Thank you for your comment. I don’t think we disagree—Slovakia (and other European countries) have done extremely well by acting quickly. I also fully support washing hands, wearing face masks and being smart about social contact. I think you are responding to my sentence
[...] this suggests to me that ‘The Dance’ will look a lot more like ‘a full quarantine, but with a few restrictions lifted’ than like ‘restoring social contact, but wash your hands and wear a face mask’.
I’m sorry for the confusion. The situation you describe sounds more like my scenario 3 than my scenario 2, and I think I explained poorly where I draw the line in my quoted statement above. Going by wikipedia, the most recent round of relaxations in Slovakia still sounds far from life as normal to me. The maximum occupancy set at shops is up to 1 person per 15 square meters, which is 25% of what it is in normal times. I imagine similar concerns apply to offices, but I can’t find how many people are back to working at the office. The opening of schools happened only this Monday, so it really is too early to tell what the impact of that will be. Zvi voices some concerns.
Lastly, my entire goal was to try and talk about relative impact, and give perspective to the magnitude of the measures we can expect going forwards. I don’t see where I have mistakenly given absolute statements on effectiveness of measures (in fact I only mentioned face masks once, without making any statement for or against them in the OP), but if you point them out I would be happy to change them.
On the second reading, yeah, I also think we mostly agree. My comment made more sense to me (as a reaction to you) when I was writing it than it does now… I guess that’s an inherent risk of commenting past midnight; sorry for that.
The line between scenarios 2 and 3 would be difficult to draw, because most countries probably do a bit of both. I suppose by now almost everyone tries to do tracking, testing, and quarantine… as much as the number of active cases permits logistically. I also suppose that by now almost everyone encourages hand washing, and at least some degree of social distancing. (The face masks seem to remain controversial in some countries, for reasons beyond my understanding. Unless this information is obsolete, because things change so quickly.)
There also seem to be things not discussed publicly. I’ve heard that some countries adopted an (unwritten?) rule that in care homes, old people with COVID-19 symptoms should not be sent to hospitals, but merely given painkillers, to prevent hospital overcrowding. Yeah, reliable source needed.
The permanent lifestyle changes do not have to be as bad as it sounds. Some of them may fall into category “a bad situation forced us to explore new options, and some of them actually turned out to be improvements”.
For example, I really enjoy the possibility of working from home, which otherwise would not be possible. I also wasn’t sure whether my two little kids would allow me to work undisturbed, which is why I didn’t even try negotiating with my employer. Now that I tried it, and found a solution for the related problems, I feel comfortable about it. This knowledge is irreversible; not just for me, but for thousands of people. Many who were reluctant to work from home are now reluctant to return to the open-space offices. Could this lead to a permanent change in the industry?
The limitations put on shops made me experiment with online shopping. Previously, I was aware that it exists, but I haven’t tried it. I simply bought groceries almost every day on my way back from work. Now I learned to buy for 3 days in advance, and for a purchase of this size it makes more sense to order things online (no need to carry heavy stuff, discount on transport). I learned to cook from leftovers. Some of these habits will probably stick. Also, some shops and restaurants that didn’t do it before, now started doing home delivery. (You mentioned 25% of supermarket capacity, but in real life it doesn’t feel like an issue—either I am lucky, or people generally started to order stuff online and shop more strategically, so the new supermarket capacity remains sufficient. I spend less time waiting in a line than I did before.)
Avoiding traffic made me always check on Google Maps how far something is by feet. Surprisingly, many things are closer than I assumed. I live in the center of the city, so “20 minutes by feet” actually covers quite a lot. Another possibly permanent, slightly-R0-reducing change.
By the way, I suspect that thinking about R0 as one number is somewhat misleading. I believe that a small subset of people/activities are superspreaders, so maybe “R0 = 2” could easily become “R0 = 1″ by preventing a small number of activities, with small impact on most people. Yes, it is a political problem; the superspreaders will be quite vocal about their freedoms. With sufficient tracking and testing, we could put the superspreaders in quarantine after infecting their first hundred victims, thus preventing them from infecting thousand more. There could be a cultural change making superspreading events less popular.
With regards to second peak, I don’t know what is the impact of season. Maybe the thing that contributed most to slowing down coronavirus was the summer. (By warming up the air; by giving people more vitamin D; or possibly some other mechanism, or all of them combined.) If that is the case, the second peak will come at autumn. We should spend the summer having as many social activities as we can, while we still can.
