Thanks for that. Here's another sobering one from the same source about (not) waiting for gov't officials to act:Originally Posted by OlongJohnson
https://quillette.com/2020/03/03/dea...tury-pathogen/
Thought the particularly salient bits were these (granted these are business guys and not necessarily MDs):
...in an existential crisis, decisions need to be made on the basis of incomplete evidence. Measures implemented too early are deemed “alarmist,” if implemented too late, “negligent.”
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has recommended that early robust control measures are the key to saving lives and halting transmission of COVID-19. Worryingly, Robert Nelson, Managing Director and co-founder of ARCH Venture Partners, a biotech venture capital firm located in Seattle, San Francisco, and Chicago, has told Quillette that, in some places in the United States, it may already be too late:
These bureaucrats and politicians who think panic is lines at Costco and angry parents when a school is closed, may find out that panic is when you are taking mom to the emergency room and she dies in the parking lot because no one can see her. I hope this does not happen and we get lucky, but all signs point the other direction.
...As a venture capitalist, Nelson’s job is to make bets on the future. With expertise in biomedicine his firm has invested in over 100 companies, 27 of which are valued in excess of $1 billion. On COVID-19, he said:
The HUGE error now in [the] USA is being made by state and local health departments—they fear panic, so they are afraid to cancel public events and close schools. They are still waiting for symptomatic cases to act when we know there is huge asymptomatic spread. This is folly, and the expansion in places like Seattle will likely be uncontrollable. We must take more decisive action at state and local levels to immediately close schools and large gatherings and use social distancing, in order to flatten the curve. The reason that is so urgent is there is no way for our system to handle the critical and acute care burden unless we flatten the curve.
Several CEOs in the tech industry are not waiting for local government leadership to implement self-distancing and are taking their own pre-emptive measures.
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