2019 Novel Coronavirus Covid-19 Discussion

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#2446802 26-Mar-2020 07:56

NumPy:
The only sensible way to combat this thing, and continue how we were is to have immunity. This can only be achieved two ways unfortunately. No amount of money/debt is going to solve that. What we need is lots of negative pressure rooms, a couple thousand respirators, and space for the sick. That is what China did, and they got on top of it early. Nobody seems to be talking about this stuff.

You seem to have skipped the part where China completely locked down large chunks of the country for over 2 months.

Batman

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#2446803 26-Mar-2020 08:00

NumPy:

Lastman:

What puzzles me a bit is what is the endgame here? The government doesn’t seem to be talking about that. We hear about “flattening the curve” to allow the health system to cope. They are particularly likely to want to get it under control before the winter virus “advantage” makes it too hard to stop. That is sensible in itself.

But this is a virus that is unlikely to be eliminated worldwide with around 400000 cases so far, and virtually every country inflicted and carriers can have mild or no symptoms. Even if we contained it we’d have to keep out borders closed for years, with the associated effect on trade and tourism, till a vaccine became available or herd immunity overseas slowed it or it mutated to a less deadly form(the ultimate goal of any virus). The prospects don’t look that flash.

Nobody knows the endgame, do we bankrupt ourselves in the process and still face the inevitable? I am starting to have my doubts that what we are doing is correct. The amount of money we are throwing at this thing seems absurd. Future generations are going to have a huge debt to deal with. The economic consequences to NZ in my opinion are far more dire than the virus itself.

The only sensible way to combat this thing, and continue how we were is to have immunity. This can only be achieved two ways unfortunately. No amount of money/debt is going to solve that. What we need is lots of negative pressure rooms, a couple thousand respirators, and space for the sick. That is what China did, and they got on top of it early. Nobody seems to be talking about this stuff.

All hope is now to see what happens in the next 4 week, by then we should at least have a good idea if we going to have it under control or not. If its out of control, are we are horribly unprepared? For now its a waiting game so we should sit tight.

i see 3 apocalyptic scenarios, i better be wrong.

1. no cure, so just let the virus do its thing. Thanos finger snap. remember some are completely asymptomatic. we have a new human race of virus-humans.

2. no cure, a few islands lock up where nobody goes in and nobody goes out. (Singapore, Taiwan, ?NZ) forever.

3. a bit like 1, but virus mutates and everybody over 16 dies, civilization reverts back to stone age. 10,000 years later people go - i wonder why there is a tall green woman in new york island. i wonder how they built that. was there a civilization that we didn't know about?

NumPy

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#2446809 26-Mar-2020 08:14

Handle9:
NumPy:

The only sensible way to combat this thing, and continue how we were is to have immunity. This can only be achieved two ways unfortunately. No amount of money/debt is going to solve that. What we need is lots of negative pressure rooms, a couple thousand respirators, and space for the sick. That is what China did, and they got on top of it early. Nobody seems to be talking about this stuff.

You seem to have skipped the part where China completely locked down large chunks of the country for over 2 months.

My point is that they prepared for the influx of infected very sick people needing life support. They spent a lot of money at doing just that, we tend to be spending a lot of money at bailing companies out (Air NZ), paying salaries, paying peoples mortgages etc.. I would much rather see that money being used to prepare for the possible inevitable. Sick people in their thousands needing immediate life support.

Fred99

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#2446812 26-Mar-2020 08:25

NumPy:

My point is that they prepared for the influx of infected very sick people needing life support. They spent a lot of money at doing just that, we tend to be spending a lot of money at bailing companies out (Air NZ), paying salaries, paying peoples mortgages etc.. I would much rather see that money being used to prepare for the possible inevitable. Sick people in their thousands needing immediate life support.

It's not inevitable that we'd have an uncontained exponential explosion of cases. That's what China prevented.

