Also, all public sector employees who do not perform critical functions will be sent home on paid leave, and all private companies are recommended to do the same.
On top of this all public gatherings of more than 100 people is discouraged, and it is alsp encouraged for all bars and nightclubs to keep closed for now. These are expected to be signed into law within the week.
It has been motivated at least in Denmark (limit was 1000, now 100) and Sweden (limit 500) that larger events attract people traveling to it. This traveling and being among large crowds large is what they want to avoid.
While smaller events, say a local low division football team, doesn't normally attract a tone else than locals. The exact number is arbitrary but has to be something, right now 100 in Denmark, 500 in Sweden and will likely change over time.
Yes. The Joe Rogan experience episode with Michael Osterholm talked about this. Basically all of this social distancing is about slowing the spread so as to not overwhelm the healthcare system, not stop it. They can calculate how much you impact the speed of spread if you limit gatherings to 1k, 100, 50, 5, etc. From there it's a somewhat subjective risk assessment of what you want to recommend, bearing in mind that destroying the economy results in deaths from downstream effects.
Are businesses being provided lines of credit or other funding sources to continue paying employees while their income might decline in the short term? Or are they able/expected to pay out of cash reserves or existing business credit lines?
yes, the specifics aren't out yet but a package is being put together right now by the government. We don't know yet how much, but the numbers are in the billions.
The government is aware that this is a dificult situation financially for a lot of companies and are working to resolve it. A lot of it will be through delayed payment of taxes and VAT to keep cashflow.
For starters VAT and payroll taxes deadlines will be extended, more measures will come. People who have been forced to cancel major events, will be refunded.
There are no immediate promises of such measures being made. Edit: Since this is being downvoted could someone provide a source for such immediate promises? I must have missed it.
Something that I heard from an epidemiologist the other day is how shutting down schools and daycares can be incredibly counterproductive, because such a high percentage of health care workers have children which suddenly are at home and need to be supervised, pulling these workers out of their duties.
I suppose its ok early on, but seems problematic if enough people eventually get infected.
Understood that schools are primary transmission vectors.
I disagree here. Denmark is acting proactively and shutting down schools for 2 weeks. This is a "rip the band aid off early" type of move. By shutting down everything for 2 weeks, they effectively self-quarantine during the entire incubation period and will dramatically slow the rate of the virus.
China, on the other hand, did not do this, and they were forced to shut down schools for 6 months.
These moves are HARD and painful, but the key to stopping a pandemic is acting overly aggressive and far-reaching. The USA is not doing nearly enough. We're going to be Italy in about 2 weeks.
I live in Denmark and have been following this way too closely. I think we will be Italy within the next two weeks. Until today people have been completely unconcerned. But in the last three days the number of detected cases has jumped from 37 to 92 to 264 to 516. Nobody was taking this seriously until today, and there's just no way this hasn't already spread across the country undetected.
for the two weeks as of day one of the changes. What if the virus shows up on day 15, the day after things return to normal? Will they stay shutdown for another two weeks?
>China, on the other hand, did not do this, and they were forced to shut down schools for 6 months.
where did you get that 6 months number from? considering Virus started in January and its March now.
>These moves are HARD and painful, but the key to stopping a pandemic is acting overly aggressive and far-reaching.
there is nothing aggressive or far-reaching in those moves, Poland enacted similar measures yesterday and every expert agrees its not enough and too late.
> Understood that schools are primary transmission vectors.
Are they? There seems to be limited transmission from children (to other children or even adults), in part because they generally aren't getting symptomatic when exposed.
. "For COVID-19 virus, initial data indicates that children are less affected than adults and that clinical attack rates in the 0-19 age group are low. Further preliminary data from household transmission studies in China suggest that children are infected from adults, rather than vice versa."
I don't deny kids can transmit it to other kids, just that the odds are low. In fact, the only school I could find that was a cluster (Suyeong-gu Kindergarten in Korea) was 5 infected adults, 1 infected kid, and 160 negatives (which I assume were dominated by children).
Does anyone know of school clusters that have emerged?
I saw the Joe Rogan clip[1] and I agree that Michael Osterholm's analysis of this seems correct when it comes to the United States.
