Generic Virus Thread

[chrisp65]

3 minutes ago, tonyh29 said:

That’s about toxic fumes from the fuel getting  into the air and seems to be Unite v EASA , who the cleaner than your office air line comes from , ( the same EASA that the Brexit thread holds up as all that is good and holy in the aviation world  )

 

Yeah, the fumes, that’s it. Plus viruses are also too small for HEPA filters.

I think we’re all agreed aircraft air isn’t really that great.

[HanoiVillan]

My personal experience is that I usually develop a cold suspiciously soon after taking long flights, but I appreciate that's nothing more than uninformed anecdote.

[Vive_La_Villa]

1 hour ago, StefanAVFC said:

Why the hell are football matches still happening in the UK? Why are any big events still happening?

Complete madness

With 3k fans flying in from Madrid where coronavirus has hit hard. It’s ridiculous.

[maqroll]

Trump to declare a "National Disaster" tonight. Expert on CNN says he expects *at a minimum* that 170 million Americans will be infected.

This is looking bad.

[HanoiVillan]

One thing that's very annoying about the Johns Hopkins dashboard is that clearly behind the scenes the standard tedious battles about the names for places are carrying on as normal. Just over the last few days, Taiwan has gone from 'Taiwan' to 'Taipei and environs' (ha!) to ''Taiwan (Other)'', and now to 'Taiwan*'.

[tonyh29]

10 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

 

Yeah, the fumes, that’s it. Plus viruses are also too small for HEPA filters.

I think we’re all agreed aircraft air isn’t really that great.

HEPA filters in planes capture 99.9% of particles (bacteria, fungi, and larger viruses or virus clumps) 0.1–0.3 micrometers in diameter

Corona virus is I believe .01 so a plane filter will most likely stop it , your average hone purifier probably not

so whilst you can’t legislate for someone with it sneezing directly on you , you won’t be catching it through the plane filter 

 

Edited March 12, 2020 by tonyh29

[LakotaDakota]

remember when people thought SARS & MERS were bad at the time? Crazy how this has spread so much compared to what were both very similar coronaviruses that barely managed to infect 10,000 between them

[chrisp65]

12 minutes ago, tonyh29 said:

HEPA filters in planes capture 99.9% of particles (bacteria, fungi, and larger viruses or virus clumps) 0.1–0.3 micrometers in diameter

Corona virus is I believe .01 so a plane filter will most likely stop it , your average hone purifier probably not

so whilst you can’t legislate for someone with it sneezing directly on you , you won’t be catching it through the plane filter 

 

Yep, looks like you’re right.

 

[KentVillan]

I was initially on board with the govt on this, but I wonder if it's going to turn out that some very dubious "behavioural science" / "social psychology" has underpinned part of our response.

The whole concept of "going too early" seems to originate from some "modelling" they've done of public compliance with govt guidelines. But how on earth can you model compliance based on empirical findings in a crisis of this scale when there has been no previous medical crisis of this scale in living memory? What's the empirical evidence base? I'd love to see at the end of it all where this idea of "keeping the powder dry" has emerged from, and what evidence is informing it.

It's one thing saying people don't normally comply with guidelines on food hygiene or road safety or whatever. It's another thing saying the population will ignore guidelines when faced with clear evidence of an immediate threat. The former is totally plausible. The latter just seems to be resigning yourselves to defeat because a peer-reviewed psychology paper says you can't do it. (I hope I'm wrong.)

The Chief Scientific Officer and Chief Medical Officer have both trotted it out, as has David Halpern (Behavioural Unit), as have various govt ministers. It just has that ring of classic groupthink. People who've been sitting together in a room for too long debating what to do. They've all settled on this idea, and everyone else in the world can see that it's madness. (Fair play, I will eat humble pie if they turn out to have pulled a blinder here...)

The Japanese have gone for the complete opposite approach: fire all your weapons at once, and hold down the trigger, and it appears to have worked. (Although there is talk of this second peak if you go too early, but surely that's still better than one massive peak that completely overwhelms capacity?)

 

 

[AndyM3000]

Looks like we are entering the next phase. Football likely to be behind closed doors this weekend.

[StefanAVFC]

Still holding out hope that our flights are cancelled by Sunday so we can reschedule or get a refund 

[HanoiVillan]

2 minutes ago, KentVillan said:

I was initially on board with the govt on this, but I wonder if it's going to turn out that some very dubious "behavioural science" / "social psychology" has underpinned part of our response.

The whole concept of "going too early" seems to originate from some "modelling" they've done of public compliance with govt guidelines. But how on earth can you model compliance based on empirical findings in a crisis of this scale when there has been no previous medical crisis of this scale in living memory? What's the empirical evidence base? I'd love to see at the end of it all where this idea of "keeping the powder dry" has emerged from, and what evidence is informing it.

It's one thing saying people don't normally comply with guidelines on food hygiene or road safety or whatever. It's another thing saying the population will ignore guidelines when faced with clear evidence of an immediate threat. The former is totally plausible. The latter just seems to be resigning yourselves to defeat because a peer-reviewed psychology paper says you can't do it. (I hope I'm wrong.)

