Coronavirus could delay MSFS

[Alan_A 1,650]

6 hours ago, Chock said:

I think people need to remember that when you hear alarmist news reports that COVID-19 presently has a 4.6 percent mortality rate, they are neglecting to mention this evidently means it presently also has a 95.6 percent survivability rate.

Um... you do realize that this is a public health issue, not just an individual health issue, right?  The case fatality rate matters not just in the “am I going to die?” sense, it matters in the “how many people are infected?” sense. So to put it in perspective, the 4.6 percent case fatality rate figure that you seem to think is such good news is actually double the case fatality rate for the Spanish Flu, which killed millions. Seen another way, an 0.5 percent case fatality rate affecting 10 percent of the US population would kill over 150,000 people. That’s not negligible. 

You avoid hitting those levels by limiting the spread, which is why public health professionals want you to do things like washing your hands and avoiding large gatherings. Washing your hands isn’t hard to do and the benefits are significant. Sorry if that means I’m another person on a high horse from your POV. 

Here’s preparedness advice for health professionals from a responsible source, with additional historical background. Worth a look: http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/cbn/2020/cbnreport-02272020.html

[honanhal 1,420]

On the one hand, I hope those of you making light of this are right and this is all overblown (this is extraordinarily unlikely, unfortunately). On the other, the fact that there are large numbers of people who see this the way you do also makes it even harder to contain this, putting everyone at more risk.

You want to talk about gallows humor? Based on what we know about Avsim age demographics, a Covid pandemic would not be good news for a lot of people in this community. Including, perhaps, some of the people who think this is such a hysterical overreaction. You guys have seen figures on how much more deadly this is for people over 60 (let alone over 80), right?

James

[pete_auau 1,163]

wonder  why  the  flu  isn't  taken  so  seriously as   the  Covid  

 

In total, the CDC estimates that up to 42.9 million people got sick during the 2018-2019 flu season, 647,000 people were hospitalized and 61,200 died. That’s fairly on par with a typical season, and well below the CDC’s 2017-2018 estimates of 48.8 million illnesses, 959,000 hospitalizations and 79,400 deaths.

 

 

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

The flu is taken seriously. The flu kills people whose health is already compromised in some fashion. Its mortality rate is low, but its rate of contagion is high. Vaccine manufacturers make billions of dollars selling a product that is virtually outmoded on the day of its initial release. Mutation in certain viruses is so rapid that the act of producing an effective vaccine would need to be in the order of months not years. It's not for lack of either interest or trying. 

[Pastaiolo 1,688]

22 minutes ago, jabloomf1230 said:

The flu is taken seriously. The flu kills people whose health is already compromised in some fashion. Its mortality rate is low, but its rate of contagion is high. Vaccine manufacturers make billions of dollars selling a product that is virtually outmoded on the day of its initial release. Mutation in certain viruses is so rapid that the act of producing an effective vaccine would need to be in the order of months not years. It's not for lack of either interest or trying. 

Mutations are always possible, however this is not a game (like Plague Inc for example) and they are not simultuaneus so they do not affect every infected person at the same time. There have been already mutations now from the original coronavirus in China too.

As for the influenza vs coronavirus. The first is known, vaccines are prepared to cover most of the population and especially those who cannot take the vaccine and rely on others having it.
The second is getting studied now, there are no vaccines, it is a very contagious and sadly it puts a big strain on national healthcare systems in the way that a 5% of those infected need ICU for a few weeks (assuming they all make it, which it isn't the case considering most of them are in their 70-80s and their immune system already weakened). In Europe most countries have ICU beds ready in the order of thousands. And you have to consider that those are not "unused" beds. They are used for other situations like an ictus, a stroke and so on.
So the main issue right now is making sure everybody who needs ICU does find an ICU for them, which leads back to the previous graph i posted in how even a pandemic needs to be managed so that the cases are more gradual in time to make the healthcare system be able to handle all the cases.

Edited March 7, 2020 by Pastaiolo

[KevinAu 441]

Unfortunately, people have turned whether to react properly to this virus a political thing...with the associated accusations and name calling. At least that is how it has become here in the usa and apparently the uk.

Edited March 7, 2020 by KevinAu

[lechat60 0]

I wonder what the Corona virus has to do with us bottom dwellers in our playrooms flying whatever flight sim you wish to use.  Is the price of peanuts also affecting MSFS too?

[KevinAu 441]

18 minutes ago, lechat60 said:

I wonder what the Corona virus has to do with us bottom dwellers in our playrooms flying whatever flight sim you wish to use.  Is the price of peanuts also affecting MSFS too?