Of course we're doing what's possible to prepare for an influx of cases. Perhaps you're looking at what happened in China the wrong way. While the total number of cases they had was very high before they flattened the curve, it was affecting only a tiny proportion of the overall population - and yet they threw massive resources from the whole country into stopping it.

Grunta47

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#2446814 26-Mar-2020 08:26

NumPy:

Nobody knows the endgame, do we bankrupt ourselves in the process and still face the inevitable? I am starting to have my doubts that what we are doing is correct. The amount of money we are throwing at this thing seems absurd. Future generations are going to have a huge debt to deal with. The economic consequences to NZ in my opinion are far more dire than the virus itself.

The only sensible way to combat this thing, and continue how we were is to have immunity. This can only be achieved two ways unfortunately. No amount of money/debt is going to solve that. What we need is lots of negative pressure rooms, a couple thousand respirators, and space for the sick. That is what China did, and they got on top of it early. Nobody seems to be talking about this stuff.

All hope is now to see what happens in the next 4 week, by then we should at least have a good idea if we going to have it under control or not. If its out of control, are we are horribly unprepared? For now its a waiting game so we should sit tight.

Agree. Do we bankrupt ourselves and cause massive social upheaval to fix a naturally occurring event? Its a hard question and one that will be debated for many months once this is over. What if a new virus comes out next year, do we hunker down for another 4 weeks minimum?

While Trump is an idiot, he does (finally) make an intersting point....that you cant shut down the economy. Will the cure be worse than the disease? In the USA they don't have the social support structures we have so there is a higher possibility of violent crime and mayhem. If more people die of violent crime due to the lockdown than the virus itself then has it been worth it? That issue shouldn't happen here, as we already have wage subsidies, rent hikes banned, no evictions, etc. We have plans in place to take care of those less fortunate.

Eventually we may have to accept the fact that until a vaccine is readily available we just need to continue with our daily lives and take the risk. After all, Homo Sapiens have been doing this for 2 million years and have still thrived.....it is only in the last 70-100 years that we have been able to beat disease through vaccines.

frankv

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#2446815 26-Mar-2020 08:36

Batman:

i see 3 apocalyptic scenarios, i better be wrong.

1. no cure, so just let the virus do its thing. Thanos finger snap. remember some are completely asymptomatic. we have a new human race of virus-humans.

2. no cure, a few islands lock up where nobody goes in and nobody goes out. (Singapore, Taiwan, ?NZ) forever.

3. a bit like 1, but virus mutates and everybody over 16 dies, civilization reverts back to stone age. 10,000 years later people go - i wonder why there is a tall green woman in new york island. i wonder how they built that. was there a civilization that we didn't know about?

If you're looking for apocalyptic scenarios, there's a never-ending series... e.g.

4. we effectively control covid-19, only to find that the one person really good at predicting orbits has died,and unexpectedly an asteroid hits Earth.

I don't think that focussing on unlikely apocalypses is useful. Likely WORST case is that maybe 5% of the world's population dies. Looking at Hbei province, 3,163 deaths (67,000 cases) out of 58.5M population = .005% death rate. So even 1% isn't likely unless there's complete and utter failure of the public health system.

Fred99

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#2446816 26-Mar-2020 08:36

Grunta47:

Agree. Do we bankrupt ourselves and cause massive social upheaval to fix a naturally occurring event?

If you were starving, you'd do whatever was needed to save yourself and your loved ones. Famines are "naturally occurring events". You're arguing that we shouldn't bother to do what most of the purpose of all human effort should be - to provide comfort and safety for human beings. It's "too expensive" to enforce building codes to stop buildings from collapsing in natural events like earthquakes - but we do it.

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Geektastic

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#2446817 26-Mar-2020 08:37

Handle9:
freitasm:
They just can't find a way back - which is understandable with all the closed down hubs and borders. Unfortunately, New Zealand can't send an aeroplane to every large city in the world, and neither could people travel to these cities - other countries are under their own lockdown too.

