Please stay home!

Mesquite Nevada, home of everyone’s beloved crag The Grail/Lime Kiln just confirmed their first COVID 19 case. Please do not compromise this small and aging community by showing up to climb. You may be putting the locals at risk. Also St. George has 5 confirmed cases as well, so please stay home. This is my home crag and areas. Please respect our pleas.

Seriously?

What's "COVID-19"?

Foy O wrote:

It's a new type of drug that the kids are using. 

I hope we can get it in my area. Sounds exciting!

Oh don't worry its' coming to your area. We have our first case here & only 25 people tested so far.

FrankPS wrote: Seriously?

What's "COVID-19"?

Are you on Jeopardy? Wise the f up Franky.

Kaiser San Jose says about 50% of their patients have COVD-19
Don't worry it's coming. 

Is there a big location crossover between 20 something climbers and 80 year old emphysema patients in mesquite? What if the climbers promise not to go to the bingo parlor or hang out in the local pharmacies? 

misty murphy wrote: Mesquite Nevada, home of everyone’s beloved crag The Grail/Lime Kiln just confirmed their first COVID 19 case. Please do not compromise this small and aging community by showing up to climb. You may be putting the locals at risk. Also St. George has 5 confirmed cases as well, so please stay home. This is my home crag and areas. Please respect our pleas.

i understand where you're coming from, but  this is some weird logic , to be honest... your community already has infected individuals and most likely has community transmission-- whether some outsiders show up  is kind of a moot point now. 

mpech wrote:

to be honest... your community already has infected individuals and most likely has community transmission-- whether some outsiders show up  is kind of a moot point now. 

Actually I think your logic is strange. If you introduce even more disease vectors, your infection will spread faster than if you didn't have those additional vectors present. And spreading a virus faster is exactly what we don't want, especially considering St George population has a high percentage of retirees. So people coming into a new community are adding numbers of vectors.

I'm continually astounded at how many people just don't get the underlying principles behind "don't be mobile, interact less". This isn't a principle that stops working once someone in your community has an active infection. This is the entire point behind how we flatten the curve.  

"Above all, health officials have encouraged people to avoid public gatherings, to stay home more often and to keep their distance from others. If people are less mobile and interact with each other less, the virus has fewer opportunities to spread.

Some people will still go out. Maybe they cannot stay home because of their work or other obligations, or maybe they simply refuse to heed public health warnings. Those people are not only more likely to get sick themselves, they are more likely to spread simulitis, too."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/corona-simulator/

I'm essential.

Aerili wrote:

Actually I think your logic is strange. If you introduce even more disease vectors, your infection will spread faster than if you didn't have those additional vectors present. And spreading a virus faster is exactly what we don't want, especially considering St George population has a high percentage of retirees. So people coming into a new community are adding numbers of vectors.

Feel free to do the epidemiological modeling to prove this-- eg model the infection rate in St. George with just community transmission  vs. mixture of community transmission + low level of travel-related transmission. 

Given that there is undoubtedly community transmission occurring in St. George right now, it is very difficult for travel-introduced transmission to catch up with community transmission as a major source of infection.

best,
matt

Rico Kazee wrote: What if I buy a house in Moab? Can I go then? 

No, but you do get to be self-righteous on Mountain Project.

Aerili wrote: I'm continually astounded at how many people just don't get the underlying principles behind "don't be mobile, interact less". This isn't a principle that stops working once someone in your community has an active infection. This is the entire point behind how we flatten the curve.  

I understand concept of "flatten the curve," but it is worth talking about it in a quantitative manner.  Feel free to read the authoritative modeling of the pandemic under various mitigation strategies: 

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-Global-Impact-26-03-2020.pdf

Key points for me:
1) under all mitigation strategies, even the most extreme ones, hospital bed capacity is overwhelmed. Pretty intuitive to understand why-- when you have a COVID-related ARDS event, the patient will need critical care for a multi-week period.

