Coronavirus Thread

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MWBATL

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Techster said:
I'm one of those "prepare for the worst" people...I literally have a mechanical room with shelves full of canned food and dried goods "just in case", a backup generator, and a filtration system.

Here is something I'd like to know: How does everyone feel about the steps the Government has taken so far. Not enough being done, or doing a good job?

Seriously, no judgements...just would like to hear everyone's opinion. I live in Atlanta close to the CDC and Emory so I get a LOT of info from neighbors and friends that work there. Not everyone is in the same situation as myself.
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My own take is that the world, especially the media and political worlds, have panicked.
In modern society, we accept some level of fatalities in exchange for commercial or convenience benefits. I can tell you right now how to save 50,000 or so American lives each and every year....outlaw driving by private citizens. But the price we would all pay is considered too high and does not justify the number of lives saved. That is implicit in how each of us and our whole society lives.

I feel the cost benefit has not been done on this disease, and has gone FAR overboard to the harm of 330 million in order to save less than 10,000 American lives. (I am wagering that the total will come in under 10,000 since it has not exceeded 5,000 in China yet, a country with four times our population).
 
RonJohn

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Techster said:
Again, we are interpreting what we are reading differently. There are caveats in that article, but caveats are in all medical articles. It's pretty evident that the woman was the only link to the 5 people who caught the virus, and all 5 are 400 miles away from outbreak...again, the woman being the link between 400 miles and the 5 people that got infected.
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The article described an earlier case that came to the same conclusion, but afterwards talked to the "asymptomatic" person and found that they had indeed had symptoms. I am skeptical of everything.

The research letter basically says that the person who traveled from Wuhan tested negative, then positive, then negative, then negative. They estimated her incubation period as 19 days, which is pretty long. They estimated her families incubation period as 1 day, which is pretty quick. This article says that this study has not been peer reviewed. Are they certain that the entire family wasn't infected by another person? They said patient 1 was the only person in contact with the family who had been to Wuhan, but how much vetting was done of that? They said that the negative tests were false negatives. How sure are they of that? I'm not a doctor or an epidemiologist, so I'm not saying that they are wrong. However, their conclusions have not been vetted by peers. Their data has not been vetted by peers. I won't say they are wrong, but I won't accept as fact that they are correct without such verification.
 
Techster

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MWBATL said:
My own take is that the world, especially the media and political worlds, have panicked.
In modern society, we accept some level of fatalities in exchange for commercial or convenience benefits. I can tell you right now how to save 50,000 or so American lives each and every year....outlaw driving by private citizens. But the price we would all pay is considered too high and does not justify the number of lives saved. That is implicit in how each of us and our whole society lives.

I feel the cost benefit has not been done on this disease, and has gone FAR overboard to the harm of 330 million in order to save less than 10,000 American lives. (I am wagering that the total will come in under 10,000 since it has not exceeded 5,000 in China yet, a country with four times our population).
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Not going to argue your opinion as it seem some can't be swayed (on both sides). But here is a question for you:

Do you think the number of deaths being reported in China is "low" because of the ruthless containment measures they took? That is, wouldn't it have been a LOT higher, and spread a lot further in greater numbers (thus more deaths) had they not instituted the measures they did?

China has 3+ billion people. Say "only" 10% of the population was infected if they didn't institute any containment and mitigation measures. That's 300 million people infected. Give it the lower end of the death rate being reported, about 1.5% of those infected (statistics are hovering around 5% https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/china/ ). At 1.5%, that's still 4.5 MILLION deaths had they not instituted the containment and mitigation measures they did....and that's only if 10% of the population contracted the virus.

You can play with the numbers either way (more/less percentage), but it's pretty evident that if containment measures weren't taken to the extent they did, the death rate would have soared beyond "just" 5,000.

BTW, the measure of the affects of the virus can't be limited to deaths. You also have to factor in missed days of work, cost of medical care, cost to human hours battling the virus, etc.
 
TechCubed

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ncjacket79 said:
Some truth to that supersize, but vent shortage would be more the purview of individual states and CON laws. However blaming that for shortages assumes more hospitals and nursing homes would have asked for more vent beds. They are more expensive and the additional fixed costs would raise rates required to break even. Haven’t seen any detailed breakdown but it would be interesting to see how any shortage breaks down between CON states and those without.
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My wife works in healthcare for one of the companies that runs several hospitals around Atlanta. She'd be the first to tell you that healthcare is a business, and they make their decisions based on baseline data, not worst-case or extreme scenarios (like what we are on the cusp of right now). They invest more in training and simulations to practice how they'd adjust staffing, etc. It's more an exercise in how to move the pieces on the board rather than stashing additional (expensive) equipment that may never be used.
 

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Well, some sobering news. I live in a smallish town of 90,000 people, 1 million in the metropolitan area. My wife is a nurse at a local hospital. She is in day surgery and said the ICU and PICU are both full right now. She said there are rumors they have a COVID-19 patient there, but nothing has been announced. I asked her if the ICU was full of those types of patients or just regular business and she said she didn't know. But its really sobering either way. If the hospital is full because of COVID-19 patients (I can't imagine that's the case), that's not good. If its already full before we have any patients that need assistance, that's not good either.
 

WreckinGT

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MWBATL said:
My own take is that the world, especially the media and political worlds, have panicked.
In modern society, we accept some level of fatalities in exchange for commercial or convenience benefits. I can tell you right now how to save 50,000 or so American lives each and every year....outlaw driving by private citizens. But the price we would all pay is considered too high and does not justify the number of lives saved. That is implicit in how each of us and our whole society lives.

I feel the cost benefit has not been done on this disease, and has gone FAR overboard to the harm of 330 million in order to save less than 10,000 American lives. (I am wagering that the total will come in under 10,000 since it has not exceeded 5,000 in China yet, a country with four times our population).
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Would your advice to Italy be to raise all bans immediately, reopen everything and just live with what happens?
 
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There is a cool interactive chart here which shows the increase in cases by country. I wish they would have adjusted for population, but either way you can tell that the vast majority of the world is all in the same boat. You'll see for example that despite South Korea flattening its curve (1 of only a couple with relatively slow increases in cases), it is still doubling its nationwide cases every 4 days. That is improving and probably by the time the numbers roll for another week, they will rival Japan and Singapore with having one of the flattest curves. Those are the 3 countries in the entire world that appear to me to have things in a reasonably managed scenario. Despite the fact cases are doubling every 7-10 days, there are also all the people who had Coronavirus for 7-10 days and are now recovered. So that's probably a good rate of increase in cases that prevents hospitals from being overwhelmed I would guess.

Info here: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/in...OQK7a_8zW2KU2QlMilj-vKo82Z4rd_08UGgzWsd6hCfqc
 

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If I'm reading the new bill from the House that the Senate is taking up, it mandates at least 2 weeks of paid sick leave (which many small business type folks don't get) among other things...and if I'm reading it right, its paid by the employer, not the federal government. That will pretty much be the final nail in the coffin for many people's jobs and small businesses.
 
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