We need an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus in America

[Harpy Eagle]

World
We need an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus in America
Yaneer Bar-Yam, Opinion contributor
USA TODAY OpinionMarch 21, 2020, 11:30 AM EDT

I am an MIT-trained physicist and complexity scientist who studies pandemics. I have warned about global pandemics due to increasing travel for 15 years. I recommended community based monitoring of symptoms to stop Ebola in West Africa in 2014, and it worked. The fastest and even the only way to contain COVID-19 in the United States is a five-week national lockdown.
Closing schools, bars and movie theaters are good measures, but not enough. Our relaxed approach to social distancing is insufficient to stop the exponential growth of COVID-19. Until Americans consistently adopt strong social distancing recommendations — a lockdown — the disease will continue to spread exponentially.
During a five-week national lockdown, federal, state and local authorities would ensure that all Americans stay home except to obtain food and other essentials, access medical care, or do work essential to the functioning of society. Travel would cease: We would close our borders and airports and prohibit all unnecessary travel across state and county (or town) lines within the United States. The U.S. government would have to provide aid to citizens separated from their sources of income and ensure care for vulnerable members of society.
Lockdown would sharply reduce cases
During the first two weeks of a lockdown, infected individuals will either recover from mild cases of COVID-19 at home or seek medical attention for the 14% of cases that are severe. During the third, fourth and fifth weeks, any newly infected family or cohabitants of infected individuals will recover or seek medical attention and their isolation will prevent further spreading. By the end of the lockdown, the number of infections will be a small fraction of what they are now.

The lockdown will give us time to dramatically scale up our supply of COVID-19 test kits and capacity to process them. If we reduce the number of infections using the lockdown and start a massive testing regime in the United States, we can control COVID-19 after five weeks without such extreme social distancing measures. Isolating sick individuals and their immediate contacts will be enough.

The human and economic costs of delaying this lockdown will be staggering. The COVID-19 outbreak has many more cases now than are visible (tip of the iceberg) and they are growing rapidly. Absent sufficiently effective intervention, new cases will increase 1.3 to 1.5 times each day. We had almost 20,000 cases in the United States on Friday, over 5,800 more cases than the previous day. Without a lockdown, in one week there will be about 200,000. In two weeks: 2,000,000. One in seven cases require hospitalization and 5% require ICU care with ventilators to survive. There aren’t nearly enough ventilators available.

The effectiveness of a five-week lockdown will be dramatic — and also entirely predictable.

We know a U.S. lockdown can work because it worked in China. At the height of its COVID-19 crisis in mid-February, China had locked down an estimated 760 milllion people, approximately half of its population. This policy was so successful that Wuhan is now much safer from coronavirus than New York City or Washington, D.C. The few new COVID-19 cases in China now stem from foreign travelers rather than local transmission, and all are safely quarantined.

We know what we have to do. President Donald Trump and our states' governors and local leaders must act now to save millions of lives.

Yaneer Bar-Yam is the founding president of the New England Complex Systems Institute, where he is an expert on pandemics and other complex systems. He is spearheading the effort of over 3,000 volunteers working to stop the outbreak at endcoronavirus.org. Follow him on Twitter: @yaneerbaryam

We need an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus in America

Locking down the country would reduce infections and allow time for massive testing. There will be staggering human and economic costs if we delay.

www.yahoo.com

United States Infections and deaths from Coronavirus as of February 29, 2020
Infections: 68
Deaths: 1

United States Infections and deaths from Coronavirus as of March 22, 2020
Infections: 35,000
Deaths: 458

The exponential rise in infections and deaths in just 3 weeks is incredible. Where will the United States be on April 23, 2020 without the lockdown proposed above?

It would be nice to think we could shutdown our economy for 5 weeks and survive as a country, but it is not reality. A 5 week lockdown is a case of the cure being worse than the disease

There is no other option. This is a disaster situation. The priority is survival, not making money. The entire economy will have to be refocused to fighting this war, just like it was during World War II.

Bullshit. We’ve endured worse pandemics before, and we didn’t shut down the whole nation.
Forcing businesses to shut down is wrong. Cracking down on people going to parks is wrong. Let people make up their own damned minds. But authoritarian asswipes can never let that happen.

Go to the park. Get infected from someone you come into contact with. You get sick with a mild case. Go to visit grandma and she dies.

I am not coming into contact with anyone at the park or the biking trails which my stupid city closed.

 

[White 6]

Think about the pain and suffering if you allow the pandemic to continue. There is now HALF measure when dealing with a pandemic. No middle road. You either Fight it with everything you have, or you don't. The economic effects of overwhelming and destroying this U.S. health care system and killing 2 million Americans before the year is out will be just as severe or more severe than the economic effects of a total lock down.

This is a pandemic and has to be dealt with the right measures. Essential business's can continue, but non-essential business's must shut down. Your bottom line is not worth the deaths of 2 million Americans.

Think of the pain and suffering from a 30% unemployment rate. Think of the pain and suffering of thousands of business that will no longer exist.

Some very knowledgeable people say we are probably going to 30$ unemployment any way. Don't shut down across the board, have 30% unemployment, loss of business etc and not stop the pandemic and face continued more metered death and destruction, or shut it all down, take the hit, secure the poor and maybe nip this now? Might be better in the long run to take the hit for 5 weeks and begin putting it back together then, if will halt the epidemic spread.

 

[jc456]

World
We need an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus in America
Yaneer Bar-Yam, Opinion contributor
USA TODAY OpinionMarch 21, 2020, 11:30 AM EDT

I am an MIT-trained physicist and complexity scientist who studies pandemics. I have warned about global pandemics due to increasing travel for 15 years. I recommended community based monitoring of symptoms to stop Ebola in West Africa in 2014, and it worked. The fastest and even the only way to contain COVID-19 in the United States is a five-week national lockdown.
Closing schools, bars and movie theaters are good measures, but not enough. Our relaxed approach to social distancing is insufficient to stop the exponential growth of COVID-19. Until Americans consistently adopt strong social distancing recommendations — a lockdown — the disease will continue to spread exponentially.
During a five-week national lockdown, federal, state and local authorities would ensure that all Americans stay home except to obtain food and other essentials, access medical care, or do work essential to the functioning of society. Travel would cease: We would close our borders and airports and prohibit all unnecessary travel across state and county (or town) lines within the United States. The U.S. government would have to provide aid to citizens separated from their sources of income and ensure care for vulnerable members of society.
Lockdown would sharply reduce cases
During the first two weeks of a lockdown, infected individuals will either recover from mild cases of COVID-19 at home or seek medical attention for the 14% of cases that are severe. During the third, fourth and fifth weeks, any newly infected family or cohabitants of infected individuals will recover or seek medical attention and their isolation will prevent further spreading. By the end of the lockdown, the number of infections will be a small fraction of what they are now.

The lockdown will give us time to dramatically scale up our supply of COVID-19 test kits and capacity to process them. If we reduce the number of infections using the lockdown and start a massive testing regime in the United States, we can control COVID-19 after five weeks without such extreme social distancing measures. Isolating sick individuals and their immediate contacts will be enough.

The human and economic costs of delaying this lockdown will be staggering. The COVID-19 outbreak has many more cases now than are visible (tip of the iceberg) and they are growing rapidly. Absent sufficiently effective intervention, new cases will increase 1.3 to 1.5 times each day. We had almost 20,000 cases in the United States on Friday, over 5,800 more cases than the previous day. Without a lockdown, in one week there will be about 200,000. In two weeks: 2,000,000. One in seven cases require hospitalization and 5% require ICU care with ventilators to survive. There aren’t nearly enough ventilators available.

The effectiveness of a five-week lockdown will be dramatic — and also entirely predictable.

We know a U.S. lockdown can work because it worked in China. At the height of its COVID-19 crisis in mid-February, China had locked down an estimated 760 milllion people, approximately half of its population. This policy was so successful that Wuhan is now much safer from coronavirus than New York City or Washington, D.C. The few new COVID-19 cases in China now stem from foreign travelers rather than local transmission, and all are safely quarantined.

We know what we have to do. President Donald Trump and our states' governors and local leaders must act now to save millions of lives.

Yaneer Bar-Yam is the founding president of the New England Complex Systems Institute, where he is an expert on pandemics and other complex systems. He is spearheading the effort of over 3,000 volunteers working to stop the outbreak at endcoronavirus.org. Follow him on Twitter: @yaneerbaryam

We need an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus in America

Locking down the country would reduce infections and allow time for massive testing. There will be staggering human and economic costs if we delay.

www.yahoo.com

United States Infections and deaths from Coronavirus as of February 29, 2020
Infections: 68
Deaths: 1

United States Infections and deaths from Coronavirus as of March 22, 2020
Infections: 35,000
Deaths: 458

The exponential rise in infections and deaths in just 3 weeks is incredible. Where will the United States be on April 23, 2020 without the lockdown proposed above?

It would be nice to think we could shutdown our economy for 5 weeks and survive as a country, but it is not reality. A 5 week lockdown is a case of the cure being worse than the disease

There is no other option. This is a disaster situation. The priority is survival, not making money. The entire economy will have to be refocused to fighting this war, just like it was during World War II.

Bullshit. We’ve endured worse pandemics before, and we didn’t shut down the whole nation.
Forcing businesses to shut down is wrong. Cracking down on people going to parks is wrong. Let people make up their own damned minds. But authoritarian asswipes can never let that happen.

Go to the park. Get infected from someone you come into contact with. You get sick with a mild case. Go to visit grandma and she dies.

how does that really all happen knowing what everyone knows? social distancing and all. that's pathetic to think people are that stupid.

