Personal Note About The Pandemic: Be Mark Watney
Keith’s note: As a biologist I cannot let this pandemic go by without paying close attention to the details. They are scary. If you are young the risk is less equally – perhaps more likely that you are going to be seriously sick if infected – and you will still able to spread COVID-19 to others. If you are in good health you will probably be OK. But if you have any – I repeat any – underlying physical issues and/or are a Boomer (or older) then you should be very afraid. The death risk goes up – well above Flu. Stock up on the essentials. Make sure you have an extra supply – and take – your meds. Become a hermit. If your spouse gets this – so will you. You can interact with others to your heart’s content online for a few months. There is no treatment. There is no cure. Only prevention and common sense are available to you. This is survivable but you need to take responsibility for your own survival.
Our current federal government will fail you in this regard. Get used to it.
Be Mark Watney.
Hello from Italy. Your future is grimmer than you think., Washington Post
“Writing this from Italy, I am also writing to you from your own future. From our state of emergency, we have been watching the crisis unfold in the United States with a terrible sense of foreboding. Please stop waiting for others to tell you what to do; stop blaming the government for doing too much or too little. We all have actions we can take to slow the spread of the disease — and ensuring that your own household has enough canned goods and cleaning supplies is not enough. You can do a lot more. You should do a lot more. Stay away from restaurants, gyms, libraries, movie theaters, bars and cafes, yes. But also: Don’t invite people over for dinner, don’t let your kids go on playdates, don’t take them to the playground, don’t let your teenagers out of your sight. They will sneak out with their friends, they will hold hands, they will share their drinks and food. If this seems too much, consider the following: We are not allowed to hold weddings or funerals. We can’t gather to bury our dead. For us, it might be too late to avoid an incredible loss of life. But if you decide against taking actions because it seems inconvenient, or because you don’t want to look silly, you can’t say you weren’t warned.”
I agree. The United States has been derelict in its duty to keep all of us safe. I am in BC, Canada. I have always thought that the US CDC was the epitome of excellence. But our health providers here in Canada have been updating us every day, for weeks now. For a long time, we in BC – one Province – have conducted more tests than the whole of USA. I have watched as the virus has spread in only a limited way in Canada, because we were able to identify and isolate those that had it. Meanwhile, the infected started to be those who had visited the USA. Some of our infected were those that had only visited the USA.
My understanding from reading the Canadian news papers is that most of the 117 cases in Canada are from Egypt, Iran and Italy, including the new cluster on Vancouver Island just announced. Unlike the U.S., Canada was slow in banning travel from virus regions.
Most Canadian cases have come from foreign shores, for sure. But the take away is, those positive tests have been tracked down and isolated. The idea of imposing bans on travel from infected countries is to delay the onset of community spread. Not to eliminate that, that is not possible. It is to buy time to do a bunch of other stuff, like gear up for additional testing, additional isolation, and additional hospital beds. The thing is, the USA did none of those things. They bought additional time with their ban on Chinese travel, then stopped any additional measures.
Case in point: The Washington State Kirkland Old Age home where the majority of deaths have occurred. They just today (March 14) received the tests results on 95 people that are providing care to this facility. They have discovered that 47 of those 95 tested positive! If they had known this earlier, those that had tested positive would have been quarantined and isolated from their old age patients, possibly preventing some deaths.
But you also need to know who to test. The two weeks when it doesn’t show is the problem.
BTW it appears Canada is rapidly catching up with U.S. on a per capita basis and has belately decided to close its borders.
https://www.bbc.com/news/wo…
Coronavirus: Canada to bar entry for most foreigners – Trudeau
Yeah, this is a nasty virus. I think we’ll all be hunkered down for a while no matter what country we are in.
Dissemination of information in the US is strictly controlled in order to prevent Trump from looking inadequate for the task.
If this thing is really that bad then it seems to me one of the most prudent things to do is to shut down all air travel. That should help slow the rapid spread of it and help get it under control.
Where am I wrong?
As I understand it, travel restrictions (long distance ones, that it) are best at keeping a disease from spreading. Once it’s already spread, which I think is true in this case, they aren’t nearly as useful. At that point, it’s a matter of measures like avoiding personal contact and local quarantines.
Perhaps, but it’s interesting to note China has placed restrictions on those entering the country to prevent the virus from being reintroduced to it.
If you shut down ALL air travel even for shorter distances, Chicago to Indianapolis, you will dramatically slow it’s spread.