Denmark however has a completely different structure socially. All private sector employees who can work from home are urged to work from home. All public sector employees who are not working in any matter-of-life-and-death function are forced to stay at home. The public sector employees will still get paid despite not working. Practically this means very, very few cases of health care workers with children needs to be home supervising the children.
Wait, how would this prevent health care workers with children from needing to be home? Who is going to be watching those kids while the parents are working at a hospital?
Probably best to shut them down too early or not at all. Grandparents tend to be relied upon as babysitters in time of need, so if you wait until transmission among school children is widespread your actions just delivered the virus to some of the most vulnerable populations.
My parents are elderly and my partner's parents live 150 miles away, and both work; We have no family that is able or willing to watch our child so we pay for care (and it's hugely expensive, over $2500/mo for center based care)
My partner works as an RN, and I'm in software development. I've always taken the days off when our child is ill, it's logistically simpler, but I make 2X the salary so we have always said my job is the priority if we lose child care long term.
If our daycare closes for a long period that means my partner needs to stop going to work and there's one less RN at that hospital.
To make things worse, our daycare has already stated that the current "24 hours fever free" policy of your child returning is now "14 days fever free, or a physician's note indicating it's safe to return" -- and you must keep paying while they are out, that's the existing policy when it's a day or so and apparently will continue even when it's two+ weeks... no relief expected.
If daycares are forced to shutdown, but still require payment from parents, that will be absolutely egregious and infuriating.
It is a war and calculation should be done in a different way.
1. Healthcare system is the TOP priority and keeps its resource adequate is critical.
2. If workers need to take care of their children, try to seek more ways to staff the hospital: (1) recruiting volunteers for non-specialized roles (2) adjusting shifts (3) concentrate resources, even move resources geographically.
Basically this is what China has done to bend the curve and what Italy is currently doing. You have to think this as a whole.
The prime minister said schools and daycares would stay open to serve those. Also that the school itself is not the problem, only the amount of people.
Denmark has a substantial safety net with generous parental leave policies. Accordingly, it would expected that one parent or relative could help out without impacting their own income and job security.
No they wont, schools will shut fully down. For ppl that rely on child care, and cant do it themselves, something will be provided. But the schools are not it.
Well, let’s think about what might happen: people still need to work, and children want to play. Hey let’s meet all at one parent’s home today and tomorrow at the next...
I really doubt it is as effective as many think unless there is a general lock down and people are expected not to visit other people.
There's a big difference between putting 500 kids in a building for eight hours a day and a bunch of small, clustered groups of kids forming for playdates.
This is an analysis if you just shutdown schools, if you send all but critical for food/power/utilities workers home and pay them, then the assumptions are completely different.
I wonder what basically a 2-4 week vacation for an entire nation looks like.
Our kindergarten is currently preparing for just that. Which parents have other options of day care, who can have kids at home, who can take additional kids. I understood that to be something city wide. I have no problem having three instead of two kids at home, I working from home anyway, so if I have my own kids or an additional one doesn't make much of a difference for me. But it does for other parents.
PM said that people in critical functions who could find a care solution for their kids should show up to school -- and a solution would be worked out.
She admitted that the specifics of such solutions are not known at this time.
I'm surprised they don't just provide a day care service for the children of healthcare workers, considering those children are more likely to get infected by their parent anyways just preemptively treat them as patients with some shared curriculum and oversight.
A virologist mentioned that kids up until 19 basically don't get sick from this virus, something like 0.2%, and even if they do its not as hard on them as on adult in their 40ies or older. So indeed very counter productive
0.2% is the mortality rate up to 19, not the risk of getting sick (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019#Morta...). The disease can be serious even if it's not fatal, and children can easily spread the virus to their families. It's even possible for someone to become infected and spread the virus without showing any symptoms at all.
I haven't heard any authoritative sources talk about that. Do you have a cite?
The world is in crisis. Arguing against public attempts to contain a virus based on "Something that I heard" is more than a little irresponsible right now. Surely the point is valid as a debate subject, but it needs numbers and it needs analysis. Prima facie, social isolation works, and at this stage is our only remaining hope at containment.
Interestingly Iceland, which has most of it's infections from Italy (and the other Alpine countries), designated those countries as areas with high risk of infection long before those countries would admit it, is not looking into these kinds of closures. I understand that they request people not to gather in large groups, on a completely voluntary basis and anyone is free to self-quarantine with pay or benefits.
