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Yup. The alternative is, 2 week quarantine before you fly, but that might have issues.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
Yup. The alternative is, 2 week quarantine before you fly, but that might have issues.

In theory its the more sensible approach if you can be held somewhere like a hotel on site at the airport or next to it. So that you don't undo all the good work by then getting infected travelling to the airport. It also means that the plane should, in theory, have no infected people on board and thus even on a long flight you should be safe from infection.

2 Weeks at the arrival location is, in a way, bit like closing the gate after the horse has bolted because it means that if one person on the plane did have it; chances are the rest now have it as well. So instead of 1 infected person in the source country, you've got 100 or more - some of which will be flight crew - in the destination country instead. So now they've got a medical problem and they are not "home". This might be a huge issue for some more developing countries that might not have the best medical care on hand. Suddenly there's calls for people to be flown back home.

Either way though 2 weeks in isolation prior or following travel at BOTH ends of the travel means a solid month doing nothing to make one outgoing and return trip. That excludes any time spent on the actual trip itself. In the modern world that's a vast chunk of time and very few people can afford a month's holiday or a months business costs for anything but the most essential of travel.

yeah thats the issue, whos going to pay for it

 Future War Cultist wrote:
I wish I traveled more often in the past.

Now imagine that if you're currently in a long distance relationship..

For those still on the fence, these are 2 peer reviewed medical journal articles which explain the basis for lockdowns and social distancing- or as they're technically referred to, nonpharmaceutical interventions to impact pandemics. You'll notice they're both from 2006 or 2007. They are based on studies of what worked, and what didn't from pandemic outbreaks starting at the 1918 influenza (Spanish flu).

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/208354

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3291415/

Both conclude that the severity of pandemics can be greatly reduced by early and sustained application of multiple interventions- in other words, the earlier you can get these measures into place and the more measures are there, the better outcomes for the population.

Sqorgar, while we don't have a lot of evidence for what works on the Coronavirus, we have over a century of well documented responses to pandemics that support social distancing, masks, and even closing schools and public places.

What differs about it, and what required this mass shutdown and isolation is ironically how mildly it impacts most people. Interventions work well if you self quarantine for 2 weeks at first sign of symptoms, with a traditional illness. That worked with SARS, influenza, everything we've dealt with before- this one though does have a very high rate of asymptomatic infection. That makes it impossible to isolate your infectious people without isolating everyone until you can identify the people who are infected but asymptomatic.

We need at the least some sort of contact tracing protocol in place before you can safely relax the restrictions, and ideally readily available, rapid testing.

Historically speaking, social isolation measures do save lives, and we have a century worth of data and study by epidemiologists to back it up, as well as the dramatic differences between the death rates in countries that did not lock down or restrict early in this pandemic.

The top countries by death and cases are USA, Spain, Italy, UK, and Russia. The USA bungled their response and delayed it, Spain and Italy did the same, the UK lost that critical first response by embracing the herd immunity approach, and Russia, well.... Russia throws doctors who dissent out of windows. The measures work, and they reduce deaths. Doing more of them early and for a longer time results in more reduction of deaths, and frankly a shorter emergency period.

The article Sqorgar linked is not a study. Its an opinion piece, by someone who as far as I can tell is not qualified on the subject, conjuring with numbers in a very suspect way to what seems to be a pre made conclusion. For example, taking the date of lockdown start for Spain without acknowledging that the official lockdown only began a week after multiple measures had already been taken. Same for France. These measures ramped up into a lockdown, it didn't go from 0 to 100 on the official lockdown date.

Furthermore, these graphs seem outdated. Take the Lombardy one, newer graphs seem to show the peak actually around the period Sqorgar's article claims the lockdown effect (which is flawed in itself, because the median time for over 70 is about two weeks, not over three and they are the majority of deaths, when looking at age/death relation, the spike timing of the lockdown actually makes sense, because 80% of Italy's death are over 70 years old so the average of Sqorgar's article doesn't apply for 4/5ths of deaths, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jmv.25689?af=R )should not yet kick in, but the article itself has older graphs with an earlier expected peak than actually occurred. Compare figure 6 Lombardy from this article, the peak is actually spot on if you take two weeks into account rather than the predicted estimate Sqorgar's article works with of 3 to almost 3.5 weeks, age is a massive factor in the earlier spike unless you only going of the average time, which is what Sqorgar's article does:

https://voxeu.org/article/covid-19-italy-analysis-death-registry-data

Germany after lifting the lockdown seems to experience a rise in infection. The R rate being at 1.1 now, but more information might be needed:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52604676

Leaked UK advice coming tonight does away with instruction to stick within your own household and simply advises you to stay at home as much as possible and to limit contact with others.