I think the thread started as how the corona virus may delay the release of the new msfs. But that was back on the first page if you missed it.

[G-RFRY 1,712]

1 hour ago, lechat60 said:

I wonder what the Corona virus has to do with us bottom dwellers in our playrooms flying whatever flight sim you wish to use.  Is the price of peanuts also affecting MSFS too?

The delaying of MSFS will be a catastrophe for some users apparently.   

[Alan_A 1,650]

About effective public health responses... and ineffective ones... there was an interesting article in today's Wall Street Journal about lessons from the 1918-1919 flu pandemic (which I need to stop calling the "Spanish Flu," because there was nothing Spanish about it - Spain got tagged with it because it was neutral in WW I and therefore its media reported it first, since they weren't restricted by demands for cheerful war propaganda).  The article itself is likely behind a paywall, but here's a relevant excerpt. It discusses lessons learned in the US, where, because there wasn't a central public health response, cities decided for themselves what to do.  It became a sort of laboratory for what worked and what didn't.
 

Quote

In 1918, Philadelphia was one of the hardest-hit American cities, partly because it was, as the muckraker Lincoln Steffens put it, “the worst-governed city in America.” In his book “The Great Influenza,” the historian John M. Barry describes the efforts of Dr. Wilmer Krusen, director of Philadelphia’s Public Health and Charities department, a well-intentioned man who lacked public health experience and was prone to inaction. On Sep. 28, 1918, he allowed the city to proceed with a Liberty Loan parade to sell millions of dollars in war bonds, despite warnings that the event would spread illness. The parade drew 200,000 people; within 72 hours, every bed in the city’s 31 hospitals was filled.

By contrast, Mr. Barry shows, St. Louis had the most success of any large American city in fighting the pandemic. Dr. Max Starkloff, the city’s health commissioner, said that his goal was to “keep the epidemic out of the city, if possible, and if that fails, to use every means to keep it down to the lowest possible number of cases.” He created an advisory body that included representatives of the city’s chamber of commerce, schools, medical society, university, Red Cross and local public health services. He pursued what he called “intelligent citizen cooperation” through active outreach to the community. And he engaged health department staff, policy makers and teachers to implement individual quarantines and bans on public gatherings. Thanks to Starkloff’s rapid, inclusive and systematic efforts, St. Louis’s mortality rate from the flu was half of Philadelphia’s.

So there's a study for those of you that think that aggressive reactions are overblown and unnecessary.  I'd say, "have at it," except that complacency and inaction affect the rest of us, too. At the risk of repeating - pandemics illustrate that we're all connected whether we like that idea or not. 

So instead I'll say - wise up, and get with the program.

Edited March 7, 2020 by Alan_A

[Nedo68 533]

Just in:

Italy Announces Restrictions Over Entire Country.
All of Italy’s 60 million people are coming under restrictions that had earlier applied to the northern part of the country.

wonder what next european country will do the same, soon we'll all be apart.

Edit: and now Austria Closes Passage from Italy Without Health Clearance,

Austria won’t allow travelers from Italy to enter the country unless they can present a medical certificate demonstrating health.

Edited March 10, 2020 by Nedo68

[fluffyflops 1,858]

at virgin we have asked the crew and flight deck to take unpaid leave to help the bank balance.

Tel Avia is canned and west coast routes being culled/combined due to load factors

Edited March 10, 2020 by fluffyflops

[Chock 17,769]

On 3/7/2020 at 5:48 PM, Alan_A said:

So there's a study for those of you that think that aggressive reactions are overblown and unnecessary.

I don't think anyone is genuinely suggesting that reactions to potential pandemics are unnecessary, but in citing the way individual cities in the US managed the matter in the Influenza pandemic toward the end of WW1, one has to be careful not to draw incorrect conclusions from isolated facts without a wider study of their contemporary context. Bear in mind that correlation does not equal causation.

It may indeed be true that Philadelphia had a parade at the time and within three days of that parade all the city's hospital beds were full, but it could well be the case that they were going to be full anyhow because of pre-existing infections regardless of whether the parade had gone ahead or not. For example, how empty were they prior to this parade? If they were at 95 percent capacity the day before being filled, it would not have taken much to see them filled up to capacity. Was there a big fire or train wreck that week which caused the beds to be filled up? One would have to demonstrate the filling of beds was directly caused or influenced by the action of holding a parade in a significant way, and nothing else, in order to use this as conclusive evidence to support the merits of the City's officials not having gone ahead with allowing the parade to take place.

