A lot of people just look at the two figures for a) how many people each infected person passes the virus to, and b) the mortality rate for those that have the virus.
Whilst these are important, the huge difference between COVID-19 and normal flu is that normal flu has a lot of pre-existing immunity, which has a huge effect on limiting the spread. Whereas with something like COVID-19, no-one has had it before, there is no immunity, and so it sweeps through the population.

Yes, good point. This is of course modelling over a population, so it's impossible really to factor in the huge number of different personal choices that can be made.

Here in the UK, testing - or rather lack of - has been a problem. There is anecdotal evidence of people coming down sick with COVID-19 symptoms, but they are only entitled to sick pay once they have been medically diagnosed with the virus. As the government policy is not to do wide-scale testing, this means in practice that a lot of ill people aren't being tested, so don't qualify for sick pay, and so are staying at work rather than self-isolating just in order to get money to live... and as a result they are spreading the virus.

I understand it is difficult for governments to cover everything, but this specifically is a big problem with current policy in this country. Having said that, policy is changing almost by the hour, so who knows, we may soon see implementation of testing after all.


The 14-day quarantine policy that China are implementing now for people entering the country seems the best way to fight this. In fact the Chinese response from the Wuhan lockdown onwards has been good (although was shockingly poor prior to this as they tried to suppress whistleblowers). Difficult for countries that don't have that level of central control to follow suit with lockdowns and new entrant quarantines etc, but other SE Asian countries have responded well, and provide examples to follow.
The problem here is the 5 day incubation period, and the fact that governments are notoriously reactive rather than pro-active, meaning that quarantines etc tend to be implemented later than is optimal.

Uniqueness doesn't disprove evolution.
Any species is a species precisely because it is different to everything else.

Horns can also be used for courtship, burrowing, and as a cooling mechanism.

Kind of interesting, and could conceivably be the reason the Christian devil has two horns. When people invented the devil, they likely made him similar to things that were already identified by the society as evil or threatening, such as a venomous snake.

'Another' proof implies that there is some proof already. There isn't.
The horned viper is a viper, which is a snake. Evolutionary history of snakes is understood.

Evolution is evidence-based. There is proof.
Intelligent Design is faith-based. It is a belief that exists despite the presence of evidence to the contrary. You can't advance the cause of Intelligent Design by applying evidence (because there isn't any). If you want people to convert from accepting Evolution to accepting Intelligent Design, then you have to make a faith-based appeal. Won't work with me, but that's the way to do it.

(apologies for large images)

Viper family tree on here:

http://whozoo.org/herps/herpphylogeny.html

And then the broader perspective:

https://www.evogeneao.com/en

For those who haven't seen it, there's a great simulator here that demonstrates how quarantining and social distancing work.

And another one here showing how epidemics spread, the examples covering varieties of R₀ values (how many cases an infected person will go on to cause directly) and R_e values (similar to R₀ but takes into account that some people will be immune). Comparisons are made between COVID-19 and something that is more contagious (measles), and something that is less contagious but has higher fatality percentage (ebola). There are also examples of how various precautionary and preventative measures can have an effect: masks/gloves, and then quarantines.

Have a look. It's not just dry numbers, these are highly visual simulators that can provide some real understanding of how and why viruses spread, and some insight into what can be done to stop them or at least manage them, and why these strategies work. Results will be different every time you run through these, but the overall patterns remain largely consistent.

Finally, a little more involved is this virus trajectory modeller, where you can move sliders to control R₀, R_e and other variables.

That's nonsense. Mortality rate seems higher than flu, and the R0 value that represents how contagious it is also seems higher. The main factor however is that there is no pre-existing immunity. This is why it is sweeping through whole populations; there is no brake from the people who are immune because they have had it before - no-one has had this before. And you can't compare death stats of covid-19 with prior year flu because the covid-19 pandemic is in progress right now, numbers will climb massively from current levels.



Exactly. Economies are in major trouble. I suspect there will be huge waves of nationalisation of whole industries before this thing is done.

Weirdly, looking at other pictures of him, it does explain the tan lines - seems he has been 'protecting' himself against Covid19 for a long time now...

There's actually a dehydrated water farm in the US. There are reports of people driving at over 200mph there - presumably because they are desperate for the toilet because of all that (dehydrated) water.

The Coronavirus is already hitting major economies hard, and the worst is yet to come. Many businesses are going to get hit really badly. At the moment it is airlines and travel companies bearing the brunt of it, but this will extend throughout society as quarantines and restrictions go on with no end date in sight.

We are seeing the first indications of (re)nationalisation of some companies:
France ready to nationalise virus-stricken companies
Spain has nationalised private hospitals
Italy is renationalising an airline

Is this the start of a wide-ranging renationalisation program? Governments are attempting to inject cash and put other measures in place to prop up stricken companies, but it seems likely this will be difficult. Fundamentally, when there is a crisis such as this, private companies competing against one another are ill-equipped to maintain the day-to-day running of a country. It seems that government control is the only way to do it.

Thoughts?

Whilst you are unlikely to pass it on because you wash your hands, that's not true of everyone. It's quite possible that someone could cough into their hand, and then grab the handrail to get upstairs. It's going to be difficult for us all to start regarding every surface as a potential threat. Not sure what guidance (if any) there is for shops, but they need to be disinfecting things like handrails very frequently.

Got to merit that 

It wasn't this stuff, was it?