I'm betting on A LOT of parties next weekend, and some very busy national parks and beaches (weather permitting).

My neighbour heard the rumours that lockdown was going to be modified on Sunday (clearly leaked to the media in advance of Boris Johnsons speech later today) and annoyingly widely speculated on in the media, especially the news papers

and translated that into a large backgarden party on Saturday for various family and friends with no social distancing at all and people coming in and out of the house all afternoon

it depressed the hell out of me as I fear that's being repeated all around the country (and reports from Londons parks confirms it is)

I fear a significant uptick in cases in a week or twos time, and deaths in a month and am just hoping these aren't high enough for everything to end up tightened up again

So I guess FL. reopened last Monday. Friday we went out for a few things. At Walmart we got in with no issue and people were hit or miss on the masks but it did seem like people were giving each other a lot of space. We tried to follow the marked directions but found a lot of people doing their own thing. I didn't see it as a problem as the foot tragic was so light. Sadly they were out of craft paint but almost all of the rest of the store was open, didn't see if the garden center as open or not we were trying to stick to a list and get in and out and be on our way.
The restaurant we had chosen was still only doing carry out but they are very strict about it and keep the door locked until they are ready to bring out bags of food. I like how they are doing it. I know they want to reopen and follow them on FB and know they are dealing as best they can.
The feed store was different. we placed the order online and parked and waited when we got there ect. they had a lot of foot traffic in and out and not very many people were wearing masks. Their store is so much smaller than the huge Walmart building so it compounds the exposure to other people. I can imagine a lot of them were thinking, I'll just be in and out but probably neglected to realize with a reopening comes a larger number of other people. Or they just don't care, who can say.
I tried the liquor store online site to place an order but decided to go in to pick it up. They had masks on and a set of face shields set up on the counters at the registers. Walmart and out local grocery store had the same as well.
We're homebodies mostly and in a rural area. I do think a reopen and an encouragement to not really go out is a step in the right direction but it'll be difficult for areas with a higher population. So far for this whole lockdown I've still been able to do everything I have needed or wanted to do including carry out from restaurants. A day or two ago our county has If I remember 120 or 121 cases and only 2 deaths so far.
My largest complaint I guess, would be the way some places have decided what is or is not essential items in stores. I read that seeds were deemed not essential in some places as declared by their governments. And yet you could still order them on line. I just think more places should have and should operate a stronger online component to their business. I was glad to see the FLGS set up a site of their own. I really hope it helps keep them alive. A comic shop I follow on FB in Olympia Washington also seems to be using social media and I think a new website to carry on. I'm really hoping more businesses let people work from home as applicable. I mean, hey if it's good for the environment maybe they can get a tax credit or something.
I guess it's not all gloom and doom out there, ymmv.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
A lot of the income is from ticket sales. How will that be replaced?

I'm a basketball fan, and recently read that 40% of revenue is from in-person attendance. That's crazy! I've only ever been to one professional game of it and found I liked the broadcast better anyway . Hopefully they do recoup some of that from extra TV/online viewership...

Regarding travel, my wife had a professional training in europe moved from May to October. Hopefully that's before a second surge, if there is one...

 RiTides wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
A lot of the income is from ticket sales. How will that be replaced?

I'm a basketball fan, and recently read that 40% of revenue is from in-person attendance. That's crazy! I've only ever been to one professional game of it and found I liked the broadcast better anyway . Hopefully they do recoup some of that from extra TV/online viewership...

Regarding travel, my wife had a professional training in europe moved from May to October. Hopefully that's before a second surge, if there is one...

That's a colossal percentage of revenue for a major team compared to the big global sports. Are tickets astronomically expensive?

