I do NOT want to make this into a political thread. I'm just telling you what I've heard with my own ears: people with a known cultural/tribal combativeness against "liberals" are refusing to believe/ignoring/doubting/downplaying the official information we have on a pandemic outbreak, even though they work at a ƒucking HOSPITAL. It is NOT political and it SHOULDN'T BE political so please, let's discuss the actual subject. I'm sorry I said anything, but I wasn't offering an "opinion" --just telling you what I heard, and why it was troubling in the context that appropriate actions taken by individuals are unavoidably critical to mitigating the impact of a communicable disease with a long, asymptomatic incubation period.

Ya I have been hearing this... WHY UNTIL ONLY THE END OF THE MONTH things are closing??

Is it gonna magically dissapear??


My mom/dad cancelled thier trip to florida and disneyworld is closing for 2 weeks also. (Until the end of march)

Ya its best not to. This isnt the political base after all.....

fair enough.

But those threads of human life can not be teased apart completely or indefinitely.

Our shared experience with this virus will be affected most directly by our behavior, association, hygiene, medical response, and on and on. Each one of those is affected by what we think, in turn affected by what we believe, and that is based on what we're exposed to, so to speak.

We all take in things from outside ourselves, the microbes then inhabit our bodies and the ideas inhabit our minds. They are inseparable. How well we can incorporate or resist them depends on how we respond and how "healthy" we are at the outset.

The urge to wax political is strong, but I'll resist it for here and now.

I cannot fathom how you might have gotten this conclusion out of my post.

It's to flatten out the rate of community spread, so there are enough hospital beds to deal with the critical cases that are inevitably going to happen as a result of the known infections and the fact that we've passed the point of being able to do contact tracing.

Hi Dude

ƒlint's explanation is exactly correct. I can not improve on it.

What I might be able to do is to describe a picture that might help you visualize what's going on and why a two-week school closure might help.

I want you to imagine a fire in the forest. A few trees have caught fire from a campfire--bad. As the fire gets hotter on each tree, the unburned trees adjacent to the burning trees might catch on fire--probably will catch on fire, at some point. With no intervention, the edge of the fire just grows bigger and bigger, the whole fire gets hotter and faster because there's more of it and it wants to spread to unburned areas.

Now imagine at the very start of the fire if we had been able to cut a firebreak around the burning trees and just let them burn. Since the heat from the fire wasn't close enough to spread to the other trees across the firebreak, the fire will die out. That would be great. That WOULD HAVE BEEN great if we'd closed our borders (put a firebreak around the country--exceedingly difficult) before any cases/fire showed up in the country. That did not happen.

But! Imagine if we had teams of foresters moving just beyond the edge of the fire, not cutting a complete break, but cutting down every other tree, or every third or eighth tree. Now the unburned trees in close proximity to the burning trees are fewer--there are fewer places for the fire to leap onto and spread outward. This won't put the fire out but it chokes the speed of the spread, giving the firefighters and foresters time to do their job. Their opponent, the fire, is growing more slowly giving them time to focus on the hottest spots or the most vulnerable spots.

Now back to the schools and concerts and basketball games, etc. By limiting the close physical contact or near contact of lots of people, like the kids, or the fans, there are literally fewer opportunities for the virus to be spread. So as ƒlint pointed out, the curve, the steepness with which the number of new cases/burning trees increases will be less steep, the curve will be flattened. This flattening gives us/firefighters/hospitals/first responders/test kit manufacturers more time working at maximum capacity to address the ones that are sick/ablaze. Those resources are limited. Keeping the number of people they have to address under the number they can address is all we can do now. The alternative is to just get burned.

or look at this graphic

They don't know who patient zero is.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2...s-patient-zero

All y'all are being super patient with the "flattening the curve" explanations, but what Dude asked was why ONLY a month. The restrictions slow the spread only as long as they're in place, and any lifting of those restrictions before significant herd immunity has developed will cause the spread to speed right back up again.

The incubation period alone has been shown to be up to 28 days in some cases. Recovery takes anywhere from 3-8 weeks. Wuhan is only now back at normal hospital capacity (last temporary hospital closed its doors yesterday,) and restrictions are very much still in place there.

American quarantines, when they are declared, will have to be longer than a month.

Yeah. It’s two weeks (for now) that I am remote working. I’m sure they will re-evaluate when the two weeks are up. Hopefully there will not be layoffs then. I need to stay productive.

Really heartwarming and beautiful: Italians facing the quarantine are making music with each other, singing and playing tambourines from their balconies and windows!

The Corona Crooners release their debut album "Quarantine."

Problem is, the economic concerns are not panic. They are missed shipments, dry supply chains, and a consumer base that is being quarantined in many nations. The losses are in fact real, and are the virus, not the panic.

Toilet paper is a whole other story.

Spain follows Italy into national lockdown.

https://apnews.com/1dde718068517f188b3fa65a7edcbf86

last time I bothered to check...
 

222,000 flu cases and 22,000 flu deaths, in the US, so far.

1,864 carona cases and 41 deaths, in the US, so far.

🤔