Anyone else think the same

[ColinUK]

And the CDC have stated again that there is no plan to Margate wearing of masks by the General public in day to day life.

 

[grovesy]

I wonder after this all over if there will be rise in people with allergies to gloves, and cleaning products.

 

[Eddy Edson]

What’s the point of forcing people to wear sub medical grade masks if they’re not being taught how to fit them properly, not being taught how to take them off properly, and if they’re completely ineffectual against viruses?

Because they're not completely ineffecttive: it looks like the main cough'n'sneeze transmission route isn't via tiny aerosols but via bigger gobs of mucus, which even a DIY mask can block.

 

[Bruce Stephens]

What’s the point of forcing people to wear sub medical grade masks if they’re not being taught how to fit them properly, not being taught how to take them off properly, and if they’re completely ineffectual against viruses?

It's not (in this context) to protect the mask-wearer, it's to protect everyone else from the mask-wearer.

But that's probably a tricky message to get across effectively to people, especially after insisting that people shouldn't be wearing masks because they don't work. (If wearing masks is effective in reducing transmission (when infected people wear them), that would provide a convenient explanation for Japan's relatively limited infection rates (so far, at least).)

 

[everydayupsanddowns]

I think masks can lull people into a false sense of security. I went to a supermarket this morning, and the only people who weren’t observing the 2metre distance were three shop assistants wearing masks, who were standing in a corner close together having a good gossip.

I am also seeing many people walking around wearing masks slung under their chins! Or simply not covering their nose.

 

[zoombapup]

So I'm going out for the first time today, so I can gather some stuff from Asda and while I'm there, get some elastic so I can sew myself some masks. I know they're only likely to be minimally effective (although apparently cotton still can filter some 50% of droplets), the point is that we need to get people to wear masks as a societal thing like they do in asian countries.

It's not about masks being effective so much as just putting up some barriers to transmission. Ideally we'll increase the number of contactless interactions too.

As a scientist, it does fascinate me to think of what societal changes might be happening in the coming years. Stuff like increased robotization, contactless, cloud-based stuff, homeworking etc. Lots and lots of changes are likely to happen as a result of people realizing how vulnerable they are, but sadly I'm not sure all of the lessons will be positively learnt. I'm expecting a ton more racism and "other" attacks for instance.

 

[grovesy]

I am also seeing many people walking around wearing masks slung under their chins! Or simply not covering their nose.

Waste of time!

 

[Eddy Edson]

As a scientist, it does fascinate me to think of what societal changes might be happening in the coming years. Stuff like increased robotization, contactless, cloud-based stuff, homeworking etc. Lots and lots of changes are likely to happen as a result of people realizing how vulnerable they are, but sadly I'm not sure all of the lessons will be positively learnt. I'm expecting a ton more racism and "other" attacks for instance.

Some easy predictions:

- People willing to give up some privacy in return for biosecurity, but with protections and oversight. Networked temperature sensors, person trackers and maybe virus sniffers integrated into national and trans-national systems tracking everything and everybody, feeding massive databases with analytics continuously running threat scenarios. The ability to quicckly define a geofence and track and control what passes through it.

A field day for analytics and cheap micro IoT sensor and network companies.

- The cruise industry is completely borked but then has a miraculous recovery, in the same way that people eventually rebuild in bushfire and earthquake zones 🙂

-

 

[Eddy Edson]

Some easy predictions:

- People willing to give up some privacy in return for biosecurity, but with protections and oversight. Networked temperature sensors, person trackers and maybe virus sniffers integrated into national and trans-national systems tracking everything and everybody, feeding massive databases with analytics continuously running threat scenarios. The ability to quicckly define a geofence and track and control what passes through it.

A field day for analytics and cheap micro IoT sensor and network companies.

- The cruise industry is completely borked but then has a miraculous recovery, in the same way that people eventually rebuild in bushfire and earthquake zones 🙂

-

https://twitter.com/x/status/1244382963657330690

 

[louloulou]

with every country in lock-down and still seeing death rates soaring does anyone else think that a lock down really works or is making it worse, if it was working then we surely wouldn't see Italy and Spain along with New York with so many deaths.

also does anyone else think this is air-borne? i have spoken with a few people and they think so esp with the high amount of deaths.

finally just after Xmas many of us in our area fell really sick and a press article suggests that the virus might of all ready been here without anyone knowing it, mine was described as strange flu like symptoms without the flu but made me extremely unwell.