 RiTides wrote:
I guess I'll agree to disagree - your #1 point / assumption (that lockdowns don't make "a lick of difference") has been, in my view, proven false both in this thread and in general. If our starting points are that different, we can't really effectively discuss much beyond that...

I haven’t read a single article or paper that has evidence that the lockdowns have worked, or how well they’ve worked. Heck, if you search for “have lockdowns worked”, you’ll primarily find articles saying it has not, and a few that assert that it has without explanation or data. But I’m always open to counter arguments, so if you have a link to something empirical, I’d love to read it.

nfe wrote:

 RiTides wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
A lot of the income is from ticket sales. How will that be replaced?

I'm a basketball fan, and recently read that 40% of revenue is from in-person attendance. That's crazy! I've only ever been to one professional game of it and found I liked the broadcast better anyway . Hopefully they do recoup some of that from extra TV/online viewership...

Regarding travel, my wife had a professional training in europe moved from May to October. Hopefully that's before a second surge, if there is one...

That's a colossal percentage of revenue for a major team compared to the big global sports. Are tickets astronomically expensive?

NBA ticket sales make up about 22% of annual revenue each year. The bulk of revenue for major league sports (in the US) comes from multi billion dollar tv deals. Live sports are one of the few remaining types of programming that consistently gets high viewership.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/193410/percentage-of-ticketing-revenue-in-the-nba-since-2006/

 Sqorgar wrote:

 RiTides wrote:
I guess I'll agree to disagree - your #1 point / assumption (that lockdowns don't make "a lick of difference") has been, in my view, proven false both in this thread and in general. If our starting points are that different, we can't really effectively discuss much beyond that...

I haven’t read a single article or paper that has evidence that the lockdowns have worked, or how well they’ve worked. Heck, if you search for “have lockdowns worked”, you’ll primarily find articles saying it has not, and a few that assert that it has without explanation or data. But I’m always open to counter arguments, so if you have a link to something empirical, I’d love to read it.

he let's ignore that sweden vs denmark comparison, or South korea, or New zealand which have more or less squashed it.

yeah,

Prestor Jon - Here's the link where I got the 40% revenue number from. Adam Silver (the NBA commissioner) just said this on a call with all NBA players this week:

Silver said that 40% of the league's revenue comes from money built around game nights in arenas.

https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/29152271/adam-silver-preps-nba-players-challenges-ahead

It says "money built around game nights", so that probably adds concessions and... not sure what else to ticket sales alone. But yeah, I had not expected it to be that high...

 Sqorgar wrote:

 RiTides wrote:
I guess I'll agree to disagree - your #1 point / assumption (that lockdowns don't make "a lick of difference") has been, in my view, proven false both in this thread and in general. If our starting points are that different, we can't really effectively discuss much beyond that...

I haven’t read a single article or paper that has evidence that the lockdowns have worked, or how well they’ve worked. Heck, if you search for “have lockdowns worked”, you’ll primarily find articles saying it has not, and a few that assert that it has without explanation or data. But I’m always open to counter arguments, so if you have a link to something empirical, I’d love to read it.

It is probably to early to really tell if these lockdowns worked this time. In about 5 years we will have a few, peer-reviewed and well-regarded studies about the impact.

We can only go off what worked in the past, as that is the closest we have good access to the data for analysis. Based on that, some studies from 2006 and 2007 dealing with past epidemics and pandemics is the best we have to work with and make contingency plans with.

Therefore, you can say "No this time is totally unique and like nothing else" or you can think "It probably has some lessons from past outbreaks". Of course, if you say the former that essentially means you have no real plan except hope, and hope is not a strategy.

Not Online!!! wrote:

he let's ignore that sweden vs denmark comparison, or South korea, or New zealand which have more or less squashed it.

yeah,

How can you say I ignored the Sweden vs Denmark comparison when I wrote an entire post directly addressing it? The comparisons made in those articles were not apples to apples comparisons and create misleading implications.

Also, South Korea didn't have a lockdown - they used extensive testing and contract tracing, but did not force a stay at home order or force the closing of "non-essential" businesses. Hell, Running Man (my favorite tv show) has been producing new episodes throughout this entire situation. I'd be thrilled if we followed South Korea's example and didn't have a lockdown (though I have privacy concerns about how they do contract tracing).

