Food.
That’s it.
There are no diets, dietary supplements, teas, juices, vitamins, minerals, essences of various rare animals, tinctures, extracts, detoxification regimens, purgatives, cleanses, flushes, pomades, or tonics that will *boost" your immune system. Period.
I wasn’t too concerned.
Then it was just announced that Stanford has canceled in-person classes, because a faculty member has contracted Covid-19 and two students have been quarantined.
Next to my cubicle at work sits an intern, and she sits a couple of feet away from me. She’s a student at Stanford three days a week she has been snuffling and clearing her throat the last day or two.
Now it’s getting real.
Posts like this (and hearing commentary like this IRL) used to frustrate me; now it makes me happy. So, so happy!
Trump himself has told us the mortality rate is far less than 1%. Assume it is .5%. Given that there have been 19 deaths then 19/.005=3800 cases [and probably many more]
For another article on the testing kit fiasco, see:
Great links RaftPeople. They might shut down some of the debate on masks in parallel threads.
I don’t think it’s as dumb as statement as you’re implying. I’d personally phrase it more as “We absolutely have something to worry about, because it appears to be at least as bad as the flu”.
But memes like e.g. It kills 20 times more people, are based on dubious extrapolations.
Well let’s say “a balanced diet”, because if you’re deficient in a nutrient, it’s possible that might be impacting some operation of your immune system in some way, even if in general you’re eating enough. And there are nutrients that as many as a third of the population are deficient in.
Other than that I agree that it’s quakery.
nm
Let’s just note the effect of ordinary flu in an ordinary year in the United States.
The CDC says that the normal yearly figures for normal flu for the the past few years have been:
9 million – 45 million illnesses
140,000 – 810,000 hospitalizations
12,000 – 61,000 deaths
Nobody has panicked, or even cared very much about this.
So far this year about 20,000 people have already died from ordinary flu in the US.
Isn’t the Coronavirus worse? Yes, but not by that much. With the huge amount of attention it’s getting, it will soon be under control.
Here’s an article by the Director of the US Office of Emergency Care Research at the National Institutes of Health, who also wrote a book about flu:
The Coronavirus is no 1918 Pandemic
The differences between the global response to the Great Flu Pandemic and today’s COVID-19 outbreak could not be more striking.
And here is another article with info by medical experts:
I finally have a solution to Trump and his worshipers. I’m booking a cabin on Carnival’s new cruise ship, the SS Petri Dish. Ah, luxury at last.
Based on CURRENT information (meaning the conclusion could change with more information) Covid-19 is, definitely, more deadly than the flu if you catch a severe case. Between 5 and 30 times more deadly - the range is due to uncertainty about the data and course of illness as this disease is only a few months old.
If the flu kills more people in a year it’s because more people get the flu. Hundreds of millions of people catch flu every year. Only about 100,000 have caught covid-19 so far - but more will. When there are a hundred million cases of covid-19 we’ll have a much better idea how it stacks up against the flu, but there is definitely reason to believe that it will have a higher death toll.
It is not, however, the black death, smallpox, ebola, or anything like that level of death and destruction. It’s still going to be an uncomfortable year ahead.
Italy may not be typical but northern Italy’s (Lombardy’s) health care system is “steps from collapse”.
No, this will be the norm for a lot of the world.
Which is why it is so maddening to see over and over and over the “comparisons” to ordinary flu. Common flu doesn’t have this effect.
Unless, of course, you want to talk about real flu: the Spanish one of a century ago. A death rate comparble to that one means ~200 million dead. And there’s a lot more people more densely packed now.
Once this but hits a crowded slum in Rio, Lagos, Mexico City or whatever, the comparisons to common flu will go out the window.
I guess you missed my link (a few posts above) to an article by a leading medical expert on the subject who said, “Whatever happens next, it won’t be a second 1918” - and gave detailed reasons why.
I ride public transportation to work so this will be interesting.
Many of his reasons were based on the expectation that modern medicine would lower the mortality rate with things such as antibiotics and antivirals. Perhaps. But there is also reason to believe that when pneumonia in the setting of Covid-19 kills it is no so much from bacterial superinfection as it cytokine-mediated, i.e. the body’s response to the virus.
And even the author admits, “. . . antiviral medications . . . are not as effective as we would like, but they have been given to a number of very sick COVID-19 patients. Whether those antiviral medications or the antibiotics that are often given in tandem are responsible for successful outcomes is hard to determine”. IOW, we don’t know if antivirals work.
The author you cite also places great emphasis on the beneficial and possible life-saving role of modern critical care medicine - ICUs, ventilators, and ECMO. Fair enough, if there are enough (but as ftg said, if you live in Rio, Lagos, or an American inner city, there probably won’t be).
He also mentions low-tech measures.
In 1918 they didn’t know the cause, or how it was transmitted, or how to limit the spread of the disease. We do.
So we can use simple and effective measures like hand-washing, quarantine, covering our mouths when we cough, and basic hygiene in hospitals to greatly limit the spread. That in itself makes a big difference.
In addition (from the other article linked), vaccine prototypes exist and are being rapidly developed and tested. A large range of drugs and treatments are currently being tested around the world. Even by mid-February, there were already more than 80 clinical trials under way for antiviral treatments. It’s likely that there will be effective vaccines and treatments within months.
Millions of people, including the medically fragile, elderly people, and medical workers, get flu shots every year because they do care about this.
We don’t have a vaccine for the novel coronavirus. So the medically fragile, elderly people, and medical workers have every right to care about what is going on right now. And so do the people who love them.
Do you think governments who have been quarantining their populations are overreacting? Do you think they are crippling their own economies for shits and giggles? Or is it possible that you do not have the right perspective to really judge how serious COVID-19 is?
True. I read an interesting tidbit that, in 1918, there was a widespread belief that the alignment of the planets, and their influence on Earth, caused it. From this came the word “influenza”.
Covid is like the Spanish flu in that both are respiratory infections.
They differ significantly in death rate, which cases tend to be most serious (young vs old) and symptoms.
It’s just a thing people say to cause, or wallow in, panic.
Still disagree. You need to bring the low estimate down and take out the “definitely”.
Plenty of Chinese provinces outside Hubei, indeed all of them, are reporting death rates lower than the lower bound of your estimate range.
Yes, I know, it’s China and therefore we can just ignore what they’re saying, handful of salt, yadda yadda. But then why are we using the number from Hubei?
We also know that the earth is round yet flat earthers abound. Trusting ‘people’ to do the right thing just because ‘we know’ is doomed to fail in the current environment of morons and conspiracy theories.
I read an interesting post on Reddit from someone in Italy.
They think the reason the virus has been so virulent there is because the people have swamped hospitals. The hospitals have thus become sources of the virus, spreading it to patients and everyone else.
Which is why I think China was smart to build all those extra hospitals. Direct folks with severe COVID-19 symptoms to those places, and you keep existing hospitals from becoming hotbeds of infection.
On one hand, Americans might be reluctant to rush hospitals since a lot of us can’t afford the cost of the ER.
But on the other hand, Americans might be prone to rush because it seems reasonable to go to the hospital when you might have the disease that has shut down entire cities.