I don't doubt that it is likely that it was a contributing factor, but as noted, unless we can eliminate any other potential reasons for the spread, then the correlation does not equal the causation merely because of what could have just as easily been a coincidence of timing which made it appear to be a major cause. Of note in drawing such a conclusion as that, is the incubation period of the 'Spanish Flu', is estimated to have been from around two days to a week, and if we go off that, it is unlikely that healthy people becoming infected at a parade would then be so ill as to be hospitalised within three days, as the main killer with that influenza would slowly, but progressively weaken the victim's bronchial tubes, making them susceptible to bacterial pneumonia. I've had bacterial pneumonia, and it did indeed nearly kill me, causing me to be hospitalised with a collapsed lung amongst other things, but it took about two weeks for me to be so bad as to go to hospital with the symptoms, whereupon they admitted me. I didn't even know I had a collapsed lung believe it or not. Prior to that, I thought I just had a bad cold.

So back with that analysis of actions in Philadelphia in 1918, if we make the mistake of assuming one thing is definitely a cause for another, what we are doing, is akin to suggesting that because we see the sails of a windmill going around on a windy day, we can surmise that windmills cause it to be windy.

Edited March 11, 2020 by Chock

[Alan_A 1,650]

47 minutes ago, Chock said:

I don't think anyone is genuinely suggesting that reactions to potential pandemics are unnecessary, but in citing the way individual cities in the US managed the matter in the Influenza pandemic toward the end of WW1, one has to be careful not to draw incorrect conclusions from isolated facts without a wider study of their contemporary context. Bear in mind that correlation does not equal causation.

Proving once again, I'm afraid, that you don't have a background in public health.  In public health - especially in emergency situations like a pandemic - correlation sometimes stands in for causation because speed counts.

Several points:

1. The passage about the comparative approaches in Philadelphia and St. Louis is drawn from John M. Barry's authoritative history, The Great Influenza. The example itself is cited in scientific literature.  Here's an example. 

2. Every introductory epidemiology course includes mention of Hippocrates' writings on malaria.  Hippocrates associated malaria with "miasma" and stagnant water and recommended, as a public health measure, draining the swamps.  Roman writers including Marcus Terentius Varro also associated malaria with swamps.  None of them understood that mosquitoes were the transmission vector.  Nevertheless - because they correlated swamps with malaria - they made exactly the right public health recommendation. Get rid of the swamps and you stop malaria.  They did it because it worked.  This is taught as an example of how to reason as an epidemiologist does, acting fast when needed, even on limited evidence.

3. In the case of viral contagion, we have an established literature on what works and what doesn't.  The measures currently being put in place for COVID-19 are part of known public health practice - too slowly and haphazardly in many cases.  But no one is dithering or talking about wind and windmills.

Now - how do I know this stuff? Because I took that course in epidemiology.  My background - during the early years of the HIV epidemic, I worked on the communications staff of the New York City hospital that had the largest HIV case load.  I spent time with the Allergy and Infectious Disease staff and worked out on the units with nurses and patients. Later, I worked for several years with Burroughs Wellcome on HIV professional education programs, which included attending several International AIDS Conferences and working closely with researchers and clinicians and community health professionals and activists.  Along the way I got a masters degree in health policy - including coursework in epidemiology and public health. I continue to work with the hospital and medical device industries among a couple of others.

I'm not saying all this to wave credentials around for the sake of it. I'm saying it because I'd really like you to pay attention to what I'm telling you, as a matter of safety. I respect your knowledge of aviation and flight simulation, and read your posts with a great deal of attention.  But please listen to me in this particular instance.  In this and some of your past posts, you're giving people bad information and encouraging them to be complacent when that's the last thing that's needed.  I agree completely that much of the panic is overblown but the urgency of the core public health message - about hand-washing and social distancing (like avoiding the 1918 Philadelphia parade) isn't.  This situation is very serious and potentially very dangerous.  There's an extensive literature and a known set of best public health practices.  Please follow them, and please encourage other people to follow them. Listen when we tell you these things.

 

Edited March 11, 2020 by Alan_A

[Dominique_K 10,150]

17 hours ago, Alan_A said:

In public health - especially in emergency situations like a pandemic - correlation sometimes stands in for causation because speed counts.

 

Thank you for your interesting contributions, Alan. Appreciated that you take the time. It is a little blurry in my memory, but I don’t remember that the the 2002/03 SARS epidemy triggered such massive public health measures (quarantines etc.) and panic ?