Similarly, Japan didn't have a lockdown - or really do anything else, actually - and they seem fairly unaffected by this thing. I can't speak on New Zealand, so I'll look into it.

Parts of Japan were under a state of emergency and a voluntary lockdown. But Japan claims it could not initiate a mandatory lockdown due to their constitution. However, its approach did not look to different in the areas under a state of emergency compared to a lockdown. Working from home, closing of business and schools etc.

South Korea had enough capacity for contact tracing not to have needed a lockdown. But virtually no other country has that capability, the US would need to increase the number of daily tests more than ten fold to reach that point, based on some estimates. SK could check the spread in a way few other countries could or even can at this point. Arguing that SK didn't need a lockdown is only possible due to its unique position at that point.

South Korea also did some pretty illiberal things, publishing people's names and addresses etc.i don't think even China went that far.

Sqorgar - I wanted to write a separate post just addressing your post. For reference, I'm a mechanical engineer who has worked primarily in the biotech industry in a laboratory setting - so not a scientist, but I'm around them all the time

Scientific papers take a long time to produce. Like Easy E said, I'm sure these will be forthcoming one way or another. Right now, we're all responding in real-time.

So, that leaves us trying to piece together things logically. And the reason I didn't want to engage with your discussion earlier is, if we can't agree about a fundamental starting point, we can't really usefully (and logically) discuss things further.

For this post, I'm going to use the term "social distancing" rather than "lockdown" which I think has some baggage associated with it. If you are contending that social distancing doesn't help prevent the spread of a disease like this, I feel that is a basic logical fallacy. This disease is not unique in how it spreads, and you could look at any number of studies for similar diseases spread by coughing / sneezing / etc to see what measures are helpful. In light of this - of course staying distant from others helps. Also, of course wearing a mask helps. This was a point I argued earlier in the thread before the government advised for wearing masks, and again, it's just logical.

But no one is right all the time. If you look at my posts even earlier, I wasn't sure how much social distancing was really needed - I was still hoping to play at my FLGS like normal . The point is, we're all acting off incomplete information, but logically - how could social distancing measures NOT help?

You can say, you don't agree with them for other reasons, but it's obvious they help. And if you can't accept that as a starting point for discussion, then we can't really go on to discuss what measures should or shouldn't be implemented based on other societal factors.

Two final points. First, we've all been behind the 8-ball on this, as I posted earlier France had community transmission a month before they identified their first (what they thought was isolated) case. So, no wonder we've all been way off in response times, and suffered so much as a result. This is in large part China's fault, and of course there will be review of WHO oversight (in my view, I think they need beefing up, rather than the reverse, but they just didn't have the information they needed, and thus gave bad guidance like recommending against travel restrictions, because they were in the dark like everyone else).

Second, as you have seen I'm in favor of the easing of some restrictions. We're all figuring this out as we go! Did it make sense to close Florida beaches during the spread break rush? Absolutely! But now, being able to use them as a local (we go to a state park where there is literally just beach, no commercial outlets) lets us actually avoid people more than the other forms of exercise we were trying to use. There is room to discuss what parts of lockdowns need to continue, or not. But in my view, there is no room to say that social distancing is ineffective. Logically, this is just impossible to defend for an infectious disease. This is also why I like discussing "social distancing" rather than lockdown... you mention Japan, and they're a country that through their culture naturally are most distant. South Korea is another example that avoided massive lockdown, but to do so implemented things that were impossible in the US - massive amounts of testing and contact tracing, and cultural acceptance of things that many other places would balk at:

https://time.com/5830594/south-korea-covid19-coronavirus/

I really like the last line of this article, though, as I think once we're past the "crisis" point in other countries, it's the way forward:

We will continue to adjust the level of social distancing in consideration of further progress, and we are ready to implement a “social distancing in normal life,” under which our normal life and virus containment can both be achieved in balance with each other.

Figuring out how to social distance in normal life is the key to getting out of lockdowns as much as possible. If you can mitigate risk while still opening things back up, that's the ideal scenario... but it obviously has to be tailored to each country, culture, and at what point they are on the infection curve.

