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[TamerVirus]

Trump's Euro travel ban has been extended to the UK and Ireland

[andrea]

I guess UK's plan of "just let everyone be infected" wasn't considered reassuring.

[Jopax]

Capitalism ho!

It's quite fascinating how profit seeking can override any basic decency humans have.

[dragdeler]

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[Cthulhu]

Price gouging is just correcting supply-demand discrepancies.  If they charge more than the market can bear even amid the distortions, well, a lead pipe is an economic instrument too.

It all balances out.

[mko]

Price gouging is just correcting supply-demand discrepancies.  If they charge more than the market can bear even amid the distortions, well, a lead pipe is an economic instrument too.

It all balances out.

(1) price gougers, especially during panic, often make situation worse
(2) short-term total profit is not the most important, even in case of caring only about economy preventing needless deaths is more proftiable

----

It works as you describe only in cases of price-gougers correctly identifying supply-demand discrepancies and not making the worse.

It is typical that they buy too many items, fail to sell them all, with lower number of items reaching consumers (and in case of life saving items it causes death).

It is typical that their buying triggers panic, making markets less effective.

They also disrupt supply chains. In many cases price gougers intentionally create panic.

[ChairmanPoo]

We all underestimated this. And I´m guilty too. In my defense I believed that the mass rallies would be cancelled and it wouldn´t spread so much.

But I´m kidding myself. In truth there were a lot of documents circulating among my peers, which ended up getting back to me. Information leaflets about coronavirus that were downplaying the real risk by a lot. A couple of weeks ago the health emergency department was saying that we´d have a handful of cases at most. I believed them. Many of us believed them. Because we were too damn used to taking the communiques from the ministry at face value, because this is so out of normal that it was easier to believe this, and because the lie contains enough of a nugget of truth to be believeable (for most people it will indeed be a flu. THe problem is that it spreads so rapidly that the relatively low percentage of very sick people overwhelms and crashes healthcare systems).

Many people still don´t believe this. I posted some projections in a medical forum which show that the way we are going Spain is going to fare worse than Italy very soon. I was booed. Way too many people still don´t see how bad this is going to be.


I don´t know what is going to happen, either here at a societal level or to me personally. Maybe this week´s measures will be effective early on or maybe not (I´m leaning on no because people were lukewarm, and because Italy managed to slow the spread but they´re still reeling during seven days of strict quarantine).

[Cthulhu]

It works as you describe only in cases of price-gougers correctly identifying supply-demand discrepancies and not making the worse.

It is typical that they buy too many items, fail to sell them all, with lower number of items reaching consumers (and in case of life saving items it causes death).

It is typical that their buying triggers panic, making markets less effective.

They also disrupt supply chains. In many cases price gougers intentionally create panic.

That's what the lead pipe is for.

I'm suspicious of this "flattening the curve" thing that's going around.  You'll notice they never put numbers on their little graphs they post. 300 million people in the US, assuming 10% get infected over 9 months (which seems low), that's 30 million infections, 6 million needing at least short hospital trips, and 1.5 million needing intensive care or they'll die.  The US has like 180,000 or so ventilators, and the people on them are going to be on them for at least two weeks, probably close to four.  Even assuming the rate of infection is smooth and not a bell curve, that's basically the entire US ventilator capacity permanently locked up for the entire 9 months.  No wiggle room whatsoever.

How flat does the curve need to be?  Are we gonna be social distancing and keeping everyone home from school and work for the next year?  Longer?

[ChairmanPoo]

I think everyone is lying. A lot. About many things. Or rather we're getting partial truths.

[mko]

I'm suspicious of this "flattening the curve" thing that's going around.  You'll notice they never put numbers on their little graphs they post. 300 million people in the US, assuming 10% get infected over 9 months (which seems low), that's 30 million infections, 6 million needing at least short hospital trips, and 1.5 million needing intensive care or they'll die.  The US has like 180,000 or so ventilators, and the people on them are going to be on them for at least two weeks, probably close to four.  Even assuming the rate of infection is smooth and not a bell curve, that's basically the entire US ventilator capacity permanently locked up for the entire 9 months.  No wiggle room whatsoever.

How flat does the curve need to be?  Are we gonna be social distancing and keeping everyone home from school and work for the next year?  Longer?