 

[Admiral Rockwell Tory]

World
We need an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus in America
Yaneer Bar-Yam, Opinion contributor
USA TODAY OpinionMarch 21, 2020, 11:30 AM EDT

I am an MIT-trained physicist and complexity scientist who studies pandemics. I have warned about global pandemics due to increasing travel for 15 years. I recommended community based monitoring of symptoms to stop Ebola in West Africa in 2014, and it worked. The fastest and even the only way to contain COVID-19 in the United States is a five-week national lockdown.
Closing schools, bars and movie theaters are good measures, but not enough. Our relaxed approach to social distancing is insufficient to stop the exponential growth of COVID-19. Until Americans consistently adopt strong social distancing recommendations — a lockdown — the disease will continue to spread exponentially.
During a five-week national lockdown, federal, state and local authorities would ensure that all Americans stay home except to obtain food and other essentials, access medical care, or do work essential to the functioning of society. Travel would cease: We would close our borders and airports and prohibit all unnecessary travel across state and county (or town) lines within the United States. The U.S. government would have to provide aid to citizens separated from their sources of income and ensure care for vulnerable members of society.
Lockdown would sharply reduce cases
During the first two weeks of a lockdown, infected individuals will either recover from mild cases of COVID-19 at home or seek medical attention for the 14% of cases that are severe. During the third, fourth and fifth weeks, any newly infected family or cohabitants of infected individuals will recover or seek medical attention and their isolation will prevent further spreading. By the end of the lockdown, the number of infections will be a small fraction of what they are now.

The lockdown will give us time to dramatically scale up our supply of COVID-19 test kits and capacity to process them. If we reduce the number of infections using the lockdown and start a massive testing regime in the United States, we can control COVID-19 after five weeks without such extreme social distancing measures. Isolating sick individuals and their immediate contacts will be enough.

The human and economic costs of delaying this lockdown will be staggering. The COVID-19 outbreak has many more cases now than are visible (tip of the iceberg) and they are growing rapidly. Absent sufficiently effective intervention, new cases will increase 1.3 to 1.5 times each day. We had almost 20,000 cases in the United States on Friday, over 5,800 more cases than the previous day. Without a lockdown, in one week there will be about 200,000. In two weeks: 2,000,000. One in seven cases require hospitalization and 5% require ICU care with ventilators to survive. There aren’t nearly enough ventilators available.

The effectiveness of a five-week lockdown will be dramatic — and also entirely predictable.

We know a U.S. lockdown can work because it worked in China. At the height of its COVID-19 crisis in mid-February, China had locked down an estimated 760 milllion people, approximately half of its population. This policy was so successful that Wuhan is now much safer from coronavirus than New York City or Washington, D.C. The few new COVID-19 cases in China now stem from foreign travelers rather than local transmission, and all are safely quarantined.

We know what we have to do. President Donald Trump and our states' governors and local leaders must act now to save millions of lives.

Yaneer Bar-Yam is the founding president of the New England Complex Systems Institute, where he is an expert on pandemics and other complex systems. He is spearheading the effort of over 3,000 volunteers working to stop the outbreak at endcoronavirus.org. Follow him on Twitter: @yaneerbaryam

We need an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus in America

Locking down the country would reduce infections and allow time for massive testing. There will be staggering human and economic costs if we delay.

www.yahoo.com

United States Infections and deaths from Coronavirus as of February 29, 2020
Infections: 68
Deaths: 1

United States Infections and deaths from Coronavirus as of March 22, 2020
Infections: 35,000
Deaths: 458

The exponential rise in infections and deaths in just 3 weeks is incredible. Where will the United States be on April 23, 2020 without the lockdown proposed above?

It would be nice to think we could shutdown our economy for 5 weeks and survive as a country, but it is not reality. A 5 week lockdown is a case of the cure being worse than the disease

There is no other option. This is a disaster situation. The priority is survival, not making money. The entire economy will have to be refocused to fighting this war, just like it was during World War II.

Bullshit. We’ve endured worse pandemics before, and we didn’t shut down the whole nation.
Forcing businesses to shut down is wrong. Cracking down on people going to parks is wrong. Let people make up their own damned minds. But authoritarian asswipes can never let that happen.

Go to the park. Get infected from someone you come into contact with. You get sick with a mild case. Go to visit grandma and she dies.

I am not coming into contact with anyone at the park or the biking trails which my stupid city closed.

Neither am I. I have to mask up and stay as far away from everyone as possible. Some asshole goes to Florida on spring break, catches the virus, gives it to their brother, sister, Mom or Dad and they give it to my wife who then gives it to me. I am as good as dead.

 

[eagle1462010]

Riddle me this..........nothing to do with the thread.......LOL

Can ventilation systems and AirConditioning spread Coronavirus...........

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ced2/a164b88dcab4e87cf739ad97fc3c98458019.pdf

SARS HONG KONG.....it did...........and yet they say it isn't happening now. On the Cruise ship either....

Why do I believe they are wrong...........SARS is similar.....and it's very possible that the Ventilation in New York High Rises are spreading this thing..........

One other note...........I read another site ...have to find it again that HUMIDIFIERS can help minimize the spread also

 

[jc456]

World
We need an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus in America
Yaneer Bar-Yam, Opinion contributor
USA TODAY OpinionMarch 21, 2020, 11:30 AM EDT

I am an MIT-trained physicist and complexity scientist who studies pandemics. I have warned about global pandemics due to increasing travel for 15 years. I recommended community based monitoring of symptoms to stop Ebola in West Africa in 2014, and it worked. The fastest and even the only way to contain COVID-19 in the United States is a five-week national lockdown.
Closing schools, bars and movie theaters are good measures, but not enough. Our relaxed approach to social distancing is insufficient to stop the exponential growth of COVID-19. Until Americans consistently adopt strong social distancing recommendations — a lockdown — the disease will continue to spread exponentially.
During a five-week national lockdown, federal, state and local authorities would ensure that all Americans stay home except to obtain food and other essentials, access medical care, or do work essential to the functioning of society. Travel would cease: We would close our borders and airports and prohibit all unnecessary travel across state and county (or town) lines within the United States. The U.S. government would have to provide aid to citizens separated from their sources of income and ensure care for vulnerable members of society.
Lockdown would sharply reduce cases
During the first two weeks of a lockdown, infected individuals will either recover from mild cases of COVID-19 at home or seek medical attention for the 14% of cases that are severe. During the third, fourth and fifth weeks, any newly infected family or cohabitants of infected individuals will recover or seek medical attention and their isolation will prevent further spreading. By the end of the lockdown, the number of infections will be a small fraction of what they are now.

The lockdown will give us time to dramatically scale up our supply of COVID-19 test kits and capacity to process them. If we reduce the number of infections using the lockdown and start a massive testing regime in the United States, we can control COVID-19 after five weeks without such extreme social distancing measures. Isolating sick individuals and their immediate contacts will be enough.

The human and economic costs of delaying this lockdown will be staggering. The COVID-19 outbreak has many more cases now than are visible (tip of the iceberg) and they are growing rapidly. Absent sufficiently effective intervention, new cases will increase 1.3 to 1.5 times each day. We had almost 20,000 cases in the United States on Friday, over 5,800 more cases than the previous day. Without a lockdown, in one week there will be about 200,000. In two weeks: 2,000,000. One in seven cases require hospitalization and 5% require ICU care with ventilators to survive. There aren’t nearly enough ventilators available.

The effectiveness of a five-week lockdown will be dramatic — and also entirely predictable.

We know a U.S. lockdown can work because it worked in China. At the height of its COVID-19 crisis in mid-February, China had locked down an estimated 760 milllion people, approximately half of its population. This policy was so successful that Wuhan is now much safer from coronavirus than New York City or Washington, D.C. The few new COVID-19 cases in China now stem from foreign travelers rather than local transmission, and all are safely quarantined.

We know what we have to do. President Donald Trump and our states' governors and local leaders must act now to save millions of lives.

Yaneer Bar-Yam is the founding president of the New England Complex Systems Institute, where he is an expert on pandemics and other complex systems. He is spearheading the effort of over 3,000 volunteers working to stop the outbreak at endcoronavirus.org. Follow him on Twitter: @yaneerbaryam

We need an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus in America

Locking down the country would reduce infections and allow time for massive testing. There will be staggering human and economic costs if we delay.

www.yahoo.com

United States Infections and deaths from Coronavirus as of February 29, 2020
Infections: 68
Deaths: 1

United States Infections and deaths from Coronavirus as of March 22, 2020
Infections: 35,000
Deaths: 458

The exponential rise in infections and deaths in just 3 weeks is incredible. Where will the United States be on April 23, 2020 without the lockdown proposed above?

It would be nice to think we could shutdown our economy for 5 weeks and survive as a country, but it is not reality. A 5 week lockdown is a case of the cure being worse than the disease

There is no other option. This is a disaster situation. The priority is survival, not making money. The entire economy will have to be refocused to fighting this war, just like it was during World War II.

Bullshit. We’ve endured worse pandemics before, and we didn’t shut down the whole nation.
Forcing businesses to shut down is wrong. Cracking down on people going to parks is wrong. Let people make up their own damned minds. But authoritarian asswipes can never let that happen.

Go to the park. Get infected from someone you come into contact with. You get sick with a mild case. Go to visit grandma and she dies.

I am not coming into contact with anyone at the park or the biking trails which my stupid city closed.

