Are you really ready for two years of this?

[Jingthing 69,890]

16 minutes ago, UbonThani said:

Staggered openings is the go. 2 mths open up strict controls. 4 months loosen up. 6 months normal.

 

 

It will be country by country. No country is going to risk going instantly totally open from totally closed. Limits will be tested and going backwards will always be an option too. But assuming there is a vaccine in 18 months there is a light at the end of the tunnel for survivors. Mass testing will help because assuming there is immunity from having had it large numbers can probably begin to safely ignore all the restrictions. 

[Why Me 1,646]

1 hour ago, thaibeachlovers said:

While I may disagree as to locking the country down, even I accept that mass air travel is probably dead for a year of more. Even if people were prepared to risk it, many that would like to travel are unlikely to have the spare cash to be able to do so. Anyway, hardly worth flying to another country on holiday if having to go into quarantine for 2 weeks.

If airlines have no customers for a year or more, I can't see flying coming back in the same way, or at least I hope so. Mass tourism has not been kind to host countries. Is that a silver lining?

 

However, the economic effect on all the thousands of people that once worked in overseas travel is going to be catastrophic, unless most can convert to domestic travel, which is the obvious way forward.

Disagree. International air travel will make a comeback sooner than later. It's not just tourism, it's about global business (there's just so much you can Zoom).  And tourism itself is 10% of the world economy. A contraction of that amount won't be tolerated.

 

In fact, once the rapid testing kits (Abbot Labs, 15mins.) are widely available and not crazy expensive, travel can be made quite safe. Ask passengers to show a test result within 3 days.

 

In fact, parts of the world will (hopefully) within a couple of months be down to negligible local transmission. Apparently China's already at zero local transmission in most (all?) provinces. In which case there's no need for even tests for travelers from those parts.

 

Prediction: expect Chinese tourists to be back in the millions here starting June/July. The Chinese are climbing the walls for cabin fever, Thailand's hospitality industry is desperate for visitors, ..., see what happens when the lid comes off.

[Brunolem 7,178]

1 hour ago, Jingthing said:

It will be country by country. No country is going to risk going instantly totally open from totally closed. Limits will be tested and going backwards will always be an option too. But assuming there is a vaccine in 18 months there is a light at the end of the tunnel for survivors. Mass testing will help because assuming there is immunity from having had it large numbers can probably begin to safely ignore all the restrictions. 

Everyone is basing his hopes on testing and vaccine.

 

Once again, until now science has not been able to produce a vaccine against a virus of the corona family (SARS and others), so there is no reason that this is going to change abruptly.

 

As for the tests, even at a hundred thousands per day, which no country has achieved yet, it takes ten days to test one million persons, and one hundred days (more than 3 months) to test ten millions, which is still a fraction of the population in most countries.

 

Meanwhile the economy is dying every day a little more, and three months from now there will be not much left.

 

Fearing civil unrest, governments will come up with other restrictive measures, making it impossible to go back to normal life...

[UbonThani 2,690]

1 hour ago, Jingthing said:

Whenever this ends, Thailand, our home countries, and indeed the world will be greatly even radically transformed from this crisis. I'm not making specific predictions but some are obvious.

Cruise ships will be largely stuffed. Good.

 

Airports will have stricter measures.

 

Everyone hates China.

[chessman 838]

1 hour ago, thaibeachlovers said:

If I follow your reasoning correctly, every time we experience such an event we must lockdown and destroy our economies. So, if that is true, if we come out of lockdown and it starts again we must go back into lockdown. Not only that, but when the next similar virus starts we must repeat till a vaccine is developed, which takes up to or longer than a year.

 

I may be missing something, but that seems like a recipe for the destruction of our civilization. Tell me how I'm wrong.

Look at the graphs for cases and deaths. They were doubling every 4 days. That is serious, very serious. This is also a new virus so we have very little to fight it. If this was allowed to continue it could be absolutely devastating. To human life and the economy. You are dealing with a lot of unknowns here, there are good arguments that the death rate is not as high as first thought... but the one thing you do know is that cases and deaths are doubling every 4 days. By the way, if there was a pattern that road accidents and deaths were doubling every 4 days I'm pretty sure they would close the roads pretty damn quickly.

 

I read today that economic activity is about 80ish percent currently. Gdp not expected to recover until late 2021. This will be very tough for a lot of people... but many governments will try to plug holes and the economy isn't destroyed. I'm interested in what economic activity you think has been wrongly stopped? I think restaurants, bars and shopping centres would be suffering severely anyway. Tourism would be virtually zero. It's kind of a false choice, the economy is going to suffer whatever the government does.

 

It seems Spain and Italy might already be over the worst of it, they've had a number of days now where the number of deaths has gone down. Let's hope the social distancing is beginning to work. IHME (the institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation) have a lot of models for the USA. They are expecting about 90,000 deaths with the peak coming in about a week and very few deaths from June. This is with social distancing measures. So it seems that 2 years or even 6 months is over estimating things. In 2 months there should also be quick and cheap point-of-care tests that will also help a lot. If we can easily identify who has the virus then it will be much easier to contain the inevitable outbreaks.

 

Am I being too optimistic? Perhaps... it's still a terrible situation but is hardly the destruction of civilisation. You should stop listening to the talkback radio, it's not good for mental health.

[chessman 838]

15 minutes ago, Brunolem said:

As for the tests, even at a hundred thousands per day, which no country has achieved yet, it takes ten days to test one million persons, and one hundred days (more than 3 months) to test ten millions, which is still a fraction of the population in most countries.

