Coronavirus

I won't ever agree with his sluggish initial response to this crisis, but I have much greater respect for him for responding to the situation as it has evolved.

True. That happened when he started listening to the experts that this country apparently had had enough of (quoting his chum and partner in crime Michael Gove).

Let’s hope the measures announced help save the lives of thousands of people.

Am I the only one that finds ironic he is addressing the nation behind the slogan “protect the NHS” considering his party had decimated it so badly during the last decade?
 
Am I the only one that finds ironic he is addressing the nation behind the slogan “protect the NHS” considering his party had decimated it so badly during the last decade?

What are you talking about? It's the bloody EU that stole the NHS funds to buy plane tickets for all those Romanians and Pakistanis to invade the country!
 
What are you talking about? It's the bloody EU that stole the NHS funds to buy plane tickets for all those Romanians and Pakistanis to invade the country!

To be fair, the situation of the public health services in the worst affected countries in Europe is as bad, if not worse, as that of the NHS for very similar reasons (austerity policies).
 
There's been an increase in helicopter flights to my local hospital (about a quarter of a mile from where I live), and it's not one of the regular air ambulances. My first guess is they're transferring in medical equipment from another area.
 
Spain:
Close to 40000 cases
2700 deaths
514 deaths the last 24 hours
the medical personnel infected are 5400 (1500 the last 24 hours)

We're following Italy steps or even worse
 
Although small compared to the numbers of other countries, I find it unsettling that Norway today has seen the first deaths outside of the Oslo area (one in Bergen on the west coast and one in Tromsø far north). It illustrates that the virus hasn't been contained to one region. There's to be a press conference later today, I expect the government is going to confirm that the lockdown will continue beyond Easter.

The death toll in Spain is awful reading :( Good news from one country is followed by bad news from another.

@GhostofCain - an interesting graphic that puts things in perspective. Black Death makes most of the other pandemics look like miniplanets next to Jupiter :eek: But as things are progressing now, it will be a surprise if Covid-19 does not end up in the same order of magnitude as the swine flu.
 
The death toll in Spain is awful reading :( Good news from one country is followed by bad news from another.
Yes. The funeral services are saturated and the authorities don't allow the wakeings of the dying. People can't say goodbye to their loved ones.
Soldiers who are helping in desinfectan labours in residences for the elders had found dead bodies in some of them along with the living ones. Employees and responsible people left them abandoned. It's a crazy, horrible and unbeliveable story.
Tomorrow we're going to surpass China in deaths :(
 
It sounds like Donald is going to let people congregate after 15 days. Which will kill hundreds of thousands. Man, we should build a wall around America to keep the Americans out.

Also, Mexico should pay for it.

The situation in Croatia isn't catastrophic but the earthquake in Zargreb didn't help at all. A 15 y.o. girl died due to injuries, and imagine earthquake survivors in a social distancing environment. It's like a bad joke. As of this moment, there are infected in every region, in total 382 active cases on 4.2 million people, with a non-exponential growth. One person died. 16 recovered. There are new cases every day but still no boom. It's been one month since the first confirmed case. This gives me hope that we won't have a worst case scenario.
 
‘The real situation is not nearly as terrible as they make it out to be.’

That’s Michael Levitt, a Nobel laureate and Stanford biophysicist, delivering his optimistic take on the coronavirus pandemic to the Los Angeles Times over the weekend.

Levitt was credited for correctly calling early on that China would get through the worst of its devastating outbreak before many other health experts predicted.

On Jan. 31, China had 46 new deaths compared with 42 the day before, which Levitt recognized as a slowing rate of growth. So he sent out an optimistic report.

“This suggests that the rate of increase in number of the deaths will slow down even more over the next week,” he said in a note widely shared on Chinese social media. Levitt, who won the 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry, also said the number of deaths would soon start decreasing every day.

He ultimately nailed his call for a mid-February peak with a total tally of about 80,000 cases and 3,250 deaths. As of March 16, China had counted a total of 80,298 cases and 3,245 deaths — in a country of almost 1.4 billion people where about 10 million die every year.

He’s got a similar view for the United States.

What we need is to control the panic... we’re going to be fine,” he said, adding that the data doesn’t support the gloom and doom epidemiologist have been warning about.

Levitt looked at the stats from 78 countries with more than 50 reported cases of COVID-19 every day and sees “signs of recovery,” focusing on the number of new cases, not the cumulative figure.

“Numbers are still noisy but there are clear signs of slowed growth,” he told the L.A. Times, claiming that, however, the trajectory of deaths in the U.S. back up his findings.

There are now 35,224 cases and 471 deaths in the U.S., as of Monday morning, according to Johns Hopkins University. On Friday afternoon, there were 16,018 cases and 210 deaths.

Levitt said social-distancing mandates and getting vaccinated against the flu are both critical to the fight against the spread. Italy’s strong anti-vaccine movement, he explained, likely played a factor in the explosion of cases, because the spread of the flu likely was a factor in overwhelming hospitals and increasing the chances of coronavirus going undetected.

He lays some of the blame on the media for sparking panic by focusing on the increase in cumulative cases and spotlighting celebrities, like Tom Hanks and Idris Elba, who have been infected.

Levitt is also worried that an overreaction could trigger another crisis, with lost jobs and hopelessness creating their own set of problems, such as a surge in suicide rate.

On Sunday, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard said he sees the U.S. unemployment rate hitting 30% in the coming months as the world continues to grapple with the coronavirus pandemic. If his projection proves true, unemployment would be worse than it was during the Great Depression and three times worse than the 2007-’09 recession.

While those kinds headlines continue to spread fear, Levitt sticks by his simple message: The coronavirus pandemic is “not the end of the world.”

But he also blames the media for causing unnecessary panic by focusing on the relentless increase in the cumulative number of cases and spotlighting celebrities who contract the virus. By contrast, the flu has sickened 36 million Americans since September and killed an estimated 22,000, according to the CDC, but those deaths are largely unreported.
 
China completely locked down provinces. Seems unlikely the US will do the same.

Flu killed 0.0006% of people it infected since September. COVID is much deadlier, as Italy is currently finding out.
 
Perhaps individual states will take the initiative and lead the way here.
This is what I expect. Several state governors have already been leading voices in the pandemic (Cuomo, Newsom, Polis, namely). But Trump’s actions will have devastating consequences for middle America and Florida, which will spill over to responsible states despite their best efforts.
 
China completely locked down provinces. Seems unlikely the US will do the same.

Flu killed 0.0006% of people it infected since September. COVID is much deadlier, as Italy is currently finding out.
From another article (same guy)

news.yahoo.com/why-nobel-laureate-predicts-quicker-210318391.html


Now Levitt, who received the 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing complex models of chemical systems, is seeing similar turning points in other nations, even those that did not instill the draconian isolation measures that China did.
 
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