view...and none of Trump's children.

[Shirley]

[HouseDivided]

Well crap. Nobody who’s going to pretend like keeping the economy shut down for two or three or twelve more months is “no big deal”? Color me disappointed.

In a perfect world, you'd have different people representing different points of view...and none of Trump's children.

I will concede the none of Trump’s children part. Not seeing a valid reason to involve them.

[Shirley]

“Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television.”
Woody Allen

[sdoyel]

[jfish26]

None of it matters until November, unless and until McConnell perceives the Senate majority to be at risk.

[twocoach]

Well crap. Nobody who’s going to pretend like keeping the economy shut down for two or three or twelve more months is “no big deal”? Color me disappointed.

It's not the formation of the team that concerns people. We all agree that experts need to get together to lay out the groundwork for getting things rolling again.

It is the "experts" that Trump built this team out of that people have a problem with.

[DCHawk1]

Oh.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... naviruses/

[jfish26]

Just read that. The implications would be staggering.

[Mjl]

Just read that. The implications would be staggering.

Would it? I mean, if the virus came from negligence at a lab rather than some more natural way, what difference will it make? Some kind of world-wide-imposed penalty against China?

[seahawk]

“Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television.”
Woody Allen

A question about contact tracing, since I hear that mentioned as something that is an integral part of any reopening. As you've likely had more experience in speaking with those who are presenting with some illness than the rest of us, how well are we going to be able to do contact tracing in our society?

[HouseDivided]

Just read that. The implications would be staggering.

Would it? I mean, if the virus came from negligence at a lab rather than some more natural way, what difference will it make? Some kind of world-wide-imposed penalty against China?

Reparations!

[Shirley]

A question about contact tracing, since I hear that mentioned as something that is an integral part of any reopening. As you've likely had more experience in speaking with those who are presenting with some illness than the rest of us, how well are we going to be able to do contact tracing in our society?

Contact tracing, especially now that the US has 600,000 confirmed infections, (There have no-doubt been several times that infected, and imagine trying to trace all the contacts of that many people), depends on a number of factors, testing being one, that we still don't seem to be very good at. Then there's the privacy/surveillance aspects, if you do it with location tracking.

"[C]ontact tracing, the method of figuring out who an infected person encountered and could have infected. That can take the form of interviews with infected people or location tracking with mobile devices."

This first link is about location tracking. It referenced the second article which was more interesting and comprehensive, to me.

Apple and Google have a clever way of encouraging people to install contact-tracing apps for COVID-19 By building contact-tracing into their operating systems, the companies could make a difference in the global pandemic response




The case for ending the Covid-19 pandemic with mass testing. By one estimate, America may need 35 million Covid-19 tests per day for people to return to work.

...Making and deploying the millions of tests needed would require radical investments and interventions. Testing millions of people a day until the pandemic is over is not as simple as buying more tests. It would require a national mobilization on the scale of a world war.

“There is no historical example of this without command and control,” Allen said.

...Clearly, building a national pandemic response strategy around mass testing is not simple, easy, or cheap. But it may end up being simpler, easier, and cheaper than just about any other approach that’s been tried.

The recent CDC paper modeled how different tactics would work to curb the spread of Covid-19. The researchers reported that “active surveillance, contact tracing, quarantine, and early strong social distancing efforts are needed to stop transmission of the virus.”

A combination of these measures have helped places like Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore limit the spread of disease. But many of these areas are now seeing a rise in new infections, mainly imported from abroad, as they relax these measures to try to return to normal. Some places have had to restore lockdown measures. So no one is out of danger from Covid-19 just yet.

Truly ending the pandemic requires a complex strategy, since many of the tactics that have been deployed so far are inadequate on their own. And it would require far more effort to deploy them in a large, dispersed country like the US.

For instance, take contact tracing, the method of figuring out who an infected person encountered and could have infected. That can take the form of interviews with infected people or location tracking with mobile devices.

But contact tracing in the US would still require mass testing as well as information collection to limit the Covid-19 outbreak to levels of places like Hong Kong and South Korea. Many of the places that deployed contact tracing did so at early stages of the pandemic, when the prevalence rate of the infection was still low, which limited the numbers of contacts that needed to be traced. That made it cheaper and faster to conduct contract tracing.

In the US, with a much higher prevalence of the virus, such tracing would still require testing for a much larger segment of the population than is currently available.

“Even if we were to use those methods, you would need vastly more tests,” said E. Glen Weyl, who co-authored the Safra Center’s paper on mass testing and works as a political economist at Microsoft. “And if you don’t want to use those methods, or you’re afraid that they won’t get enough take-up, then you would need truly enormously larger numbers of tests.”

Weyl estimated that a completely random testing system without contact tracing would require about 100 million tests a day. Contact tracing could help economize the use of tests, but testing would still be needed for millions of people per day. So scaling up testing capacity is a no-regrets tactic for combating the pandemic.

Meanwhile, the current social distancing regimen in the United States is not only a huge economic and social drain, it also has holes and inconsistencies. That means it could take several months if not longer to bring the prevalence of the virus down within the population on its own.

...Testing for antibodies could be useful for research purposes to identify who was previously infected in order to trace the spread of the virus. People with antibodies could also donate their blood serum to help treat infected people or to develop new therapies. And if it is confirmed that surviving an infection confers robust, lasting immunity to the virus, a positive antibody test could help identify people who can safely end their social distancing. That would be particularly useful for front-line workers who are desperately needed back on their feet.

But immunity testing is not an easy ticket to restarting the economy. The number of people who have survived the virus so far are nowhere near enough to reopen all the shuttered shops and offices. A scenario where there are enough immune workers to restart the economy would imply spread of the disease through the population, and with it, the inevitable spike in hospitalizations and deaths. And that is exactly the scenario most public health officials are trying to avoid.

[...]