***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.”

[rtmike]

It seems to have taken residence in the Portland/Vancouver area.
Two reports in Portland and my wife said someones at her hospital right now with it. Hospitals about a mile away. Good thing the wind doesn't usually come from the south, lol.

[Nickhead]

Originally Posted by rtmike

It seems to have taken residence in the Portland/Vancouver area.
Two reports in Portland and my wife said someones at her hospital right now with it. Hospitals about a mile away. Good thing the wind doesn't usually come from the south, lol.

lol!

[ChiliConCarnage]

Originally Posted by carlos3652

Breakdown of deaths can be found here:

https://www.worldometers.info/corona...-demographics/

45% of deaths had an underlying health issue including cardiovascular, cancer, diabetes, etc
22% of deaths are 80+ year olds (almost 1/4)

That seems to be all based on data from China though. A lot of people say not to trust it. Of course, people were saying China tried to hide it/were slow to react and that's why Wuhan was so bad but it's starting to look like they did well for having no warning time. The rest of the world had weeks to a month to prepare and were still seeing real problem areas.

[suzzer99]

Doctors everywhere are feeling their spidey senses clamoring. Inadequate PPE and rapidly outdated testing protocols, while there is active mild disease circulating widely, means what happened in the Bronxville hospital is not a fluke. No hospital has tested every single existing patient with an unidentified viral illness for COVID. How can we send healthcare workers into these rooms without N95 masks, splash guards, gloves and gowns, and ensure their safety? We can’t. How about the safety of other patients? How about the safety of immunocompromised patients? We can’t.

We are being told not to panic, to wash our hands and test based on outdated criteria, using a process that can’t handle the rate at which we need these tests done. Meanwhile our colleagues in Bronxville are in utter chaos and we are on high alert for how this wave crashes upon our system. Please stay away from healthcare centers unless you have a true medical emergency and keep a close watch on your local news for hotspots in your community. This is a rapidly evolving situation. This is NOT the time to slack off. Social distancing works. As does proper hand and hard surfaces hygiene.

From a doctor I follow on FB. Bronxville is the hospital in Westchester where they've have the big outbreak.

[loochy]

Originally Posted by suzzer99

From a doctor I follow on FB. Bronxville is the hospital in Westchester where they've have the big outbreak.

blah blah blah


he could have just said the last 5 sentences and saved us the trouble

Please stay away from healthcare centers unless you have a true medical emergency and keep a close watch on your local news for hotspots in your community. This is a rapidly evolving situation. This is NOT the time to slack off. Social distancing works. As does proper hand and hard surfaces hygiene.

[suzzer99]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...what-you-cant/

When a danger is growing exponentially, everything looks fine until it doesn’t

There’s an old brain teaser that goes like this: You have a pond of a certain size, and upon that pond, a single lilypad. This particular species of lily pad reproduces once a day, so that on day two, you have two lily pads. On day three, you have four, and so on.

Now the teaser. “If it takes the lily pads 48 days to cover the pond completely, how long will it take for the pond to be covered halfway?”

The answer is 47 days. Moreover, at day 40, you’ll barely know the lily pads are there.

That grim math explains why so many people — including me — are worried about the novel coronavirus, which causes a disease known as covid-19. And why so many other people think we are panicking over nothing.

During the current flu season, they point out, more than 250,000 people have been hospitalized in the United States, and 14,000 have died, including more than 100 children. As of this writing, the coronavirus has killed 29 people, and our caseload is in the hundreds. Why are we freaking out about the tiny threat while ignoring the big one?

Quite a number of people have suggested that it’s because the media just wants President Trump to look bad. Trump seems particularly fond of this suggestion.

But go back to those lily pads: When something dangerous is growing exponentially, everything looks fine until it doesn’t. In the early days of the Wuhan epidemic, when no one was taking precautions, the number of cases appears to have doubled every four to five days.

The crisis in northern Italy is what happens when a fast doubling rate meets a “threshold effect,” where the character of an event can massively change once its size hits a certain threshold.

In this case, the threshold is things such as ICU beds. If the epidemic is small enough, doctors can provide respiratory support to the significant fraction of patients who develop complications, and relatively few will die. But once the number of critical patients exceeds the number of ventilators and ICU beds and other critical-care facilities, mortality rates spike.

Daniele Macchini, a doctor in Bergamo, Italy, recently posted a heart-stopping account to Facebook of what he and his colleagues have endured: the hospital emptying out, the wards eerily silent as they waited for the patients they couldn’t quite believe would come … and then, the “tsunami.”

“One after the other the departments that had been emptied fill up at an impressive pace. … The boards with the names of the patients, of different colors depending on the operating unit, are now all red and instead of surgery you see the diagnosis, which is always the damned same: bilateral interstitial pneumonia.”

A British health-care worker shared a message from a doctor in Italy, who alleged that covid-19 patients in their hospital who are over 65, or have complicating conditions, aren’t even being considered for the most intensive forms of supportive treatment.

The experts are telling us that here in the United States, we can avoid hitting that threshold where sizable regions of the country will suddenly step into hell. We still have time to #flattenthecurve, as a popular infographic put it, slowing the spread so that the number of cases never exceeds what our health system can handle. The United States has an unusually high number of ICU beds, which gives us a head start. But we mustn’t squander that advantage through complacency.