It also seems that a lot of people equate Pandemic with lethality which it doesn’t.
First, “spread” is the key word. My point was that, once a virus has spread, measures to slow its spread are moot points. If the rate of infection is the same in San Francisco and Boston, it doesn’t really matter if people fly from the one city to the other. Travel restrictions and quarantines can make a big difference when the rate of infection in some places is high and low in others. But once the virus has already spread, they make much less of a difference. (Although Dr. Matula has a good point about controlling spread back to places where the disease has already died out.)
Second, Chicago to Indianapolis is a poor example for banning air travel. How many people actually fly between those cities? As opposed to driving? Especially in the US, air travel isn’t the only, or even the main, form of travel between cities. Unless you’re talking about isolating large regions, effective travel restrictions would have to involve all forms of travel, not just air travel.
And, while pandemic and highly lethal are not the same, COVID-19 is pretty bad. The numbers are uncertain for it, but they are somewhere in the 1-3% range by most reports. That’s similar to the “Spanish” flu of 1918-1920 (although that’s also uncertain due to the record-keeping practices of a century ago.) No, we’re not talking about something like the plague of the 1340s. But that doesn’t say much.
More that you may thing because Chicago is one of the major hubs for connecting flights in the mid-west. Things spread faster because of air travel.
I agree. It’s already here. Last I checked, I’m pretty sure confirmed cases have been reported in all 50 US states.
If the airlines were going to be shut down completely, that should have been done months ago. Doing it now is pointless and could actually do more damage than good by preventing essential travel.
Someone in Cincinnati Ohio now has the virus. How did she get it? AWell according to the news she got it while in New York and brought it with her when she flew from New York to Cincinnati and now exposing people there.
Things like this spread over long distances faster because of the speed and reach of air travel. I still maintain that if it’s really as bad as the authorities claim it is all air travel should be shut down. That will do a lot more to slow it’s spread than forcing my tennis club to close.
Decided to watch the Martian again last night, needed that break from all this… so when I saw this post I did not immediately think “be a hermit”… (a very good idea, btw) instead I thought you were referring to:
“Pandemics demand transparency and competence,” said Mark Warner of Virginia. “Classification authority should never be abused in order to hide what the government is doing, or not doing, just to satisfy domestic political concerns.”
So… to paraphrase Mark Watney… “WTF?!?!”
Big sigh.
I have been following this story since the first reports of it in the Hong Kong papers around New Year’s about Chins hiding the outbreak of a new disease. The governments of Europe really failed their citizens by not following the U.S. lead and restricting travel from China and Asia in early January. Today Europe, with a population size similar to the U.S. has 22,000 cases compared to only 1,000 in the U.S. Folks forgot the ancient lesson that the only way to stop a pandemic with no cure is by quarantine, thinking it’s some outdated idea.
The only reason there are 1000 confirmed cases is that we have only performed 10000 tests. South Korea has been performing 10000 a day! God help us if we were ever hit with a bio terror attack.
Well here is another statistic that doesn’t require testing. The death toll in the U.S. is around 40, while it’s around 1200 in Europe at last report.
Almost all of the deaths in Europe are in Italy. Unfotunately fot the U.S, it looks like the time for containment has passed.
https://www.reuters.com/art…
It’s just not testing that created the difference. Italy is in the EU and although they could ban direct flights like South Korea did, they could not stop folks returning from China from flying other EU nations and just crossing into Italy by auto or train. The other is Italy has a much older population and also had a flu epidemic in February which probably masked the early cases of it. That is why health care providers were hit hard in Italy, unlike South Korea. It is also why the death rate is high in Italy versus other nations.
In any case the CDC log jam on approved testing kits has been broken and private labs are now supplying them in quantities.
Oddly, the current theory is that the outbreak in Italy was from someone at an auto factory in Bavaria, where they had a visit from someone from Asia. So it’s not necessarily that people were coming from China and going into Italy
The European Union and travel in Europe is a little more convoluted that that. Free travel is part of the Union treaties, but it can require passports and watch lists. When the United Kingdom was part of the EU, that did happen most of the time (although travel to Ireland was handled differently.) Also, the open, passport-free borders are part of the Schengen agreement, which isn’t part of the EU treaty system. Some EU nations aren’t part of it, and some non-EU nations are. And, yes, that does make enforcing a quarantine difficult. It also enables many the economic benefits. People can, for example, live in Vienna and work in Bratislava (or vice versa.)