Neither am I. I have to mask up and stay as far away from everyone as possible. Some asshole goes to Florida on spring break, catches the virus, gives it to their brother, sister, Mom or Dad and they give it to my wife who then gives it to me. I am as good as dead.

that's been that way since forever. flu kills 20,000 and that didn't bother you before did it?

 

[eagle1462010]

Experts say risk of coronavirus spread through ventilation systems in NYC apartment buildings is very low

Amenity spaces with HVACs are closing.

www.brickunderground.com

Guidance from NYC
The city says no special ventilation precautions are recommended for residential or commercial buildings. City guidance states, “the spread of coronaviruses from person-to-person over long distances, such as through HVAC systems, has not been shown.” The advice is to check working windows and the supply and exhaust vent systems to make sure they are working properly. As the weather warms, the CDC's recommendation to "increase ventilation by opening windows" should become easier for New Yorkers as part of suggested good hygiene practices.

Princess Cruises says the HVAC system of the Diamond Princess was not responsible for the recent spread of infection to passengers onboard. Nearly 700 passengers developed Covid-19 on the ship, which was quarantined in Japan in February. On its website, the company cites a letter from Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which says, "there is no current evidence to suggest that the virus spreads through air-handling systems."



The study in my previous post is how SARS spread in Hong Kong......Opening windows in High rises and the air flow moved the SARS to other Apartments and Buildings.

Another Riddle...........Why not put HUMIDIFIERS in key areas of LOBBIES and such..........The virus molecules can't travel as far........in hot humid weather..............

 

[eagle1462010]

https://www.condair.com/humidifiernews/pressreleases/humidifiers-can-reduce-the-transmission-risk-of-coronavirus

“The survival times of SARS coronaviruses on inanimate surfaces and as infectious droplets in the air have been studied. An identical pattern has appeared repeatedly. Very low temperatures (tested at 6°C) and very low humidity (30%) enable viruses to survive for long periods on surfaces and in the air. Even at moderate temperatures of 20-30°C, there was a long survival time, but only when the air was dry. Very high temperatures (>30°C) render the coronaviruses inactive. This is why there have been repeated MERS epidemics on the Arabian Peninsula solely during the cooler winter months. It is assumed that the current Coronavirus will also exhibit a similar behaviour in relation to humidity and temperature. The rate of transmission from human to human is influenced by indoor conditions,” explains Dr. Walter Hugentobler, FMH General Physician, and Dr. Stephanie Taylor, Harvard Medical School, Medical Advisors for Condair Group.



This means that conditions in homes and on public transport where air is typically heated to 20 to 24 degrees for comfort, have resulting low relative humidity from approximately 20 % to 40 %. These are the ideal environmental conditions for SARS coronaviruses to survive on surfaces and in the air over a long period of time, and consequently for increased transmission via contact with contaminated surfaces and inhalation from the air.



“Air humidification acts in a proactive way to combat the spread of viruses by infected people, including so-called super spreaders, even before any symptoms appear or a diagnosis can be made. Additionally, the respiratory tract's defences are improved in all people due to the more efficient cleaning of the airways and enhanced immune defences. Raising air humidity by humidification reduces the risk of virus spread in hospitals and other buildings at low-cost and without causing negative effects,” Said Hugentobler.

 

[Dogmaphobe]

It has been my experience locally that there is an inverse relationship between a person's support for a complete shutdown and the degree to which doing so would affect them personally.

Teachers, for instance, are all for an utter lock down. They are at home right now getting paid to not work. They have nice pers for when they retire and they have free medical benefits. Small business owners are not quite as enthusiastic, as they have none of these things.

It is always easy to demand that others make the sacrifice so you don't have to, and right now it is the public sector doing that to the private.

Nice pers? Did you mean "perks"?

Where the hell did you morons come up with this "free medical benefits" bullshit? You have been told by others and myself that is simply not true. Everywhere I worked in 21 years as a teacher, I paid for my medical in part for myself and 100% for my family.

What's next? Retirement benefits? The same benefits that we provided at 100%.

I wish you dumbasses could come up with another reason to bash teachers because you are jealous and did not have an opportunity to actually get an education.

PERS stands for public Employees retirement system.

One of the many things you obviously do not know.

 

[eagle1462010]

So...........does anyone else have issues to what NYC is saying............in 2003 opening windows SPREAD SARS.........proven.......

Ventillation systems move air.......and in dryer conditions.......the virus moves easier ans lives longer........Yet SARS doesn't do so well in HUMID HOT CONDITIONS........

I think the Ventilation system on the Cruise ship spread the virus........some of it at least......and I THINK IT IS SPREADING IT IN NEW YORK CITY

Theory.......AGREE......DISAGREE?

 

[eagle1462010]

Outbreak of Legionnaires Disease highlights role of ducts in indoor air quality

A recent outbreak of Legionnaires disease in New York City has contributed to an increased interest among building professionals in the role that duct leakage plays in the spread of the disease.

www.proudgreenhome.com

Aug. 27, 2015

“We have heard from a number of our East Coast dealers that are responding to an uptick in calls from commercial clients that are concerned about the recent epidemic,” said Walsh. “They are learning that the microbes responsible for Legionnaires disease are typically spread through a contaminated indoor air environment, and that has led them directly to concerns about duct leakage.”

According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), the EPA and others, duct leakage can be a major contributor to health risks associated with poor indoor air quality. Leaks in the ductwork allow contaminants to enter the duct system at one location within a structure and then spread throughout the rest of the building.

Experts believe that Legionella Pneumophila, the bacteria that causes Legionnaires disease, is typically spread through a building’s ventilation system. In the recent New York City epidemic, the outbreak has been traced to contaminated cooling towers, which release water mist. It is likely that the contaminated water mist spread throughout the atmosphere with the assistance of leaky ventilation systems, and then was inhaled by occupants.

“It’s estimated that poor indoor air quality costs businesses as much as $100 billion a year in lost productivity, health costs and other related problems,” said Walsh. “Poor indoor air quality can cause everything from headaches, coughing and skin irritation to more serious health concerns such as what we’re seeing in New York.”

Since it first appeared in late July, more than 100 people have been diagnosed with Legionnaires Disease. While this disorder is easily diagnosed and can be treated with antibiotics, 10 people have died due to this latest outbreak.

To help minimize health risks associated with poor indoor air quality, many health organizations including the CDC, the EPA and the American Lung Association, recommend sealing ductwork. While some leaks can be addressed using traditional duct sealing methods, studies show that the most efficient and cost-effective means of sealing ductwork is with the use of aerosol-based duct sealing technology.

“We are working hard to educate the public about the problems associated with poor indoor air quality and the role that duct leaks play in exacerbating the problem,” said Walsh. “The recent Legionnaires outbreak is a reminder of how easily airborne diseases can spread and put us all at risk.”

 

[U2Edge]

World
We need an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus in America
Yaneer Bar-Yam, Opinion contributor
USA TODAY OpinionMarch 21, 2020, 11:30 AM EDT

I am an MIT-trained physicist and complexity scientist who studies pandemics. I have warned about global pandemics due to increasing travel for 15 years. I recommended community based monitoring of symptoms to stop Ebola in West Africa in 2014, and it worked. The fastest and even the only way to contain COVID-19 in the United States is a five-week national lockdown.
Closing schools, bars and movie theaters are good measures, but not enough. Our relaxed approach to social distancing is insufficient to stop the exponential growth of COVID-19. Until Americans consistently adopt strong social distancing recommendations — a lockdown — the disease will continue to spread exponentially.
During a five-week national lockdown, federal, state and local authorities would ensure that all Americans stay home except to obtain food and other essentials, access medical care, or do work essential to the functioning of society. Travel would cease: We would close our borders and airports and prohibit all unnecessary travel across state and county (or town) lines within the United States. The U.S. government would have to provide aid to citizens separated from their sources of income and ensure care for vulnerable members of society.
Lockdown would sharply reduce cases
During the first two weeks of a lockdown, infected individuals will either recover from mild cases of COVID-19 at home or seek medical attention for the 14% of cases that are severe. During the third, fourth and fifth weeks, any newly infected family or cohabitants of infected individuals will recover or seek medical attention and their isolation will prevent further spreading. By the end of the lockdown, the number of infections will be a small fraction of what they are now.

The lockdown will give us time to dramatically scale up our supply of COVID-19 test kits and capacity to process them. If we reduce the number of infections using the lockdown and start a massive testing regime in the United States, we can control COVID-19 after five weeks without such extreme social distancing measures. Isolating sick individuals and their immediate contacts will be enough.

The human and economic costs of delaying this lockdown will be staggering. The COVID-19 outbreak has many more cases now than are visible (tip of the iceberg) and they are growing rapidly. Absent sufficiently effective intervention, new cases will increase 1.3 to 1.5 times each day. We had almost 20,000 cases in the United States on Friday, over 5,800 more cases than the previous day. Without a lockdown, in one week there will be about 200,000. In two weeks: 2,000,000. One in seven cases require hospitalization and 5% require ICU care with ventilators to survive. There aren’t nearly enough ventilators available.

The effectiveness of a five-week lockdown will be dramatic — and also entirely predictable.

We know a U.S. lockdown can work because it worked in China. At the height of its COVID-19 crisis in mid-February, China had locked down an estimated 760 milllion people, approximately half of its population. This policy was so successful that Wuhan is now much safer from coronavirus than New York City or Washington, D.C. The few new COVID-19 cases in China now stem from foreign travelers rather than local transmission, and all are safely quarantined.

We know what we have to do. President Donald Trump and our states' governors and local leaders must act now to save millions of lives.

