Any evidence that social distancing actually works?

Uhhh, yeah there's proof. I have barely interacted with anyone for a week or two, and I DON'T have the virus. How's that?????????

Harambe wrote:

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.

It started in Wuhan China and it had at least several weeks if not a month or more to spread unchecked before we even knew what was happening

And Sweden is not doing social distancing and they have the same infection rate as the US per capita same with a few other Asian countries.

I have a source on the ground in Vienna, Austria. 108 corona-19 virus deaths with a population of 8,822,000. Austria is next door to Italy. Austria has a state, Tyrol with many Italians. Austria's disciplined practice of social distancing is evidence social distancing works. You may say Austria is 2.6% the population of U.S. Austria is only about 40% the size of state of Minnesota.

dunes runner wrote:

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.

In your case, it's fatal.

Ezrun wrote:

It started in Wuhan China and it had at least several weeks if not a month or more to spread unchecked before we even knew what was happening

And Sweden is not doing social distancing and they have the same infection rate as the US per capita same with a few other Asian countries.

It was in the US for several weeks before we did anything either. I don't understand exactly what the argument is here. In early stages of outbreak growth is of course very slow. You have some weeks to respond, but the threat seems small...

Harambe wrote:

Ezrun wrote:

It started in Wuhan China and it had at least several weeks if not a month or more to spread unchecked before we even knew what was happening

And Sweden is not doing social distancing and they have the same infection rate as the US per capita same with a few other Asian countries.

It was in the US for several weeks before we did anything either. I don't understand exactly what the argument is here. In early stages of outbreak growth is of course very slow. You have some weeks to respond, but the threat seems small...

Think about it. The virus started in Wuhan China. It took anywhere from 4 weeks to 3 months to realize what was going on

Again think about it. When the first people got infected. They could have been asymptomatic. You can take 15 days for symptoms to appear. So my point is that it could have been a good month before the first case was even in a hospital maybe even longer maybe 6 weeks.

So you could have had thousands or tens of thousands of people asymptomatic who are moving about the population in a city of 11 million

It's not long before the whole city will be saturated

It's like the person who starts taking antibiotics for a viral infection a week after they've had it and they're going to get better anyway but they make a connection between the antibiotics and feeling better. Completely erroneous

In other words the whole shutdown was an erroneous feeling that they're doing something when in actuality the virus had saturated the city and was going to have the same exact results

Sweden is evidence of that same infection rate as the US per capita and they're doing very mild restraints on Behavior

Bottom line is people's understanding of this is naively simplistic. It's a respiratory virus that gets in the air for several hours and get in the environment for several days outside of a host organism

My point is people are giving misleading advice that somehow social distancing is slowing the spread when in reality it probably has no effect

Maybe they're doing it for the slim chance that it could have a mild slowing down of people flooding Hospital's

It's a respiratory virus it's going to be in the air in any public setting you go into a supermarket it's going to be in the air you go into laundromat it's in the air. It's going to be on objects it's going to be Community shared with everyone in your house

The whole idea of social distancing is completely naive to the ease of spread

Guaranteed when this is all said and done Sweden is going to have the same transmission rate as any City with strict protocols

People are completely inaccurate when assessing threats and much of our behavior is counterproductive.

Again I think you're missing the simple point that Wuhan China could have had tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of people mingling around who are asymptomatic in the six weeks before we even knew there was a new virus. Maybe 8 weeks maybe 12 weeks it could have been a while before this was diagnosed in a hospital even if it was only 4 weeks that's still a lot of time for a lot of people to mingle

libs are dumb wrote:

Density may speed the spread.

Said another way - social distancing works. Thanks for admitting it.

old guy 74 wrote:

Ever heard of 'common sense?'

in other words, no, you have no evidence

Ezrun wrote:

In other words the whole shutdown was an erroneous feeling that they're doing something when in actuality the virus had saturated the city and was going to have the same exact results

Sweden is evidence of that same infection rate as the US per capita and they're doing very mild restraints on Behavior

Bottom line is people's understanding of this is naively simplistic. It's a respiratory virus that gets in the air for several hours and get in the environment for several days outside of a host organism

You have a lot of things wrong here for someone writing with so much conviction. Respiratory droplets can't levitate, for one. Distancing has worked in the past with other aerosol diseases.

The major one is the weird belief that many people share (with no evidence) that the virus has infected far more of the population than conventional belief suggests.

This just doesn't work with the math. People test positive for WEEKS with the virus and places only see positive rates of 5-10% of tests! You can't reconcile these two numbers. You'd be seeing very high of positive test rates all over the world if this was true. But it's not true under any testing regimes.

Add in the fact that hospital surges seem to start 2 weeks or so after evidence of community transmission everywhere!

The only way your argument works is if there is an extremely low rate of symptomatic infections. Like 100x lower than current numbers. That's a tantalizing belief but I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that.