Slovakia has clamped down much tighter than most other European countries as they are essentially allowing no one in except for residents or those who can show proof of employment. So yes the live in Vienna work in Bratislava people can still do that, but that’s about it. They have even shut down their international airports.
To your point for the moment anyway it’s much less restrictive at most European border crossings other than not allowing people in from affected areas. Also checking people’s temperatures at border crossing is becoming increasingly common.
Vienna and Bratislava are virtually part of the same metropolitan area, I’m not sure what the point is. A closed border and a quarantine which exempts commuters doesn’t strike me as effective. And those aren’t the only cities in Europe which have this issue. Some of Geneva’s suburbs are in France. In 2015, Denmark and Sweden made a discovery when they tried to close the border due to the immigrant crisis. An amazing number of people commute between Copenhagen and Malmö, Sweden. Trying to check passports for everyone crossing the bridge was a minor disaster.
I guess my point is that European border crossings aren’t government by one body, like the EU, or even one treaty. They are a a real mess of multiple, multi-national treaties with somewhat different mix of nations involved each. I think the closest they’ve ever come to a closed border was the Western front of the first world war. It’s not like Britain, with exactly one ground (well underground) route off the island. Or even like the United States, where we’ve never been able to close the Canadian border (with two totally failed attempts I can think of) and where controlling traffic to and from Mexico is not exactly a success story.
There is a large element of social habits in play in Italy – extended families living together, lots of socializing, lots of physical contact. Trying to interrupt that is no small task. Blaming Chinese travelers is just wrong.
This morning, Germany has 75% more cases than the US, and 80% fewer deaths. That neatly summarizes who is handling this pandemic better, I would say.
Time will tell as this is still early and most infection haven’t run their course yet. Of course it probably helps Germany has a large domestic medical industry. BTW it stopped exporting medical supplies leaving the rest of the EU to fend for themselves. So much for EU unity during emergencies…
https://www.ft.com/content/…
Italy wonders where Europe’s solidarity is as coronavirus strains show
Germany blocks exports of medical supplies to Rome and ECB president shakes market confidence
“The governments of Europe really failed their citizens by not following the U.S. lead and restricting travel from China and Asia in early January.” Do you have a source for this? I haven’t been tracking this closely, but from this Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
it appears that US travel restrictions went into effect Feb. 2, and Italy’s on Jan. 31. Also, South America has a larger population than the US and has fewer than 100 cases as of early March. So there’s obviously more to it than government policy…
Unfortunately it doesn’t do any good to shut the front door while leaving the back door open. Italy may have stopped flights to China, but it is easy enough for folks to go to other European destinations and take trains or cars into Italy without being checked out. It would also explain why the north got hit first instead of Rome.
The same seems to be true of Sub-Saharan Africa. Perhaps it doesn’t survive well in the tropics. If so then warmer weather may help stop it, if we are lucky.
In practice, the back door is open, even for travel into the United States. If someone wants to fly from China to the United States, they can just change planes _and_ airlines in Vancouver. If CBP asks where they came from, they could claim to have been on vacation in the Canadian Rockies. Sometimes, I think the open borders in Europe aren’t so much a sign of good will and internationalism, but more just an admission of defeat and the fact that the borders are going to be porous.
Physical issues with boomers (older people)… we have an aging workforce at NASA, new space people are younger. I wonder how this will change demographics.
I hope you do not mean what I think you mean.
Sorry, I know it was terrible post. I see a lot of NASA bashing, virtually none for SpaceX over the years. Though we have a crisis but sure not getting much comforting guidance out of Washington DC. As a boomer myself it makes things more stressful.
I saw a political Facebook post the other day saying, Yes but the average age of deaths are 80 years old. I response was, so what? Think about what you are saying.
Our culture has been marching down a path of increasing dehumanization for a long time, and it’s been accelerating in the past 100 years. The only thing that seems to change with any consistency is that the acceptable recipients of disdain/discounting shift around per the whims of whatever current generation considers itself wisest in its present time.
Kinda ironic that it stems in part from the rise of Humanism which itself arose in the wake of the Enlightenment.
I have lived my entire life with an immunodeficiency and even now post-marrow transplant my b-cells are having difficulty parsing my IgD antibodies into IgA and IgG antibodies. I have had to live very germ-aware for decades. One develops certain protective and consideration habits.