Yaneer Bar-Yam is the founding president of the New England Complex Systems Institute, where he is an expert on pandemics and other complex systems. He is spearheading the effort of over 3,000 volunteers working to stop the outbreak at endcoronavirus.org. Follow him on Twitter: @yaneerbaryam

We need an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus in America

Locking down the country would reduce infections and allow time for massive testing. There will be staggering human and economic costs if we delay.

www.yahoo.com

United States Infections and deaths from Coronavirus as of February 29, 2020
Infections: 68
Deaths: 1

United States Infections and deaths from Coronavirus as of March 22, 2020
Infections: 35,000
Deaths: 458

The exponential rise in infections and deaths in just 3 weeks is incredible. Where will the United States be on April 23, 2020 without the lockdown proposed above?

It would be nice to think we could shutdown our economy for 5 weeks and survive as a country, but it is not reality. A 5 week lockdown is a case of the cure being worse than the disease

There is no other option. This is a disaster situation. The priority is survival, not making money. The entire economy will have to be refocused to fighting this war, just like it was during World War II.

Bullshit. We’ve endured worse pandemics before, and we didn’t shut down the whole nation.
Forcing businesses to shut down is wrong. Cracking down on people going to parks is wrong. Let people make up their own damned minds. But authoritarian asswipes can never let that happen.

Go to the park. Get infected from someone you come into contact with. You get sick with a mild case. Go to visit grandma and she dies.

I am not coming into contact with anyone at the park or the biking trails which my stupid city closed.

Neither am I. I have to mask up and stay as far away from everyone as possible. Some asshole goes to Florida on spring break, catches the virus, gives it to their brother, sister, Mom or Dad and they give it to my wife who then gives it to me. I am as good as dead.

that's been that way since forever. flu kills 20,000 and that didn't bother you before did it?

Coronavirus is 44 times more deadly than season flu. Seasonal flu has a vaccine you can take, coronavirus does NOT. When will you start to understand these basic facts?

 

[U2Edge]

Harsh Steps Are Needed to Stop the Coronavirus, Experts Say
Donald G. McNeil Jr.
The New York TimesMarch 23, 2020, 12:02 PM EDT

Terrifying though the coronavirus may be, it can be turned back. China, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan have demonstrated that, with furious efforts, the contagion can be brought to heel.

Whether they can keep it suppressed remains to be seen. But for the United States to repeat their successes will take extraordinary levels of coordination and money from the country’s leaders, and extraordinary levels of trust and cooperation from citizens.

There is a chance to stop the coronavirus. This contagion has a weakness.

Although there are incidents of rampant spread, as happened on the cruise ship Diamond Princess, the coronavirus more often infects clusters of family members, friends and work colleagues, said Dr. David L. Heymann, who chairs an expert panel advising the World Health Organization on emergencies.

No one is certain why the virus travels in this way, but experts see an opening nonetheless. “You can contain clusters,” Heymann said. “You need to identify and stop discrete outbreaks, and then do rigorous contact tracing.”

In interviews with a dozen of the world’s leading experts on fighting epidemics, there was wide agreement on the steps that must be taken immediately. Those experts included international public health officials; scientists and epidemiologists; and former health officials in both Republican and Democratic administrations.

Americans must be persuaded to stay home, they said, and a system put in place to isolate the infected and care for them outside the home. Travel restrictions should be extended, they said; productions of masks and ventilators must be accelerated, and testing problems must be resolved.

“The American way is to look for better outcomes through a voluntary system,” said Dr. Luciana Borio, who was director of medical and biodefense preparedness for the National Security Council before her unit was disbanded in 2018. “I think you can appeal to people to do the right thing.”

What follows are the recommendations offered by the experts interviewed by The New York Times.

Scientists must be heard

The White House holds frequent media briefings to describe the administration’s progress against the pandemic, often led by President Donald Trump or Vice President Mike Pence, flanked by a rotating cast of officials.

Many experts declined to speak on the record for fear of offending the president. But they were united in the opinion that politicians must step aside and let scientists both lead the effort to contain the virus and explain to Americans what must be done.

Above all, the experts said, briefings should focus on saving lives and making sure that average wage earners survive the coming hard times — not on the stock market, the tourism industry or the president’s health. There is no time left to point fingers and assign blame.

“At this point in the emergency, there’s little merit in spending time on what we should have done or who’s at fault,” said Adm. Tim Ziemer, who led the pandemic response unit on the National Security Council before its disbanding. “We need to focus on the enemy, and that’s the virus.”

Stop transmission between cities

The next priority, experts said, is extreme social distancing. If it were possible to wave a magic wand and make all Americans freeze in place for 14 days while sitting 6 feet apart, epidemiologists say, the whole epidemic would sputter to a halt.

Obviously, there is no magic wand. But the goal of lockdowns and social distancing is to approximate such a total freeze. To attempt that, experts said, travel and human interaction must be reduced to a minimum.

Stop transmission within cities

Within cities, there are dangerous hot spots: One restaurant, one gym, one hospital, even one taxi may be more contaminated than many identical others nearby because someone had a coughing fit inside.

Each day’s delay in stopping human contact, experts said, creates more hot spots, none of which can be identified until about a week later, when the people infected there start falling ill.

To stop the explosion, municipal activity must be curtailed. Still, some Americans must stay on the job: doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers; police officers and firefighters; the technicians who maintain the electrical grid and gas and phone lines. The delivery of food and medicine must continue.

But the weaker the freeze, the more people die in overburdened hospitals — and the longer it ultimately takes for the economy to restart.

Fix the testing mess

Testing must be done in a coordinated and safe way, experts said. The seriously ill must go first, and the testers must be protected.

In the United States, people seeking tests are calling their doctors, who may not have them, or sometimes waiting in traffic jams leading to store parking lots. On Friday, New York City limited testing only to those patients requiring hospitalization, saying the system was being overwhelmed.

Isolate the infected

As soon as possible, experts said, the United States must develop an alternative to the practice of isolating infected people at home, as it endangers families. In China, 75% to 80% of all transmission occurred in family clusters.

Instead of a policy that advises the infected to remain at home, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now does, experts said cities should establish facilities where the mildly and moderately ill can recuperate.

Wuhan created many such centers, called “temporary hospitals,” each a cross between a dormitory and a first-aid clinic. They had cots and oxygen tanks, but not the advanced machines used in intensive care units.

U.S. cities now have many spaces that could serve as isolation wards. Already New York is considering turning the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center into a temporary hospital.

Find the fevers

Because China, Taiwan and Vietnam were hit by SARS in 2003, and South Korea has grappled with MERS, fever checks during disease outbreaks became routine.

In most cities in affected Asian countries, it is commonplace before entering any bus, train or subway station, office building, theater or even a restaurant to get a temperature check. Washing your hands in chlorinated water is often also required.

Trace the contacts

Finding and testing all the contacts of every positive case is essential, experts said. At the peak of its epidemic, Wuhan had 18,000 people tracking down individuals who had come in contact with the infected.

At the moment, the health departments of some American counties lack the manpower to trace even syphilis or tuberculosis, let alone scores of casual contacts of someone infected with the coronavirus.

Borio suggested that young Americans could use their social networks to “do their own contact tracing.”

Make masks ubiquitous

There is very little data showing that flat surgical masks protect healthy individuals from disease. Nonetheless, Asian countries generally make it mandatory that people wear them. The Asian approach is less about data than it is about crowd psychology, experts explained.

All experts agree that the sick must wear masks to keep in their coughs. But if a mask indicates that the wearer is sick, many people will be reluctant to wear one. If everyone is required to wear masks, the sick automatically have one on and there is no stigma attached.

Also, experts emphasized, Americans should be taught to take seriously admonitions to stop shaking hands and hugging. The “WHO elbow bump” may look funny, but it’s a legitimate technique for preventing infection.

Preserve vital services

Federal intervention is necessary for some vital aspects of life during a pandemic. Only the federal government can enforce interstate commerce laws to ensure that food, water, electricity, gas, phone lines and other basic needs keep flowing.

Trump has said he could compel companies to prioritize making ventilators, masks and other needed goods; some have volunteered. He also has the military; the Navy is committing two hospital ships to the fight. And Trump can call up the National Guard.

High-level decisions like these must be made quickly, experts said.

“Many Western political leaders are behaving as though they are on a tightrope,” said Dr. David Nabarro, a WHO special envoy on COVID-19. “But there is no choice. We must do all in our power to fight this.”

Produce ventilators and oxygen

The roughly 175,000 ventilators in all U.S. hospitals and the national stockpile are expected to be far fewer than are needed to handle a surge of patients.

The manufacturers, including a dozen in the United States, say there is no easy way to ramp up production quickly. But it is possible other manufacturers, including aerospace and automobile companies, could be enlisted to do so.

Providers, meanwhile, are scrambling for alternatives. Canadian nurses are disseminating a 2006 paper describing how one ventilator can be modified to treat four patients simultaneously.

The United States must also work to increase its supply of piped and tanked oxygen, Aylward said.

Retrofit hospitals

Hospitals in the United States have taken some measures to handle surges of patients, such as stopping elective surgery and setting up isolation rooms.

The national stockpile does contain some prepackaged military field hospitals, but they are not expected to be nearly enough for a big surge.

In Wuhan, the Chinese government famously built two new hospitals in two weeks. All other hospitals were divided: 48 were designated to handle 10,000 serious or critical coronavirus patients, while others were restricted to handling emergencies like heart attacks and births.

Recruit volunteers

China’s effort succeeded, experts said, in part because of hundreds of thousands of volunteers. The government declared a “people’s war” and rolled out a “Fight On, Wuhan! Fight On, China!” campaign.