People are not stateless. Statelessness is when the state either disappears or revoke someone's citizenship. This is not the case here.

Refusing to admit NZ citizens to NZ (which is what a number of people are suggesting) is rendering them stateless.

Sorry, but it isn’t. It’s temporarily denying them access in the greater good. They remain citizens and NZ continues to exist, ergo they are not stateless, they are temporarily stuck despite having had weeks of warning.

debo

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#2446819 26-Mar-2020 08:40

Fred99:

There's no guarantee that we will have lasting immunity after infection (you don't with other related coronaviruses) and there's no guarantee that there will ever be an effective vaccine (for the same reason).

They have tested immunity on monkeys and it does last. see this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4P91VrfPGw&t=0s

debo

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#2446824 26-Mar-2020 08:50

Batman:

i see 3 apocalyptic scenarios, i better be wrong.

1. no cure, so just let the virus do its thing. Thanos finger snap. remember some are completely asymptomatic. we have a new human race of virus-humans.

2. no cure, a few islands lock up where nobody goes in and nobody goes out. (Singapore, Taiwan, ?NZ) forever.

3. a bit like 1, but virus mutates and everybody over 16 dies, civilization reverts back to stone age. 10,000 years later people go - i wonder why there is a tall green woman in new york island. i wonder how they built that. was there a civilization that we didn't know about?

4. all countries go into lock down. The export of food is stopped. Countries that are reliant on food imports threaten military action if food exports don't continue. WW3.

gchiu

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#2446826 26-Mar-2020 08:51

debo:
Fred99:

There's no guarantee that we will have lasting immunity after infection (you don't with other related coronaviruses) and there's no guarantee that there will ever be an effective vaccine (for the same reason).

They have tested immunity on monkeys and it does last. see this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4P91VrfPGw&t=0s

It should not need to be said but we aren't monkeys.

Worst scenario, we lose our senior politicians!

Fred99

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#2446828 26-Mar-2020 08:52

debo:

Fred99:

There's no guarantee that we will have lasting immunity after infection (you don't with other related coronaviruses) and there's no guarantee that there will ever be an effective vaccine (for the same reason).

They have tested immunity on monkeys and it does last. see this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4P91VrfPGw&t=0s

Yes - I posted a link to the (pre-publication) paper somewhere many pages above in this thread.

It does last, but that gives no indication of how long it lasts - and how long it lasts is the critical thing.

With the study on monkeys - they re-infected them basically as soon as they recovered from infection. All that study suggests is that evidence that some presumed cases of humans becoming "reinfected" may have been more likely cases where the infected humans had never recovered fully - even if they tested negative using the rRT-PCR tests which aren't conclusive (false negatives).

gchiu

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#2446829 26-Mar-2020 08:53

debo:
Batman:

i see 3 apocalyptic scenarios, i better be wrong.

1. no cure, so just let the virus do its thing. Thanos finger snap. remember some are completely asymptomatic. we have a new human race of virus-humans.

2. no cure, a few islands lock up where nobody goes in and nobody goes out. (Singapore, Taiwan, ?NZ) forever.

3. a bit like 1, but virus mutates and everybody over 16 dies, civilization reverts back to stone age. 10,000 years later people go - i wonder why there is a tall green woman in new york island. i wonder how they built that. was there a civilization that we didn't know about?

4. all countries go into lock down. The export of food is stopped. Countries that are reliant on food imports threaten military action if food exports don't continue. WW3.

One of the American aircraft carrier have got infected sailors. Hard to have WW3 when a bayonet charge means keeping 2 m separation distance according to Geneva convention.

dogstar001

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#2446831 26-Mar-2020 08:55

I'm also confused. Are we trying to flatten the curve or eliminate the virus? Has the PM or Bloomfield clarified this?

gchiu

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#2446832 26-Mar-2020 08:56

Presumably if they can find a boat they can paddle this way and Australia will assist them straight to Christmas Island.

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