This is not a safe assumption to make. Once a medical system becomes overwhelmed, there’s relatively little fallback to be made and relatively little that we’ve advanced since 1919. The advice is still the same, wash your hands, don’t touch your face, keep away from other people. The two genuine public health interventions we’ve made since 1919: A much wider range of disinfectants and masks.
From that perspective, people from 1919 have a marked advantage on us because they were used to regular pandemics and knew what to do. There’s lots of little practical pieces of knowledge on, eg: best practices for helping a quarantined person recover in your house without getting infected yourself that we’ve totally lost today.
For example, it was discovered during SARS that the virus spread through faulty U-bends in the plumbing. To this day, HK has people regularly flush 1L of water through less used U-bends as a precautionary measure. It’s little things like that that people who have not lived through a pandemic never think about.
There’s a reason why the countries which lived through SARS have had a notably more severe response to COVID 19 than those who didn’t.
If addressed to me, I’m on the fence with this one. To me cancelling an admitted student week end is a no big deal thing to do and little meaningful purpose is served by them. Cancelling a wedding with out of town guests? That would be an over-reaction in my mind.
The WHO is still taking the position that this is containable. Let’s go with that position for second. IF it is then there is no evidence that mass quarantines of regions accomplishes that goal any better than identifying the infected individuals with liberal testing protocols, isolating them, and tracing their contacts. (Which was done in most of China outside of Hubei.) In that scenario the reported mortality rate is not so far off because most case are being identified
The alternative perspective is that there are many more cases out there minimally symptomatic from kids to adults who have not been identified. In this scenario COVID-19 has a much lower true infection mortality rate but there is little possibility of containment, precisely because it is so often mild. The horse long left the barn. If that is the case then risk to the under 60 crowd without serious chronic health conditions is minimal, less than influenza possibly, but the risk to those 70+ and/or with significant chronic health disease is substantial, possibly worse than influenza, no good data yet to say if so, and if so by how much, minimally in addition to whatever influenza brings, and that storm is unavoidable, even if it doesn’t hit until next late Fall. The focus then is coming up with plans to protect those most vulnerable, which includes having good real time surveillance data on its prevalence in communities.
Doesn’t address what I was saying at all.
I was saying that your assertion that Covid-19 is **definitely **5-30 times more deadly that the flu is dubious, given that it requires ignoring data from many provinces and some countries.
It certainly could be in that range, but I don’t think we can rule out the possibility of it being lower than your lower estimate either. Especially since the number that is undoubtedly going to increase over time is the number of asymptomatic or very mild cases.
FWIW no travel restrictions from my company or clients yet. I’m in FL and CA this week.
First class upgrades are certainly much more available than usual, that’s for sure.
There are apparently multiple strains of covid-19, some more aggressive than others. Italy may simply have had the bad luck to get the more aggressive one early
(note - link is to Forbes which is a popup-heavy ball of suck…but it did have the best article I could find)
Every story on the BBC front page is Corona Virus. It’s not that only Americans are freaking out about the Corona virus, it’s that we are mostly concerned about Corona virus and ourselves.
Wow, the alternative seems way more likely to me. But it still seems valuable to slow the spread both to reduce the peak load in intensive care facilities and also to buy as much time as possible for doctors to learn how to treat it. Which antivirals, maybe a vaccine, heck, even minor stuff like whether fever is helpful or not as part of the body’s defense.
Simply ignoring the problem allows faster/greater spread through a population, which means the medical system is more likely to be overwhelmed after which you get people dying because the community lacks the resources to save them even if the knowledge of how to save them is there.
The US is going to have a higher death rate than, say, Germany because
The highest authorities are ignoring/downplaying the problem
Policy is being made on “gut feeling” and “hunch” rather than science and medicine.
Many Americans either have poor access or NO access to the health system outside of emergency/imminent death.
The high cost of any form of health care will discourage people from going to the doctor or being tested for this virus (a lot of Americans will balk at $1,000+ to get tested).
Many people in America have no paid sick leave but they still have bills to pay, which give a perverse incentive to go to work sick and spread any virus they carry further.
Many people in America risk losing their job entirely if they take time off, which is further incentive to go to work sick.
So the public health experts are being ignored while people have significant pressures to go to even when clearly sick which is the exact OPPOSITE of a proper response to an epidemic. The result will be that this virus runs rampant until enough people are too sick to function all at once, at which point the medical system is overwhelmed and breaks down. That’s the point at which people start dying not just from covid-19 but also from other reasons because at that point there will not be enough doctors and medicine to go around.
