Vietnamese here, we totally trust the number because:
- Every cases are documented and published on the medias (yes, I know that's not a good thing for privacy) to make contact tracing easier.
- Vietnam is an authoritarian country with extensive public security apparatus so tracing and quarantining is easy. There have been cases that someone got quarantined because her friend who lives in other country tested positive, and that's after she returned to Vietnam.
- Also the Communist Party of Vietnam has everything to lose if they can't handle this, so they are serious at containing covid 19. They even used cyber attacks on China to gain intel on how serious Ncov is back in December last year.
- Most importantly, wartime like mass mobilization helped a lot. Every people did their part, the military set up quarantine camps and check points, disinfecting hotspot. The people cooperated with the guideline: avoiding going out, wearing mask or stay in quarantine if their areas has positive cases (the government will provided food and other necessities).
- They do everything to keep the number of deaths at zero: The worst case, patient 91, was recently detached from ECMO after 2 months, his lung recovered from 10% to 40% capacity and he has woken up from coma. The cost for his treatment is $200k and counting, and he isn't even a Vietnam national!
Vietnam formed a task force called GK1 to research how to safely detonate those mines during the war. According to them the mines at Hòn La were detonated due to lightning stroke nearby.
Source: all 11 members of GK1 were from my university. I still remember the first day at school and they were talking about how they provided engineering effort for the war (bazooka clone, sea mines clearance, 2nd Mig pilot to downed a B52 etc..) but I'm sure some of them are just propaganda.
I work for a Japanese companies, and more than half of the developers here have non-IT backgrounds like marketing, sales, design etc... All of them started with scala from zero and 2~3 years later they start talking about monad, final tagless or writing concurrency helper libraries... Our brain is quite malleable so having non IT background doesn't prevent you to be a good developer.
(I am not a professional, so what I write below might be wrong)
Having more time to develop a vaccine or effective treatments is essential, it doesn't have to be herd immunity. Plus in countries where covid19 rate is low enough, social distancing can be helpful for finding and isolating clusters to suppress the epidemic.
Of course, there are two ways out of this, herd or vaccine. The above is a variation of herd that may result in less deaths.
The real problem is that waiting until a vaccine is just not even remotely realistic for so many reasons that it's not even funny. We could end up causing more indirect deaths with social isolation than we could possibly imagine, worst case being a huge collapse in the economy results in a large regional or global conflict.
Indeed, CDC's numbers for March indicate that social isolation is reducing non-ncovid-19 deaths by twice as much as sars-cov-2 is adding them. That's short term, so not what GP was talking about, but very significant numbers nonetheless.
How many suicides? Guys losing their businesses that they put everything into. Can't even go fishing without their fellow man ratting them out to Big Brother.
"How did it end?
The most popular theory of how the plague ended is through the implementation of quarantines. The uninfected would typically remain in their homes and only leave when it was necessary, while those who could afford to do so would leave the more densely populated areas and live in greater isolation.
Improvements in personal hygiene are also thought to have begun to take place during the pandemic, alongside the practice of cremations rather than burials due to the sheer number of bodies."
Depending on the intensity of light you have and the wattage is the bulb, 7 mins is way too long. If your bulb is very close to the mask 10 seconds is more than enough.
UV-C is basically entirely blocked by the ozone layer and doesn't reach the surface of the earth.
Its extremely dangerous, and can cause eye and skin damage with under 60 seconds of exposure, it is absolutely something you do not want to be anywhere around when active.
The 32nd patient here caught ncovid-19 and started showing symptoms on the the 2nd of March whole staying in the UK. But the hospital refused to test her and told her to self quarantine at home instead. Six days later her condition got worse and her family which is very rich rented an airplane to fly her back to our third world country for treatment. The girl now has damaged lung and is in serious condition. I just don't know what is wrong with the hospitals over there, why did they refuse to test her? It's very irresponsible and the situation seems much worse than it seems in the UK.
Oh and nearly half a dozen new cases here recently are all Britons too.
(Google for 32nd covid-19 patient in Vietnam if you want to know more)
Edit: It also occurs to me that if she is from a wealthy family perhaps she tried to use private healthcare - which would be definitely be the wrong thing to do in an emergency situation.
The NHS's approach to testing definitely isn't perfect, but it seems to be fairly well thought out and relatively aggressive. They don't want people going to hospitals or GP surgeries because that can spread the infection to more vulnerable people.
Also, if I'm understanding the news coverage correctly, all the cases of Covid-19 exported to Vietnam from the UK are related. More specifically, they're tied to one traveller who'd recently visited Lombardy in Italy, either by flying on the same plane as her back to Vietnam whilst she had symptoms or in the case of patient 32 by having met up with her in London. Having symptoms and having met someone confirmed to have the virus would definitely qualify for testing here or most places.
Testing is a furiously oversubscribed service. Capacity last week was 800 tests/day, and half that the week before. Nationally. You can't test everybody.
If you're sent home and told to self-isolate, you're essentially being told you're likely to have it. Go home and don't give it to anybody else.
UK hospitals have 160k beds, already 90% full of sick people. They can't admit people who present with a cough, risking existing patients and staff for somebody who doesn't need support.
The hospital did the right thing here.
The patient would have been admitted if and when they got to the point where they needed support. I'm not sure what you think they would have gained by being admitted before that point. But hey-ho. Instead she flew halfway across the world, exposing who-knows how many more people on her travels. Great!
I have read that normal soap (or any kinds of detergents) is more effective than hand sanitizer in killing corona virus. The reason is that corona virus is enveloped in a lipid coating and the soap 'pops' it like a ballon, destroying the virus. So just washing your hand is enough.
But N95 masks aren't cheap and AFAIK must be disposed after one day of usage. So they must be reserved for the medical workers, while the other can use 3 or 4 layers surgical masks, which should provide adequate protection.
Think about how many disposable gloves the average healthcare worker goes through. Dozens per shift, at least. Those are about 5 cents a pop, easily more than a dollar per day.
Google has more than one hundred thousands employees, so interviewing is a very hard problem at that scale. So is there a better way of hiring for giant companies? One that doesn't involve forcing interviewee to farm leetcode for months?
I unfortunately do not have the answer to this problem and understand it is a hard problem to solve, that said, I still feel sad about the state of the industry in this regard.
I believ the sanction put on Iran by the Trump administration is of the main factors for very high mortality rate of Covid-19. This has caused suffering not just for the Iranian people but the whole region as now Iran lacks the equipments and medicines to put the epidemic under control. But I doubt the current President cares about that...
