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2020-05-10 -Signs, Portents, and the Weather-
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Matt Ridley: We know everything — and nothing — about Covid
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Long, full of useful information. Herewith a taste:
[Spectator] It is data, not modeling, that we need now.
We know everything about Sars-CoV-2 and nothing about it. We can read every one of the (on average) 29,903 letters in its genome and know exactly how its 15 genes are transcribed into instructions to make which proteins. But we cannot figure out how it is spreading in enough detail to tell which parts of the lockdown of society are necessary and which are futile. Several months into the crisis we are still groping through a fog of ignorance and making mistakes. There is no such thing as ‘the science’.
This is not surprising or shameful; ignorance is the natural state of things. Every new disease is different and its epidemiology becomes clear only gradually and in retrospect. Is COVID-19 transmitted mainly by breath or by touching? Do children pass it on without getting sick? Why is it so much worse in Britain than Japan? Why are obese people especially at risk? How many people have had it? Are ventilators useless after all? Why is it not exploding in India and Africa? Will there be a second wave? We do not begin to have answers to these questions.
As a result, we don’t really know what works. It is possible that washing your hands, not shaking hands with others, not gathering in large crowds, and wearing a face mask in public, but no more than this, might have been enough, as Sweden seems to suggest. Forcibly shutting schools and stores and aggressively policing sunbathers in parks may have added little in terms of reducing the rate of spread.
Yet it is not obvious why testing would make a difference, especially to the death rate. Testing does not cure the disease. Germany’s strange achievement of a consistently low case fatality rate seems baffling — until you think through where most early cases were found: in hospitals. By doing a lot more testing, countries like Germany might have partly kept the virus from spreading within the healthcare system. Germany, Japan and Hong Kong had different and more effective protocols in place from day one to prevent the virus spreading within care homes and hospitals.
There is one vital fact that emerges from the fog. Countries that did a lot of testing from the start have fared much better than countries that did little testing. This is true not just of many Asian countries, such as South Korea (though Japan is an exception), but within Europe too. Up to the middle of last month, Iceland, Lithuania, Estonia and Germany had done many more tests per million people and recorded many fewer deaths per million people than Belgium, Britain, Italy and Sweden. As Max Roser of the website Our World In Data puts it: ‘The countries with the highest death rates got there by having the lowest testing rates.’
The horrible truth is that it now looks like in many of the early cases, the disease was probably caught in hospitals and doctors’ surgeries. That is where the virus kept returning, in the lungs of sick people, and that is where the next person often caught it, including plenty of healthcare workers. Many of these may not have realized they had it, or thought they had a mild cold. They then gave it to yet more elderly patients who were in hospital for other reasons, some of whom were sent back to care homes when the National Health Service made space on the wards for the expected wave of coronavirus patients.
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Posted by trailing wife 2020-05-10 00:00||
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Posted by g(r)omgoru 2020-05-10 09:33||
2020-05-10 09:33||
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Posted by M. Murcek 2020-05-10 10:57||
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Posted by Lex 2020-05-10 11:19||
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Posted by Clem 2020-05-10 11:35||
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Posted by Frank G 2020-05-10 11:40||
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Posted by Lex 2020-05-10 11:42||
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Posted by Clem 2020-05-10 12:31||
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Posted by Frank G 2020-05-10 12:33||
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Posted by Clem 2020-05-10 12:36||
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Posted by Lex 2020-05-10 14:12||
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Posted by Bobby 2020-05-10 16:01||
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12:59 Skidmark
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09:52 trailing wife
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