I hope that this worldwide challenge we are facing spins off better personal habits in the general population. Everybody would benefit.
I have had asthma all my life, a legacy of having the flu when I was two. I had to be home schooled during my high school years because it was so bad. So I agree 110% with your view as I need to be careful as well. I hate it when folks think they are being “tough” by skipping the flu vaccine or showing up at meetings/work while sick with something.
That’s actually something I don’t like about what’s sometimes called the American “work ethic.” Flu vaccine or not, lots of people feel compelled to show up at work no matter how sick they are. If they are physically capable of stumbling in, some people think it’s pure laziness to stay in bed. And quite a few managers expect employees to show up unless so sick that they’re in a hospital (ok, a mild exaggeration.)
That’s not only bad for the other people at work, it’s bad for the person who is sick (it takes longer to get over something.) With some luck, this epidemic will teach people and managers that, yes, it is possible to work from home. And, yes, that’s probably a good idea when you aren’t feeling well.
There’s the American work ethic, and then there’s being just plain stupid and inconsiderate. They aren’t the same thing.
Working at a university, this is the norm for students. There’s always someone hacking away with uncovered mouth in a public space. Grades before common sense…
You can also blame some of the professors. They’re usually the ones who decide what happens if a student with a cold misses an exam.
You see it throughout the semester, not just at exam time.
Outsourcing all of our medical hardware and medication to China was a poor tactical decision.
Definitely, I hope once this is over we seriously rollback globalization, it’s simply irresponsible to depend on a semi-hostile foreign country for critical hardware and materials.
Yes, one of the origin purposes of tariffs was to keep a domestic capability in critical industries. This would be one way to start fixing it.
As much as I like international collaboration, I do see the national security side of this. Before the first world war, many people said national economies were so intertwined that major wars were no longer possible. That did not turn out to be true. And a decisive factor in the second world war was the United States’ enormous, domestic industrial capability. I have to wonder what would happen if we got into a war, with whoever, and China decided to put us under an embargo.
Yes, economists who aren’t familiar with the history of their theories forget that was one of the objections to the idea of free trade so in their arguments they neglect factors like economic security, trade manipulation to create global monopolies and innovation generated from spinoff technologies.
A good example that is being ignored at the moment is Saudi Arabia taking advantage of the decline in demand from this crisis to flood the oil markets with cheap oil to destroy the U.S. and Russian oil industries so they are able to re-establish their power in setting the price for oil while hopefully undercutting the economics of electric cars and alternative energy sources.
I would like to put out one suggestion why there might have been classified meetings. Two of the countries hit, China and Iran, are not known for the free flow of information. If the US turned to the intelligence community to use intelligence assets to get more accurate and trustworthy information for the HHS you could understand why they would not want to publicized the source of that information or the assets used to gather it. But it would be information that it would be critical for them to know about planning a response.
Be Mark Watney, yes. But EVERYONE be Mark Watney. I have to raise a concern with Keith’s statement about being young and the primary risk being infecting others. That is a real risk. However, multiple deaths have occurred in people in their 20’s and 30’s among the Chinese medical professionals on the front lines in this disease. No one can afford to assume they will be OK if they get this.
COVID-19 cases are most severe in older portions of the population. Younger members are as likely to be infected as older people but they are not getting as ill. As such, being asymptomatic, they are less likely to be tested and therefore more likely to be leading normal lives and spreading the virus as opposed to people who are diagnosed as being positive and are self-quarantining. see “A critical question in getting a handle on coronavirus: What role do kids play in spreading it?”
https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/27/coronavirus-kids-what-role-transmission/ “Though the evidence to date suggests this virus doesn’t inflict severe disease on children, there’s reason to think kids may be helping to amplify transmission. It’s a role they play to devastating effect during flu season, becoming ill and passing flu viruses on to their parents, grandparents,”” teachers, and caregivers.
On a case by case basis, yes. But I suspect this epidemic will produce hundreds of studies and papers on demographics and health issues. For example, people over 60 are more likely to die from COVID-19 than someone in their 20s or 30s, they may also be less exposed. It’s harder to self-isolate if you’re a student in a dorm, or if you share an apartment. Staying home from work isn’t a problem if you are retired. And I suspect more young people are health care providers, especially the ones who have the most direct contact with patients. That would make them at a higher risk of getting infected. So I suspect someone will do a study on the odds of being infected relative to the risk of death if infected. The answer isn’t obvious to me.