This is very interesting and I had this conversation yesterday with my GP In November my Brother In Law come back from China I went out for meal sat next to him and doing normal family stuff 6 days later I become really Ill worse Flu ive ever had this went on for 3 months runied my christmas my husband got it as well he was ill for months and hes never unwell. they thought I had Pnemonia as My astham so bad I was close to Hospital

 

[Davein]

One of the experts on the telly this morning was explaining that if someone coughs/sneezes at you the droplets that may land on your face will absorb through these basic material masks and infect you that way. I have got the respirator masks with changeable filters, cost a fortune but hopefully offers a tad more protection than the basic paper ones. Unfortunately by its very nature, the virus is unseen and silent and anyone could get infected simply by removing any PPE and not disposing of correctly or thorough washing.

 

[Bruce Stephens]

with every country in lock-down and still seeing death rates soaring does anyone else think that a lock down really works or is making it worse, if it was working then we surely wouldn't see Italy and Spain along with New York with so many deaths.

There's a significant delay involved: social distancing now might help reduce death rates in at best 2 or 3 weeks.

(It seems to me that's one of the major risks of us not testing lots more people: the testing we have is basically useless for estimating how infections are spreading. If we had enough testing to test statistical samples (including people who have no symptoms) we could see effects of social distancing (and other measures) within days, potentially. That would (one hopes) involve testing lots of people, so maybe it's just never going to be practical.)

 

[zoombapup]

Some easy predictions:

- People willing to give up some privacy in return for biosecurity, but with protections and oversight. Networked temperature sensors, person trackers and maybe virus sniffers integrated into national and trans-national systems tracking everything and everybody, feeding massive databases with analytics continuously running threat scenarios. The ability to quicckly define a geofence and track and control what passes through it.

A field day for analytics and cheap micro IoT sensor and network companies.

- The cruise industry is completely borked but then has a miraculous recovery, in the same way that people eventually rebuild in bushfire and earthquake zones 🙂

-

Yeah, totally agree, we're likely to be pushing a lot more in that direction (I teach computer science, although my focus is mostly AI and graphics), I'm 100% sure that tracking will be a main focus, given the UK already has the highest number per capita of cameras in the world, I reckon that our surveillance state will be quite ubiquitous. So widespread use of facial recognition and tracking coupled with heat-sensors to detect feverish individuals and forcibly isolate them quickly.

The idea of a geofence is nice though, I might steal that and use it in a paper 🙂 never heard of that term, but it does make sense to have some sort of tracking requirement, especially for incoming overseas travellers from riskier countries, have a requirement to wear a short-term tracking device (and strict enforcement of it, like not being able to go outside while you're wearing it), which is something I've seen in other countries.

Now might be a good time to invest in a few key companies too. I reckon FLIR will make a boatload of new customers (they do heat-sensitive camera tech), likely as you say IOT devices will too. I'm already surrounded by voice activated devices and IOT equipment, but I can definitely see more widespread adoption of those as "contactless" devices in public areas for instance.

Fascinating and depressing in equal measure.

 

[Eddy Edson]

There's a significant delay involved: social distancing now might help reduce death rates in at best 2 or 3 weeks.

(It seems to me that's one of the major risks of us not testing lots more people: the testing we have is basically useless for estimating how infections are spreading. If we had enough testing to test statistical samples (including people who have no symptoms) we could see effects of social distancing (and other measures) within days, potentially. That would (one hopes) involve testing lots of people, so maybe it's just never going to be practical.)

Yes, because you are only ramping up testing now, I think it must be difficult to make confident inferences from short term case numbers. Presumably you could see a rise in reported case numbers even if distancing measures are working & the lag is taken into account, just because you're testing more and more.

Here in Oz we've been testing at a rate equivalent to what would be 30K+ per day in UK terms (about 450 per million per day), and have completed about 10,000 per million since the thing began. One of the highest rates in the world, I think, and it gives you a bit of confidence that the detected numbers aren't too far off the actual.

One of the things that high volume testing reveals, in Oz and elsewhere, is that young folks get infected at a rate not too dissimilar to oldies. In Oz, 20-29 yr olds have a higher infection rate than 50-59 yr olds, for example. Clubs and bars, no doubt ....

Where you're mainly testing just sick people in hospital, the data gets skewed towards the elderly, who get sicker but aren't at a hugely higher risk of infection, it would seem.

 

[Eddy Edson]

Yeah, totally agree, we're likely to be pushing a lot more in that direction (I teach computer science, although my focus is mostly AI and graphics), I'm 100% sure that tracking will be a main focus, given the UK already has the highest number per capita of cameras in the world, I reckon that our surveillance state will be quite ubiquitous. So widespread use of facial recognition and tracking coupled with heat-sensors to detect feverish individuals and forcibly isolate them quickly.

The idea of a geofence is nice though, I might steal that and use it in a paper 🙂 never heard of that term, but it does make sense to have some sort of tracking requirement, especially for incoming overseas travellers from riskier countries, have a requirement to wear a short-term tracking device (and strict enforcement of it, like not being able to go outside while you're wearing it), which is something I've seen in other countries.