Sorry for the book but that's my take. Social distancing is obviously effective. Lockdowns are trickier, but are basically just forcing social distancing (in my view). The sooner we can all learn to social distance in normal life, the sooner we can get back to it, imo!

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
South Korea also did some pretty illiberal things, publishing people's names and addresses etc.i don't think even China went that far.

True, and if you break quarantine in SK if you have the virus, you might be jailed for a year. Afaik that goes a lot further than in Europe or the US.

In Greece we had a bloody lockdown from mid march to now and we only had 2,8 k cases. Turkey next door delayed 2 weeks and the numbers are still spiking there.
So Yeah lockdowns bloody work!
And sorry for the tone but antiscience types and antivaxers get seriously on my nerves.

Yeah they do - but the bummer is, because so many countries were unaware of how many cases they had, some came too late . I honestly think some of the blame is unfair in certain situations... Italy, for instance, culturally is just set up to suffer from this (with their close-knit communities, with multi-generational families living together, etc) and also got caught with a strong seeding very early on. I'm sure we'll all learn from this on how to handle such things in the future... but the deck was stacked strongly against many places this time.

Greek families are even more closer knit. The grand parents here habitually take on the role of babysitters while the parents are off working and during the economic crisis the pension of a grandparent was what brought food on the table. Plus more packed busses and trains due to chronically underfunded public transport.
Our health system is also underfunded. No way we would have so few cases if the lockdown hadn't gone in effect.
With numbers...
Greece cases per million 261 and deaths per million 14. Full lockdown 23 of March
Turkey (same climate and familial structures funny how we Mediterraneans look alike)
Cases per million 1,644 Deaths per million 45 Partial lockdown from April 5.
How's that for the effect of quarantine?

konst80hummel wrote:
In Greece we had a bloody lockdown from mid march to now and we only had 2,8 k cases. Turkey next door delayed 2 weeks and the numbers are still spiking there.
So Yeah lockdowns bloody work!
And sorry for the tone but antiscience types and antivaxers get seriously on my nerves.

post hoc ergo proctor hoc again.. youre making a blanket assumption off one piece of information without considering a whole host of other factors. I could make a simple counterpoint in stating that Belgium has a strict lockdown, and they have the worst death rate per million in Europe. Holland has advisory social distancing and a targeted 'intelligent' lockdown in place has a much lower death rate.

 RiTides wrote:
Sqorgar - I wanted to write a separate post just addressing your post. For reference, I'm a mechanical engineer who has worked primarily in the biotech industry in a laboratory setting - so not a scientist, but I'm around them all the time

Scientific papers take a long time to produce. Like Easy E said, I'm sure these will be forthcoming one way or another. Right now, we're all responding in real-time.

So, that leaves us trying to piece together things logically. And the reason I didn't want to engage with your discussion earlier is, if we can't agree about a fundamental starting point, we can't really usefully (and logically) discuss things further.

For this post, I'm going to use the term "social distancing" rather than "lockdown" which I think has some baggage associated with it. If you are contending that social distancing doesn't help prevent the spread of a disease like this, I feel that is a basic logical fallacy. This disease is not unique in how it spreads, and you could look at any number of studies for similar diseases spread by coughing / sneezing / etc to see what measures are helpful. In light of this - of course staying distant from others helps. Also, of course wearing a mask helps. This was a point I argued earlier in the thread before the government advised for wearing masks, and again, it's just logical.

But no one is right all the time. If you look at my posts even earlier, I wasn't sure how much social distancing was really needed - I was still hoping to play at my FLGS like normal . The point is, we're all acting off incomplete information, but logically - how could social distancing measures NOT help?

You can say, you don't agree with them for other reasons, but it's obvious they help. And if you can't accept that as a starting point for discussion, then we can't really go on to discuss what measures should or shouldn't be implemented based on other societal factors.

Two final points. First, we've all been behind the 8-ball on this, as I posted earlier France had community transmission a month before they identified their first (what they thought was isolated) case. So, no wonder we've all been way off in response times, and suffered so much as a result. This is in large part China's fault, and of course there will be review of WHO oversight (in my view, I think they need beefing up, rather than the reverse, but they just didn't have the information they needed, and thus gave bad guidance like recommending against travel restrictions, because they were in the dark like everyone else).

