Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic

[wichajster]

Well the answer is still spread and breed. If planetary travel is too fast, easy and cheap, go interplanetary. If we somehow manage interplanetary mass tourism, go interstellar and keep going.

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Yes, self-sustaining colonies outside Earth would reduce risk. But self-sustaining colonies are in the extreme future.

Note what kind of things you need to be self-sufficient! For example CPU foundry costs alone runs into billions (costs are not directly important, but it is good indication of complexity). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_fabrication_plant

"Colony on Moon/Mars" is borderline absurdity, "profitable human settlement" may be impossible. "truly independent colony" is lets say a questionable content.

And while extrasolar travel is technically achievable (see Orion drive), estimates go like "50% of global economic output, for centuries, for a single one-way mission to the nearest star"...

 

[Omegastar]

...If you're an alcoholic how will the virus work on you? Will you be ok-ish or will it affect you all the same?

 

[Derrandoo]

Space stuff is pretty much a pipe dream.

Moon colony/Orbital stuff is the "reasonable" approach and would require trillions of dollars of dedicated investment over a long period of time.

Getting access to space resources won't work until we have a method of delivering them to Earth or an existing economy in Orbitals/Moon bases.

To put it really simply, there is no expectation of return on establishing space colonies or moon bases. They'll be hilariously massive money sinks, never return anything particularly useful to Earth and enrage any cost-cutting bureaucrat.

So we're stuck on Earth until we get to some one-world government that starts firing people into space with dedication to establishing human habitats no matter the cost.

 

[TanaNari]

If you're an alcoholic how will the virus work on you? Will you be ok-ish or will it affect you all the same?

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First: ethanol (aka- drinkable alcohol) isn't a particularly strong form of alcohol... and the concentration which humans can survive is far too low to have any scientifically detectable impact on a viral infection. Seriously, a .08 blood-alcohol equals .08% alcohol concentration. Viruses might be weak to alcohol, but they're not that weak.

Comparatively, Isopropyl bottles are usually sold at about 70% concentration (or close to a thousand times more concentrated). Ethanol that concentrated is 140 proof, which *would* also be potent enough to kill most pathogens if used as a sanitizer. And also drop the unprepared on their asses after a couple shots.

In addition, most other alcohols are far more destructive than ethanol, which is why drinking them is less 'party time' and more 'funeral procession'.

Second: if it *did* have an effect, it would only be effective on infections which predominately reside in the bloodstream (and/or liver maybe?)... I'm pretty sure Wuhan Flu predominately infects lung tissue. If you imbibe enough alcohol to saturate your lungs... well, you're already dead... which I suppose is one way to cure the virus...

Third: significant alcohol consumption does hurt your immune system, which usually would make you more vulnerable to all forms of pathogens, though I'm unaware of any coronavirus-centered literature on that subject. But there are plenty of studies with more extreme immunodeficiencies and vulnerability to the common cold, which is close enough where I'm concerned.


TL;DR? Drinking alcohol ain't gonna help you avoid getting sick, and stands a good chance of making things worse for you.

 

[evildice]

...If you're an alcoholic how will the virus work on you? Will you be ok-ish or will it affect you all the same?

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Alcohol will dry you out, which reduces the defenses of your upper-respiratory mucus membranes, and additionally the alcohol may influence you make unsanitary decisions, such as tongue-kissing the pizza delivery boy instead of tipping, or hosting a party for your frat-boy friends who just got back from partying in Florida, or forgetting to wash your hands.

It won't help, and it may hurt significantly.

 

[magic9mushroom]

If only because it's not truly possible to eliminate bacteria, because they can live outside of the body indefinitely

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Not all of them. Also, plenty of viruses have nonhuman reservoirs (smallpox didn't, hence the eradication project).

Yep. At this point, there are only two true threats to humanity. The first being ourselves (we have gotten very good at killing each other over the last century) and the second being celestial events. One unfortunate space rock and all are works are for naught.