The consensus over there is that the disruptions would be worse than an increase in infections. Closing schools and other limits would only delay the infections and they would likely become unmanageable when limits are lifted. The emphasis is on protecting those that are most likely to get seriously sick, and not limiting the number of infections of those that are not at (high) risk. They also consider that if those that have been infected build immunity, it would be better (and I'm paraphrasing) "to just get it over with."
On Friday they will start testing around the country to get a better understanding of the infection rate, especially whether it's already prevalent in the community. This will be on an unprecedented scale, as they expect to test >2% of the population. The expected result is that the infection is already widely distributed in the community.
This seems like an insane policy based on what we know about sars2-cov and the demographics of Iceland. Over 25% of the population (95K) is in the most vulnerable age group. If just 1% of that cohort becomes sick, you'll swamp the entire healthcare system. And that's excluding the effect on the other 75%. Just because they're risk is lower doesn't mean they won't need hospital care.
30 intensive care beds may prove insufficient if there is widespread infection. Not only the elderly need intensive care: in Italy 40% of the patients in intensive care are below 60.
Only days ago, a Denmark university professor openly claimed ( actually more like lashed out ) at Hong Kong people /students over-reacting with CoronaVirus and there is no need to wear masks.
I guess that didn't age well. Still wish more people have trusted the advice from HK from our experiences with SARS and how to handle information from CCP.
Norway got more cases than denmark (622 vs 514), and our government is still asleep. The "wait and see" attitude makes shure they are always 3 steps behind.
At this point the number of cases is slightly less important than the rate. Denmark's numbers are increasing at a rate that's unprecedented amongst all current COVID-19 outbreaks (amongst the data that is available). The past 2 days the numbers in Denmark have tripled twice (and are on track to triple another time today).
You could expect Denmarks numbers to overtake Norway's before the end of today or whenever the new measurements come in.
Denmark's # of confirmed cases was up 627% from yesterday.
For anyone interested in watching this unfold, I highly recommend the daily posts by /u/Fwoggie2 on /r/supplychain. Every day he posts a status update on the growth of cases per country and supply chain impacts for goods across the globe. Here's the link to today's report. https://new.reddit.com/r/supplychain/comments/fgwbrx/covid19...
This is actually a great opportunity for a natural experiment. AFAIK Norws and Swedes have similar cultures re: touching and kissing; probably very similar genetics too.
The risks of not freaking out and it decimating the populace should easily outweigh the risks of freaking out and it not having an impact. It's very difficult to even rationalize the latter because a freakout might mean the impact is negligible.
A large number of companies have instituted a work-from-home policy in response, mine among them. Indefinite duration. Priority given to people who ride public transport, and especially people who are vulnerable from a health perspective. Estimate approximately 70% of the company will be working from home for at least two weeks.
Let's see if this works. Otherwise, it's soon the Wuhan routine or the default result: write off a low single-digit portion of the population in two months. The last option would be devastating.
Readit News
On top of this all public gatherings of more than 100 people is discouraged, and it is alsp encouraged for all bars and nightclubs to keep closed for now. These are expected to be signed into law within the week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3URhJx0NSw
The government is aware that this is a dificult situation financially for a lot of companies and are working to resolve it. A lot of it will be through delayed payment of taxes and VAT to keep cashflow.
This will hit smaller companies hard; particular service sector such as hair dressers, restaurants, contractors etc.
I suppose its ok early on, but seems problematic if enough people eventually get infected.
Understood that schools are primary transmission vectors.
China, on the other hand, did not do this, and they were forced to shut down schools for 6 months.
These moves are HARD and painful, but the key to stopping a pandemic is acting overly aggressive and far-reaching. The USA is not doing nearly enough. We're going to be Italy in about 2 weeks.
no such thing
>China, on the other hand, did not do this, and they were forced to shut down schools for 6 months.
where did you get that 6 months number from? considering Virus started in January and its March now.
>These moves are HARD and painful, but the key to stopping a pandemic is acting overly aggressive and far-reaching.
there is nothing aggressive or far-reaching in those moves, Poland enacted similar measures yesterday and every expert agrees its not enough and too late.