The Chief Scientific Officer and Chief Medical Officer have both trotted it out, as has David Halpern (Behavioural Unit), as have various govt ministers. It just has that ring of classic groupthink. People who've been sitting together in a room for too long debating what to do. They've all settled on this idea, and everyone else in the world can see that it's madness. (Fair play, I will eat humble pie if they turn out to have pulled a blinder here...)

The Japanese have gone for the complete opposite approach: fire all your weapons at once, and hold down the trigger, and it appears to have worked. (Although there is talk of this second peak if you go too early, but surely that's still better than one massive peak that completely overwhelms capacity?)

I wouldn't go so far as to say I was 'on board', but while I still don't believe that there's a specific plan to overwhelm the health system, I am now pretty convinced that your post here is correct, and that their constant touting of 'we'll be guided by the science' is covering up some pretty 'interesting' behavioural science for which the evidence must be quite weak. Has anyone provided a citation yet for 'if we go to social distancing too soon, people will get bored and stop complying'?

 

[StefanAVFC]

Panic buying has moved to Poland. We aren't that hit yet but everything is closed, everyone is working from home and the land borders have 'sanitary checks'. We are going down south to an isolated house for our holiday and stocking up on some essentials in case we have to fully isolate.

Still no real need to panic. Just be sensible.

[KentVillan]

1 minute ago, HanoiVillan said:

I wouldn't go so far as to say I was 'on board', but while I still don't believe that there's a specific plan to overwhelm the health system, I am now pretty convinced that your post here is correct, and that their constant touting of 'we'll be guided by the science' is covering up some pretty 'interesting' behavioural science for which the evidence must be quite weak. Has anyone provided a citation yet for 'if we go to social distancing too soon, people will get bored and stop complying'?

 

Yeah by "on board" I just meant it looked like we had good people (Chris Whitty, etc.) in charge. But it's increasingly dawning on me that this has involved a lot of socio-political judgments that are beyond the realms of what someone like Chris Whitty can be expected to lead on.

I also don't think there's a conscious plan to blitz through this - more likely to be cockup rather than conspiracy.

But I've always been a big fan of this book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Blunders-Our-Governments-Anthony-King/dp/1780742665

Quote

blunder/ bl nd (r)/, n., A gross mistake; an error due to stupidity or carelessness.

There are a handful of cock-ups that we remember all too well, from the poll tax to the Millennium Dome. However, the list is longer than most of us realize and it s growing. With unrivalled political savvy and a keen sense of irony, distinguished political scientists Anthony King and Ivor Crewe open our eyes to the worst government horror stories and explain why the British political system is quite so prone to appalling mistakes. You will discover why:

• The government wasted up to £20 billion pounds in a failed scheme to update London s Underground system.
• Tens of thousands of single mothers were left in poverty without financial support from absent fathers.
• Tony Blair committed the NHS to the biggest civilian IT project the world has ever seen, despite knowing next to nothing about computing.
• The Assets Recovery Agency cost far more to run than it ever clawed back from the proceeds of organised crime.
• The Coalition government is at least as blunder-prone as any of its predecessors.

  Groupthink, constantly rotating ministers and a weak parliament all contribute to wasted billions and illogical policy. But, it doesn t have to be this way. Informed by years of research and interviews with senior cabinet ministers and civil servants, this razor-sharp diagnosis of flawed government is required reading for every UK citizen. With its spirited prescriptions for more fool-proof policymaking, it will prove to be one of the most important political books of the decade.

And I see so many signs of the same mistakes here, because this crisis is a test not just of epidemiology, but also of good judgment and political incentives.

The Behavioural Insights ("Nudge Unit") people are incentivised to offer "clever" (i.e. counter-intuitive) advice because it makes them look useful. I'm just so worried that that's exactly what's happened here. We've tried to cook up a uniquely British approach that showcases our contrarian brilliance.

And knowing how policy advice percolates around Westminster and Whitehall, it's not that much of a reach that it would just become the received wisdom, including among an expert epidemiologist like Chris Whitty - precisely because it is such an unprecedented situation, that empirical evidence has gone out of the window, and he is having to take some of this on trust (as well as possibly trying to find compromise positions with politicians who want to keep the economy active).

Just suspicions on my part, but feels plausible given how things have played out.

[HanoiVillan]

6 minutes ago, KentVillan said:

The Behavioural Insights ("Nudge Unit") people are incentivised to offer "clever" (i.e. counter-intuitive) advice because it makes them look useful. I'm just so worried that that's exactly what's happened here. We've tried to cook up a uniquely British approach that showcases our contrarian brilliance.

The fact that the 'Nudge Unit' was privatised some time ago might be contributing to this as well, trying to show other governments our contrarian ideas in the hope to drum up some business later.

What doesn't seem to be happening very much, though, is actual 'nudging'. Pressure to wash our hands mostly seems to be social pressure we are applying to each other, rather than the result of incentives from above.

[StefanAVFC]

All travel to US from Europe (apart from UK) suspended

[villarule123]

Tom Hanks tested positive 

[KentVillan]

17 minutes ago, StefanAVFC said:

All travel to US from Europe (apart from UK) suspended

Would love to know the rationale behind making an exception of the UK.

[StefanAVFC]

Yep

Good thread there

Maybe golf resort in Scotland is a factor?

[KentVillan]

6 minutes ago, villarule123 said:

Tom Hanks tested positive 

@Xela are Deadpool bonus points available for avatars? Obviously I know in your case that wouldn't good.