Corona Virus, general conversation
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Optimistic Paranoid
Adventurist
I remember hearing that back during the Clinton years, DC had a whopping big snowstorm. Of course, DC grinds to a halt anytime they get more than an inch or two. Anyway, Clinton announced that only essential personnel should report for work. 90% of the Federal work force showed up. No one wanted anyone to think that THEIR job wasn't essential! 
The Pentagon parking lot was empty. They had adminstrative leave and were being paid to stay home. The landscaping crews contracted to clear snow on the other hand worked 120 that week and slept in their trucks. The only other thing that was open was a strip bar.I remember hearing that back during the Clinton years, DC had a whopping big snowstorm. Of course, DC grinds to a halt anytime they get more than an inch or two. Anyway, Clinton announced that only essential personnel should report for work. 90% of the Federal work force showed up. No one wanted anyone to think that THEIR job wasn't essential!
jscusmcvet
Adventurist
I work for a health care system here in NC. My small part is operating 6 medical fitness centers (these are gyms like you may belong to with additional expertise and clinical services on site). Average age of our 11,000 members is 51. Our largest age group is 70-79. We are communicating to all members about the basics of hand washing and wiping down your equipment. After last night's presidential address where he said, "If you are 65 and don't need to be around groups of people..." we are allowing those members 65 and older to put their membership on hold at no charge as this situation develops. We've had dozens of appointments cancel as well. All that said we went out to dinner last night and the place was slam packed...
On the personal side I am trying to find an angle to get myself quarantined at the compound indefinitely and still get paid
On the personal side I am trying to find an angle to get myself quarantined at the compound indefinitely and still get paid
Gallowbraid
Adventurist
On the personal side I am trying to find an angle to get myself quarantined at the compound indefinitely and still get paid
My boss just gave me permission to do exactly this. The number of conference calls just skyrocketed though. Time to install a bluetooth headset in my motorcycle helmet.
Optimistic Paranoid
Adventurist
Mucksavage
Adventurist
I'm currently in the hospital ER w/my 85 y.o. Mom. She complained of an A-Fib flair. I thought she should tough it out thinking going to the ER would expose her. I checked her & her ankles are swollen indicating congestion around her heart so here I sit, looking at people wondering how many here have sat watching hours of fear-mongering mainstream media & have talked themselves into sickness.
ArkansasDon
Adventurist
Facebook is really bad about the over exaggeration of this Coronavirus. It reminds me of all the hype back when the dot-com bubble bursting Y2K in 2000. LOL! I really think our society has lost it's way with common sense. It to the point of a continuous reality tv show of stupid people re-acting to stupid things.
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Optimistic Paranoid
Adventurist
So let's see. The NHL and NBA have suspended their seasons. March Madness is off. MLB has ended spring training and pushed the opening back to some date to be named later. Broadway theaters have all closed. The Stock Market has tanked. The State University of New York is shutting down. And Tom Hanks has announced he has it. Have I missed anything?
Oh, and this is funny. Rolling Stone reports that some porn stars have stopped shooting new videos for fear of catching the virus via exchange of saliva. Apparently that's scarier than having unprotected sex with multiple partners.
Oh, and this is funny. Rolling Stone reports that some porn stars have stopped shooting new videos for fear of catching the virus via exchange of saliva. Apparently that's scarier than having unprotected sex with multiple partners.
Gallowbraid
Adventurist
My daughter had a school trip to New York scheduled in two weeks that was just cancelled earlier today. They also cancelled every field trip, sporting event, club meeting and school board meeting for the next several weeks. Later in the day they went the rest of the way and cancelled all classes for the next two weeks. Several local colleges followed suit.
There is no toilet paper left in my part of the metro Atlanta area. I was in a home depot earlier today where people were buying carts full off a pallet stack with an inflated price.
There is no toilet paper left in my part of the metro Atlanta area. I was in a home depot earlier today where people were buying carts full off a pallet stack with an inflated price.
Optimistic Paranoid
Adventurist
An excerpt from an article that appeared on the political news site THE HILL:
Days after it became clear that the virus had spread from China’s Hubei province to South Korea, the government in Seoul moved quickly to track contacts, limit public events and, most crucially, test those who showed any symptoms, even at mobile drive-through testing sites. The country has tested more than 210,000 of its citizens for the virus, far more than any other nation outside of China.
