ErinInTheSky

Just a FYI: Italy is old AF. It's why their death rates are probably going to be the worst from this AND from other things. It doesn't mitigate the threat coronavirus poses to all countries, us included though, because the way that coronavirus threatens us is by wrecking healthcare systems. Novel bugs with no population immunities, even if they are simple flus, are disruptive. When they carry a significant death rate, hospitalization rate, incubation period, it's even worse.

Coronavirus mortality rate right now in Italy is much more than that (8.5%), and they've only had 1-2 million cases of flu per year because the majority of people are vaccinated or have lingering immunities out of a population of 60M. Coronavirus is a novel bug with no population immunities. Spain is shortly behind Italy right now and about to experience the same thing. As are lots of countries in Europe, and we're not far behind. Honestly at the end of the day this becomes a raw numbers problem and not a percentage problem. Once you overwhelm hospitals (as you see in those videos I posted), then people are dying not just of COVID but of lots of other things that they can't get treatment for.

When's the last time you've seen a flu that made the insides of hospitals look like this?

I don't recall the flu ever doing this:

6k cases 600 deaths today in Italy. Even on lockdown it’s still increasing bad.

https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/03/18/world/europe/18reuters-health-coronavirus-italy-tally.html?searchResultPosition=5 :-/ It's not slowing down in Italy.

It's not an option at all. Even the best of the studies only focus on the coronavirus deaths. What the "suck it up" scenario also does, which is why it is absolutely 100% not an option, is it destroys our health care system. It will make it virtually impossible to treat all other illnesses like strokes, heart attacks, surgeries people need to save their lives, could even shut down primary cares.

But put it this way: This disease will make its presence known whether you believe the numbers that are coming or not. Every other nation tried to ignore it and it brought them to their knees. It absolutely demolishes hospital capacity.

I've explained this a number of times. There's a 3 week period between initial infection and getting bad enough to get to the ICU. It takes a long time for this disease to take course. And because the growth is an exponential function with a doubling time of about 3-4 days, infection 3 weeks ago would be a miniscule number of cases.

People aren't going to take this seriously until people they know start dying. Unfortunately by that time, you're 3 weeks behind because it takes 3 weeks from infection to death. "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." - Dr. Albert Bartlet

I was pretty hopeful with respect to weather, but what's going on in Florida and Louisiana has kinda dashed that hope for me.

Nobody, not even our most senior epidemiologist Dr Fauci, thinks this is close to 0.1%. The lowest recorded in any country is South Korea at 0.7%, and they do SUPER widespread testing and likely have the best sample. However - this is a very rough case fatality rate done by dividing the total number of deaths by the total number of cases. This is not the best way to do it, because it takes about 3 weeks from infection to die from this thing. The right way is to divide the total number of deaths by the total number of cases 3 weeks ago. But even then it's not so simple. How many factors are bringing it down (undiagnosed asymptomatic), how many are bringing it up (over capacity health care system, which increases fatalities dramatically, hence "flatten the curve"). PhDs will be earned determining the case fatality ratio on this. Estimates seem to range from 0.7% (asymptomatic carriers, elderly die first, fatality rate drops) at the absolute lowest to 5.6% at the absolute highest (over capacity health care system, 3 week lag time in deaths). No matter what, it's not going to be "just the flu". Do your part and help flatten the curve so that we trend as close to that 0.7% as possible.

It's a 100+ year old solution, but it works:

Yup. If you keep schools open, kids become a vector of transmission between families and kind of makes the whole shutting other things down absolutely pointless. It's a vulnerability in our system to flatten the curve. You have to reduce human interaction as much as feasible to slow the progress of the glut that is about to clobber hospitals.

I honestly think I got it from him. He recovered very fast though. I stocked up before the madhouse rush so I'm good for a long time.

Just wanted to check in with all of y'all. I'm OK. Still haven't gotten tested but I have almost fully recovered. Life goes on. I've stocked up on supplies and am ready to ride this out for the next month with my son. Hope all are well.

So there are two ways to control this disease: - The massive quarantine system. This is the China method. It works. It's brutal and effective. It costs the country greatly economically. - The surgical contact tracing system. To do this you need MASSIVE testing capacity. South Korea has run 200k tests and they are much smaller than us. When they get a hit, they not only contact trace, they alert everyone via text message about an area where a coronavirus patient was at that they may have passed through. They ALL wear masks. They all drive through test at the slightest symptom. There's actually a third... The Italy, Iran, and now the United States system... which is to let it burn through. Iran tried this and it brought them to their knees, infecting and killing politicians and leaders. Italy tried this and now they're importing help from China. We're trying it too.

I really just hope we can get the testing up soon.

Let me also add... during the whole outbreak, they got masks sent from all other countries and made their own along with other PPE. Now the supply chain is all kinds of messed up and we can’t even get the chemical required to extract the viral RNA for testing. https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/rna-extraction-kits-for-covid-19-tests-are-in-short-supply-in-us-67250

China leveled off cases with massive testing, the most comprehensive quarantine ever established, and quarantining all incoming people for 14 days. also... Hubei can’t go back to normal. They are still massively locked down 6 weeks later. and... China lucked out in a way by being the first country because when they established their measures, they could focus on one single area. We aren’t so lucky. We will have Hubei like situations all over our country.

I think we will be lucky to get out of this with 12k plus us deaths. It’ll take serious quarantine measures.

Thanks Mattie. I’ll be fine. Today was better than yesterday so I think I’m finally turning the corner. WHATEVER it is I have, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

Thankfully my work can be done online. I haven’t completely isolated myself but for the most part I have.

Thank all of you for the kind words. I don’t wanna sound like a hypochondriac or something but the last several days have been stressful on top of the normal being sick stuff.