COVID-19 Megathread 5: The Trumps catch COVID-19

[ilikeverin]

So what are the chances schools don't meet in the fall?

Many universities seem to be leaning towards cancelling in-person classes.

[ilikeverin]

This is interesting:

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1254856060734550017

Something I've wondered: have other countries seen protests in favor of reopening such as those that have occurred in a number of U.S. cities?

It almost seems like a cynicism index.

[ilikeverin]

https://twitter.com/i/events/1219057585707315201

I guess no more international travel, forever.

If it does turn out that this disease is endemic and impossible to vaccinate against, I think we as a society would decide to abandon any special curbs. We've already decided that the flu represents a level of chronic danger that we're comfortable tolerating to have a functioning society; presumably we'd just add COVID to the list.

[ilikeverin]

Even though we are months removed, and the weather is now warm, in my head it still feels like it’s March. Anyone else?

Yeah people have wasted two months of their lives on this; fortunately, that’s starting to change now as lockdowns are being relaxed. 

"Wasted?"

I really don't get why people are acting like not being able to go to group events is "wasting" one's life. I've been carrying on with life pretty much as normal, though obviously not making impulse shopping trips. I can go to the park, I can read (libraries being closed is tough, but at least here they're open for curbside service), I can still talk to to people on the phone or even video chat, I can order delicious food from local restaurants, I can do crafts, I can train my pets, I can play video games, etc etc etc. Why is social distancing "wasting" life?

The mental health impacts of this are real and we must be aware of making sure we get the interaction we need, even if it's different than normal. But anyone who is "wasting" their life cannot blame the virus for it: there's plenty to do that doesn't require being in close proximity to others.

I can't help but compare people complaining about this to a spoiled child who has way more toys than they can ever play with complaining when some of the toys are taken away, even though there are still dozens in reach.

Umm, no, most of what living life is requires being around other people.  Basically all you can do alone is distract yourself from the fact that you are alone with entertainment and stuff.  If you actually support social distancing (which has been a stupid concept from day 1), you could make every single one of those same arguments for seasonal flu.

Fortunately, I live in a place where people have brains and have largely given up on social distancing out of fear for a virus that is basically the flu in terms of death rate.

In fact, I've come to believe that the proper policy would have been literally the opposite of social distancing, where we encouraged everyone young and healthy to have even greater social contact than usual to try to hit herd immunity within a couple weeks or so while sparing the tiny minority of people for whom the coronavirus is actually a concern from the virus.

Even in the strictest lockdowns, most people aren’t alone, they are with their families.   I’d have to think you believe this is meaningful.   And you can still interact with everyone else online if you want, which is what most of our regular interactions are now anyway outside of family and work.

My daily life didn’t really change much as a result of the lockdowns, since I was already on leave from my job to be with my newborn daughter.  Honestly, the thing I’m missing most is the opportunity to be alone in my office (to get a break from the family for a while).

I'd imagine it's pretty nice to be an introvert who lives with a family right now. I'm a single extrovert who lives alone. I designed my life to be constantly out and about with other people. This is hell for me. The last time I touched another human (except when I needed bloodwork done in April) was March 14th. My hobbies and interests all involve being around other people, even the ones I can do on my own. I bake for others. I watch shows so I can talk about them when I'm with others. I go to church to form community with others. And suddenly those have all been ripped away from me. If one of my parents were to be wasting away, dying in a hospital from this disease, I would be breaking CDC recommendations if I so much as got a hug from a friend.

Look, I'm not one of the #ReopenEverything crazies. I am trying to diligently stick to the instructions of the state of Connecticut. I do not think life should go back to how it was until we have a vaccine. But to dismiss the feelings of folks who miss being around people out of hand—not just to say "this is hard, and scary, and I can understand how hard this must be in your life, but it's a part of the shared sacrifice we have to make", but instead to compare being an extrovert to being a "spoiled child" and blithely insist that "most of our regular interactions are [online] now"—will just entrench those attitudes further. I am miserable being on my own. The ways that structure my life and bring me joy are illegal right now.

So of course this feels like wasted time to me. I am not anxious every day like I was at first, but I haven't felt real joy for months, now, because the most joyous days of my life are ones where I feel surrounded by people. The analogy for me is not to a "spoiled child"; it's to a street urchin, being directed to the dumpster of social comfort found on Zoom or online while forbidding them from the restaurant that the dumpster belongs to. If you want to tell the urchins why they can't enter the restaurant, you need to start by acknowledging that you're feeding them a crappy meal, not by bragging about the home garden you have.

[ilikeverin]

These awful numbers for the sunbelt states near the summer solstice kind of kills the hope that summer is automatically better.

To me, it suggests an alternative hypothesis: cases spike at times of the year when people stay indoors. Cases disappear at times of the year when people are happy to be outdoors. Those are different times in different places.

[ilikeverin]

Scientists identify six different types of coronavirus with increasing severity levels

Analysis of thousands of cases by artificial intelligence software has revealed different "clusters" of symptoms and ranked them in order of severity.

Headache and loss of smell are common to all six groupings, but the range of symptoms varies widely after that.

Scientists at King's College London (KCL) found that patients with the sixth type of Covid-19 are nearly 10 times more likely to end up needing breathing support than patients in the first group.

Are these different strains or just different symptom tracks?  For instance, if person A had the mildest one, would person B get that same version from him/her?  If that's the case, that would be a huge development because it would really make an "intentional and rapid herd immunity strategy" much easier to implement with much less cost.

I wish that that article linked to the full article (or gave enough information to find it), but it seems like it's the "just different symptom tracks" option... I'm guessing they did a factor analysis based on symptoms, which is basically just a way to sort people with different constellations of symptoms into separate groups that could be used to predict later outcomes. So this could be used to predict which cases would get a lot worse, but not to predict disease spread.