Any evidence that social distancing actually works?

Do we have any differential equations nerds in here? It's been 25 years since I've done them, but I think it's fairly straightforward to figure out the concentration of infection in a room. Assumptions:

Room has 28kL of air. Patient exhales infected air at 500mL per breath, which is about 20L per minute. Half-life of coronavirus is about an hour in aerosol form. You should be able to find the equilibrium of infection in the room with initial condition of a clean room.

My bad. 20 breaths per minute is average, so 10L per minute of infected air.

Star wrote:

This is at least a good simultaneous experiment if it slows or limits the spread of other sicknesses as well.

Yea, like this wasn't known before? I'm pretty sure kids learn in Kindergarten that if you're sick you should stay home so you don't get other kids sick.

Your evidence is probability: The was a choir north of Seattle that met on March 6 (before all of this blew up). Of the sixty people who gathered, none was showing symptoms, they refrained from touching, and they used hand sanitizer. Three weeks later 45/60 people have the disease. Given that under1% of the Washington population has the disease, that 75% of this group tested positive is impeccable evidence that gathering caused rapid spread.

Using a binomial cumulative distribution frequency calculator I tried finding the odds of this happening by chance. My calculator, which has resolution to 1 in 100,000,000,000, can‘t even process the infinitesimal odds and just spits out zero. In fact, anything more than 11 cases would cause an answer of zero to pop up.

I don‘t have the numbers of the 61 members who did NOT attend, but would be shocked if more than 5-10 have it.

Most experts agree the actual death toll in Wuhan was closer to 42,000. One mortuary went through 10,000 urns.

The whole point of social distancing is not to prevent you from ever getting infected, it’s to slow the rate of infection so that our medical treatment facilities can absorb the additional sick people that will come on top of the expected number of other sick or ill people. This can really only play out three main ways. One, we keep strictly observing social distancing until 75% to 80% of the population get the virus. Two, we stay in our current stay at home mode for the 12 to 18 months it will take to find/test/produce/administer a vaccine to 75% to 80% of the global population that hasn’t caught the virus already. Three, we just have at it and let the chips fall were they may. We accept the reality of changed medical ethics that will make hard cutoffs about who to try and use limited medical capacity on and who to just roll into a non treatment wing with no medical attention whatsoever to either suffocate in your own fluid filled infected lungs or possibly pull through on your own if you’re lucky. In Italy they realized that they were spending too many resources and too much time on people and they would still die. The learning from this was that everyone could not be saved, so with difficulty they adjusted their criteria from trying to save everyone to only trying to save those under 65 without preexisting medical morbidities. Then because more sick people kept coming in and medical staffs were losing people because they were getting sick too, the age cutoff age was dropped to 60.

Without knowing to what extent people are adhering to social distancing, how can you know how effective it is? But even if is being followed it probably takes 3 weeks to start to see the impact on the number of cases.

Apparently we do not have to isolate a lot longer to flatten the curve. In theory, we have stopped the spread, even if people are at peak dying rates.

The slow the spread idea makes sense

But it's also possible that a lot of the responses are actually delayed. And you have people doing a lot of needless and unproductive actions

Also as was noted you might save some lives from the coronavirus but you might cost some lives from other negative factors from social distancing and disrupting the flow of society

Also let's face it people proliferate a lot of poisons. From harmful cleaning products, 2 unnecessary toxins, 2 terrible behaviors like smoking, unnecessary automobile exhaust, people basically spend a lot of time poisoning each other. Unnecessary prescription drugs. Anyway I think we should have a tiered way of starting things back up where we slowly Implement more and more businesses. I guess we can prioritize levels of necessity. I think this would be the most sensible way

the biosphere is intricate wrote:

Is it just possible that social distancing has zero effect on the spread of the virus

Yes it is possible. Japan and Sweden both have small numbers of corona deaths. Neither has implemented a quarantine.

colorunner123 wrote:

the biosphere is intricate wrote:

Is it just possible that social distancing has zero effect on the spread of the virus

Yes it is possible. Japan and Sweden both have small numbers of corona deaths. Neither has implemented a quarantine.

