Mridul K. Thomas
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ecology - phytoplankton - functional traits

20.03.2020

2/1/2021

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This appears to be a very well thought-out plan for how we should deal with the coronavirus - and it's not what most countries are attempting to do.

Important: flattening the curve is *not enough*. No country has enough hospital capacity to deal with the massive surge of cases that will arise, even if it's slower. Japan is best prepared, and it has 13 hospital beds per 1000 people. The global average is about ~2 per 1000 people. Emergency care/ICU beds are ~20 times lower than that. And nobody has any pre-existing immunity to this virus, so everyone can get infected.

Instead of slowing the surge through relatively mild action, we ought to go very hard now to reverse it, as China and South Korea have done. This is presently being dismissed as an option because it is thought that this would have to last many months, and when you relax, you get the epidemic anyway. But this is not true - a few weeks of intense effort could buy us the time to 1) do much more testing and tracing, which lets us identify new cases early and prevent subsequent surges, 2) develop medication/vaccines, 3) build up medical capacity, and 4) learn much more than we presently know about it.

I am not an expert in this, so I would love to hear counter-arguments.

https://tomaspueyo.medium.com/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56
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    Why I did this

    I am not an expert on Covid, viruses, or vaccines, but I am a scientist with relevant training. I believe we have a responsibility to clearly communicate science to the public, especially in emergencies. So I started to write summaries of Covid developments on facebook in March 2020 to help friends and family understand the situation as it unfolded. This is an archive of those posts (created much later).

    I also tracked the spread of alarming Covid variants for a few months at http://covidvarianttracking.com/ and mapped the consequences of faster variant spreading at https://tabsoft.co/2YwHCmZ.
    ​

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