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.
Thank you for your comment. I don’t think we disagree—Slovakia (and other European countries) have done extremely well by acting quickly. I also fully support washing hands, wearing face masks and being smart about social contact. I think you are responding to my sentence
I’m sorry for the confusion. The situation you describe sounds more like my scenario 3 than my scenario 2, and I think I explained poorly where I draw the line in my quoted statement above. Going by wikipedia, the most recent round of relaxations in Slovakia still sounds far from life as normal to me. The maximum occupancy set at shops is up to 1 person per 15 square meters, which is 25% of what it is in normal times. I imagine similar concerns apply to offices, but I can’t find how many people are back to working at the office. The opening of schools happened only this Monday, so it really is too early to tell what the impact of that will be. Zvi voices some concerns.
Lastly, my entire goal was to try and talk about relative impact, and give perspective to the magnitude of the measures we can expect going forwards. I don’t see where I have mistakenly given absolute statements on effectiveness of measures (in fact I only mentioned face masks once, without making any statement for or against them in the OP), but if you point them out I would be happy to change them.
On the second reading, yeah, I also think we mostly agree. My comment made more sense to me (as a reaction to you) when I was writing it than it does now… I guess that’s an inherent risk of commenting past midnight; sorry for that.
The line between scenarios 2 and 3 would be difficult to draw, because most countries probably do a bit of both. I suppose by now almost everyone tries to do tracking, testing, and quarantine… as much as the number of active cases permits logistically. I also suppose that by now almost everyone encourages hand washing, and at least some degree of social distancing. (The face masks seem to remain controversial in some countries, for reasons beyond my understanding. Unless this information is obsolete, because things change so quickly.)
There also seem to be things not discussed publicly. I’ve heard that some countries adopted an (unwritten?) rule that in care homes, old people with COVID-19 symptoms should not be sent to hospitals, but merely given painkillers, to prevent hospital overcrowding. Yeah, reliable source needed.
The permanent lifestyle changes do not have to be as bad as it sounds. Some of them may fall into category “a bad situation forced us to explore new options, and some of them actually turned out to be improvements”.
For example, I really enjoy the possibility of working from home, which otherwise would not be possible. I also wasn’t sure whether my two little kids would allow me to work undisturbed, which is why I didn’t even try negotiating with my employer. Now that I tried it, and found a solution for the related problems, I feel comfortable about it. This knowledge is irreversible; not just for me, but for thousands of people. Many who were reluctant to work from home are now reluctant to return to the open-space offices. Could this lead to a permanent change in the industry?
The limitations put on shops made me experiment with online shopping. Previously, I was aware that it exists, but I haven’t tried it. I simply bought groceries almost every day on my way back from work. Now I learned to buy for 3 days in advance, and for a purchase of this size it makes more sense to order things online (no need to carry heavy stuff, discount on transport). I learned to cook from leftovers. Some of these habits will probably stick. Also, some shops and restaurants that didn’t do it before, now started doing home delivery. (You mentioned 25% of supermarket capacity, but in real life it doesn’t feel like an issue—either I am lucky, or people generally started to order stuff online and shop more strategically, so the new supermarket capacity remains sufficient. I spend less time waiting in a line than I did before.)
Avoiding traffic made me always check on Google Maps how far something is by feet. Surprisingly, many things are closer than I assumed. I live in the center of the city, so “20 minutes by feet” actually covers quite a lot. Another possibly permanent, slightly-R0-reducing change.
By the way, I suspect that thinking about R0 as one number is somewhat misleading. I believe that a small subset of people/activities are superspreaders, so maybe “R0 = 2” could easily become “R0 = 1″ by preventing a small number of activities, with small impact on most people. Yes, it is a political problem; the superspreaders will be quite vocal about their freedoms. With sufficient tracking and testing, we could put the superspreaders in quarantine after infecting their first hundred victims, thus preventing them from infecting thousand more. There could be a cultural change making superspreading events less popular.
With regards to second peak, I don’t know what is the impact of season. Maybe the thing that contributed most to slowing down coronavirus was the summer. (By warming up the air; by giving people more vitamin D; or possibly some other mechanism, or all of them combined.) If that is the case, the second peak will come at autumn. We should spend the summer having as many social activities as we can, while we still can.
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.