Sweden actually has a high corona death per capita.

Japan, China, HK and South Korea don’t. Population in all these countries wear face mask to reduce infection to others.

That seems to be the biggest common factor.

Rupp will have such an advantage...

colorunner123 wrote:

the biosphere is intricate wrote:

Is it just possible that social distancing has zero effect on the spread of the virus

Yes it is possible. Japan and Sweden both have small numbers of corona deaths. Neither has implemented a quarantine.

So is it possible that all of humanity will wake up to evidence-based reasoning as The Guiding principles for human life from this

After all we got in this mess cuz people were following ancient superstitions about what to eat. And we have a population where more people believe in ghosts and goblins than understand evolution.

jhgbfvtg wrote:

colorunner123 wrote:

Yes it is possible. Japan and Sweden both have small numbers of corona deaths. Neither has implemented a quarantine.

Sweden actually has a high corona death per capita.

Japan, China, HK and South Korea don’t. Population in all these countries wear face mask to reduce infection to others.

That seems to be the biggest common factor.

Rupp will have such an advantage...

You're spreading nonsense Sweden has the same infection rate as the US. The difference in death rates will even out and is only happening cuz you have a small sample size

Let me guess is it just possible that you believe and continue to proliferate lot of the fairy tales you were raised on. You believe a man lives in the sky? We have a population that believes otter nonsense in the face of reality. We're surrounded by people who believe in fairytales and ridiculous Notions instead of evidence-based reasoning. More people believe in ghosts and goblins than understand evolution. People have no real understanding of The Germ theory of disease the biosphere and basic science tific principles. They continue to Peddle nonsense to fit into cultural norms which proliferate poisons

Transmission is the point of social distancing death rates are irrelevant. Same exact transmission rates!

Ezrun wrote:

Transmission is the point of social distancing death rates are irrelevant. Same exact transmission rates!

Exactly!

Chris P wrote:

I agree it's everywhere let's face it science isn't most people strong point. It's like the people who are saying don't touch your face. You'd wonder how dogs survive going around eating garbage and stuff off the streets. I'm off for good hygiene but let's face it people are idiots in their understanding of basic science. It's this kind of group think that led to the Vietnam War

Yes, I agree with this.

dunes runner wrote:

[quote]the biosphere is intricate wrote:

Is it just possible that social distancing has zero effect on the spread of the virus

Social distancing has had no positive effect on previous viruses.

Also, the ultra fast spread of covid-19 cannot have been due to social interactions, which has been verified by several scientists. To the contrary, it has most likely been spread by aerosol sprays, and by being (intentionally) contained in clothing, such as baseball hats wrapped up on plastic, which is one of the ways it was transmitted to Iraq and Iran.

Come on man don't get wrapped up into crazy conspiracies. We've had tons of examples of viruses that have jumped the Gap from animals to humans

This happened because of poor animal husbandry and for sanitation regarding domestic animals being mixed with produce selling shops in confined quarters

There is zero evidence that this is a bioweapon. And there's tons of evidence that it is a naturally occurring respiratory virus. Just look at the way it is progressed around the world. Obviously it's being transmitted from people to people

I'm just arguing that respiratory viruses are simply going to be transmitted in the air much easier than we realize. So if you go into any public room you're going to be exposed to it. Social distancing might slow it down a little but look at Sweden they're doing just fine with only mild measures in place.

the biosphere is intricate wrote:

Is it just possible that social distancing has zero effect on the spread of the virus

Look at Wuhan China they had a similar course of progression that a lot of other cities seem to be having. And the virus had up to 2 months to spread unchecked

This is just wrong? Wuhan went into lockdown around the same time that other major areas have done the same: when hospitals started to fill up with Covid patients.

It seems to have worked there. There isn't really a negative control to compare against because everyone seems to arrive at the conclusions that social distancing measures are essential once an outbreak has started.

libs are dumb wrote:

Density may speed the spread. Wait a few more weeks and I predict that the number of cases per state will mirror the population.

If so, that would be related to total population, showing that density didn't matter.