Your immune system isn’t a muscle that you make stronger by working out every day. If it encounters a germ, you might gain immunity. If it doesn’t, you won’t.
If immune systems working out a lot helped you avoid infection, people with seasonal allergies would kick the shit out of COVID-19. After all, their immune systems work out harder than John Cena.
I thought the immune system provoking allergies was because it wasnt being challenged by the local environment??
Notre Dame University will have an interesting schedule. It will start early, have no breaks, and end by November. Hopefully when a new spike will occur.
Huh—you are hoping that a new spike in cases will appear in November? Or do you mean “hopefully before any new spike occurs”?
I was just on a conference call with a colleague, who has two daughters in college. She said that both of her daughters just learned that their schools were going to be on that sort of schedule this fall. (We’re in Chicago, so it’s entirely possible that one of her daughters does, indeed, go to Notre Dame.)
4,988,994 total cases
324,958 dead
1,959,149 recovered
In the US:
1,570,583 total cases
93,533 dead
361,180 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
The flaw in that premise is the theory about why the “Spanish Flu” was so bad. I mean, hygiene was nowhere near modern standards a hundred years ago, so everybody should have had good immunity muscle.
It is thought that the “Spanish Flu” was so deadly because it generated a “cytokine storm”, which occurs when the immune system goes ape with the antibodies. The blood/lymph systems have a finite space, much of which is used for metabolic stuff (oxygen, sugar, nutrients, booze and waste) and if you try to squeeze too many Y-shaped thingies in there, you end up with sludge that cannot move what needs to be moved to keep the working parts working.
Thus, there is a limit to how much we can fight off and how hard we can do it. It seems like it can take only a tiny nudge, sometimes, to hit that limit and go over.
Taiwan’s Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) on Wednesday (May 20) announced zero new cases of Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19), marking the 13th straight day without an imported case and 38 days without a new local infection.
The CECC announced that they received 224 reports of people with suspected symptoms on Tuesday (May 19). Since the outbreak began, Taiwan has carried out 69,876 COVID-19 tests, with 68,824 coming back negative.
Taiwan has now extended its streak of no new local infections to 38 days. Out of 440 total confirmed cases, 349 were imported, 55 were local, and 36 came from the Navy’s “Goodwill Fleet.”
Up until now, only seven patients have succumbed to the disease, while 402 have been released from hospital isolation. This leaves only 31 patients still undergoing treatment for COVID-19 in Taiwan.
Other news:
The suspension of all outbound and inbound tours imposed on Taiwanese travel agencies will be further extended until the end of June, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread across the world, the Tourism Bureau said Tuesday.
The ban, which began on March 19, was originally scheduled to last until the end of April. It was then extended until May 31.
The further extension of the ban by one month is due to the still grave COVID-19 pandemic worldwide, the Tourism Bureau said.
Although Taiwan has seen no new COVID-19 cases for 12 consecutive days, the disease has infected more than 4.8 million people globally, and the death toll has surpassed 317,000.
Why is no one talking about Iran? They seem to be experiencing the second wave.
I found this: I imagine that most news services are too taken up with their own tragedies. It is NOT a competitive sport.
I like the way you explain science. If you had been my high school science teacher, I might have enjoyed it. And learned something. 
One Interesting theory as to why so many young and healthy people died is that Aspirin was new and people were taking like a whole bottle to stop the flu. In other words- the aspirin killed them, not the flu. :dubious:
Today in Austria:
[ul]
[li] Vienna’s Tourist Association reports that overnight stays in April were down by 98.2%.[/li][li] The Austrian Chamber of Labour has secured for its members (i.e., all three million employees in the country) a €10 million hardship fund for emergency loans. (Many members have had their salaries placed on hold while the government processes their employers’ furlough applications.)[/li][li] On my way home from work today, while passing the imperial palace, I encountered another anti-lockdown protest, this time organized by the country’s far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ). There were about 500 people in attendance; immediately next to this protest, and separated by a double line of police officers, was a slightly smaller anti-fascist protest organized by various far-left groups.[/li]
People at the FPÖ protest were carrying signs and shouting slogans like “Stop the corona madness!”, “Protect your homeland, not your nose and mouth!”, and “Get rid of the masks!” Hardly any of the protesters were wearing masks anyway. (Incidentally, the FPÖ are the same folks that fought tooth and nail against the smoking ban in restaurants, which was finally implemented in 2019, and who are now campaigning to repeal it.)
Later on the news I saw some interviews with the protesters in the crowd, who variously claimed that the lockdown measures are too extreme (even in their current, much relaxed form), that the virus is not particularly dangerous, that the pandemic is a fiction invented by the big American banks as an excuse to rob the public of their money, and that the protesters are by no means tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists.
[li] Current statistics: 16,295 confirmed infections, 633 deaths, 14,882 recovered.[/li][/ul]
The fact that there are more densely populated cities than the nation of Iceland does not actually indicate that Icelands population is not densely concentrated. New York may have been harder hit than most places due to population density. That does not actually mean that Icelands population density was a factor in its favor. It is possible not to be as dense as the densest cities on the planet and still be densely populated.
I think you may be confusing population size with population density, and its effects on epidemic disease.
No? Nor is it as lethal as the bubonic plague. Not sure how that affects the issue at hand.
I am not sure what the relevance is. Yes, most of Iceland is pretty empty. Thats why the areas where everyone lives are densely populated. Yes, its a small city by global standards. The virus does not really care, it’ll do the same harm percentagewise in 1000 people as it would in 10 000 000.
I am not sure if you realize that you are comparing the population density of a country to that of a ***city ***and saying the country has an “extremely low population density” because its population density is not tha high for a city.
If two-thirds of the US lived in an conurbation with the density of Huntsville, would you refer to it as “low density”?
The population density of Lombardy is 420 ppl/sq km. Grand Est seems to be the worst hit part of France. Its 97 ppl/sq km. At a glance, it seems Castille La Mancha was the hardest hit in Spain, their population density is 26 ppl/sq km.
Density - people per unit of area - very much affects how epidemic diseases behave. Yes, Iceland’s Reykjavik is the densest city on the island but in absolute terms it’s far from what most people think of as “very dense”. The denser the population the more transmission and higher infection rates. This involves absolute numbers and not relative density.
I’m not sure why you don’t understand that.
It is also true that it’s not the only factor at work - low density populations can be heavily impacted, and high density populations that can stop transmission can be less affected (islands that can impose effective quarantine quickly, or not, being examples of both).
I am trying to say that density very much affects how epidemic diseases behave. I am glad you got that bit. Absolute number of the population less so. I am also glad you seem to have understood that population density enables disease transmission and can increase infection rates.
I am less impressed with the “I’m not sure why you don’t understand that.” as I have been trying to explain this to you for several posts.
I am also trying to say that Iceland is not at all “extremely low population density” in any way that affects how epidemic diseases behaves or impact the population. They are absolutely the opposite. There is a reason why Iceland is listed among the most urbanized nations on earth. There is also a reason why they rank among nations that are basically cities only on such lists. It is the same reason why you use cities as examples when trying to illustrate the density of most of the population.
That reason is that the population of the nation Iceland mostly live in a density that is equivalent to cities not nations. And this is not an advantage when it comes to epidemic disease.
Yeah. That doesn’t look good. Lots of data here and many ways to map/graph it. From Country, down to US County. http://ncov.bii.virginia.edu/dashboard/
You’ll need to play with a bit to see just how much info is there.
Don’t know if this has been posted before (and it’s not exactly new news,) but far from costing lives, the coronavirus may have in fact actually result in a net gain of over 70,000 lives saved in China.