2) look at figure 7 if you want to model the pandemic in the most likely mitigation strategy in the US-- a multi-month social isolation strategy. The inability to maintain mitigation efforts forever will eventually lead to a rebound in cases. Unfortunately the authors do not model the # of deaths in the unmitigated vs. permanent social isolation vs. temporory social isolation scenarios.

3) none of these models attempt to factor in the significant morbidity/mortality induced by the mitigation itself (eg. other critical care not being provided; loss of health insurance from the unemployed; etc...)

Look, it's easy to pretend like the correct path forward here is straightforward and obvious. It's not. I think it is reasonable to have social distancing measures in place right now, and I encourage people to stay at home,  but we have to be sanguine that this is not a panacea.

best,
matt

caughtinside wrote: Well I’m not going to to any modeling, but I’m not sure why you think that. It’s not about another source “catching up” it’s about reducing overall cases short term. 

Read the ICL modeling paper I sent in the previous post, it is estimated that hospitals will be overwhelmed by a factor of 7-fold in high-income countries in the BEST CASE mitigation scenarios. Small communities thinking that somehow their hospitals will not be overwhelmed if only all visitors stayed away is wishful thinking. 

caughtinside wrote:

Thanks for posting that, I will read it later. 

That said, I don’t think a productive takeaway will be ‘well mesquite has a case, so the Grail is a go.”

I agree. Not a good time to be traveling around and climbing. At same time, I was trying to inject some subtleness/realism/data/uncertainty into the conversion. 

What a way to respect the wishes of the locals!  This is why climbing areas get closed.

Matt, at no point did I state that places like St George won't have their healthcare resources overwhelmed one way or another. I think it's pretty clear that our country is gonna be fucked at this point in many ways. But there are still degrees of "overwhelmed" and I believe this is the point our public health experts are making right now -- they can be astoundingly overwhelmed and have a higher mortality rate, or they can have a lesser degree of being overwhelmed and likely a lower mortality rate. It's easy to compare and contrast data in light of implemented measures from a) CV-19 already, and b) and data from the 1918 pandemic to examine fatality rates in light of "what was done". The WaPo article I linked earlier does show various simulations of disease transmission in light of how many people are mobile or not. Your linked paper doesn't model anything about introducing additional vectors of disease in the form of people traveling into new communities vs not. Its focus was on transmission to the elderly in light of income level, GDP of country, and level of measures taken to slow transmission or not. However it does seem to support the theory that allowing vectors to travel around in whatever fashion they desire is not going to be helpful at all and will accelerate transmission.

"If mitigation including enhanced social distancing is pursued, for an R0 of 3.0, we estimate a maximum reduction in infections in the range 30-38% (median 33%) and a range of reduction in mortality between 19%-55% (median 39%) representing 16 million lives saved for R0=3 (assuming the mortality patterns observed in China). These optimal reductions in transmission and burden were achieved with a range of reductions in the overall rate of social contact between 40.0%- 44.9% (median 43.9%),  ..."

To me, your statements before and after are contradictory: first you say it's moot if new vectors are introduced to a community that already has disease, and later you say "yeah but I agree we shouldn't be traveling and climbing". For me, this is not injecting subtle/realism/data. It's murky and unhelpful and it doesn't align with statements by our epidemiologists and public health leaders.

Anyway, I'll be going with the public health leaders on this.

St. George is full. Go home. Even Black Rocks, which is closed, has been packed. 

https://covidactnow.org/

vanlifer currently in st george here. been here 6 weeks, what is the point of me leaving now? If i go home now, i drive 3000 miles, through southern NY, to my elderly parents' house and potentially expose them. doesnt sound like a great idea. please consider that some people have been here a while and not everyone with an out of state license plate showed up yesterday.

caesar.salad wrote: vanlifer currently in st george here. been here 6 weeks, what is the point of me leaving now? If i go home now, i drive 3000 miles, through southern NY, to my elderly parents' house and potentially expose them. doesnt sound like a great idea. please consider that some people have been here a while and not everyone with an out of state license plate showed up yesterday.

"Live by the sword, die by the sword."

              Tradiban