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Yeah, with the caveats that it'd need to be a damned big rock (Chicxulub wouldn't cut it) and that aliens count as celestial.

We were multiple times decisions away from nuclear war.

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This is not relevant to species extinction.

So we're stuck on Earth until we get to some one-world government that starts firing people into space with dedication to establishing human habitats no matter the cost.

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Nah, I'd bet on competition. The Cold War dick-measuring contest was what got us to the Moon.

 

[zup]

And now the restaurants are selling only take-away. So maintaining any kind of safety distance in the breakroom is impossible. This really was not thought through properly.

 

[OverReactionGuy]

Well, they pretty much let go all of their waitresses and waiters. At least the ones here said to try to file for unemployment because they don't know what the fuck is going on if they are going to get paid or not.

 

[magic9mushroom]

Note what kind of things you need to be self-sufficient! For example CPU foundry costs alone runs into billions (costs are not directly important, but it is good indication of complexity). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_fabrication_plant

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You don't actually need to get a CPU foundry there immediately for a colony to act as an insurance policy - modern CPUs while very nice are not actually necessary to support humans on another planet. They just have to be able to build one themselves given sufficient time.

Venus is the most hospitable and lowest-tech of the choices; the only real issue is that there's no easy source of metals there (plenty of carbon and power, though).

Also, the main issue with interstellar is not propulsion. The problem with interstellar is time. You get a totally self-sufficient space habitat plus a life-extended crew, and you can go anywhere in the galaxy via solar sail (and reasonably fast, too).

 

[wichajster]

(sorry, forgot about rule 8)
What kind of things your government is pushing taking COVID as a good pretext?

In Poland government tried to make easier for its electorate (old people) to vote by widespread postal voting, while not giving ability to use postal vote for others. Thankfully it was stopped for now in the upper house of parliament, but is still extremely concerning. I admit that I was not taking seriously all "PiS is threat to democracy" before (as vast majority of them were dubious and exaggerated). Maybe I should change my mind earlier.

And Hungary is doing very suspicious things.

On 30 March, Parliament approved a bill 137-53 to make the state of emergency indefinite and grant the ability for Prime Minister Orbán to rule by decree.[79]​ Parliament has been suspended, and all elections are postponed to after the state of emergency. The bill also makes the deliberate distribution of misleading information that obstructs responses to the pandemic punishable by up to five years in prison, and breaking quarantine punishable by up to three. The bill faced opposition for containing indefinite restrictions on these powers, as well as concerns over the possibility that the "fake news" prohibition in the bill could be abused for censorship of non-official statements.

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I wonder how likely is that they will keep it with Orban as king of Hungary.

You don't actually need to get a CPU foundry there immediately for a colony to act as an insurance policy - modern CPUs while very nice are not actually necessary to support humans on another planet. They just have to be able to build one themselves given sufficient time.

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Building one is also tricky at best. Managing to do this after collapse of Earth would be harder than doing it before. CPU foundry requires plenty of specialized electronics.

And it would be very likely that any problem/failure in any part of complex system (electronic production or whatever else) would soon start destructive cascade.

And in case of Earth it would be "just" economic & cultural collapse with massive deaths, on offworld colony it would mean that everybody died.

 

[cross_grave]

What kind of things your government is pushing taking COVID as a good pretext?

In Poland government tried to make easier for its electorate (old people) to vote by widespread postal voting, while not giving ability to use postal vote for others. Thankfully it was stopped for now in the upper house of parliament, but is still extremely concerning. I admit that I was not taking seriously all "PiS is threat to democracy" before (as vast majority of them were dubious and exaggerated). Maybe I should change my mind earlier.

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And they still refuse to postpone the fucking presidential election, last time I checked.

 

[magic9mushroom]

What kind of things your government is pushing taking COVID as a good pretext?

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To my understanding our government is mostly playing ball for now and sticking to non-politically-charged actions.

Building one is also tricky at best. Managing to do this after collapse of Earth would be harder than doing it before. CPU foundry requires plenty of specialized electronics.