Many people idled by the lockdowns stepped up to act as fever checkers, contact tracers, hospital construction workers, food deliverers, even babysitters for the children of first responders. With training, volunteers were able to do some ground-level but crucial medical tasks.

Americans often step forward to help neighbors affected by hurricanes and floods; many will no doubt do so in this outbreak.

“This truly is an ‘all hands on deck’ situation,” Ziemer said.

Prioritize the treatments

Clinicians in China, Italy and France have thrown virtually everything they had in hospital pharmacies into the fight, and at least two possibilities have emerged that might save patients: the anti-malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, and the antiviral remdesivir, which has no licensed use.

There is no proof yet that any of these are effective against the virus. Italy and France have trials underway, and hospitals in New York are writing trial protocols now.

Find a vaccine

The ultimate hope is to have a vaccine that will protect everyone, and many companies and governments have already rushed the design of candidate vaccines.

The process will take at least a year, even if nothing goes wrong. The roadblock, vaccine experts explained, is not bureaucratic. It is that the human immune system takes weeks to produce antibodies, and some dangerous side effects can take weeks to appear.

After extensive animal testing, vaccines are normally given to about 50 healthy human volunteers to see if they cause any unexpected side effects and to measure what dose produces enough antibodies to be considered protective.

If that goes well, the trial enrolls hundreds or thousands of volunteers in an area where the virus is circulating. Half get the vaccine, the rest do not — and the investigators wait. If the vaccinated half do not get the disease, the green light for production is finally given.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Harsh Steps Are Needed to Stop the Coronavirus, Experts Say

Terrifying though the coronavirus may be, it can be turned back. China, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan have demonstrated that, with furious efforts, the contagion can be brought to heel.Whether they can keep it suppressed remains to be seen. But for the United States to repeat their successes...

www.yahoo.com

 

[eagle1462010]

World
We need an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus in America
Yaneer Bar-Yam, Opinion contributor
USA TODAY OpinionMarch 21, 2020, 11:30 AM EDT

I am an MIT-trained physicist and complexity scientist who studies pandemics. I have warned about global pandemics due to increasing travel for 15 years. I recommended community based monitoring of symptoms to stop Ebola in West Africa in 2014, and it worked. The fastest and even the only way to contain COVID-19 in the United States is a five-week national lockdown.
Closing schools, bars and movie theaters are good measures, but not enough. Our relaxed approach to social distancing is insufficient to stop the exponential growth of COVID-19. Until Americans consistently adopt strong social distancing recommendations — a lockdown — the disease will continue to spread exponentially.
During a five-week national lockdown, federal, state and local authorities would ensure that all Americans stay home except to obtain food and other essentials, access medical care, or do work essential to the functioning of society. Travel would cease: We would close our borders and airports and prohibit all unnecessary travel across state and county (or town) lines within the United States. The U.S. government would have to provide aid to citizens separated from their sources of income and ensure care for vulnerable members of society.
Lockdown would sharply reduce cases
During the first two weeks of a lockdown, infected individuals will either recover from mild cases of COVID-19 at home or seek medical attention for the 14% of cases that are severe. During the third, fourth and fifth weeks, any newly infected family or cohabitants of infected individuals will recover or seek medical attention and their isolation will prevent further spreading. By the end of the lockdown, the number of infections will be a small fraction of what they are now.

The lockdown will give us time to dramatically scale up our supply of COVID-19 test kits and capacity to process them. If we reduce the number of infections using the lockdown and start a massive testing regime in the United States, we can control COVID-19 after five weeks without such extreme social distancing measures. Isolating sick individuals and their immediate contacts will be enough.

The human and economic costs of delaying this lockdown will be staggering. The COVID-19 outbreak has many more cases now than are visible (tip of the iceberg) and they are growing rapidly. Absent sufficiently effective intervention, new cases will increase 1.3 to 1.5 times each day. We had almost 20,000 cases in the United States on Friday, over 5,800 more cases than the previous day. Without a lockdown, in one week there will be about 200,000. In two weeks: 2,000,000. One in seven cases require hospitalization and 5% require ICU care with ventilators to survive. There aren’t nearly enough ventilators available.

The effectiveness of a five-week lockdown will be dramatic — and also entirely predictable.

We know a U.S. lockdown can work because it worked in China. At the height of its COVID-19 crisis in mid-February, China had locked down an estimated 760 milllion people, approximately half of its population. This policy was so successful that Wuhan is now much safer from coronavirus than New York City or Washington, D.C. The few new COVID-19 cases in China now stem from foreign travelers rather than local transmission, and all are safely quarantined.

We know what we have to do. President Donald Trump and our states' governors and local leaders must act now to save millions of lives.

Yaneer Bar-Yam is the founding president of the New England Complex Systems Institute, where he is an expert on pandemics and other complex systems. He is spearheading the effort of over 3,000 volunteers working to stop the outbreak at endcoronavirus.org. Follow him on Twitter: @yaneerbaryam

We need an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus in America

Locking down the country would reduce infections and allow time for massive testing. There will be staggering human and economic costs if we delay.

www.yahoo.com

United States Infections and deaths from Coronavirus as of February 29, 2020
Infections: 68
Deaths: 1

United States Infections and deaths from Coronavirus as of March 22, 2020
Infections: 35,000
Deaths: 458

The exponential rise in infections and deaths in just 3 weeks is incredible. Where will the United States be on April 23, 2020 without the lockdown proposed above?

It would be nice to think we could shutdown our economy for 5 weeks and survive as a country, but it is not reality. A 5 week lockdown is a case of the cure being worse than the disease

There is no other option. This is a disaster situation. The priority is survival, not making money. The entire economy will have to be refocused to fighting this war, just like it was during World War II.

Bullshit. We’ve endured worse pandemics before, and we didn’t shut down the whole nation.
Forcing businesses to shut down is wrong. Cracking down on people going to parks is wrong. Let people make up their own damned minds. But authoritarian asswipes can never let that happen.

Go to the park. Get infected from someone you come into contact with. You get sick with a mild case. Go to visit grandma and she dies.

I am not coming into contact with anyone at the park or the biking trails which my stupid city closed.

Neither am I. I have to mask up and stay as far away from everyone as possible. Some asshole goes to Florida on spring break, catches the virus, gives it to their brother, sister, Mom or Dad and they give it to my wife who then gives it to me. I am as good as dead.

that's been that way since forever. flu kills 20,000 and that didn't bother you before did it?

Coronavirus is 44 times more deadly than season flu. Seasonal flu has a vaccine you can take, coronavirus does NOT. When will you start to understand these basic facts?

H1N1 while not being as transmitable.....was a deadly Flu.....killing a hell of a lot more than this one has...........

It killed the young.......4000 Americans died in the 1st 6 months.......it killed by some estimates nearly 600,000 in the world..........A VACCINE was started within a FEW MONTHS.......

Now we have several VACCINES in the works within a few months again.........time will tell their success and how to manufacture so much of it is another problem.

WE CANNOT STAY SHUT DOWN FOR A VERY LONG TIME......IT WILL ECONOMICALLY DESTROY US AND THE WORLD.................Even with all of the people staying home...........we ONLY MINIMIZE THE SPREAD.......it's gonna keep coming back until medicine BEATS IT......or it runs it's course........

I do think once it gets MUGGY AND HOT down south....the spread will lessen.....I've shown SARS studies from the past already saying so.........Even though now they say it's NEW......LOL

SARs. .....isn't NEW.......NEITHER IS CORONA...........BOTH HAVE BEEN STUDIED........

 

[U2Edge]

World
We need an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus in America
Yaneer Bar-Yam, Opinion contributor
USA TODAY OpinionMarch 21, 2020, 11:30 AM EDT

I am an MIT-trained physicist and complexity scientist who studies pandemics. I have warned about global pandemics due to increasing travel for 15 years. I recommended community based monitoring of symptoms to stop Ebola in West Africa in 2014, and it worked. The fastest and even the only way to contain COVID-19 in the United States is a five-week national lockdown.
Closing schools, bars and movie theaters are good measures, but not enough. Our relaxed approach to social distancing is insufficient to stop the exponential growth of COVID-19. Until Americans consistently adopt strong social distancing recommendations — a lockdown — the disease will continue to spread exponentially.
During a five-week national lockdown, federal, state and local authorities would ensure that all Americans stay home except to obtain food and other essentials, access medical care, or do work essential to the functioning of society. Travel would cease: We would close our borders and airports and prohibit all unnecessary travel across state and county (or town) lines within the United States. The U.S. government would have to provide aid to citizens separated from their sources of income and ensure care for vulnerable members of society.
Lockdown would sharply reduce cases
During the first two weeks of a lockdown, infected individuals will either recover from mild cases of COVID-19 at home or seek medical attention for the 14% of cases that are severe. During the third, fourth and fifth weeks, any newly infected family or cohabitants of infected individuals will recover or seek medical attention and their isolation will prevent further spreading. By the end of the lockdown, the number of infections will be a small fraction of what they are now.

The lockdown will give us time to dramatically scale up our supply of COVID-19 test kits and capacity to process them. If we reduce the number of infections using the lockdown and start a massive testing regime in the United States, we can control COVID-19 after five weeks without such extreme social distancing measures. Isolating sick individuals and their immediate contacts will be enough.

The human and economic costs of delaying this lockdown will be staggering. The COVID-19 outbreak has many more cases now than are visible (tip of the iceberg) and they are growing rapidly. Absent sufficiently effective intervention, new cases will increase 1.3 to 1.5 times each day. We had almost 20,000 cases in the United States on Friday, over 5,800 more cases than the previous day. Without a lockdown, in one week there will be about 200,000. In two weeks: 2,000,000. One in seven cases require hospitalization and 5% require ICU care with ventilators to survive. There aren’t nearly enough ventilators available.

