Posted on 03/09/2020 7:18:15 AM PDT by familyop
It is almost 90 degrees in Singapore, and the humidity is almost 90 percent. There are over 130 cases of the novel coronavirus there and the country's officials are hypervigilant, on the lookout for more. People in Singapore may not realize it, but the numbers of cases may remain small, not as much because of public health measures but because the heat and humidity may present a natural barrier to the spread of a respiratory virus.
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Ping.
We’re also seeing a decrease in the number of new cases in China
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You can’t trust any numbers coming out of China.
Yep, I’ll only trust it when we’ve got satellite pics of China’s pollution spewing again.
Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines are pretty low as well. Similar climate. This bodes well. I would have expected China like numbers coming from those areas due to regional vice habits, customs and sanitation. Great news.
Warm weather will settle in across the southern US in early April and you’ll see temps in the 90s (in some locations) by mid-May. As with the flu, you’ll see a drop in cases and that trend will shift north as we move from spring into summer.
China isn’t trustworthy, but they can’t lie about the COVID-19 cases and get away with it. The spotlight is on them.
The CEO of Apple went back into full production in China a couple of weeks ago because of the low number of Coronavirus.
At that time he said he was doing so because it was over, and the best business decision was to get right back to work.
Flu A dropping in probably just the result of people taking the basic actions and steps recommended for COVID-19. Unintended positive consequence.
Flu cases in the USA are dropping as well.
2) The behavior changes being asked of us for dealing with the Coronavirus, are essentially the same as the ones as for limiting the flu, except now more people are actually doing them.
I presume the heat will help; I didn’t think humidity helped, I thought lower humidity was harder on a virus, because high humidity helps with droplet formation which seems to be the way this thing spreads.
(Note: there are some reports it can be aersolized, but those also seem to come from places where they actively did things that would help; like the old folks home in Washington that was actively using nebulizers and CPAP machines on positive patients).
The fact that the entire cruise ship wasn’t infected suggests that this thing isn’t easily passed on through airborne means; the fact that we don’t have entire planeloads infected also suggests that.
“Granted, China is using extreme measures to stop the spread”
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And aside from boarding and welding people up in their home, no serious person believes China’s low numbers. They still haven’t come clean on the Tienanmen Square Massacre numbers.
Not seeing a decrease in Singapore, whereas we are seeing a decrease in S Korea, despite cool, seasonable temperatures.
Things to think about in Singapore.
They have had the gold standard response.
The Singapore contact tracing has been outstanding.
Singapore has been doing “sentinel” testing, which is testing everyone at every medical contact. This has allowed them to catch “clusters” before the virus pops up on any screening.
When you are told to quarantine in Singapore, the penalty is severe and imposed.
Those things are on top of a higher outside temp.
Singapore is a small, modern, and compliant country. They are ahead of the virus. They have been since the start.
The US is none of those things.
We’ve had “outbreaks” in the past, where it turned out that the dangerous “new” virus was just another strain of the flu/common cold that we hadn’t had a specific test for.
So when we started testing, we saw exploding numbers of infected, not because of the spread of the particular strain - it had already spread pretty much world-wide in the years before we started testing - but simply because we’d greatly increased the number of tests we were doing.
Is that the case with COVID-19?
I have no idea. No one has any idea.
That’s the whole point.
Of course the density of Singapore and large public education campaigns in S. Korea will cause variations.
At best, the numbers coming from the factories is that they are at about 40%. This is due to a shortage of materials (internally supplied) and a shortage of people.
I wonder where the people are?
Yep, you might as well try herding cats, than to do that in the US.
Our saving grace is that the US for the most part has relative low-density population.
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