As a consequence, South Korea had confirmed 7,755 cases of COVID-19 through Wednesday, according to the World Health Organization. The number of new cases identified every day has slowed substantially. Sixty people have died, a mortality rate of a little under eight-tenths of a percent.
Italy, by contrast, was far slower to take the threat seriously once it became clear coronavirus had arrived on its shores. The country recorded its first two cases on January 31, and a cluster of new cases on February 21, three weeks later.
The government waited until March 8, when more than 7,300 people were confirmed to have contracted the coronavirus, to impose a broad lockdown on Lombardy and 14 northern provinces. Two days later, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte extended that lockdown to the entire country.
That slow approach to drastic action has led to an explosion of cases. The total number of cases in Italy has grown by more than 1,000 for each of the last five days; on Wednesday, Italy reported 2,300 new cases — and more than 200 new deaths in just a 24-hour period. Hospitals are so overwhelmed that doctors are making excruciating decisions about which patients in need of medical attention will get treatment. About 6 percent of those who have contracted the virus in Italy have died.
The critical factor that has made the difference between South Korea’s mortality rate, 0.8 percent, and Italy’s, 6 percent, is the capacity of the respective health systems to treat patients they see.
“Countries that act fast can reduce the number of deaths by [a factor of] ten. And that’s just counting the fatality rate. Acting fast also drastically reduces the cases, making this even more of a no-brainer,” wrote Tomas Puyeo, an author and tech expert who analyzed mortality rates between impacted countries in a Medium post
Epidemiologists say a virus that has spread as widely as this coronavirus has is likely to infect a huge portion of the population, whether fast action is taken or not. But the rate at which those infections take place matters a great deal: If infections happen all at once, as in Italy, the system’s capacity will become overwhelmed. If infections happen more slowly, as in South Korea, the system can treat the patients with the most dire symptoms.
The catchphrase that epidemiologists have embraced acknowledges those differences: Flatten the curve, a reference to the bell curve that defines the case counts in any given outbreak.
A rapid pandemic will send case counts above the level at which health systems can support. A slower-burning one may still infect the same number of patients, but at a low-enough rate that the health system can handle capacity at any given moment.
“The goal is to slow down the spread and have it happen over a larger period of time so that hospitals aren’t overwhelmed and supply chains can keep up,” John Wiesman, the Washington state secretary of health, told The Hill days before the scope of the outbreak in his home state was evident. “It’s important for the public to understand what that goal is so that they’re not confused and say 'hey, this isn’t working.'”
The whole article is here:
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/487284-why-canceling-events-makes-sense-in-the-age-of-covid-19
Days after it became clear that the virus had spread from China’s Hubei province to South Korea, the government in Seoul moved quickly to track contacts, limit public events and, most crucially, test those who showed any symptoms, even at mobile drive-through testing sites. The country has tested more than 210,000 of its citizens for the virus, far more than any other nation outside of China.
As a consequence, South Korea had confirmed 7,755 cases of COVID-19 through Wednesday, according to the World Health Organization. The number of new cases identified every day has slowed substantially. Sixty people have died, a mortality rate of a little under eight-tenths of a percent.
Italy, by contrast, was far slower to take the threat seriously once it became clear coronavirus had arrived on its shores. The country recorded its first two cases on January 31, and a cluster of new cases on February 21, three weeks later.
The government waited until March 8, when more than 7,300 people were confirmed to have contracted the coronavirus, to impose a broad lockdown on Lombardy and 14 northern provinces. Two days later, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte extended that lockdown to the entire country.
That slow approach to drastic action has led to an explosion of cases. The total number of cases in Italy has grown by more than 1,000 for each of the last five days; on Wednesday, Italy reported 2,300 new cases — and more than 200 new deaths in just a 24-hour period. Hospitals are so overwhelmed that doctors are making excruciating decisions about which patients in need of medical attention will get treatment. About 6 percent of those who have contracted the virus in Italy have died.
The critical factor that has made the difference between South Korea’s mortality rate, 0.8 percent, and Italy’s, 6 percent, is the capacity of the respective health systems to treat patients they see.