So everyone needs to understand a few things.

First, the virus is here, and it is spreading quickly, even though everything looks normal. Right now, the United States has more reported cases than Italy had in late February. What matters isn’t what you can see but what you can’t: the patients who will need ICU care in two to six weeks.

Second, this is not “a bad flu.” It kills more of its hosts, and it will spread farther unless we take aggressive steps to slow it down, because no one is yet immune to this disease. It will be quite some time before the virus runs out of new patients.

Third, we can fight it. Despite early exposure, Singapore and Hong Kong have kept their caseloads low, not by completely shutting down large swaths of their economies as China did but through aggressive personal hygiene and “social distancing.” South Korea seems to be getting its initial outbreak under control using similar measures. If we do the same, we can not only keep our hospitals from overloading but also buy researchers time to develop vaccines and therapies.

Fourth, and most important: We are all in this together. It is your responsibility to keep America safe by following the CDC guidelines, just as much as it is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s or President Trump’s responsibility to lead us to safety. And until this virus is beaten, we all need to act like it.

[eDave]

Coronavirus Conference Gets Canceled Because of Coronavirus.

The Council on Foreign Relations has canceled a roundtable called “Doing Business Under Coronavirus” scheduled for Friday in New York due to the spread of the infection itself.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...of-coronavirus

@not_the_onion

[BigRedChief]

Originally Posted by Schnitzel

I can only report on what’s currently going on here in Europe. I believe many, including myself, have underestimated this virus. It’s not the flu, mortality rates have shown that. And the flu will not just go away, just because CoVid has arrived. Hospitals have to deal with both diseases at the same time. Here in Switzerland, a country with one of the best health care systems in the world, some hospitals have already reached their capacity now, and we are basically one week behind Italy. In Italy, hospitals are considering to start using age limits on ventilators, because there are not enough machines available. Older patients would then just be left to die.

I am not worried about myself, because I’m not part of the risk group. I do know however many persons who are. Panic does not help, but effective measures need to be taken on a government level. It is, however, hard to enforce such measures in the Western World in the same way as in China, especially in a population that still underestimated the situation. Life is not the same anymore here. We will see what will happen when the virus hits overcrowded cities like NYC.

Is the US health system up for the task? Is the health system anywhere up for the task?

I've been telling the posters this in here for a while. Hospitals are going to get swamped. We have 70 million citizens over 60 years old.

We have 10K ventilators in reserve but not that many beds. Maybe 1000 more beds. We will have to set up the vents in high school gyms, hotel rooms etc. But, I think the issue will be not enough Respiratory Therapists to run them all. You cant just put RN's running them. Your off in the slightest pressure/ramp you can injure the lungs and its going to be a slow death for that person.

We are 3 weeks behind Europe. We wasted those 3 weeks with trying to develop our own test and botching it instead of just using the same test the rest of the world uses. Our leadership also thought it was just going away in a few days and played golf.

Mandatory quarantines will never be accepted here but it looks like alot of the public is willing to self-quarantine to protect themselves and others. They seem to be taking this seriously now.

[Monticore]

Sudbury in northern Ontario just got its first confirmed case , that hospital runs over capacity more than 50% of the year already , there is no way it will be able to handle much overflow , many patients from my town go there for treatment since it’s our regional cancer treatment centre, when discharged they usually end up in the hospital where my wife and I work , it is going to be a shitshow for the forceable future.

Hopefully our ceo doesn’t over react like she did with sars but once we start getting cases in sturgeon it’s going to suck we have a large retirement community.

[dlphg9]

Originally Posted by BigRedChief

Mandatory quarantines will never be accepted here but it looks like alot of the public is willing to self-quarantine to protect themselves and others. They seem to be taking this seriously now.

That dumbshit in Missouri sure wasn't willing to self quarantine. Ya know, the one who was supposed to quarantine himself and then went to a school program. ****ing stupid selfish mother ****er needs to think about other people instead of just himself.

[Hammock Parties]

Puked my guts out in the shower this morning. I was afraid I had the ebola strain of the coronavirus but I think it was just taking my vitamins on an empty stomach.

[Pablo]

Originally Posted by eDave

Went to a Clan Of Xymox concert tonight. Packed house. No masks. Shared my vape with a few peeps.

Shit bro, looks like the band's already got it.

[Pablo]

Originally Posted by Hammock Parties

Puked my guts out in the shower this morning. I was afraid I had the ebola strain of the coronavirus but I think it was just taking my vitamins on an empty stomach.

What kind of weakshit body you got that Flintstones on an empty stomach make you toss your cookies?

Get tested ASAP, you just might have teh AIDS.

[srvy]

Originally Posted by Pablo

Shit bro, looks like the band's already got it.

[Hammock Parties]

Originally Posted by Pablo

What kind of weakshit body you got that Flintstones on an empty stomach make you toss your cookies?

Get tested ASAP, you just might have teh AIDS.

I think it was because I took two tabs of wellness formula instead of just one like normal.

No idea why I did that but watching orange puke come out of your quivering body at 8 AM while a pandemic is going on is a bit frightening.