The effectiveness of a five-week lockdown will be dramatic — and also entirely predictable.

We know a U.S. lockdown can work because it worked in China. At the height of its COVID-19 crisis in mid-February, China had locked down an estimated 760 milllion people, approximately half of its population. This policy was so successful that Wuhan is now much safer from coronavirus than New York City or Washington, D.C. The few new COVID-19 cases in China now stem from foreign travelers rather than local transmission, and all are safely quarantined.

We know what we have to do. President Donald Trump and our states' governors and local leaders must act now to save millions of lives.

Yaneer Bar-Yam is the founding president of the New England Complex Systems Institute, where he is an expert on pandemics and other complex systems. He is spearheading the effort of over 3,000 volunteers working to stop the outbreak at endcoronavirus.org. Follow him on Twitter: @yaneerbaryam

We need an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus in America

Locking down the country would reduce infections and allow time for massive testing. There will be staggering human and economic costs if we delay.

www.yahoo.com

United States Infections and deaths from Coronavirus as of February 29, 2020
Infections: 68
Deaths: 1

United States Infections and deaths from Coronavirus as of March 22, 2020
Infections: 35,000
Deaths: 458

The exponential rise in infections and deaths in just 3 weeks is incredible. Where will the United States be on April 23, 2020 without the lockdown proposed above?

It would be nice to think we could shutdown our economy for 5 weeks and survive as a country, but it is not reality. A 5 week lockdown is a case of the cure being worse than the disease

There is no other option. This is a disaster situation. The priority is survival, not making money. The entire economy will have to be refocused to fighting this war, just like it was during World War II.

Bullshit. We’ve endured worse pandemics before, and we didn’t shut down the whole nation.
Forcing businesses to shut down is wrong. Cracking down on people going to parks is wrong. Let people make up their own damned minds. But authoritarian asswipes can never let that happen.

The country is at war with a deadly pathogen. You should be on the side of the United States and not the pathogen which is killing people. The ideas you express will allow the pathogen to spread more and kill more Americans.

This virus is going to infect at least half the population regardless of any measures taken. We shouldn’t willfully destroy the entire economy on the untenable goal of preventing most people from being exposed to the virus. Those who can social distance and self quarantine should, those who can’t should carry on. There are usually 40,000 deaths a year just the flu, yet we don’t stop the nation to prevent it. Even if COVID19 is two or three times worse it’s still not worth shutting everything down.

1. Coronavirus is 44 times worse than seasonal flu in terms of risk of death if infected.
2. If you allow half of the population to be exposed, you will KILL 2 MILLION AMERICANS AT MINIMUM WITHIN A YEAR!
3. IF YOU ALLOW HALF OF THE POPULATION TO BE EXPOSED, you will destroy the health care system in this country. Then, millions won't get treatment for whatever condition they have.

You obviously don't understand how serious this is. New York State only has 3,000 Ventilators and will need 37,000 to meet the number of patients they will see in the coming weeks. This is a disaster. It will overwhelm every hospital in the country if you allow it to spread to half of the population.

The people most at risk can isolate themselves. Destroying the economy will lead to a decade of depression and millions will still die. History shows that those conditions will also lead the world into war.

The scientific models show that is not the case, and that extreme lock downs are what is necessary. People who have not symptoms can spread it to vulnerable people in the population. Lockdown is the only way to defeat a pathogen like this. The sooner everyone realizes that, the more lives will be saved, and the sooner this will be over.

 

[eagle1462010]

Harsh Steps Are Needed to Stop the Coronavirus, Experts Say
Donald G. McNeil Jr.
The New York TimesMarch 23, 2020, 12:02 PM EDT

Terrifying though the coronavirus may be, it can be turned back. China, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan have demonstrated that, with furious efforts, the contagion can be brought to heel.

Whether they can keep it suppressed remains to be seen. But for the United States to repeat their successes will take extraordinary levels of coordination and money from the country’s leaders, and extraordinary levels of trust and cooperation from citizens.

There is a chance to stop the coronavirus. This contagion has a weakness.

Although there are incidents of rampant spread, as happened on the cruise ship Diamond Princess, the coronavirus more often infects clusters of family members, friends and work colleagues, said Dr. David L. Heymann, who chairs an expert panel advising the World Health Organization on emergencies.

No one is certain why the virus travels in this way, but experts see an opening nonetheless. “You can contain clusters,” Heymann said. “You need to identify and stop discrete outbreaks, and then do rigorous contact tracing.”

In interviews with a dozen of the world’s leading experts on fighting epidemics, there was wide agreement on the steps that must be taken immediately. Those experts included international public health officials; scientists and epidemiologists; and former health officials in both Republican and Democratic administrations.

Americans must be persuaded to stay home, they said, and a system put in place to isolate the infected and care for them outside the home. Travel restrictions should be extended, they said; productions of masks and ventilators must be accelerated, and testing problems must be resolved.

“The American way is to look for better outcomes through a voluntary system,” said Dr. Luciana Borio, who was director of medical and biodefense preparedness for the National Security Council before her unit was disbanded in 2018. “I think you can appeal to people to do the right thing.”

What follows are the recommendations offered by the experts interviewed by The New York Times.

Scientists must be heard

The White House holds frequent media briefings to describe the administration’s progress against the pandemic, often led by President Donald Trump or Vice President Mike Pence, flanked by a rotating cast of officials.

Many experts declined to speak on the record for fear of offending the president. But they were united in the opinion that politicians must step aside and let scientists both lead the effort to contain the virus and explain to Americans what must be done.

Above all, the experts said, briefings should focus on saving lives and making sure that average wage earners survive the coming hard times — not on the stock market, the tourism industry or the president’s health. There is no time left to point fingers and assign blame.

“At this point in the emergency, there’s little merit in spending time on what we should have done or who’s at fault,” said Adm. Tim Ziemer, who led the pandemic response unit on the National Security Council before its disbanding. “We need to focus on the enemy, and that’s the virus.”

Stop transmission between cities

The next priority, experts said, is extreme social distancing. If it were possible to wave a magic wand and make all Americans freeze in place for 14 days while sitting 6 feet apart, epidemiologists say, the whole epidemic would sputter to a halt.

Obviously, there is no magic wand. But the goal of lockdowns and social distancing is to approximate such a total freeze. To attempt that, experts said, travel and human interaction must be reduced to a minimum.

Stop transmission within cities

Within cities, there are dangerous hot spots: One restaurant, one gym, one hospital, even one taxi may be more contaminated than many identical others nearby because someone had a coughing fit inside.

Each day’s delay in stopping human contact, experts said, creates more hot spots, none of which can be identified until about a week later, when the people infected there start falling ill.

To stop the explosion, municipal activity must be curtailed. Still, some Americans must stay on the job: doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers; police officers and firefighters; the technicians who maintain the electrical grid and gas and phone lines. The delivery of food and medicine must continue.

But the weaker the freeze, the more people die in overburdened hospitals — and the longer it ultimately takes for the economy to restart.

Fix the testing mess

Testing must be done in a coordinated and safe way, experts said. The seriously ill must go first, and the testers must be protected.

In the United States, people seeking tests are calling their doctors, who may not have them, or sometimes waiting in traffic jams leading to store parking lots. On Friday, New York City limited testing only to those patients requiring hospitalization, saying the system was being overwhelmed.

Isolate the infected

As soon as possible, experts said, the United States must develop an alternative to the practice of isolating infected people at home, as it endangers families. In China, 75% to 80% of all transmission occurred in family clusters.

Instead of a policy that advises the infected to remain at home, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now does, experts said cities should establish facilities where the mildly and moderately ill can recuperate.

Wuhan created many such centers, called “temporary hospitals,” each a cross between a dormitory and a first-aid clinic. They had cots and oxygen tanks, but not the advanced machines used in intensive care units.

U.S. cities now have many spaces that could serve as isolation wards. Already New York is considering turning the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center into a temporary hospital.

Find the fevers

Because China, Taiwan and Vietnam were hit by SARS in 2003, and South Korea has grappled with MERS, fever checks during disease outbreaks became routine.

In most cities in affected Asian countries, it is commonplace before entering any bus, train or subway station, office building, theater or even a restaurant to get a temperature check. Washing your hands in chlorinated water is often also required.

Trace the contacts

Finding and testing all the contacts of every positive case is essential, experts said. At the peak of its epidemic, Wuhan had 18,000 people tracking down individuals who had come in contact with the infected.

At the moment, the health departments of some American counties lack the manpower to trace even syphilis or tuberculosis, let alone scores of casual contacts of someone infected with the coronavirus.

Borio suggested that young Americans could use their social networks to “do their own contact tracing.”

Make masks ubiquitous

There is very little data showing that flat surgical masks protect healthy individuals from disease. Nonetheless, Asian countries generally make it mandatory that people wear them. The Asian approach is less about data than it is about crowd psychology, experts explained.

All experts agree that the sick must wear masks to keep in their coughs. But if a mask indicates that the wearer is sick, many people will be reluctant to wear one. If everyone is required to wear masks, the sick automatically have one on and there is no stigma attached.

Also, experts emphasized, Americans should be taught to take seriously admonitions to stop shaking hands and hugging. The “WHO elbow bump” may look funny, but it’s a legitimate technique for preventing infection.

Preserve vital services

Federal intervention is necessary for some vital aspects of life during a pandemic. Only the federal government can enforce interstate commerce laws to ensure that food, water, electricity, gas, phone lines and other basic needs keep flowing.