“Countries that act fast can reduce the number of deaths by [a factor of] ten. And that’s just counting the fatality rate. Acting fast also drastically reduces the cases, making this even more of a no-brainer,” wrote Tomas Puyeo, an author and tech expert who analyzed mortality rates between impacted countries in a Medium post
Epidemiologists say a virus that has spread as widely as this coronavirus has is likely to infect a huge portion of the population, whether fast action is taken or not. But the rate at which those infections take place matters a great deal: If infections happen all at once, as in Italy, the system’s capacity will become overwhelmed. If infections happen more slowly, as in South Korea, the system can treat the patients with the most dire symptoms.
The catchphrase that epidemiologists have embraced acknowledges those differences: Flatten the curve, a reference to the bell curve that defines the case counts in any given outbreak.
A rapid pandemic will send case counts above the level at which health systems can support. A slower-burning one may still infect the same number of patients, but at a low-enough rate that the health system can handle capacity at any given moment.
“The goal is to slow down the spread and have it happen over a larger period of time so that hospitals aren’t overwhelmed and supply chains can keep up,” John Wiesman, the Washington state secretary of health, told The Hill days before the scope of the outbreak in his home state was evident. “It’s important for the public to understand what that goal is so that they’re not confused and say 'hey, this isn’t working.'”
The whole article is here:
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/487284-why-canceling-events-makes-sense-in-the-age-of-covid-19
Optimistic Paranoid
Adventurist
Follow up to my previous post. An article that appeared on The Atlantic web site on the dilemma now facing Italian doctors.
The Extraordinary Decisions Facing Italian Doctors
There are now simply too many patients for each one of them to receive adequate care.
March 11, 2020
Yascha Mounk
Two weeks ago, Italy had 322 confirmed cases of the coronavirus. At that point, doctors in the country’s hospitals could lavish significant attention on each stricken patient.
One week ago, Italy had 2,502 cases of the virus, which causes the disease known as COVID-19. At that point, doctors in the country’s hospitals could still perform the most lifesaving functions by artificially ventilating patients who experienced acute breathing difficulties.
Today, Italy has 10,149 cases of the coronavirus. There are now simply too many patients for each one of them to receive adequate care. Doctors and nurses are unable to tend to everybody They lack machines to ventilate all those gasping for air.
Now the Italian College of Anesthesia, Analgesia, Resuscitation and Intensive Care (SIAARTI) has published guidelines for the criteria that doctors and nurses should follow in these extraordinary circumstances. The document begins by likening the moral choices facing Italian doctors to the forms of wartime triage that are required in the field of “catastrophe medicine.” Instead of providing intensive care to all patients who need it, its authors suggest, it may become necessary to follow “the most widely shared criteria regarding distributive justice and the appropriate allocation of limited health resources.”
The principle they settle upon is utilitarian. “Informed by the principle of maximizing benefits for the largest number,” they suggest that “the allocation criteria need to guarantee that those patients with the highest chance of therapeutic success will retain access to intensive care.”
The authors, who are medical doctors, then deduce a set of concrete recommendations for how to manage these impossible choices, including this: “It may become necessary to establish an age limit for access to intensive care.”
Those who are too old to have a high likelihood of recovery, or who have too low a number of “life-years” left even if they should survive, will be left to die. This sounds cruel, but the alternative, the document argues, is no better. “In case of a total saturation of resources, maintaining the criterion of ‘first come, first served’ would amount to a decision to exclude late-arriving patients from access to intensive care.”
In addition to age, doctors and nurses are also advised to take a patient’s overall state of health into account: “The presence of comorbidities needs to be carefully evaluated.” This is in part because early studies of the virus seem to suggest that patients with serious preexisting health conditions are significantly more likely to die. But it is also because patients in a worse state of overall health could require a greater share of scarce resources to survive: “What might be a relatively short treatment course in healthier people could be longer and more resource-consuming in the case of older or more fragile patients.”
These guidelines apply even to patients who require intensive care for reasons other than the coronavirus, because they too make demands on the same scarce medical resources. As the document clarifies, “These criteria apply to all patients in intensive care, not just those infected with CoVid-19.”
