On Friday, 13 March 2020 9:59:07 AM AEDT Andrew Worsley via luv-main wrote:

On Fri, 13 Mar 2020 at 09:36, Russell Coker via luv-main

<luv-main@luv.asn.au> wrote:

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019

Coronavirus is spreading exponentially as diseases do. People can be infected for as long as 14 days without showing symptoms, according to Wikipedia 5 days is the average time for symptoms to develop. This means that we won't know when it gets really bad until at least 6 days after it has got really bad. An interesting question is how long after infection a person becomes infectious. On one podcast I've heard 4 days - meaning on average 1 day of infectious but not yet sick.

That might be the case, but even so 1 day on a tram can spread it a lot, and if we get unlucky that someone has their 1 day at a LUV meeting...

...

The only responsible course of action is to significantly scale back public meetings now to reduce the risk.

Perhaps people could consider an IRC or Audio/Video presentation? I don't know the trade-offs or how viable various packages are in practice though and I suspect it will take some effort to work these out.

http://openmeetings.apache.org/

https://openvidu.io/

https://jitsi.org/

Or slightly older review https://opensource.com/alternatives/skype

What we need is responses from people who want to be involved in such things. The current lack of response indicates that we shouldn't bother running it and should only use the mailing list until Coronavirus is over.

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I have raised this matter for discussion on the committee list but with no reply. So I now publicly propose that all LUV in-person meetings be cancelled from now until the stage where we know the disease is under control. I can't imagine that being before July.

As fun as LUV meetings are, it's not something that's worth risking lives over.

I have some plans for online education which could be run at the times we usually have LUV meetings, follow up here if you want to discuss that. Please use luv-talk if you want to discuss details of the disease.

Perhaps the topics could be proposed and voted on a poll (the venerable luv web site might host this?)

I suspect that this type of remote working software is going to be needed for many other organisations than luv in the near future...

True. But we need people who are interested in it, and we don't seem to have that. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

On Fri, 13 Mar 2020 at 10:08, Rick Moen via luv-main <luv-main@luv.asn.au> wrote:

Quoting russell@coker.com.au (russell@coker.com.au):

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019

Outstanding single-stop resource maintained by a qualified expert: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/dont-panic-the-comprehensive-ars-tec...

Hi, I would like to offer some additional information that I read today on a non-public Australian discussion board. I haven't sought permission from the author to quote due to timezone differences, but I hope they won't mind me sharing this anonymously. Quote of the other (I AM NOT the doctor who wrote this) person's text begins here: Okay, for a bit of background, I’m a former medical doctor who worked for around five years in medicine (3 in emergency department), who quit biomedical medicine to go into population health and have finished my Masters of Public Health a few months ago. In my opinion based on my assessment of reports coming out of China, Italy and elsewhere, the Australian government is, if anything, underplaying the problem. While on an individual level for the majority of people the symptoms are similar to the flu, the coronavirus is proving to have a mortality rate that is much higher than a normal flu - around 0.5% with gold-standard treatment. Children seem to be safe, and risk is much higher the older you are, and the more co-existing health problems you have. The virus is spreading through a global population that has no prior immunity, and is already widespread in countries all around the world. Epidemiological “best-guess” projections by experts of who will be infected, absent heroic social measures, are around 40-70% of the global population this year - an order of magnitude higher than infection rates from the flu. For those who are infected, approximately 20% have severe cases needing hospitalization for monitoring, supplemental oxygen, and potentially adjunctive treatments. Of those hospitalized, about a quarter have critical cases which need ventilatory support in the intensive care unit with 1-to-1 nursing using very expensive - and rare, machines, sometimes for up to three weeks at a time. Without this support they die (and with this support their chance of dying is decreased by a factor of ten). That is to say, if intensive care beds with ventilators run out, the number of deaths rises approximately tenfold. There are a few major problems with this. 1) The infection rate rises exponentially. A back of the envelope calculation would put Australian hospitals at the point of running out of hospital and ICU ventilator beds in somewhere from 2-6 weeks from now. This is based on estimating the number of undetected cases currently circulating within Australia right now spreading the virus, and the rate at which the virus spreads in normal conditions (based on what happened in China, Italy, South Korea, etc). When the beds run out, the mortality rate rises to about 4% of cases. If the infection infects 40-70% of the population, that means around 2 million to 3.5 million needing hospitalization this year in Australia, and 400,000 to 700,000 Australians dying. 2) If hospital beds fill up with Coronavirus cases, the capacity to treat other problems (emergency surgical conditions, chronic diseases, heart attacks, etc) is diminished. This means a rise in mortality and morbidity for other health issues. 3) The risk to medical and nursing staff is much higher than to the general population. High numbers of deaths of doctors in Wuhan and Italy strongly suggest that medical staff are vulnerable due to receiving higher viral loads (number of viruses in their initial infection) when they are infected. This means an already stressed health system undergoing a sudden drop in its capacity due to staff deaths. This is compounded by 2 week quarantines of staff. 4) Stockpiles of basic medical supplies are nowhere near enough to sustain the Australian health system through the epidemic. At the peak of the epidemic, the health system would likely use all of the protective masks in Australia within a few days. Most of our masks are made in China, which has had its factories shut down for the last month. It has been commonplace in Wuhan and in the north of Italy for medical staff to spend as much time as possible in their protective gear to avoid throwing them out after use, with some collapsing from dehydration. This is just one medical resource which will have its capacity tested by the pandemic, and which will put Australians at higher risk. Numbers 2-4 add to or compound the number of deaths given in number 1. These factors all add up to us facing something akin to the Spanish Flu of 1918, something of grave importance which we should not dismiss. Fortunately, there are things that can be done to limit the impact. You may have seen discussion recently about “flattening the curve” this is about slowing down the spread of the virus so that the caseload can be kept closer to the capacity of the health system - because more people die, the more people there are who can’t access healthcare. This goal also allows supply chains of medical goods to catch up, allows for time for medical and nursing staff to return from quarantine (and allows time for training of auxiliary staff to help with the epidemic). The experience with the social distancing measures in Wuhan have showed a strong ability to reduce the spread of the virus and reduce the number of simultaneous cases. This Medium article [1] estimates that a single day delay in implementing social distancing measures in places experiencing uncontrolled transmission results in 40% more deaths. These measures have been brought into play in Italy in recent days, and my best guess and hope is they will be brought into play in many other countries including Australia. [1] https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3...