Trump has said he could compel companies to prioritize making ventilators, masks and other needed goods; some have volunteered. He also has the military; the Navy is committing two hospital ships to the fight. And Trump can call up the National Guard.

High-level decisions like these must be made quickly, experts said.

“Many Western political leaders are behaving as though they are on a tightrope,” said Dr. David Nabarro, a WHO special envoy on COVID-19. “But there is no choice. We must do all in our power to fight this.”

Produce ventilators and oxygen

The roughly 175,000 ventilators in all U.S. hospitals and the national stockpile are expected to be far fewer than are needed to handle a surge of patients.

The manufacturers, including a dozen in the United States, say there is no easy way to ramp up production quickly. But it is possible other manufacturers, including aerospace and automobile companies, could be enlisted to do so.

Providers, meanwhile, are scrambling for alternatives. Canadian nurses are disseminating a 2006 paper describing how one ventilator can be modified to treat four patients simultaneously.

The United States must also work to increase its supply of piped and tanked oxygen, Aylward said.

Retrofit hospitals

Hospitals in the United States have taken some measures to handle surges of patients, such as stopping elective surgery and setting up isolation rooms.

The national stockpile does contain some prepackaged military field hospitals, but they are not expected to be nearly enough for a big surge.

In Wuhan, the Chinese government famously built two new hospitals in two weeks. All other hospitals were divided: 48 were designated to handle 10,000 serious or critical coronavirus patients, while others were restricted to handling emergencies like heart attacks and births.

Recruit volunteers

China’s effort succeeded, experts said, in part because of hundreds of thousands of volunteers. The government declared a “people’s war” and rolled out a “Fight On, Wuhan! Fight On, China!” campaign.

Many people idled by the lockdowns stepped up to act as fever checkers, contact tracers, hospital construction workers, food deliverers, even babysitters for the children of first responders. With training, volunteers were able to do some ground-level but crucial medical tasks.

Americans often step forward to help neighbors affected by hurricanes and floods; many will no doubt do so in this outbreak.

“This truly is an ‘all hands on deck’ situation,” Ziemer said.

Prioritize the treatments

Clinicians in China, Italy and France have thrown virtually everything they had in hospital pharmacies into the fight, and at least two possibilities have emerged that might save patients: the anti-malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, and the antiviral remdesivir, which has no licensed use.

There is no proof yet that any of these are effective against the virus. Italy and France have trials underway, and hospitals in New York are writing trial protocols now.

Find a vaccine

The ultimate hope is to have a vaccine that will protect everyone, and many companies and governments have already rushed the design of candidate vaccines.

The process will take at least a year, even if nothing goes wrong. The roadblock, vaccine experts explained, is not bureaucratic. It is that the human immune system takes weeks to produce antibodies, and some dangerous side effects can take weeks to appear.

After extensive animal testing, vaccines are normally given to about 50 healthy human volunteers to see if they cause any unexpected side effects and to measure what dose produces enough antibodies to be considered protective.

If that goes well, the trial enrolls hundreds or thousands of volunteers in an area where the virus is circulating. Half get the vaccine, the rest do not — and the investigators wait. If the vaccinated half do not get the disease, the green light for production is finally given.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Harsh Steps Are Needed to Stop the Coronavirus, Experts Say

Terrifying though the coronavirus may be, it can be turned back. China, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan have demonstrated that, with furious efforts, the contagion can be brought to heel.Whether they can keep it suppressed remains to be seen. But for the United States to repeat their successes...

www.yahoo.com

We don't need the whole article.

 

[U2Edge]

The main benefit of a "Five-Week Shutdown" is that it HAS AN END. The problem now is the anxiety about how long this bullshit will last. Any formal announcement with an end date (and an argument to support it) would be a good thing. People could plan their activities for the spring and summer with some confidence of not having them go up in smoke. Right now, nobody is planning ANYTHING, which is what is killing the economy.

Business as usual is not something to worry about. The country is under attack by a pandemic. Only an idiot would go about their normal activities when there is a global pandemic. Hunker down and survive is what you do under these conditions.

Survival rate of 99% possibly 98%..........

This will go on for a year...........like the ones in the past..........we can't wait that long.........A few weeks is already destructive as hell...........

This cannot continue very long...........They had better use this time at the ALAMO WISELY......

Its not as simple as that. The impact of going back to business as usual would not only kill 2 million Americans from coronavirus, but potentially millions of other people who won't be able to get treated at hospitals for other health issues because they are overwhelmed with patients. There is no other option but to wait until conditions allow for the resumption of other business.

oh shut the fk up! more nonsense from the nonsense king U2.

If you think that is nonsense, you have little understanding about how pandemics work and the impact they can have on hospitals. They are already running dangerously low on supplies in New York City. Do nothing, and the problem that New York City is facing will be faced by every COUNTY in the United States. Your local hospital has only so many beds and Ventilators. When they are filled with people with Coronavirus, people with other conditions can't get treatment. The system is overwhelmed. When that happens, people die from all kinds of different things.

 

[U2Edge]

Harsh Steps Are Needed to Stop the Coronavirus, Experts Say
Donald G. McNeil Jr.
The New York TimesMarch 23, 2020, 12:02 PM EDT

Terrifying though the coronavirus may be, it can be turned back. China, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan have demonstrated that, with furious efforts, the contagion can be brought to heel.

Whether they can keep it suppressed remains to be seen. But for the United States to repeat their successes will take extraordinary levels of coordination and money from the country’s leaders, and extraordinary levels of trust and cooperation from citizens.

There is a chance to stop the coronavirus. This contagion has a weakness.

Although there are incidents of rampant spread, as happened on the cruise ship Diamond Princess, the coronavirus more often infects clusters of family members, friends and work colleagues, said Dr. David L. Heymann, who chairs an expert panel advising the World Health Organization on emergencies.

No one is certain why the virus travels in this way, but experts see an opening nonetheless. “You can contain clusters,” Heymann said. “You need to identify and stop discrete outbreaks, and then do rigorous contact tracing.”

In interviews with a dozen of the world’s leading experts on fighting epidemics, there was wide agreement on the steps that must be taken immediately. Those experts included international public health officials; scientists and epidemiologists; and former health officials in both Republican and Democratic administrations.

Americans must be persuaded to stay home, they said, and a system put in place to isolate the infected and care for them outside the home. Travel restrictions should be extended, they said; productions of masks and ventilators must be accelerated, and testing problems must be resolved.

“The American way is to look for better outcomes through a voluntary system,” said Dr. Luciana Borio, who was director of medical and biodefense preparedness for the National Security Council before her unit was disbanded in 2018. “I think you can appeal to people to do the right thing.”

What follows are the recommendations offered by the experts interviewed by The New York Times.

Scientists must be heard

The White House holds frequent media briefings to describe the administration’s progress against the pandemic, often led by President Donald Trump or Vice President Mike Pence, flanked by a rotating cast of officials.

Many experts declined to speak on the record for fear of offending the president. But they were united in the opinion that politicians must step aside and let scientists both lead the effort to contain the virus and explain to Americans what must be done.

Above all, the experts said, briefings should focus on saving lives and making sure that average wage earners survive the coming hard times — not on the stock market, the tourism industry or the president’s health. There is no time left to point fingers and assign blame.

“At this point in the emergency, there’s little merit in spending time on what we should have done or who’s at fault,” said Adm. Tim Ziemer, who led the pandemic response unit on the National Security Council before its disbanding. “We need to focus on the enemy, and that’s the virus.”

Stop transmission between cities

The next priority, experts said, is extreme social distancing. If it were possible to wave a magic wand and make all Americans freeze in place for 14 days while sitting 6 feet apart, epidemiologists say, the whole epidemic would sputter to a halt.

Obviously, there is no magic wand. But the goal of lockdowns and social distancing is to approximate such a total freeze. To attempt that, experts said, travel and human interaction must be reduced to a minimum.

Stop transmission within cities

Within cities, there are dangerous hot spots: One restaurant, one gym, one hospital, even one taxi may be more contaminated than many identical others nearby because someone had a coughing fit inside.

Each day’s delay in stopping human contact, experts said, creates more hot spots, none of which can be identified until about a week later, when the people infected there start falling ill.

To stop the explosion, municipal activity must be curtailed. Still, some Americans must stay on the job: doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers; police officers and firefighters; the technicians who maintain the electrical grid and gas and phone lines. The delivery of food and medicine must continue.

But the weaker the freeze, the more people die in overburdened hospitals — and the longer it ultimately takes for the economy to restart.

Fix the testing mess

Testing must be done in a coordinated and safe way, experts said. The seriously ill must go first, and the testers must be protected.

In the United States, people seeking tests are calling their doctors, who may not have them, or sometimes waiting in traffic jams leading to store parking lots. On Friday, New York City limited testing only to those patients requiring hospitalization, saying the system was being overwhelmed.

Isolate the infected

As soon as possible, experts said, the United States must develop an alternative to the practice of isolating infected people at home, as it endangers families. In China, 75% to 80% of all transmission occurred in family clusters.

Instead of a policy that advises the infected to remain at home, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now does, experts said cities should establish facilities where the mildly and moderately ill can recuperate.

Wuhan created many such centers, called “temporary hospitals,” each a cross between a dormitory and a first-aid clinic. They had cots and oxygen tanks, but not the advanced machines used in intensive care units.

U.S. cities now have many spaces that could serve as isolation wards. Already New York is considering turning the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center into a temporary hospital.

