California and Washington have declared a state of emergency
A school district in Washington has closed for 2 weeks (22,000 students) as the virus was detected in the schools
King County has advised companies to let their workers telecommute, and has said anyone over 60 or with health problems should stay in their houses.
Dude in New Hampshire who tested positive for Covid-19 was told to self isolate; instead he went out to a mixer for medical workers and students.
China was able to crack down on virus transmission due to the harsh authoritarian nature of their government, and the willingness of the people to do as they are told.
This is going to fail miserably in the USA. There is way too much “fuck you, I will do whatever I want” attitude, combined with pig-ignorance about diseases, and a preponderance to love conspiracy theories. (which these days are fed to them from top government officials)
I don’t see the US having the success at containing the virus that China has had.
You don’t need to quarantine people in a hospital. In fact, unless they require treatment in a hospital, you shouldn’t bring them anywhere near a hospital, which tends to have lots of people with other illnesses that would be least able to withstand this new infection.
I wrote last week or so that I thought the Diamond Princess, the first cruise ship quarantined in Tokyo, would be prominently featured in future Public Health and Epidemiology texts. Let’s see if we learned anything.
Seems like at least part of the solution going forward is that cruise ships should have legal agreements in place at various port cities to handle on-shore quarantine. This might require new laws passed covering how that quarantine is set up. I get that they don’t want to just let possibly infected people get off en masse, but leaving people confined on a ship to all get sick is crazy.
What makes this especially bad? Cruise ships have long been a place where viruses spread like wildfire. It just usually happens to be norovirus and not a coronavirus.
There’s now a reported death from COVID-19 in the next county over from me, less than 25 miles away. An elderly patient with pre-existing health problems, according to reports.
Still seeing very few masks in public, and no one freaked out when I sneezed on the bus (I blame allergies). However, supervisors were passing out disinfectant desk wipes today, and we have signs popping up all over the place about desk disinfection, hand washing, etc. The womens’ restroom is nearly wallpapered with such signs. They’re also setting up for emergency text communications, so since I didn’t get the test message, I made sure they had my correct phone number before I left today.
We had our first case in Las Vegas today. “Presumptive positive” until the CDC test comes back, but officials have been told to treat PP the same as a confirmed case until notified otherwise.
———
98,370 confirmed infections
3,383 dead
55,418 recovered
What I get from that next to last paragraph is that you’ve never been to China if you hold the misconception that people there have a better understanding about matters concerning disease, less of a “fuck, you I will do whatever I want” attitude or an affinity for conspiracy theories.
Examples:
Point 1
“As it races to treat patients infected with the new coronavirus, the Chinese government is seeing potential in a cocktail of antiviral drugs. It is also recommending the Peaceful Palace Bovine Pill, a traditional Chinese medicine made with the gallstone of cattle, buffalo horn, jasmine and pearl.”
Point 2
" A CHINESE woman who knew she was infected with the deadly coronavirus has disguised her symptoms by deliberately taking antipyretics and successfully boarded a plane to France. She then bragged about her actions online in photographs with friends she met on arrival"
Point 3
“Go on WeChat, go on Weibo, look on Baidu search, and it’s full of ‘look at all the other countries getting sick,’ or ‘the virus came from the United States,’ or all different levels of conspiracy theories,” said Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information who studies China’s Internet."
And the less said about their success at “containing” a virus that is currently infecting people all over the world, the better
To judge by the numbers available to John Hopkins University and to the people at “worldometer”, within China itself they appear to have indeed achieved some measure of success regarding contention. From day to day, the number of new cases and the number of new deaths within China displays what seems to be a generally diminishing trend.
In other countries, generalized spreading appears to have begun later, and it will take time for any measures there to have an effect (also, it will roughly depend on the development level of the countries in question). Thus, faster spreading right now in the rest of the world (generally speaking) than in China.
There have been some countries that have had success containing so far. A good example is Vietnam, which (to judge by the numbers), as of today has had no new cases, and where all the cases it had have recovered. Similar to what happened there when SARS hit, the Vietnamese government took the situation very seriously and worked hard to contain the disease (and, clearly, they remembered the lessons learned in 2002-2003).
As of today, worldwide, there appear to be more people that have recovered from the disease than people actively sick. That in my opinion is a good sign.
Of course, all of this depends on whether you trust the general validity of the numbers available to international health organizations. I personally tend to trust them as generic overall indicators of the situation, especially when looked at as an aggregate.
Frankly, I wouldn’t trust a damn bit of news coming out of China, and I don’t have much faith in their ability to control virulent contagion. Here’s a long article about how badly they’ve been mismanaging African swine fever in the past few years. This is a disease that has led to the deaths of 40-60% of the pigs in China and consequently doubled the price of pork. The article highlights a list of cultural and financial obstacles arrayed against successful containment of the disease, and I have no doubt these factors are affecting efforts to combat the Coronavirus infection there.
100,674 worldwide cases (of these, 80,573 are mainland China)
3411 Dead worldwide
55753 Recovered worldwide
Most deaths aside from China = Italy with 148
US Stats to date:
239 cases
14 deaths
8 recovered
I think the US numbers are low because of insufficient testing. This virus is out in the community now, so I expect the real numbers are starting to rise exponentially.
Also, keep in mind that the current numbers are more of a snapshot in the rear view mirror; They reflect the state of the disease as it was A WEEK AGO. This means that in the Seattle area, it is likely that the virus is currently residing on surfaces all over the city.