Flattening the curve is helpful, but it seems that we are unlikely to avoid overload. Maybe South Korea and Singapore (maybe). We are going to look at "hospitals overloaded, N thousands die due to missing equipment and missing doctors" vs "hospitals overloaded but not so badly, M thousands die due to missing equipment and missing doctors".

Number of extra deaths with flattened curve will be lower, but not 0. Note also that typical "flatten the curve" images show 0 usage before crisis. This is true, but in a quite gruesome form.

Assuming hospital overload badly it means that many treatments will be skipped or postponed. You were supposed to have operation? Now it is later, hopefully you will survive. Car crash, victim needs team of 20 medics for operation? This 20 people are more needed to treat Covid19, this way they will save 10 people, not 1. Car crash victim is not operated and dies.

Official triage instructions for Italy were including "It may become necessary to establish an age limit for access to intensive care." type of recommendations (not sure how often it reached this point) - see https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/who-gets-hospital-bed/607807/

[TamerVirus]

Word is that Spain and France are going into lockdown like Italy.
Is that true, CharimanPoo?

[Iduno]

Flattening the curve is helpful, but it seems that we are unlikely to avoid overload. Maybe South Korea and Singapore (maybe). We are going to look at "hospitals overloaded, N thousands die due to missing equipment and missing doctors" vs "hospitals overloaded but not so badly, M thousands die due to missing equipment and missing doctors".

Number of extra deaths with flattened curve will be lower, but not 0. Note also that typical "flatten the curve" images show 0 usage before crisis. This is true, but in a quite gruesome form.

Assuming hospital overload badly it means that many treatments will be skipped or postponed. You were supposed to have operation? Now it is later, hopefully you will survive. Car crash, victim needs team of 20 medics for operation? This 20 people are more needed to treat Covid19, this way they will save 10 people, not 1. Car crash victim is not operated and dies.

Official triage instructions for Italy were including "It may become necessary to establish an age limit for access to intensive care." type of recommendations (not sure how often it reached this point) - see https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/who-gets-hospital-bed/607807/

What they should have is two different networks of hospitals, one for people who are sick and another for people who aren't

[Frumple]

I think everyone is lying. A lot. About many things. Or rather we're getting partial truths.

I mean, probably a lot of that is less lying than "don't actually know". Some of that don't know seems to be goddamn intentional (See the US or the UK), but fog of war, so to speak -- incomplete information, communication inefficiencies, and so on -- could easily explain a lot of the stuff we've been seeing, without having to involve dishonesty or malice.

... that said, we also have pathological liars as several countries' heads of state right now, so there's probably plenty of lies going around, too. Eh.

[ChairmanPoo]

Word is that Spain and France are going into lockdown like Italy.
Is that true, CharimanPoo?

Half and half

That is: you can´t move between the different regions and you´re supposed to stay at home except for work, buying food, or getting money out of the bank.  We´ll see how this shapes up.

´
I think we´re probably going to be worse off than Italy, soon.  And I think the goverment and the media are trying to cover this up. They´re playing the numbers as if we started at the same time, when for practical intents and purposes, the pandemic hit the Spanish mainland much later than Italy.

In fact if you go for similar numbers of cases in one and the other case, which I did, we have an eleven-day delay with Italy (they had 229 cases on the 24th of February, we had 228 on the 4th of March). If you go forward from those dates Spain is infecting up waaaaay faster than Italy. Probably because we did things as bad as Italy, and some far worse.

I think my friend was possibly partially right though. Population density is lower in the periphery. Most of the cases are in Madrid and Barcelona, with a moderate size cluster in the southern Basque Country. I think *hope* that the periphery will stay more or less uninfested. Or at least better controlled.

And I´m still very unsure as to what is going to happen here in general, and to myself in particular. I´ll continue with my paperwork and we´ll see what happens.

[ChairmanPoo]

BTW: two things

Many people still don´t believe this. I posted some projections in a medical forum which show that the way we are going Spain is going to fare worse than Italy very soon. I was booed. Way too many people still don´t see how bad this is going to be.

I made enough of a ruckus for the issue to come up in national media. They admitted that indeed, we´re doing worse than Italy. That´s something I guess.



On another subject: is anybody here knowledgeable about filter standards? I´m considering acquiring some equipment myself, and I´d like some feedback. I´m considering something more serious than standard disposable hepa masks too.