Now might be a good time to invest in a few key companies too. I reckon FLIR will make a boatload of new customers (they do heat-sensitive camera tech), likely as you say IOT devices will too. I'm already surrounded by voice activated devices and IOT equipment, but I can definitely see more widespread adoption of those as "contactless" devices in public areas for instance.

Fascinating and depressing in equal measure.

A couple of companies I do some work with are looking interesting. One has tech and cubesats for doing very low cost short messaging over satellites for asset tracking. Tiny cheap little proprietary protocol terminals for sticking on things, about the cost of an RFID tag.

Another one has wearables and algorithms for managing, tracking, geofencing, integrating sensor data from a collection of individuals, eg at an industrial site for health&safety applications. (Say: An accidental release of noxious gas gets detected by a worker's wearable device; triggers an alarm transmitted to everybody else; control centre whacks in a geofence around the dangerous area; everybody's wearable alarms if they try to cross the boundary and the control centre can monitor etc etc.)

IR sensors are interesting. I passed on a little startup which had some fairly mediocre new IR tech for object detection, but as part of the research into it seemed that there was potential for IR chip costs to drive way down if IR cameras became a standard phone feature. Maybe there's a big new use case now, like you say ...

 

[Eddy Edson]

Yeah, totally agree, we're likely to be pushing a lot more in that direction (I teach computer science, although my focus is mostly AI and graphics), I'm 100% sure that tracking will be a main focus, given the UK already has the highest number per capita of cameras in the world, I reckon that our surveillance state will be quite ubiquitous. So widespread use of facial recognition and tracking coupled with heat-sensors to detect feverish individuals and forcibly isolate them quickly.

The idea of a geofence is nice though, I might steal that and use it in a paper 🙂 never heard of that term, but it does make sense to have some sort of tracking requirement, especially for incoming overseas travellers from riskier countries, have a requirement to wear a short-term tracking device (and strict enforcement of it, like not being able to go outside while you're wearing it), which is something I've seen in other countries.

Now might be a good time to invest in a few key companies too. I reckon FLIR will make a boatload of new customers (they do heat-sensitive camera tech), likely as you say IOT devices will too. I'm already surrounded by voice activated devices and IOT equipment, but I can definitely see more widespread adoption of those as "contactless" devices in public areas for instance.

Fascinating and depressing in equal measure.

You'd probly be interested in this, if you haven't seen it: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/early/2020/03/30/science.abb6936.full.pdf

 

[zoombapup]

You'd probly be interested in this, if you haven't seen it: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/early/2020/03/30/science.abb6936.full.pdf

Thanks, yes I had a quick scan of it the other day. I've seen a few similar papers doing the rounds. There's also a bunch of research funding being thrown at the social aspects of handling the technology too.

It really does leave politics and society in an ethical pickle though, because you don't really want a surveillance state, but that is exactly what you need to handle a pandemic. I suspect what will happen is that it will be sold as "optional" to people, but then become a defacto requirement for any sort of useful interaction. So you'll have to show some sort of tracking "all clear" before you can use public transport for instance. So it will come in voluntarily but not really.

That satellite RFID tag sounds useful, providing everyone with tracking bracelets (for instance people who travel from a hotspot and back) and at international borders is definitely going to be a requirement. I do see a move towards more telecommuting coming out of this in the longer term too. Although my own experience using platforms in the education sector hasn't been stellar.

I guess we'll see things shake out in the next few years.

 

[Hepato-pancreato]

Sweden arn't on lockdown. Don't know the figures for infected people or deaths. This is strange and could it backfire..?

 

[Robin]

Sweden arn't on lockdown. Don't know the figures for infected people or deaths. This is strange and could it backfire..?

There’s a Swedish man living in our village who posted on our local forum that Sweden has one of the highest rates of single person households in the world, also that anyone who can work from home is doing so, and although cafés etc ares till open, their custom is 90% down. So it seems that Swedes are social distancing without needing legislation, which was what was tried here first, only not enough people were willing to comply voluntarily.

 

[Eddy Edson]

There’s a Swedish man living in our village who posted on our local forum that Sweden has one of the highest rates of single person households in the world, also that anyone who can work from home is doing so, and although cafés etc ares till open, their custom is 90% down. So it seems that Swedes are social distancing without needing legislation, which was what was tried here first, only not enough people were willing to comply voluntarily.

Commentary I read suggests Sweden = cloud cuckoo land. They have an exponentially growing reported case and death rate, and latest estimate from a group I follow is that actual infections are probably ~7X reported.

Using a delay-adjusted case fatality ratio to estimate under-reporting

Using a corrected case fatality ratio, we calculate estimates of the level of under-reporting for any country with greater than ten deaths

cmmid.github.io

The same group estimates that it's ~20X for the UK ...