My academic training is in political and moral philosophy. I have spent countless hours in fancy seminar rooms discussing abstract moral dilemmas like the so-called trolley problem. If a train is barreling toward five innocent people who are tied to the tracks, and I could divert it by pulling the lever, but at the cost of killing an innocent bystander, should I do it?
Part of the point of all those discussions was, supposedly, to help professionals make difficult moral choices in real-world circumstances.
If you are an overworked nurse battling a novel disease under the most desperate circumstances, and you simply cannot treat everyone, however hard you try, whose life should you save?
Despite those years of theory, I must admit that I have no moral judgment to make about the extraordinary document published by those brave Italian doctors. I have not the first clue whether they are recommending the right or the wrong thing.
But if Italy is in an impossible position, the obligation facing the United States is very clear: To arrest the crisis before the impossible becomes necessary.
This means that our political leaders, the heads of business and private associations, and every one of us need to work together to accomplish two things: Radically expand the capacity of the country’s intensive-care units. And start engaging in extreme forms of social distancing.
Cancel everything. Now.
The Extraordinary Decisions Facing Italian Doctors
There are now simply too many patients for each one of them to receive adequate care.
March 11, 2020
Yascha Mounk
Two weeks ago, Italy had 322 confirmed cases of the coronavirus. At that point, doctors in the country’s hospitals could lavish significant attention on each stricken patient.
One week ago, Italy had 2,502 cases of the virus, which causes the disease known as COVID-19. At that point, doctors in the country’s hospitals could still perform the most lifesaving functions by artificially ventilating patients who experienced acute breathing difficulties.
Today, Italy has 10,149 cases of the coronavirus. There are now simply too many patients for each one of them to receive adequate care. Doctors and nurses are unable to tend to everybody They lack machines to ventilate all those gasping for air.
Now the Italian College of Anesthesia, Analgesia, Resuscitation and Intensive Care (SIAARTI) has published guidelines for the criteria that doctors and nurses should follow in these extraordinary circumstances. The document begins by likening the moral choices facing Italian doctors to the forms of wartime triage that are required in the field of “catastrophe medicine.” Instead of providing intensive care to all patients who need it, its authors suggest, it may become necessary to follow “the most widely shared criteria regarding distributive justice and the appropriate allocation of limited health resources.”
The principle they settle upon is utilitarian. “Informed by the principle of maximizing benefits for the largest number,” they suggest that “the allocation criteria need to guarantee that those patients with the highest chance of therapeutic success will retain access to intensive care.”
The authors, who are medical doctors, then deduce a set of concrete recommendations for how to manage these impossible choices, including this: “It may become necessary to establish an age limit for access to intensive care.”
Those who are too old to have a high likelihood of recovery, or who have too low a number of “life-years” left even if they should survive, will be left to die. This sounds cruel, but the alternative, the document argues, is no better. “In case of a total saturation of resources, maintaining the criterion of ‘first come, first served’ would amount to a decision to exclude late-arriving patients from access to intensive care.”
In addition to age, doctors and nurses are also advised to take a patient’s overall state of health into account: “The presence of comorbidities needs to be carefully evaluated.” This is in part because early studies of the virus seem to suggest that patients with serious preexisting health conditions are significantly more likely to die. But it is also because patients in a worse state of overall health could require a greater share of scarce resources to survive: “What might be a relatively short treatment course in healthier people could be longer and more resource-consuming in the case of older or more fragile patients.”
These guidelines apply even to patients who require intensive care for reasons other than the coronavirus, because they too make demands on the same scarce medical resources. As the document clarifies, “These criteria apply to all patients in intensive care, not just those infected with CoVid-19.”
My academic training is in political and moral philosophy. I have spent countless hours in fancy seminar rooms discussing abstract moral dilemmas like the so-called trolley problem. If a train is barreling toward five innocent people who are tied to the tracks, and I could divert it by pulling the lever, but at the cost of killing an innocent bystander, should I do it?
Part of the point of all those discussions was, supposedly, to help professionals make difficult moral choices in real-world circumstances.
If you are an overworked nurse battling a novel disease under the most desperate circumstances, and you simply cannot treat everyone, however hard you try, whose life should you save?