Second, as you have seen I'm in favor of the easing of some restrictions. We're all figuring this out as we go! Did it make sense to close Florida beaches during the spread break rush? Absolutely! But now, being able to use them as a local (we go to a state park where there is literally just beach, no commercial outlets) lets us actually avoid people more than the other forms of exercise we were trying to use. There is room to discuss what parts of lockdowns need to continue, or not. But in my view, there is no room to say that social distancing is ineffective. Logically, this is just impossible to defend for an infectious disease. This is also why I like discussing "social distancing" rather than lockdown... you mention Japan, and they're a country that through their culture naturally are most distant. South Korea is another example that avoided massive lockdown, but to do so implemented things that were impossible in the US - massive amounts of testing and contact tracing, and cultural acceptance of things that many other places would balk at:

https://time.com/5830594/south-korea-covid19-coronavirus/

I really like the last line of this article, though, as I think once we're past the "crisis" point in other countries, it's the way forward:

We will continue to adjust the level of social distancing in consideration of further progress, and we are ready to implement a “social distancing in normal life,” under which our normal life and virus containment can both be achieved in balance with each other.

Figuring out how to social distance in normal life is the key to getting out of lockdowns as much as possible. If you can mitigate risk while still opening things back up, that's the ideal scenario... but it obviously has to be tailored to each country, culture, and at what point they are on the infection curve.

Sorry for the book but that's my take. Social distancing is obviously effective. Lockdowns are trickier, but are basically just forcing social distancing (in my view). The sooner we can all learn to social distance in normal life, the sooner we can get back to it, imo!

I feel like we are on the same sort of page when it comes to all this. Social distancing does work, that has basically been proven. its places that cant really do so, that are where the spread is occuring. hospitals, public transport etc.

I just dont feel like our reaction has been correct. blanket treating people like kids, despite most acting responsibly. The information about the spread not being driven in casual outdoor encounters needs to be pushed out, if nothing other than stopping people getting mown down by cars as they jump into the road to avoid people on pavements.

konst80hummel wrote:
Greek families are even more closer knit. The grand parents here habitually take on the role of babysitters while the parents are off working and during the economic crisis the pension of a grandparent was what brought food on the table. Plus more packed busses and trains due to chronically underfunded public transport.
Our health system is also underfunded. No way we would have so few cases if the lockdown hadn't gone in effect.

Good point, I'm preaching to the choir . Although I'm guessing Italy's initial seeding / caseload was much worse? Even from a distance seeing Greek culture, I think you're absolutely right.

queen_annes_revenge - I've definitely seen that we agree on the view of the outdoors, while staying socially distant. It's the thing I'm most excited about as some measures are eased here.

Italy had the fashion week in Milan. Visitors from all over the world. Not so much a worse seeding as a LOT more people in the same place. Greece's first recorded case was an exhibitor in the Fashion show.

 RiTides wrote:


queen_annes_revenge - I've definitely seen that we agree on the view of the outdoors, while staying socially distant. It's the thing I'm most excited about as some measures are eased here.

Yup. To be fair, at least where I am I've been left unmolested by any rozzers, whenever I've been out and about, but it's dumb things like prohibiting sports and the like on outdoor fields. Makes no sense.

Took a little trip to the shop earlier to pick up some bugmans glow. Essential purchase you know!

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:

konst80hummel wrote:
In Greece we had a bloody lockdown from mid march to now and we only had 2,8 k cases. Turkey next door delayed 2 weeks and the numbers are still spiking there.
So Yeah lockdowns bloody work!
And sorry for the tone but antiscience types and antivaxers get seriously on my nerves.

post hoc ergo proctor hoc again.. youre making a blanket assumption off one piece of information without considering a whole host of other factors. I could make a simple counterpoint in stating that Belgium has a strict lockdown, and they have the worst death rate per million in Europe. Holland has advisory social distancing and a targeted 'intelligent' lockdown in place has a much lower death rate.

That is because Belgium also counts probable corona deaths, not just positive ones like the NL. In essence the lockdown in my country versus Belgium is not that different, likely death rate wise as well if taking a broader measure. Its not advisory social distancing in the NL, its mandatory as well.

The only real difference is in how strict enforcement is and voluntary business closure versus forced closure in the retail sector.