And it would be very likely that any problem/failure in any part of complex system (electronic production or whatever else) would soon start destructive cascade.

And in case of Earth it would be "just" economic & cultural collapse with massive deaths, on offworld colony it would mean that everybody died.

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Depends on the colony. As I said, you can have a fairly low-tech colony on Venus (giant airtight balloon/lightweight structure filled with air, with everyone living inside the balloon and plants to make oxygen/food/wood from the CO2​), although the gates out of the balloon would of course need to be maintained and any punctures repaired reasonably quickly (the air wouldn't rapidly escape as it would from a spacecraft, as pressure inside and outside would be equal, but diffusion through a large puncture would eventually cause CO2​ poisoning and/or loss of buoyancy).

 

[Aleh]

What kind of things your government is pushing taking COVID as a good pretext?

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I'm pretty sure this falls under Rule 8.

 

[Megaolix]

Definitely a topic we do not care to hear about here. Stick to be about the virus or else.

 

[anhrefn]

All this covid shit shows how scary Panacea can be lol

 

[Solvakian]

Well the school district my brother goes to push back their reopening to May, I wonder how there going to handle graduations in late May.

 

[MadGreenSon]

At least Betty White is safe.

 

[defenestrator]

Please feel free to ask anything!

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Thank you for what you do.

Do most asymptomatic carriers remain that way until they get rid of the virus, or does a significant percent of them develop symptoms after a while? If it's the latter, do the symptoms escalate really fast?

 

[wichajster]

There were some reports/claims about lasting damage caused by COVID-19 infections, with reports claiming that it was common for SARS survivors.

Is it true that some/many people who went through this will have log-term damage for example to lungs?

Is rate of long-term damage higher or roughly similar as for other similar diseases?

Is it likely that someone within 25-45 age bracket will get infected and end with noticeable long-term damage?

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I am assuming that I am more likely to be seriously infected, but long-term damage is similar to other infections. Healthy adult is now far more likely to end with serious infection than in an usual year, but as base rate is low it is still not very likely.

 

[OverMaster]

What are the chances for someone over 65 but under 70, female, with slight hypertension, non smoker, no obesity problems, to develop a critical condition? Would that happen in the majority of cases for that bracket or it would not?

 

[Aleh]

What are the chances for someone over 65 but under 70, female, with slight hypertension, non smoker, no obesity problems, to develop a critical condition? Would that happen in the majority of cases for that bracket or it would not?

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The data we have is nowhere near fine-grained or complete enough to meaningfully let us answer this question.

 

[Railhazar]

Indeed, all you can do is hazarding a guess. We have yet to have enought data to give an accurate or relevant answer.

Even if we had, you could be an outlaying case. Statistics are funny like that, they do not deal with absolute.

They can only give you an estimation.

 

[OverMaster]

Three months this thing's been rampaging around the whole world and they still can't make calculations...

Well. I guess maybe in forty years, when most of us are dead already, they might give us a proper assesment then.

 

[Nickballas]

Three months this thing's been rampaging around the whole world and they still can't make calculations...

Well. I guess maybe in forty years, when most of us are dead already, they might give us a proper assesment then.

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That seems overtly pessimistic.

 

[TanaNari]

Three months this thing's been rampaging around the whole world and they still can't make calculations...

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Three months is *nothing*, this sort of data compilation will require years. Hell, it takes somewhere between six months to a year before localized disasters can be fully assessed... a planet-wide disaster like this one is going to take a while to work through.

Especially when certain countries are blatantly lying about their numbers, nobody has the resources to track every case, and some of the numbers we are getting make it look like this disease might have infected three or four times more people than anyone's realized, but a good chunk of people never experience much worse than a cough.

Either that, or tests are putting out massive numbers of false positives.

At this point, I wouldn't want to bet money on either possibility. But there's clearly something weird going on here.


Point is, we'll be here a minute before this one's sorted out.