At the moment they are having to send tests to labs, this requires infrastructure and makes it difficult to do at a high volume. When they develop a point of care test that will all change.

[Bangkok Barry 9,120]

On 4/4/2020 at 4:42 AM, Jingthing said:

On 4/4/2020 at 4:20 AM, gunderhill said:

They  should  just  accept  the death rate and  carry  on,  instead  they'll  lose  more through the economic  crash.

Well that is not the choice that countries are making for the most part so maybe you want to move to Turkmenistan. 

Trump said we shouldn't make the cure worse than the problem. It is the only thing he has ever said that I agree with.

[Sambotte 789]

21 minutes ago, chessman said:

At the moment they are having to send tests to labs, this requires infrastructure and makes it difficult to do at a high volume. When they develop a point of care test that will all change.

It's either the world wait for a vaccine for years in lockdown with riots and economy dead...

 

Either it start to seriously tackle the issue : massives tests, isolation and search for contacts.

Still not the official plan it looks like... Or ?...

 

Massives masks (the most obvious and way better than confinement or "social distancing") are still not available, when it should have been prepared years ago !

 

Upgrading hospital capacity is probably done. Or not...

 

Better cure would be nice, but nothing sure, same for a vaccine.

 

The virus does not scare me (with the numbers we have). The incredibly poor, and restrictive only, "no-answer but delay because we are late, unprepared, or unwilling" scares me. People reacting like scared-sheep too.

 

Masks and Tests are the obvious absolute priority. I don't read much about most countries really doing a serious job here.

[JackThompson 7,726]

11 hours ago, uhuh said:

Three Marseille study was not randomized. Si the results are useless.  We don't know (from this study) whether there is some efficacy or not.

Not "useless" - but agree not definitive.

 

11 hours ago, uhuh said:

The results of the French follow-up study were disappointing. 

How so?  Only one death from the group receiving both drugs, and that person was in a severe-state when the treatment began. 

 

11 hours ago, uhuh said:

Another - not French - study showed moderate efficacy. This was a methodically sound study. 

Please link to this study, I would like to read it.  Of particular importance, would be if BOTH drugs were used.  The anti-malaria component, alone, is where I have seen only "moderate efficacy," in past studies.

[Jingthing 69,890]

5 hours ago, Bangkok Barry said:

Trump said we shouldn't make the cure worse than the problem. It is the only thing he has ever said that I agree with.

I don't think he said it. 

He did tweet it. 

It wasn't his words either. 

He stole it from Fox News. 

The very same Fox News that is being sued by family members of Covid dead claiming Fox News lied to them for two months saying that it wasn't a serious threat. 

[Brunolem 7,178]

14 hours ago, uhuh said:

Three Marseille study was not randomized. Si the results are useless.  We don't know (from this study) whether there is some efficacy or not.

 

The results of the French follow-up study were disappointing. 

Another - not French - study showed moderate efficacy. This was a methodically sound study. 

If you understand French, I can send you a recent interview of Pr Raoult, where he explains that modern science, at least in his specialty, doesn't work that way anymore.

 

He is not into studies, test groups and so on, but in a much more direct approach which is getting results.

 

He explains that conclusions can be drawn quickly from the results, without the need for procrastinating forever about the methodology and whatever.

 

The real obstacle to hydroxychloroquine is that it is too simple, and especially too cheap, and that this state of affairs doesn't please the pharmaceutical industry one bit.

 

 

[DrTuner 24,558]

Yeah. I'm also preparing for a decade long global recession and the ensuing wars. Thinking of making a bid for a cabin deep in the woods in Finland. See you in 2040.

[ExpatOilWorker 5,037]

2 hours ago, DrTuner said:

Yeah. I'm also preparing for a decade long global recession and the ensuing wars. Thinking of making a bid for a cabin deep in the woods in Finland. See you in 2040.

Not a bad idea.

 

[uhuh 621]

10 hours ago, JackThompson said:

 

How so?  Only one death from the group receiving both drugs, and that person was in a severe-state when the treatment began. 

 

Please link to this study, I would like to read it.  Of particular importance, would be if BOTH drugs were used.  The anti-malaria component, alone, is where I have seen only "moderate efficacy," in past studies.

The link to the French follow-up study was posted by Oxx

The link you are asking for would take me hours to find. Sorry, this is not my main job. If I find it I pay it.

 

[thaibeachlovers 32,998]

On 4/6/2020 at 10:56 AM, Why Me said:

Disagree. International air travel will make a comeback sooner than later. It's not just tourism, it's about global business (there's just so much you can Zoom).  And tourism itself is 10% of the world economy. A contraction of that amount won't be tolerated.

 

In fact, once the rapid testing kits (Abbot Labs, 15mins.) are widely available and not crazy expensive, travel can be made quite safe. Ask passengers to show a test result within 3 days.

 

In fact, parts of the world will (hopefully) within a couple of months be down to negligible local transmission. Apparently China's already at zero local transmission in most (all?) provinces. In which case there's no need for even tests for travelers from those parts.

 

Prediction: expect Chinese tourists to be back in the millions here starting June/July. The Chinese are climbing the walls for cabin fever, Thailand's hospitality industry is desperate for visitors, ..., see what happens when the lid comes off.

Business travel is NOT "mass" travel.

 

Do you know anyone that will have enough money to go to another country to lie by a pool? NZ economy is almost destroyed already. A few more weeks will finish the job.

I can see DOMESTIC tourism really taking off though.