March 14/15th: Daily Coronavirus link updates
As part of the LessWrong Coronavirus Link Database, I am publishing a daily update post with all the new links we are adding each day that we ranked a 3 or above in our importance rankings. Here are all the top links we (Elizabeth, Ben and I) added over the weekend, by topic.
Guides/FAQs/Intros
Coronavirus: Why you must act now (medium post)
Summary and call to action, one of the best summaries I’ve found, focuses more on policy-interventions than on individual actions, but is still good at giving you an overview
UpToDate: Coronavirus Overview
UpToDate very frequently has the best overviews over many crucial medical topics. Geared towards a more professional medical audience.
Letter to loved ones asking to take CV seriously
Well written, compassionate explanation of why this is worse than what we’ve seen before and need to take this seriously. A few pointers on where to get started
Early February 80,000 hours episode on Coronavirus (1h 18min)
Long episode on coronavirus. Includes all the basic information, and discussion of big-picture implications
Spread & Prevention
Masks help prevent infection in schoolchildren:
In a group of 10,524 Japanese schoolchildren, masks and vaccination decreased the chance of catching influenza, gargling and handwashing increased the chance
Metareview: facemasks at mass gatherings
A collection of 25 studies with 12710 participants was examined. Out of 13 studies on respiratory illness, 4 showed statistically significant effectiveness, 1 showed statistically significant ineffectiveness, the rest produced no statistically significant results
“Flattening the Curve” is a deadly delusion
At current medical capacity, we’d need to flatten the curve for 10 years in order to get everyone full treatment
Summary of papers arguing that many/most infections spread from people before they show symptoms
A readable summary of some papers about how quickly people transmit the disease and how quickly the symptoms show. Argues that perhaps the majority of people transmit it before they show symptoms.
Timothy Gowers: Herd immunity is very costly, and we can’t get all the things we ant
Twitter thread on costs of UK’s herd immunity strategy, argues that we have to give up at least one of: (1) herd immunity (2) non-overwhelmed hospitals (3) get life back to normal before next winter
Paper: derives CV prevalence estimates from data on unexplained flu-like symptoms
The relative prevalence of patients influenza like illnesses that test negative for influenza has been high for the past several weeks, but not extraordinarily so (< 3 standard deviations)
Rob Wiblin: Model update suggests we are dealing with unmitigated exponential growth
Rob Wiblin updated his spreadsheet model with new data, which suggests that we are basically dealing with unmitigated exponential growth, without any significant slowdown
Progression/Outcome
Twitter: CV kills via cardiac failure, not pulmonary
Apparently the ARDS is not too severe, and they can manage people through that part of it. Instead, after several days, the virus suddenly attacks the heart, causing it to precipitously fail. The myocarditis phase is savage and kills people within a day or two
Tries to produce more accurate death-rate estimates for China, South Korea, and Italy, based on interpretation of existing data
Seattle ICU Dr describes CV progression
The Chinese data on 80% mildly ill, 14% hospital-ill, 6-8% critically ill are generally on the mark, elderly patients going to “comfort care”, detailed description of clinical presentation, remdesivir is scarce
Doctor reports 20-30% reduction in lung capacity in 1⁄4 of patients
News report on a doctor saying that 2 or 3 out of 12 patients have seen a 20-30% reduction in lung-capacity and “They gasp if they walk a bit more quickly”
Medical System
Twitter: Seattle approaching Lombardy levels
Seattle has ventilators but is out of ICU beds. Due to a lack of machines, Seattle is restricting ECMO machines to people <40 yo and < 25 BMI. Most people are dying of heart, not lung, issues
Twitter: Seattle ICU Dr describes conditions in Seattle hospital
Entire ICU taken up by CV patients, CDC is weakening quarantine on medics, they are out of masks in part because people are stealing from them
Jess Riedel’s Fermi Estimate that not containing coronavirus will overwhelm UK medical system
Jess Riedel’s Fermi Estimate that not containing the coronavirus will overwhelm the UK medical system
Dashboards
Very comprehensive dashboard with dozens of graphs. Currently the best resource I know for tracking both national and global spread.
Aggregators
Surprisingly high-quality of articles on the Medium coronavirus page.
Aggregators
Effective Altruism Facebook group on Coronavirus discussion
Facebook group with lots of members of the EA community discussing various considerations and plans
Other
[TEMPLATE] Coronavirus Household Isolation Coordination v1.2
Spreadsheet for keeping people in your social network up-to-date with each other’s health and social distancing status
Why now is a time of great opportunity for helping the world
Detailing what opportunities are available (contact tracing, building entilators, remote work tech, etc) and framing why to take action and how.
The claims in that Twitter thread (now deleted) have been retracted: https://mobile.twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1239348331186249728
Great! Thanks for the update! Will update the spreadsheet.
Is there an easy way to follow these daily updates or the corona virus tag i can recommend to people who don’t frequent LessWrong?
We don’t yet have subscription functionality for tags, sadly. I am probably not going to create many non-coronavirus posts for the next few days/weeks, so subscribing just to posts by me should get them basically just these summaries. (To do that, click on the triple-dot at the top of the post when you are logged and select “Subscribe to posts by habryka”)
It doesn’t look as if the dashboard includes the United States on many of the pages.
Regarding the Rob Wiblin model, is it possible that the conclusion (though I suspect is based on global numbers) is due to local epicenter events and so not necessarily something that should be generalized without some caveats?
Twitter: CV kills via cardiac failure, not pulmonary links to the aggragate spreadsheet, not the twitter soruce.