***NON-POLITICAL COVID-19 Discussion Thread***

[JakeF]

A couple of reminders...

Originally Posted by Bwana

Once again, don't come in this thread with some kind of political agenda, or you will be shown the door. If you want to go that route, there is a thread about this in DC.

Originally Posted by Dartgod

People, there is a lot of good information in this thread, let's try to keep the petty bickering to a minimum.

We all have varying opinions about the impact of this, the numbers, etc. We will all never agree with each other. But we can all keep it civil.

Thanks!

Click here for the original OP:

Spoiler!

Apparently the CoronaVirus can survive on a inanimate objects, such as door knobs, for 9 days.

California coronavirus case could be first spread within U.S. community, CDC says
By SOUMYA KARLAMANGLA, JACLYN COSGROVE
FEB. 26, 2020 8:04 PM

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating what could be the first case of novel coronavirus in the United States involving a patient in California who neither recently traveled out of the country nor was in contact with someone who did.

“At this time, the patient’s exposure is unknown. It’s possible this could be an instance of community spread of COVID-19, which would be the first time this has happened in the United States,” the CDC said in a statement. “Community spread means spread of an illness for which the source of infection is unknown. It’s also possible, however, that the patient may have been exposed to a returned traveler who was infected.”

The individual is a resident of Solano County and is receiving medical care in Sacramento County, according to the state Department of Public Health.

The CDC said the “case was detected through the U.S. public health system — picked up by astute clinicians.”

Officials at UC Davis Medical Center expanded on what the federal agency might have meant by that in an email sent Wednesday, as reported by the Davis Enterprise newspaper.

The patient arrived at UC Davis Medical Center from another hospital Feb. 19 and “had already been intubated, was on a ventilator, and given droplet protection orders because of an undiagnosed and suspected viral condition,” according to an email sent by UC Davis officials that was obtained by the Davis Enterprise.

The staff at UC Davis requested COVID-19 testing by the CDC, but because the patient didn’t fit the CDC’s existing criteria for the virus, a test wasn’t immediately administered, according to the email. The CDC then ordered the test Sunday, and results were announced Wednesday. Hospital administrators reportedly said in the email that despite these issues, there has been minimal exposure at the hospital because of safety protocols they have in place.

A UC Davis Health spokesperson declined Wednesday evening to share the email with The Times.

Since Feb. 2, more than 8,400 returning travelers from China have entered California, according to the state health department. They have been advised to self-quarantine for 14 days and limit interactions with others as much as possible, officials said.

“This is a new virus, and while we are still learning about it, there is a lot we already know,” Dr. Sonia Angell, director of the California Department of Public Health, said in a statement. “We have been anticipating the potential for such a case in the U.S., and given our close familial, social and business relationships with China, it is not unexpected that the first case in the U.S. would be in California.”

It is not clear how the person became infected, but public health workers could not identify any contacts with people who had traveled to China or other areas where the virus is widespread. That raises concern that the virus is spreading in the United States, creating a challenge for public health officials, experts say.

“It’s the first signal that we could be having silent transmission in the community,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. “It probably means there are many more cases out there, and it probably means this individual has infected others, and now it’s a race to try to find out who that person has infected.”

On Tuesday, the CDC offered its most serious warning to date that the United States should expect and prepare for the coronavirus to become a more widespread health issue.

“Ultimately, we expect we will see coronavirus spread in this country,” said Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. “It’s not so much a question of if, but a question of when.”

According to the CDC’s latest count Wednesday morning, 59 U.S. residents have tested positive for the new strain of coronavirus — 42 of whom are repatriated citizens from a Diamond Princess cruise. That number has grown by two since Messonnier’s last count Tuesday, although the CDC was not immediately available to offer details on the additional cases.

More than 82,000 cases of coronavirus have been reported globally, and more than 2,700 people have died, with the majority in mainland China, the epicenter of the outbreak.

But public health leaders have repeatedly reminded residents that the health risk from the novel coronavirus to the general public remains low.

“While COVID-19 has a high transmission rate, it has a low mortality rate,” the state Department of Public Health said in a statement Wednesday. “From the international data we have, of those who have tested positive for COVID-19, approximately 80% do not exhibit symptoms that would require hospitalization. There have been no confirmed deaths related to COVID-19 in the United States to date.”

CDC officials have also warned that although the virus is likely to spread in U.S. communities, the flu still poses a greater risk.

Gostin said the news of potential silent transmission does not eliminate the possibility of containing the virus in the U.S. and preventing an outbreak.