 

[Derrandoo]

We're not getting an accurate corona deathcount for years, it would hurt the legitimacy of government and every Western nation has managed to undertest significantly.

We're going to end up in a Hurricane Maria+Puerto Rico situation, where the "official death toll" makes the news and spends the next few years getting adjusted upwards after everyone stops paying attention.

On August 28, 2018 (almost a year after the hurricane), Puerto Rico revised its official tally of 64 killed in the hurricane up to 2,975, making the total death toll 3,059: an estimated 2,975 were killed in Puerto Rico

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[Railhazar]

Well, even if you dismiss the possibility of blatant lies about the number, getting a perfectly accurate number is rather difficult.

For exemple, in France, until today, we didn't have the specific number for Nursing home. And it is still, according the Ministry
of Health, pretty unaccurate.

By the way, while this epidemy is showing pretty starkly how ill prepared the world is, one should remember that it still not
as if we were facing the horror of the Black Plague.

I will not dispute that the situation is serious, i am keenly aware of that.

Afterall, my nephew and my sister caught it. And i have a 70 years-old mother. And my Grandmother is 93. Fortunately, both
are still in good health.

As serious as Covid-19 is, it is not a Sanitary Disaster.

At still not yet...

 

[Aleh]

Three months this thing's been rampaging around the whole world and they still can't make calculations...

Well. I guess maybe in forty years, when most of us are dead already, they might give us a proper assesment then.

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The issue isn't making calculations. It's gathering data... or, in other words, getting the base numbers to make the calculations from.

Here. This is a link to the website for the STROBE statement, a relatively simple list (or set of lists) of the most important items which need to be talked about in any effort to answer the questions you're talking about. Given the specific question, this is the specific document you want.

Unfortunately, most of the explanation and elaboration documents I'd normally link appear to be down (as Oxford Academic appears to be having technical issues). BMJ is suffering similar problems (and I can't even run a basic search on their site at the moment).

That's a bit of basics on what we need to understand the numbers before we start doing calculations.

The numbers people are talking about above? They're generally generated from biased settings (that we know are biased), such as nursing homes or hospitals. In the former case, nursing home residents aren't exactly typical patients (even for their age ranges). In the latter, the hospital staff don't see you unless you're having significant issues, meaning that their numbers are generally leaving out the people with more mild symptoms. They may be able to give you numbers on what to expect if you experience a cytokine storm and need to be hospitalized and put on oxygen... but they won't directly know how many people they aren't seeing.

And the testing issues we're having don't help.

And all the above is on top of the issues that were discussed by Egglord or the possibility of people "cooking the books" as it were.

The people who would normally be working on all of this and getting us better numbers anyway? They're disproportionately the ones on the front lines, actively and desperately trying to keep people alive. Or working on things like getting fucking ventilators where they're needed. Or trying to develop a vaccine. Or... well, you get the idea.

 

[Aleh]

Thank you. Very elegantly explained.

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You're welcome... although I thought it was notably incomplete. I didn't get into the challenges involved in estimating risk with these things... or the statistical methods that would need to be used (e.g. multivariate regression analysis across demographics if you're going to generate a probability model of outcomes based on an arbitrary set of risk factors while taking into account interactions) and the problems that come with them (e.g. the resultant statistical power issues, especially after you try to correct for multiple comparisons).

Yes. The possibility of permanent lung damage is there - people can get some reduced lung capacity. If it does get bad enough, as we know, more severe acute infections/pneumonia can cause scarring in the lungs.

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You're forgetting that putting people on ventilators for a long period of time, especially on higher settings, can cause lung damage too, which is fun in its own way.

 

[OverReactionGuy]

-just got watching someone on TV (I think it was the state governor person) say that the lockdown is still in effect while letting in my dog-

-sees 5 little kids riding bikes around outside-

...Okay. I know it's probably annoying to keep your kid inside for so long but at least keep them in the backyard if you do let them out when a lockdown is in effect.