Two strains? Italy has the BAD strain. Three weeks from Three Patients to Collapsing Hospitals. By Joanne Nova.
Figures from South Korea and the Diamond Princess may not be a good guide to what’s happening in Italy and Iran. There something seriously different going on there. Death rates are much higher than expected. Three weeks ago, Italy officially had three cases, now a thousand people are dead and 12,000 have the virus. The hospital system is already at the point of being overwhelmed. Reports say that even stroke patients are now missing out on help, the ICU wards are overflowing, and the staff are prioritizing younger people because they have a better chance of survival. …
Italian hospitals are so ‘overwhelmed’ by the coronavirus outbreak that stroke patients are going untreated, a doctor has revealed. …
Stop feeding fresh bodies to the virus:
The great weakness of this 32 k bit of inanimate code is that it constantly needs fresh bodies — all we have to do is stop feeding it fresh fuel. We can outwait it now, then later outwit it. The code can’t spread without hijacking our cell’s machinery. It can’t spread if we don’t put it on a plane. It may last for nine days on surfaces, but eventually the code breaks, degrades, and is no longer a threat. Sunlight, air and time can save us.
Comparing this with influenza is irresponsible. We have no herd immunity. No vaccines, no treatments. The black swan inside the black swan is the shortage of ICU beds. This is a bad event until we run out of ICU beds, then it’s off-the-charts. Yes, the death rate is much higher in older people, but that doesn’t make it OK. Do we like grandparents or not? …
As I keep saying, we have only 1 ICU bed per 12,000 people (I assume this is similar in the US and UK etc). If 12% (!) need an ICU bed, then Australia can only afford to allow the number of cases to be 16,000 simultaneously (and that assumes all our ICU beds are free, or that we have increased the number dramatically). …
China was slow to react, and did itself — and the world — harm by reacting slowly. Now we are making the same mistake.
Possibly China could have avoided 66% of all cases if it had moved One Week Faster. Maybe it could have avoided 95% of cases if it moved just Three Weeks Sooner. To state the bleeding obvious, every day we delay action will kill people.
So:
Message to readers: The way out is to stay home, order supplies. Sit this out for the moment until we know more. The less you venture out the less likely you are to catch this. Wash hands, don’t touch faces, space yourself from other people. …
Obviously flight quarantines are temporary. This is how the future pans out. We do massive action to control this immediately, asap, and the more the better. We spend the next 1 – 2 years living with the fear of repeat outbreaks. We don’t allow flights from countries that don’t have this controlled except with a two week mandatory quarantine. But sooner or later we will defeat this or find a cure or it will become “another common cold”. …
This could end up being biotech’s great moment. But bureaucracy’s dumbest mistake.
Follow Israel, Russia, and now the US — ban flights, from either the whole world or large parts of it, either completely or with two week quarantines.
It’s already too late because the virus is here, but at least limit the damage. Why isn’t this even being talked about by the Australian ruling class?
When will other countries ban flights from Australia because we are the infected ones? So dumb.