“There are few enough cases that we should at least try,” he said. “Most of us are not optimistic that that will be successful, but we’re still in the position to try.”

[dirk digler]

Rumor is they are going to say we have community spread here in Clinton due to a 72 yr old man that came to GVMH with a cold but no other symptoms really so they let him go home.


Sounds like they didn't quarantine the staff so.....

Patient was a cold symptom type patient. Screened negative for risk exposures (no high risk travel) and no fever.

Seen in fast track.. treated as many of you have been...sent home.
Returned because symptoms were worsening; screened negative again and still no fever.

Admitted. Treated...like many have been. An astute physician became concerned with his symptoms etc despite no exposures.

Placed the patient on isolation and jumped through all the hoops needed to get him tested despite the fact that he had no high risk exposures.... which was not initially allowed because you needed exposure.

The test was obtained at Golden Valley. Sadly, he patient continued to deteriorate and was intubated and transferred to a higher level of care.

This was before the test came back positive.

Then the test came back positive. Once intubated patients are not near the risk they were prior to intubation. Basically it protects the workers.

We tried to get all the exposed workers screened and could not. Now we are getting them screened.

[ghak99]

Originally Posted by Chief Roundup

I understand completely. Have you seen what is actually going on in other parts of the world? If a person does not have enough supplies and knowledge of how to make it for a couple of weeks given notice then let natural selection work I guess.

Originally Posted by Chief Roundup

I grew up in the middle of 10,000 acres in southern Missouri. If a person has a farm they have enough feed and hay to make it through a short term shut down better than most, including for their livestock.

If a person has a farm?? What in the old McDonald had a farm kind of shit is this?

The days of grampa forking hay over the fence and pouring a bucket of grain died long ago. You're talking about hobby farms. I'm talking 4800 head units and lots having 100k on feed. The actual food supply depends on massive amounts of feed, fuel, and trucks moving daily or tens of thousands of animals start to die.

For ****s sake, Canada depends on the US for a lot of it's slaughter capacity. Even they depend on US to keep things rolling or their shit is going to hit the fan.

Modern agriculture. You do not speak it.

[BigRedChief]

COVID-19 isn’t just the flu?

COVID-19 has been described by some as “just a cold,” or just like the common flu. COVID-19 is not a common flu. COVID-19 is an order of magnitude worse than the flu. The fatality rate is approximately ten times worse than the flu.


The flu spreads from September through April in the U.S., and June through August in the Southern Hemisphere. Yes, it does cause severe illness in many, but it does so over a longer time course. Time is a variable that is working against us during this COVID-19 outbreak. COVID-19 victims will be presenting to a hospital in need of critical care at a rate that is far higher than occurs with the flu.

In addition, these patients will require hospital treatment over the course of a few weeks rather than the 3-4 months of a typical flu season. The health care system in the USA is not ready to handle tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people over a short time frame. In Italy, the health care system buckled under the strain, and the health care teams are now forced to make horrible life and death decisions.

COVID-19 is a severe respiratory illness caused by the virus named SARS-CoV2. It is a novel virus, which means that no one in the world has antibodies to it because no one has ever been infected by it before. As such, when the COVID-19 virus invades our body, we do not have antibodies. We do not have a template to utilize from a previous exposure to rapidly create a defense against the virus. Because no one has antibodies, everyone is at risk for catching the virus, becoming ill, and spreading the virus so that it can infect those around you.

Exponential math is very hard to grasp. Every person with the COVID-19 virus infects approximately two people. Some less, some more. The infection rate doubles every six days. That means that if 50,000 people have the virus today, then in 6 days, 100,000 people will have it. In another 12 days it’s 400,000 and less than two weeks later it’s over a million people. We have 330 million people in the US. The experts expect that 40-70% of people will be infected. Exponential growth does not take that long to get to those scary high numbers. Every six days, we delay the number of infections double. This YouTube video does a great job of explaining this.



The rest of the info is here
https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/

[displacedinMN]

Social Distancing...

CGI by @juan_delcan pic.twitter.com/c3ZaH2YBWP

— Yashar Ali �� (@yashar) March 15, 2020

['Hamas' Jenkins]

Originally Posted by The Franchise

Do you think that can be done here? Honest question.

It certainly *could* be done. It won't be done because I think too many people are flippant about health issues until it is far too late to solve them (whether it's people non-adherent to their medication, making terrible lifestyle/diet choices, etc.), and I don't think there is the political will to enact the measures necessary to ensure a flattening of the curve. There is also an absolutely horrific strain of anti-intellectualism which has infected this society to the point where some, as you have seen in this thread, treat the preeminent people in their fields as though they are quacks.