So yes, some places will have lower death rate because they have a rational response to the crisis. Other places will have a higher death rate because ignorant, superstitious, selfish assholes are in charge. Unfortunately, I live in the latter and not the former. I can only hope the State and local level governments have a useful response because under Trump and Pence the Federal government is going to do jackshit.
I had the same experience last week- I have mid-level status, so I’m normally upgraded about 25% of the time. Last week was every flight.
At one point in the K terminal at O’Hare I could look down the corridor and see only about 20 people. I’ve never seen it that quiet, so much so that I took a picture.
Le Monde in France is similar (it’s the my usual go-to for French news). I suspect if you look that’s how it is in most countries.
People are not “freaking out”, they are concerned because this is something that likely will touch everyone on the planet at some point. It’s a bit like complaining “why does morning TV and radio news have so many stories about weather and traffic?” Because people want to know those things, it’s relevant to them. Sure, there are occasional overblown stories about this or that imminent storm but for the most part people want to know whether or not to wear a coat when going out the front door, whether or not they need an umbrella, and if they need to avoid a particular intersection due to an accident so they can get to work on time. Likewise, with this new virus people want to know if it’s in their neighborhood, what they can do to avoid it (if possible), and how it may affect them or is affecting them.
In the post I quoted you were talking about Covid-19 in general and you stated that it definitely has a fatality rate 5 to 30 times higher than the flu. We just don’t know that, there’s definitely data suggesting less than 5.
For your new point, that you speculate the death rate in the US will be high because of a poorly managed response and holes in the provision of medical care…sure, maybe. I have no issue with that speculation.
I disagree that this is a case of whataboutism. Whataboutism is when a person suggests we forget about X because they can think of a supposedly worse thing Y.
But in this debate, the only people who are comparing Covid-19 to seasonal flu are doing so in the context of trying to bring perspective. I’m not saying Covid-19 is not serious. Doubling the body count of seasonal flu would be a horrific outcome for humanity.
But the way this is being portrayed in much of the mainstream and social media is just nuts. Plenty of places I’ve already read that it’s “following the same path as 1918 flu”…in what way?
So the same people who would laugh at the need to be vaccinated for flu are freaking out about this magical, bioengineered mega-plague. And it’s having a real effect on the availability of medical supplies, masks, toilet paper (), and so on.
I am concerned about the rich people in St Louis who decided to go to a school dance, breaking quarantine. That is the kind of thing that causes a virus to multiply. Now I hear of another possible case near that area, which is very affluent. Everyone incensed here about this issue, maybe the moreso because these are people of privilege, and one expects more out of them, but probably shouldn’t. Not when Trump tells everyone to go to work, etc.
That sounds like bad history combined with bad medicine.
You don’t need to sequence viral DNA to understand that infectious respiratory diseases are transmitted by people coughing on you and other surfaces. Germ theory was well-established decades before 1918.
The name influenza comes from the 18th century, not the 20th, and while there are etymological links to pre-scientific theories of disease, the idea that most people 100 years ago thought “gee, I don’t know what’s going on with all these sick people, maybe it’s the moon?” is foolish.
Yes, we certainly have some advantages today: Better tests, better analytics, better personal protection, better intervention in the worst cases, no current world wars. But the primary methods of slowing the spread (wash your hands and try to keep sick people away from healthy people) were not absent in 1918. And we also have the negative of faster travel and more global interconnectedness.
I honestly don’t know how bad this will be compared to 1918, but I’m deeply suspicious of an article that claims that the etymology of the word ‘influenza’ is a useful datum in that determination.
China coronavirus cases are slowing, and schools and shops are reopening
From CNN’s Yong Xiong in Shanghai
The numbers of new daily confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus in China have dropped over the past few weeks.
China’s National Health Commission reported 40 new confirmed cases of the virus Sunday, the lowest number of new cases in a day since Jan. 18.
Some shopping and dining attractions at Shanghai Disney Resort resumed operations Monday “as the first step of a phased reopening,” the Shanghai Disney announced in a statement.
Twelve out of 14 filed hospitals in Wuhan have been closed after many patients were discharged, according to China’s state media People’s Daily.
And northwest China’s Qinghai province became the first province to reopen its schools in China, with more than 100 high schools opening earlier today.
), and so on.