There's a typo on their website:

"BLK. is the first ever super water that is black in colour due to the fulvic trace minerals. BLK contains powerful electrolytes and a high pH, so once you take a sip of it, you get some serious hydration along with a clean refreshing taste"

That should read:

"BLK. is the first ever super water that is black in colour due to the fulvic trace minerals. BLK contains WATER, so once you take a sip of it, you get some serious hydration along with a clean refreshing taste"

Please don't ever do this for an airdrop! You are risking a lot by giving away personal information such as that, and for the prospect of what is usually a couple of dollars reward, I would advise to stay well away. Whilst there are certainly plenty of genuine airdrops, it is also a great opportunity for scammers to vacuum up valuable personal information.

I think this is kind of the point though. They accept that it can't really be contained and the virus will work its way through most of the population eventually, but by implementing isolation they can spread out the peak and so reduce the point of maximum pressure on the healthcare system... so doctors don't have choose who lives and dies, as in Italy.


Yes, government agencies will exploit this. Kind of like what happened after 9/11, with the Patriot Act and the massive overhaul of surveillance processes.

Take a close look at this image from what is normally one of my favourite newpapers, The Guardian. The article is about a supermarket having almost sold out of tinned tomatoes; the image shows a shelf with only a few cans remaining. However they forgot to crop the image. To the left, you can see a huge stock of tins of 'Tesco Chopped Italian Tomatoes'.


https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/08/coronavirus-stockpiling-supermarkets-toilet-paper-hand-gel

I'm sure that once coronavirus started to escalate, a few people started panic-buying certain items, probably including tinned food. But newpapers and other media outlets are always desperate to get the latest exclusive, throwing out emotive and misleading headlines like anything. Surely it's the case that the panic buying escalated hugely precisely because of feverish reports of panic-buying.

Press freedom is important, but with that comes responsibility. Newpapers, TV news, etc. are right now abdicating that responsibility. They mislead people all the time, but when there is a serious situation such as now, with a global pandemic, their manipulation of the public is outright criminal. Look at what happened with that quarantine in northern Italy, leaked before it could take effect, leading to people fleeing the area in advance of the lockdown, and no doubt spreading the virus and costing lives as a result.

They are not reporting news, it's just the usual sensationalist crap, but right now it is creating panic and causing suffering and death. These people should be prosecuted.

You are absolutely correct that QCs exist and that they are being improved all the time.

However, you mentioned D-Wave, so we do need to be mindful of the distinction between quantum annealers (such as D-Wave) and universal gate quantum computers (true quantum computers). Annealers are more like quantum simulators than actual quantum computers, and they will never be a threat to bitcoin because they can't run Shor's algorithm, which is what a QC would use to break elliptic curve cryptography.

The annealing approach exploits the phenomenon of quantum tunnelling - this is a low-energy shortcut, analagous to moving between adjacent valleys by cutting straight through the hill rather than going up one side and down the other. Annealing is more for problems where there are a huge number of possible solutions, and we're just looking for one that is sufficient out of that multitude of possibilities, a 'local minimum'. So annealers are good for problems that fit into the 'travelling salesman' category, or materials science where we just want to develop a material that has sufficient strength or malleability or heat-resistance.

Universal gate quantum computers on the other hand are the ones that can threaten bitcoin. News reports often focus on the number of qubits these machines have, as if this is the only important criterion. It's not. As (universal gate) QCs scale up, the main problem is decoherence - the difficulty of maintaining that entangled quantum state (and its information) by preventing variables from the outside environment leaking in (e.g., physical vibrations, EM radiation, temperature changes).

There is work underway on a variety of solutions to the decoherence problem, but it remains very much the primary obstacle - you can have a QC with a million qubits, but it would be useless without sufficient coherence.

Much modern technology relies on the application of laws of quantum mechanics. Yes, it exists and is a big part of the technological underpinning of society. It's not just hypothetical cats in boxes. If you're interested, there's a nice overview here of QM in toasters, light bulbs and, of course, computers.
Indeed, some very esoteric and counter-intuitive rules of the quantum world have been proven and put to use, even teleportation - it may not be star-trek-style 'beam me up' stuff, but it is true, verifiable and repeatable.

Quantum mechanics is quite well understood mathematically, and scientists and engineers have been able to apply those laws to build many of the things we see around us... but as for what QM is and what it means and what its implications are for a human understanding of the universe, these are profound questions to which we may never have the answers.

I posted about this in another thread. Simply, bitcoin has the potential to be a safe-haven asset, but isn't at the moment...


To my mind, a key indicator of how far along that road to 'safe-haven' status we are will be how bitcoin reacts once the panic dies down and the recovery starts.

Coronavirus absolutely will not harm Trump in the elections; on the contrary, it will increase his chances of success.

Trump has positioned himself as an outsider standing up for common people against a corrupt establishment. It is at times of crisis such as that provoked by coronavirus that he can really run with that. Trump governs largely by pithy soundbite. In calmer, more measured times, his remarks can be picked apart to determine their veracity. But  in a crisis such as now, there is a surfeit of news, people are only interested in headlines and in leaders who "get things done". Trump complains about the bureaucracy he inherited all the time. He can very easily set a poor response to coronavirus against this backdrop, and shift any blame.
In fact he's already doing it...

Very true. It is a bit of a concern that ground-based observations are limited to the northern sky, after the southern program lost its funding way back in 2014, and is yet to be replaced. Of course we do still have space-based detection of the full sky, but the ground-based blind spot is a serious concern. Funding has now been obtained to fill the blind spot, but until construction is complete that gap is still there...
It's quite revealing of government priorities that the gap existed for a few years with no plans to fill it.


The problem with this of course is that you can still be a carrier, and pass it on to any elderly or immunocompromised people you may know.


The coronavirus is more of a threat to individual humans; asteroids are more of a threat to survival of the human species.