Are they? There seems to be limited transmission from children (to other children or even adults), in part because they generally aren't getting symptomatic when exposed.
via https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...:
. "For COVID-19 virus, initial data indicates that children are less affected than adults and that clinical attack rates in the 0-19 age group are low. Further preliminary data from household transmission studies in China suggest that children are infected from adults, rather than vice versa."
I don't deny kids can transmit it to other kids, just that the odds are low. In fact, the only school I could find that was a cluster (Suyeong-gu Kindergarten in Korea) was 5 infected adults, 1 infected kid, and 160 negatives (which I assume were dominated by children).
Does anyone know of school clusters that have emerged?
Denmark however has a completely different structure socially. All private sector employees who can work from home are urged to work from home. All public sector employees who are not working in any matter-of-life-and-death function are forced to stay at home. The public sector employees will still get paid despite not working. Practically this means very, very few cases of health care workers with children needs to be home supervising the children.
[1]: https://youtu.be/cZFhjMQrVts
My partner works as an RN, and I'm in software development. I've always taken the days off when our child is ill, it's logistically simpler, but I make 2X the salary so we have always said my job is the priority if we lose child care long term.
If our daycare closes for a long period that means my partner needs to stop going to work and there's one less RN at that hospital.
To make things worse, our daycare has already stated that the current "24 hours fever free" policy of your child returning is now "14 days fever free, or a physician's note indicating it's safe to return" -- and you must keep paying while they are out, that's the existing policy when it's a day or so and apparently will continue even when it's two+ weeks... no relief expected.
If daycares are forced to shutdown, but still require payment from parents, that will be absolutely egregious and infuriating.
1. Healthcare system is the TOP priority and keeps its resource adequate is critical.
2. If workers need to take care of their children, try to seek more ways to staff the hospital: (1) recruiting volunteers for non-specialized roles (2) adjusting shifts (3) concentrate resources, even move resources geographically.
Basically this is what China has done to bend the curve and what Italy is currently doing. You have to think this as a whole.
I really doubt it is as effective as many think unless there is a general lock down and people are expected not to visit other people.
I wonder what basically a 2-4 week vacation for an entire nation looks like.
She admitted that the specifics of such solutions are not known at this time.
Deleted Comment
The world is in crisis. Arguing against public attempts to contain a virus based on "Something that I heard" is more than a little irresponsible right now. Surely the point is valid as a debate subject, but it needs numbers and it needs analysis. Prima facie, social isolation works, and at this stage is our only remaining hope at containment.
The consensus over there is that the disruptions would be worse than an increase in infections. Closing schools and other limits would only delay the infections and they would likely become unmanageable when limits are lifted. The emphasis is on protecting those that are most likely to get seriously sick, and not limiting the number of infections of those that are not at (high) risk. They also consider that if those that have been infected build immunity, it would be better (and I'm paraphrasing) "to just get it over with."
On Friday they will start testing around the country to get a better understanding of the infection rate, especially whether it's already prevalent in the community. This will be on an unprecedented scale, as they expect to test >2% of the population. The expected result is that the infection is already widely distributed in the community.
I guess that didn't age well. Still wish more people have trusted the advice from HK from our experiences with SARS and how to handle information from CCP.
Gje cultural difference between Asia and Europe regarding masks is interesting.
You could expect Denmarks numbers to overtake Norway's before the end of today or whenever the new measurements come in.
For anyone interested in watching this unfold, I highly recommend the daily posts by /u/Fwoggie2 on /r/supplychain. Every day he posts a status update on the growth of cases per country and supply chain impacts for goods across the globe. Here's the link to today's report. https://new.reddit.com/r/supplychain/comments/fgwbrx/covid19...
And who knows maybe the authorities have done a good job tracking down infected people -- implying that the number of unknown cases is small.
Curiosity aside: hope you live long and lucky.
The scale of impact and longevity of these shutdowns could be dramatic.
Keeping kids home certainly restricts what parents can do. Some of whom may be needed to do other things.
Is there really a lot of good data to know, this will do a thing?
Nope, not in Denmark: if they're needed then they are exempt.
That doesn’t seem very drastic.
Let's see if this works. Otherwise, it's soon the Wuhan routine or the default result: write off a low single-digit portion of the population in two months. The last option would be devastating.