Maybe widespread serological testing will prove this but it seems hard to reconcile with low positive % test rates.

Come on man by the way you write you seem like a really smart guy

But my guess is that you're invested in the idea that social distancing is having a big impact and therefore your bias towards that

Is a couple of major problems with your line of reasoning

One is that it's possible that a large percentage of people who are exposed to the virus don't get infected with it

The same way people who are exposed to the flu every year don't get infected to it this is just a nature of viruses and life

Second is that all the evidence shows that the testing is not 100% accurate

Anyway you have provided no reason for why Wuhan China had a lower infection rate even though the virus had roughly two months to spread unchecked

And you have no answer to why Sweden is showing the exact same transmission rate per capita as other places that have tight lockdowns

All the evidence says the virus can stay up to 2 days outside of the human body. The evidence about how it can stay suspended in air is inconclusive

Bottom line is people are putting out misleading information because they want social distancing to work and because they're biased and invested in it. Maybe they think there is a slim chance it could reduce casualties maybe they are just inaccurate. Whatever we will get the issue settled when we can compare Sweden to the rest of the world as things continue but so far the evidence is showing in favor of my line of reasoning

Also look at the cruise ships they they had 17% infection rate and that's in a very controlled environment. You would think the infection rate even in a city would be less than that

So it's clear that even in a cruise ship where you should have a high percentage chance of getting it less than one out of five people get it or will test positive for it

Here's some info from an article on the cruise ship.As of February 20, tests of most of the 3,711 people aboard the Diamond Princess confirmed that 634, or 17 percent, had the virus; 328 of them did not have symptoms at the time of diagnosis. Of those with symptoms, the fatality ratio was 1.9 percent, Russell and colleagues calculate. Of all infected, that ratio was 0.91 percent

Definitely working with the homeless in Vegas - only one positive and no deaths!

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/03/30/us/coronavirus-las-vegas-homeless-cashman-center-trnd/index.html

Fornia wrote:

Definitely working with the homeless in Vegas - only one positive and no deaths!

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/03/30/us/coronavirus-las-vegas-homeless-cashman-center-trnd/index.html

That did make me laugh when I saw it yesterday.

UK solution is to house every homeless (which begs the question why they can't do this normally, I guess some are in vacant hotels), and it's actually happened pretty much.

US solution is to pain a white square around them :D. Unbelievable really.

UK study showed half life of about 1.1-1.2 hours in aerosols. I posted a long post about how aerosols disperse around a person, indicating your contact level with social distancing of 6-feet decreases dramatically. I think it was around 400x decrease with social distancing. Unknowns are how much exposure is "too much". This isn't a definitive number. You would have infection probabilities based on the individual and the exposure level.

Social distancing isn't 100% effective, but it helps reduce the probability of infection significantly.

I stated this in another thread, but the simple guidelines for morans is if you want to reduce your chances of getting sick, #1 - pretend that everyone is smoking and you don't want to smell their cigarette smoke. The virus may travel in exhaled breath, and exhaled breath dissipates similar to cigarette smoke. #2 - pretend everything you touch is covered in feces. You don't want to touch it, but if you're forced to, you want to wash your hands as quickly as possible. If you touch your credit card to a credit card reader, pretend the card reader smeared poop on your credit card. You put it in your wallet, there's poop smeared in your wallet.

Stopwatcher wrote:

Viruses are the most abundant part of the biosphere. If we had the ability to actually see the millions of different viruses and to see the Coronavirus and the ability to observe this on a microscopic level we would see that it's already ubiquitous and all these measures are accomplishing nothing but hurting the economy. If you want to eliminate exposure you have to seal yourself in in pressurized chamber. And have people follow the strictest protocol for items coming in kind of like Bubble Boy.

As a healthcare professional, this is basically gibberish disguised as technobabble. Yes, viruses are abundant in the environment. No, this does not mean that distancing measures and quarantines do not work.

It's a qPCR based test. Sensitivity and specificity will be high; too high to support the idea that there are massive numbers of asymptomatic people walking around. Can you show data on Sweden's transmission rate? Is there literature conclusively demonstrating a similar R0 to other Western countries?

Your reasoning/math here is bunk. You would not have tens of thousands of asymptomatic people walking around before cases are detected. With an R0 of 2.5 and an average incubation time of 1 week, you would have about 3-4 cases walking around before the first became symptomatic a week after they contracted the disease, IF we assume that people ONLY spread the disease in the asymptomatic period. Otherwise, the number is less than 3-4. If it takes 1 month for the first case to end up in the hospital after the disease is introduced to the community, we can do a back of the envelope calculation and assume an incubation period of 7 days, R0 of 3, in which case there will be approx 3^4 cases, or 81, by the time 1 patient ends up in the hospital.

And yes, if it is a respiratory virus it could very well be everywhere in the air. But infection is a dose-dependent phenomenon. Breathing in 1 viral particle, which we all have likely done, is extremely unlikely to result in infection.