10 minutes ago, motorman7 said:

  Personally, I will be a little more shocked when the death toll shrinks....People coming back to life would be pretty impressive.  I guess at that point, the Zombie apocalypse  is upon us.

 

 

 

 

Good catch on the use of words!  btw The death rate is shrinking in Italy so this is good news ?

13 minutes ago, wheee! said:

the rest of the population is forced to sweat out two weeks of isolation not knowing if they are infectious or not....

Triage only applies when it is done fairly and evenly across all the spectrum of the population. Rich and famous people and politicians should not be getting preferential treatment...

Simple. Because:

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."  -  Animal Farm (1945)

Not to be confused with "You fukked up. You trusted us." - Animal House (1978)

 New COVID-19 testing method available. Mail a sample of your stool to: 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Washington, DC 20500

9 minutes ago, Mark Maras said:

 New COVID-19 testing method available. Mail a sample of your stool to: 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Washington, DC 20500

Mar-a-Lago

The President is speaking.  Have you ever listened to someone speaking and thought "just get done so we can move on to people who know what they're talking about"".

Trump is discussing the details of the nasal swab.  Expertise.  Executive order to move to the "self-swab".

Not kidding, this is painful to watch...  Scary.

Guys I really don’t get what’s going on here. To me it seems like an overreaction by government. We have had other viruses the past, the swine flu or the SARa virus or even the normal influenza that have killed more people than this current one it makes me wonder if the government knows something that we don’t know because they are taking such drastic measures and completely destroying the economy. I think we had over 30,000 deaths in the US last year from the normal influenza and currently worldwide there less than 8,200 deaths so it’s just doesn’t make sense to me. Cases are declining in China it seems like they’ve got this under control over there. Can any of you make sense of this?


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It's the projections forward that are most concerning.  It's not now that matters, it's what will happen if we don't get ahead of the game.

Extrapolation, and exponential growth.  We are on the yellow dot line.  Look at what has happened in just the last four days.  This is real data, not hype.  If you're used to working with numbers, this is serious stuff.

https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

 

I think the main difference here is the level of contagion.  The flu is only moderately contagious, the virus has a very short life on surfaces, and we have a vaccine and proven anti-virals.  Most of us can go about our daily lives with little concern.  The folks that tend to get the flu are those who do not get vaccinated and older folks with underlying health issues - for that group the flu is potentially deadly.  Our hospital system has the capacity to handle the regular flu incidence.

This new bug is highly contagious and seems to have a longer life on surfaces (not yet conclusively proven).  While not as deadly on a case-by-case basis, it has the potential to hit all of the population that might be exposed and if it does so, the death toll will be much higher.  We have zero built-in resistance and no proven anti-viral meds or vaccine to fight this new virus, and our hospital system does NOT have the capacity to handle all of the potential cases.  People will die due to lack of care!  So... right now, avoiding exposure is the ONLY WAY to slow down the spread and the only way to avoid exposure is to halt personal interaction.  The flu virus is known to die out as soon as the weather warms but there is no track record on CV.

Edit - mine below is just an amplification of above.  Posted at the same time.

 

One more thing that has been mentioned but gets lost in the noise, when comparing to the flu.  The common flu has a vaccine, plus people have developed immunity.  So every year only a fraction of the population gets the flu.  The experts are supposing that EVERYONE will eventually get COVID-19.  Because there is no vaccine and because it is new.  That's why it's called the Novel Corona virus.  The nerdy medical researchers are doing a poor job of explaining this. 

And the administration is doing a poor job of explaining why it's important to slow the spread.  Only so many critically ill people can be cared for at any period of time.  So the "system" can't handle a large influx of patients.  When you listen to them you get the feeling that "well, we'l just all get sick and the same people that would die will die anyway".  But the reality is that many more people will die if they don't get proper care.  So when things get bad you're going to see stories about critically ill people being sent home or being cared for in a tent, and dying because no ventilators were available.

So, the personal view is "do I want a bed and a ventilator and personnel to be ready for me/my parents/my grandparents/anyone when they need it?"  If you don't care, then party on the system will get overloaded and people will be dying at home while waiting.  If you do then we need to put the effort in to stop the spread.

Edited March 18, 20205 yr by Zed Head