I’m happy to hear that some of these changes have been unexpectedly positive for you! Personally I already did a bunch of these things (shop for one week’s worth at a time, have days working from home, order online). To offer a bit of a peek at the flip side: I work in mathematics, which is uniquely suited for working at home (there’s a modern joke that to do mathematics all you need is pen, paper, a bottle of water and a supercomputer), yet 2 of the 11 colleagues in my group have suffered burnouts since March from the added stress of having to look after their households. We are considering going back to 20% office capacity soon in staggered shifts, which while nice still means we won’t have a chance to talk or work together in practice. Obviously this is exactly the point, but I want to note that this is a far cry from normal. My productivity at the moment is at an all time low, and several of my other friends have already heard that if this situation continues for much longer they will be let go from their jobs. In this sense I think this is unsustainable, or at the very least a serious hit to our global growth and productivity.
I have absolutely no quantitative guess what the impact of superspreaders is, and it would be amazing if we could stop them quickly. I think Zvi also pointed out that superspreaders get eliminated quickly in a pandemic, one way or another (and ‘having the disease, surviving and then becoming immune’ counts as the other).
I thought that the current spread of Covid-19 in warmer countries (Brazil, India) was evidence against the virus being very susceptible to temperatures, but there are a lot of confounders. If you know of any good summary of the current knowledge on this please let me know, I am very interested in this (and it would likely change my predictions massively).
I gave up on trying to model the situation. According to available data, the number of cases grows linearly—faster in some countries, slower in other countries, but almost everywhere linearly; approximately the same number of people infected each day. This doesn’t make sense to me. This stuff is supposed to be exponential, right?
Linear growth could make sense for a small country, such as Slovakia, if the internal situation is under control, and the number of infections is proportional to the number of people crossing the border. But what about bigger countries? What about those that do not have the situation under control?
A friend proposed a hypothesis that for countries like USA the reported number of infections is simply the number of people that were tested on given day, which is just a small fraction of the true number of infections. It makes sense to assume that the number of people tested each day is constant. But if the hidden growth was truly exponential, the difference between the true number of cases and the official number of cases would soon become visible… and that didn’t happen.
Another hypothesis is that politicians are already doing the “dance” as a consequence of their incentives: when the number of cases grows too quickly, there is a pressure to do something about it, and when it stops growing, there is a pressure to relax the measures, so the result is linear growth. Doesn’t sound plausible either: the incubation period is a week, so the reactive policy should lead to a sine wave instead of linear growth.
tl;dr—I don’t know; any hypothesis sounds wrong
The seasonal hypothesis would make sense if it’s not the absolute temperature that matters, but rather the relative sunshine, compared to the rest of the year. That is, the Sun does not have an impact on viruses directly, but rather on people, like it creates a yearly metabolic cycle, with different resistance to diseases at different parts of the cycle. But this is just something I made up, and I have no idea whether there is any support for this in biology.
Sorry about your situation. Could you perhaps try to have Skype calls with your colleagues during the work time? I mean, when you are at work, you probably take breaks and socialize. You can do the same at home, too. People working from home often forget to take breaks.
I’m happy to hear that some of these changes have been unexpectedly positive for you! Personally I already did a bunch of these things (shop for one week’s worth at a time, have days working from home, order online). To offer a bit of a peek at the flip side: I work in mathematics, which is uniquely suited for working at home (there’s a modern joke that to do mathematics all you need is pen, paper, a bottle of water and a supercomputer), yet 2 of the 11 colleagues in my group have suffered burnouts since March from the added stress of having to look after their households. We are considering going back to 20% office capacity soon in staggered shifts, which while nice still means we won’t have a chance to talk or work together in practice. Obviously this is exactly the point, but I want to note that this is a far cry from normal. My productivity at the moment is at an all time low, and several of my other friends have already heard that if this situation continues for much longer they will be let go from their jobs. In this sense I think this is unsustainable, or at the very least a serious hit to our global growth and productivity.
I have absolutely no quantitative guess what the impact of superspreaders is, and it would be amazing if we could stop them quickly. I think Zvi also pointed out that superspreaders get eliminated quickly in a pandemic, one way or another (and ‘having the disease, surviving and then becoming immune’ counts as the other).
I thought that the current spread of Covid-19 in warmer countries (Brazil, India) was evidence against the virus being very susceptible to temperatures, but there are a lot of confounders. If you know of any good summary of the current knowledge on this please let me know, I am very interested in this (and it would likely change my predictions massively).
I gave up on trying to model the situation. According to available data, the number of cases grows linearly—faster in some countries, slower in other countries, but almost everywhere linearly; approximately the same number of people infected each day. This doesn’t make sense to me. This stuff is supposed to be exponential, right?
Linear growth could make sense for a small country, such as Slovakia, if the internal situation is under control, and the number of infections is proportional to the number of people crossing the border. But what about bigger countries? What about those that do not have the situation under control?
A friend proposed a hypothesis that for countries like USA the reported number of infections is simply the number of people that were tested on given day, which is just a small fraction of the true number of infections. It makes sense to assume that the number of people tested each day is constant. But if the hidden growth was truly exponential, the difference between the true number of cases and the official number of cases would soon become visible… and that didn’t happen.
Another hypothesis is that politicians are already doing the “dance” as a consequence of their incentives: when the number of cases grows too quickly, there is a pressure to do something about it, and when it stops growing, there is a pressure to relax the measures, so the result is linear growth. Doesn’t sound plausible either: the incubation period is a week, so the reactive policy should lead to a sine wave instead of linear growth.
tl;dr—I don’t know; any hypothesis sounds wrong
The seasonal hypothesis would make sense if it’s not the absolute temperature that matters, but rather the relative sunshine, compared to the rest of the year. That is, the Sun does not have an impact on viruses directly, but rather on people, like it creates a yearly metabolic cycle, with different resistance to diseases at different parts of the cycle. But this is just something I made up, and I have no idea whether there is any support for this in biology.
Sorry about your situation. Could you perhaps try to have Skype calls with your colleagues during the work time? I mean, when you are at work, you probably take breaks and socialize. You can do the same at home, too. People working from home often forget to take breaks.