Despite those years of theory, I must admit that I have no moral judgment to make about the extraordinary document published by those brave Italian doctors. I have not the first clue whether they are recommending the right or the wrong thing.
But if Italy is in an impossible position, the obligation facing the United States is very clear: To arrest the crisis before the impossible becomes necessary.
This means that our political leaders, the heads of business and private associations, and every one of us need to work together to accomplish two things: Radically expand the capacity of the country’s intensive-care units. And start engaging in extreme forms of social distancing.
Cancel everything. Now.
Part of the problem is the media sensationalizing NUMBERS instead of percents. The 12,000+ cases in Italy sounds like a lot... until you realize their population is 60 million and that 12,000+ cases equates to 0.02% of their population. Many of which already had compromised health. In the US there are currently 1,600 cases... our population is 300+ million so that's 0.0005% of the population (as of right now).
This is echoing how the media has blown gun violence and police brutality out of proportion in previous years. They focus on the numbers and make it seem like a big deal. I did the math a few years ago during the peak of the BLM movement and calculated it out that there was a 0.001% chance of a racial minority experiencing police brutality. The statistics for minority-on-minority crime were far more staggering but that wasn't being talked about. Same with this COVID-19 thing. Influenza is still hands-down more deadly than the corona virus. It's just been around longer and isn't "news worthy." It's not sensationalble enough to drive up ratings. I won't even mention stats for heart disease, diabetes, cancer, or any other health epidemic in the US that is killing far more people than COVID-19 will.
Anyway, I got bored last night. According to the last CDC stats packet I saw, there is a 0.09% chance that if I get COVID-19 I could die from it. And chances are I may not even get it. The odds are better I'll win the lottery at this point.
That said, COVID-19 doesn't worry me. What worries me the most is the longterm ramifications of letting the government take away people's freedom of choice and personal responsibility. Look at what happened post 9/11. DHS and TSA took over and for the last two decades flying has been a nightmare in the name of "public safety." Freedoms were given up without a peep and now we're subject to searches, scans, and pat-downs. For what? Nothing. The TSA has yet to stop one crisis and has constantly failed when tested. Now what's going to happen? What new powers will the CDC get out of this in the name of "public health." We're already seeing restrictions on events and things are being canceled left and right. We have cities telling companies they have to shut down and they have to pay employees for their time off. Schools are being shut down forcing parents to take time off work (if they were working) to take care of their kids. Colleges are being shut down. Again, for what? "Public health?" Even when pro-active measures were being taken to increase cleaning and sanitizing it was deemed not enough and places were forced to close. No option. No choice. No personal responsibility. Just like with gun crime and flying, the "punishment" is coming before the "crime."
I'm not one to usually wear a tin-foil hat but I'm more scared of what's going to happen after COVID-19 has come and gone than COVID-19 itself.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." ~ Ben Franklin
This is echoing how the media has blown gun violence and police brutality out of proportion in previous years. They focus on the numbers and make it seem like a big deal. I did the math a few years ago during the peak of the BLM movement and calculated it out that there was a 0.001% chance of a racial minority experiencing police brutality. The statistics for minority-on-minority crime were far more staggering but that wasn't being talked about. Same with this COVID-19 thing. Influenza is still hands-down more deadly than the corona virus. It's just been around longer and isn't "news worthy." It's not sensationalble enough to drive up ratings. I won't even mention stats for heart disease, diabetes, cancer, or any other health epidemic in the US that is killing far more people than COVID-19 will.
Anyway, I got bored last night. According to the last CDC stats packet I saw, there is a 0.09% chance that if I get COVID-19 I could die from it. And chances are I may not even get it. The odds are better I'll win the lottery at this point.
That said, COVID-19 doesn't worry me. What worries me the most is the longterm ramifications of letting the government take away people's freedom of choice and personal responsibility. Look at what happened post 9/11. DHS and TSA took over and for the last two decades flying has been a nightmare in the name of "public safety." Freedoms were given up without a peep and now we're subject to searches, scans, and pat-downs. For what? Nothing. The TSA has yet to stop one crisis and has constantly failed when tested. Now what's going to happen? What new powers will the CDC get out of this in the name of "public health." We're already seeing restrictions on events and things are being canceled left and right. We have cities telling companies they have to shut down and they have to pay employees for their time off. Schools are being shut down forcing parents to take time off work (if they were working) to take care of their kids. Colleges are being shut down. Again, for what? "Public health?" Even when pro-active measures were being taken to increase cleaning and sanitizing it was deemed not enough and places were forced to close. No option. No choice. No personal responsibility. Just like with gun crime and flying, the "punishment" is coming before the "crime."
