Harry

The North Korean people not even know the rest of the world has gone to shit over this... Would be an interesting case study or what the reality is there and what the government actually do about it.

How does that whole process work mate? Is there anything special about the flight you go on? Like a special government plane or small chartered plane? Or is there a number of people all looking to make the same trip?

My question is how locked down are they? We are at stage 2 of a system where stage 4 is Italy level lockdown. We have 10 deaths and 2000 cases. Stage 2 is basically all congregating shops and gatherings shut down but normal stores still open and schools still running. America now have 70k and 1k deaths. Are major cities at that stage 4 point?

From what I hear they are better at testing, but with the density and vertical living that's so common in NY they were always going to grow faster than other places.

I just don't recall us angling to create an economic depression rather than let the virus get a run on. The morbidity rate in Germany of 0.4% has me thinking. They must have a much better handle on the true size of their outbreak but even that figure should be an upper bound.

Did we track the swine flu this obsessively? At what point did we realise the morbidity rate of that was super low?

I have to disagree mate. I'm not being pedantic but I honestly think and am pretty certain in saying it that trump is psychologically incapable of accepting responsibility for any error that he has ever made. Mistakes are the fault of others. Success is because of him. He is the most psychologically defective leader of any western country in a generation or more. You say he corrects course but I say erratic swings of position that are totally reactionary. This thing was a hoax to hurt him politically. It was then a pandemic that he was the first person to diagnose. Now it's going to be solved by Easter or people will just have to die because he can't handle the accountability of what's happened to the markets.

Is this suggesting he will lift the social distancing restrictions at Easter?

Can you send me the link to when trump admitted he fucked up?

Google search Chinese wet markets.

It's probably too early to start the conversation on that dataset. I'm sure any model of this outbreak would show countries of lower GDP are generally less mobile and therefore have lower numbers at this point.

I would still close the schools in the same position myself by the way, but I don't see their line of thinking as totally incorrect. That was my point. It smelled like total BS to me up front (and I have taken my son out of kinder), but when I actually looked into it that argument didn't collapse the way I expected.

Well last I heard it killed about 20% of those aged 70-79 whereas basically does not appear to cause major problems for children.

An asymptomatic child would be a super carrier because in most places they'd be undetected. However the data from south Korea appears to suggest that she group is a very minute proportion of the overall carrier's, and if you normalised those carrier numbers against that age groups overall share of the population it would seem to suggest they are significantly less likely to be infected (and thus be carriers) than those in other age groups.

I'm not agreeing with them but I would say that some times hard decisions need to be made when it is easier to take the nicer response. I'd expect all leaders of all countries are reviewing some pretty decent situational analysis models, outlining different possible future states 18 months from now when a vaccine is finally developed. Perhaps by that point the nation that just kept calm and carried on and let the virus rip through in three brutal months is faring better than the nation that locked all it's people away for the majority of 18 months. Perhaps the economy is better, and back on the way up, when the other nation has turned its entire populace agoraphobic, and suffers a prolonged economic depression, and entrained low productivity that takes a decade to fix and is ultimately far more destructive... I don't know, but this could be a picture of the truth your not being told, and the reasons why those in power are doing what they are....

Hey mate, what's your specific concern? I've been pondering the schools issue since I saw the conference and am just unsure. Initially I was proud of our premier for sticking to his guns (Victoria/Melbourne being the only one to close its schools early). There's obviously been a whole table of others in the cabinet meeting trying to get him to fall in line but he's held firm. I can only respect that tbh. But that decision will increase the pressure on every other premier and the PM so it's sure to have made him unpopular. Since watching that unfold I've done some reading and felt that there could be merit to the argument around kids being low incidence of corona. See the age distribution of corona cases in South Korea below. Other than Germany its the only country who's data I trust because they both have capacity for tests and are testing everyone not just the people who are coming into hospital. I can't find the data for age distribution of Germany's corona cases, but the South Korea example does seem to make a case that day care and schools are lower risk environments on average than places with dense congregations of adults.

That's really sad mate but as you say better now than in a month when things are worse. That will be a whole other level of devastating.

Some comic relief for this serious thread.

The same journalist asked Mike pence the same question later in the press conference. Listen to his answer.

They're not doing enough to contain it? Isn't every single person in the country locked inside their house? What more could be done to contain it than that? Shooting the afflicted?

I am really starting to believe that they are deliberately letting the virus spread to a pretty unbearable point. I can only guess it leads to a less prolonged situation, i.e that they don't need to hide their entire nation indoors for 18 months, but at the same time they can't announce that as their plan.

George Conway may be a knob but he really makes me laugh.