Example: ptylon's posts are really the equivalent of saying that Patrick Mahomes can't play quarterback at any level. They are that far off-base. They are that arrogant and uninformed.

Men like Fauci have been working on these issues for decades. He was at NIH when ACT-UP demonstrated there, and he actually brought the leaders of the protest in to discuss the similarities between their goals and the goals of NIH. He started a dialogue that led to real progress in confronting AIDS between the activists and the government. He's served in six administrations of both political parties. He absolutely knows what he's talking about it and what could happen.

Unfortunately, this country does not have a good record of making difficult decisions to confront epidemics/pandemics--look at what wasn't done with the blood bank industry in the early years of the AIDS epidemic--the CDC and the blood industry knew that people were contracting HIV through transfusions, the CDC made recommendations for screening and testing (using the HBV test, actually), and the blood bank industry said it would be too inexpensive and there weren't enough cases to demonstrate a real need. Don Francis, who was part of the CDC at the time, got up and said, "how many dead hemophiliacs do you need?" This was actually dramatized in HBO's version of And the Band Played On, but it is an actual event. Of course, 25,000 people ended up getting infected via transfusions with a virus with a 100% fatality rate and at that time no treatments, and most of them died before effective therapies were released. That should not have happened and it was a scandal that it did.

Further regarding AIDS, I'll give you this quote: "Later, everybody agreed the baths should have been closed sooner; they agreed health education should have been more direct and more timely. And everybody also agreed blood banks should have tested blood sooner, and that a search for the AIDS virus should have been started sooner, and that scientists should have laid aside their petty intrigues. Everybody subsequently agreed that the news media should have offered better coverage of the epidemic much earlier, and that the federal government should have done much, much more. By the time everyone agreed to all this, however, it was too late. Instead people died. Tens of thousands of them."

[suzzer99]

If you'e still hanging with friends, going to restaurants/bars, and acting like this isn't a big deal, get your shit together.

The following thread is taken from an Italian citizen.

As they put it:

"To the rest of the world, you have no idea what's coming."

MUST READ��

— Yano (@JasonYanowitz) March 14, 2020

Thread

[ptlyon]

Originally Posted by SupDock

A good place to start would be stating facts you disagree with, and why.

I'm not digging through over a hundred pages of this thread to pick out pieces of information that were posted in haste that were totally untrue or overzealous hyperbole.

I'm just saying the overreaction of this nation is pretty self evident. The "War of the World's" happened almost 90 years ago and society hasn't changed, even with the technology we have today. I'd say it's more of a detriment in this type of situation rather than helping.

[The Franchise]

Unless they postpone elections.....I’m still going to work. I’m mandated by deadlines.....some of which are in the next week or two.

[suzzer99]

NSAIDS (like ibuprofen) might make symptoms worse: https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...irus-infection

[SupDock]

I don't know if quarantining exposed healthcare workers is going to be reasonable.

[Chief Roundup]

Originally Posted by ptlyon

Nope. Don't need one to know this is being blown totally out of proportion.

This is the dumbest post I have seen on here in a very long time.

[PAChiefsGuy]

Originally Posted by ptlyon

I'm not digging through over a hundred pages of this thread to pick out pieces of information that were posted in haste that were totally untrue or overzealous hyperbole.

I'm just saying the overreaction of this nation is pretty self evident. The "War of the World's" happened almost 90 years ago and society hasn't changed, even with the technology we have today. I'd say it's more of a detriment in this type of situation rather than helping.

So you think nothing should be shut down and everyone should just be going about their business as usual?

Sounds like a great way to keep the virus from spreading. I'm sure the elderly would appreciate it.

[Chief Roundup]

Originally Posted by The Franchise

Do you think that can be done here? Honest question.

I think can is the wrong word for the situation. Will would be better. There are plenty of people that are health compromised that will not take the risk. There are those that will not risk it because they don't have to take the risk. There are those that won't because it gives them a chance to be lazy.
Point being is that there will be a large majority that will isolate causing most other things to shut down.

[SupDock]

BREAKING: Another HUGE increase in #CoronaVirus infections in Italy ����

3 590 infected and 368 dead today alone.

- 24 747 infected.
- 1 809 dead.
- 7.3% death rate.

This is a human tragedy ��

— PeterSweden (@PeterSweden7) March 15, 2020

[petegz28]

Mortality rate in US is now under 2%. Let's hope it keeps going down.