I'm not one to usually wear a tin-foil hat but I'm more scared of what's going to happen after COVID-19 has come and gone than COVID-19 itself.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." ~ Ben Franklin
Optimistic Paranoid
Adventurist
We actually have no idea how many Americans have Covid19. Most people who want to be tested CAN'T get tested yet.
What we're seeing right now are ESTIMATES. And they're all over the place because we're getting pessimistic estimates from people with one ax to grind and optimistic estimates from people with a different ax to grind.
Not sure how the CDC got THAT number. South Korea has a mortality rate of 0.8% And Italy has a mortality rate of 6%. South Korea apparently did everything right a soon as they realized they had a problem. They tested 210,000 people. Want to bet we've tested less than 10,000 people so far? Italy screwed up royally, which is why their rate is so much higher. People there are dying because there aren't enough hospital beds for the really sick. It's not that those who have, "compromised health", as you put it, died because they already have one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. Many of them probably would have survived if they could have gotten the treatment they needed.
And guess what? So far, the American response strikes me as a lot more like Italy's than South Korea's. My personal opinion.
Optimistic Paranoid
Adventurist
America doesn’t have enough hospital beds to handle COVID-19 patients,
warns Eric Boehm at Reason
And it’s thanks to needless red tape: state “certificate of need” laws that force hospitals to get government’s OK before adding services, beds and even “long-term acute-care services” — just what coronavirus patients may need to recover.
No wonder America has fewer beds per capita than other developed nations. The regs “help politically powerful hospital chains limit regional competition,” but the shortages they create could “prove disastrous.” Cato Institute senior fellow Jeffrey Singer, a medical doctor, urges lawmakers to suspend these laws during the COVID-19 outbreak. But removing them permanently, says Boehm, should be a “no-brainer,” so that the market can “adequately prepare for future pandemics.”
warns Eric Boehm at Reason
And it’s thanks to needless red tape: state “certificate of need” laws that force hospitals to get government’s OK before adding services, beds and even “long-term acute-care services” — just what coronavirus patients may need to recover.
No wonder America has fewer beds per capita than other developed nations. The regs “help politically powerful hospital chains limit regional competition,” but the shortages they create could “prove disastrous.” Cato Institute senior fellow Jeffrey Singer, a medical doctor, urges lawmakers to suspend these laws during the COVID-19 outbreak. But removing them permanently, says Boehm, should be a “no-brainer,” so that the market can “adequately prepare for future pandemics.”
Those are overall numbers and don't paint a complete picture of mitigating circumstances contibuting to dealth (ie health risks, smoking, air quality, etc). The main reason for COVID-19's mortality rate is it's ability to compromise a paitents respiratory system and given them pneumonia. So in Chinia (high population of smokers and poor overall air quality) it meant a more severe reaction for those already ill. Overall 80% of first-wave cases in china were mild with only basic flu-like symptoms. Only 14% were sever, and less than 5% were critical. 14% mortality rate for those 80 and over, but much less for younger age brackets. Mine (30-39) is only 0.2, 40-49 was 0.4% and 50-59 was 1.3%.
I'm under 50 and of reasonably good health with uncompromised immune, respritory, and cardio-vasular systems. I'm not on any major medications. I live in an area with exceptional air quality. I'm also not a smoker. The worse thing I have going on right now in some mild seasonal allergies, but it's all sinus congestion and nothing in my chest. So I'm about as low a risk patient as there can be. Hence my 0.09% chance of death if I catch COVID-19.
kmacafee
Adventurist
My daughter is a doctor in a large regional hospital in New England. Their ICU beds and ventilators are always in high demand normally. She has no idea what will happen if they get a mass of people come in but guesses they will have to triage and ration care to those most in need - and some people will die. This should be a wake up call but given the leadership we have now, it most likely wont be.