Find the fevers

Because China, Taiwan and Vietnam were hit by SARS in 2003, and South Korea has grappled with MERS, fever checks during disease outbreaks became routine.

In most cities in affected Asian countries, it is commonplace before entering any bus, train or subway station, office building, theater or even a restaurant to get a temperature check. Washing your hands in chlorinated water is often also required.

Trace the contacts

Finding and testing all the contacts of every positive case is essential, experts said. At the peak of its epidemic, Wuhan had 18,000 people tracking down individuals who had come in contact with the infected.

At the moment, the health departments of some American counties lack the manpower to trace even syphilis or tuberculosis, let alone scores of casual contacts of someone infected with the coronavirus.

Borio suggested that young Americans could use their social networks to “do their own contact tracing.”

Make masks ubiquitous

There is very little data showing that flat surgical masks protect healthy individuals from disease. Nonetheless, Asian countries generally make it mandatory that people wear them. The Asian approach is less about data than it is about crowd psychology, experts explained.

All experts agree that the sick must wear masks to keep in their coughs. But if a mask indicates that the wearer is sick, many people will be reluctant to wear one. If everyone is required to wear masks, the sick automatically have one on and there is no stigma attached.

Also, experts emphasized, Americans should be taught to take seriously admonitions to stop shaking hands and hugging. The “WHO elbow bump” may look funny, but it’s a legitimate technique for preventing infection.

Preserve vital services

Federal intervention is necessary for some vital aspects of life during a pandemic. Only the federal government can enforce interstate commerce laws to ensure that food, water, electricity, gas, phone lines and other basic needs keep flowing.

Trump has said he could compel companies to prioritize making ventilators, masks and other needed goods; some have volunteered. He also has the military; the Navy is committing two hospital ships to the fight. And Trump can call up the National Guard.

High-level decisions like these must be made quickly, experts said.

“Many Western political leaders are behaving as though they are on a tightrope,” said Dr. David Nabarro, a WHO special envoy on COVID-19. “But there is no choice. We must do all in our power to fight this.”

Produce ventilators and oxygen

The roughly 175,000 ventilators in all U.S. hospitals and the national stockpile are expected to be far fewer than are needed to handle a surge of patients.

The manufacturers, including a dozen in the United States, say there is no easy way to ramp up production quickly. But it is possible other manufacturers, including aerospace and automobile companies, could be enlisted to do so.

Providers, meanwhile, are scrambling for alternatives. Canadian nurses are disseminating a 2006 paper describing how one ventilator can be modified to treat four patients simultaneously.

The United States must also work to increase its supply of piped and tanked oxygen, Aylward said.

Retrofit hospitals

Hospitals in the United States have taken some measures to handle surges of patients, such as stopping elective surgery and setting up isolation rooms.

The national stockpile does contain some prepackaged military field hospitals, but they are not expected to be nearly enough for a big surge.

In Wuhan, the Chinese government famously built two new hospitals in two weeks. All other hospitals were divided: 48 were designated to handle 10,000 serious or critical coronavirus patients, while others were restricted to handling emergencies like heart attacks and births.

Recruit volunteers

China’s effort succeeded, experts said, in part because of hundreds of thousands of volunteers. The government declared a “people’s war” and rolled out a “Fight On, Wuhan! Fight On, China!” campaign.

Many people idled by the lockdowns stepped up to act as fever checkers, contact tracers, hospital construction workers, food deliverers, even babysitters for the children of first responders. With training, volunteers were able to do some ground-level but crucial medical tasks.

Americans often step forward to help neighbors affected by hurricanes and floods; many will no doubt do so in this outbreak.

“This truly is an ‘all hands on deck’ situation,” Ziemer said.

Prioritize the treatments

Clinicians in China, Italy and France have thrown virtually everything they had in hospital pharmacies into the fight, and at least two possibilities have emerged that might save patients: the anti-malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, and the antiviral remdesivir, which has no licensed use.

There is no proof yet that any of these are effective against the virus. Italy and France have trials underway, and hospitals in New York are writing trial protocols now.

Find a vaccine

The ultimate hope is to have a vaccine that will protect everyone, and many companies and governments have already rushed the design of candidate vaccines.

The process will take at least a year, even if nothing goes wrong. The roadblock, vaccine experts explained, is not bureaucratic. It is that the human immune system takes weeks to produce antibodies, and some dangerous side effects can take weeks to appear.

After extensive animal testing, vaccines are normally given to about 50 healthy human volunteers to see if they cause any unexpected side effects and to measure what dose produces enough antibodies to be considered protective.

If that goes well, the trial enrolls hundreds or thousands of volunteers in an area where the virus is circulating. Half get the vaccine, the rest do not — and the investigators wait. If the vaccinated half do not get the disease, the green light for production is finally given.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Harsh Steps Are Needed to Stop the Coronavirus, Experts Say

Terrifying though the coronavirus may be, it can be turned back. China, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan have demonstrated that, with furious efforts, the contagion can be brought to heel.Whether they can keep it suppressed remains to be seen. But for the United States to repeat their successes...

www.yahoo.com

We don't need the whole article.

Many people do considering the ignorance on the topic of coronavirus and the fact they are unlikely to click the link.

 

[Admiral Rockwell Tory]

It has been my experience locally that there is an inverse relationship between a person's support for a complete shutdown and the degree to which doing so would affect them personally.

Teachers, for instance, are all for an utter lock down. They are at home right now getting paid to not work. They have nice pers for when they retire and they have free medical benefits. Small business owners are not quite as enthusiastic, as they have none of these things.

It is always easy to demand that others make the sacrifice so you don't have to, and right now it is the public sector doing that to the private.

Nice pers? Did you mean "perks"?

Where the hell did you morons come up with this "free medical benefits" bullshit? You have been told by others and myself that is simply not true. Everywhere I worked in 21 years as a teacher, I paid for my medical in part for myself and 100% for my family.

What's next? Retirement benefits? The same benefits that we provided at 100%.

I wish you dumbasses could come up with another reason to bash teachers because you are jealous and did not have an opportunity to actually get an education.

PERS stands for public Employees retirement system.

One of the many things you obviously do not know.

Maybe where you live that is true. That is why you're ignorant.

 

[SweetSue92]

World
We need an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus in America
Yaneer Bar-Yam, Opinion contributor
USA TODAY OpinionMarch 21, 2020, 11:30 AM EDT

I am an MIT-trained physicist and complexity scientist who studies pandemics. I have warned about global pandemics due to increasing travel for 15 years. I recommended community based monitoring of symptoms to stop Ebola in West Africa in 2014, and it worked. The fastest and even the only way to contain COVID-19 in the United States is a five-week national lockdown.
Closing schools, bars and movie theaters are good measures, but not enough. Our relaxed approach to social distancing is insufficient to stop the exponential growth of COVID-19. Until Americans consistently adopt strong social distancing recommendations — a lockdown — the disease will continue to spread exponentially.
During a five-week national lockdown, federal, state and local authorities would ensure that all Americans stay home except to obtain food and other essentials, access medical care, or do work essential to the functioning of society. Travel would cease: We would close our borders and airports and prohibit all unnecessary travel across state and county (or town) lines within the United States. The U.S. government would have to provide aid to citizens separated from their sources of income and ensure care for vulnerable members of society.
Lockdown would sharply reduce cases
During the first two weeks of a lockdown, infected individuals will either recover from mild cases of COVID-19 at home or seek medical attention for the 14% of cases that are severe. During the third, fourth and fifth weeks, any newly infected family or cohabitants of infected individuals will recover or seek medical attention and their isolation will prevent further spreading. By the end of the lockdown, the number of infections will be a small fraction of what they are now.

The lockdown will give us time to dramatically scale up our supply of COVID-19 test kits and capacity to process them. If we reduce the number of infections using the lockdown and start a massive testing regime in the United States, we can control COVID-19 after five weeks without such extreme social distancing measures. Isolating sick individuals and their immediate contacts will be enough.

The human and economic costs of delaying this lockdown will be staggering. The COVID-19 outbreak has many more cases now than are visible (tip of the iceberg) and they are growing rapidly. Absent sufficiently effective intervention, new cases will increase 1.3 to 1.5 times each day. We had almost 20,000 cases in the United States on Friday, over 5,800 more cases than the previous day. Without a lockdown, in one week there will be about 200,000. In two weeks: 2,000,000. One in seven cases require hospitalization and 5% require ICU care with ventilators to survive. There aren’t nearly enough ventilators available.

The effectiveness of a five-week lockdown will be dramatic — and also entirely predictable.

We know a U.S. lockdown can work because it worked in China. At the height of its COVID-19 crisis in mid-February, China had locked down an estimated 760 milllion people, approximately half of its population. This policy was so successful that Wuhan is now much safer from coronavirus than New York City or Washington, D.C. The few new COVID-19 cases in China now stem from foreign travelers rather than local transmission, and all are safely quarantined.

We know what we have to do. President Donald Trump and our states' governors and local leaders must act now to save millions of lives.

We need an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus in America

Locking down the country would reduce infections and allow time for massive testing. There will be staggering human and economic costs if we delay.

www.yahoo.com

United States Infections and deaths from Coronavirus as of February 29, 2020
Infections: 68
Deaths: 1

United States Infections and deaths from Coronavirus as of March 22, 2020
Infections: 35,000
Deaths: 458

The exponential rise in infections and deaths in just 3 weeks is incredible. Where will the United States be on April 23, 2020 without the lockdown proposed above?

K

He didn't factor in the medications available now, the combination of Chloroquine and Z pack, which is now being employed in New York

It seems this will prevent many hospitalizations, ICU visits, and eventually, deaths.