It's important that everyone remain rational during these times. Fear and panic will make it all much worse.
Most of you know about my day job, I'm sharing some info here from .gov and "what I know" with my friends and family here. I will continue to update this with anything of note from official, unclassified sources:
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Coronaviruses are a family of viruses that can cause a wide range of diseases in humans. Coronaviruses are often the cause of the common cold – giving people annoying but largely harmless symptoms such as runny noses and a mild cough. Other times they may cause significant harm to people such as was seen with the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS, or MERS-CoV) or the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS, or SARS-CoV), and now with COVID-19 (technically classified as SARS-CoV2). The reason for this wide variation in how the virus affects humans has to do with how much the virus has changed over time. Often only small changes occur that allow the virus to infect people but result in only mild symptoms. Other times, such as with SARS, MERS and COVID-19, the changes that occur in the virus are large or in areas that the human immune system isn’t prepared for or isn’t equipped to defend against and this causes severe disease. Similarly, these changes also make it difficult to develop diagnostic tests and vaccines that are unique to the virus.
Latest COV-10 Developments as of 16 Mar 2020:
Worldwide 153,517 cases (+10,982), 5,732 (+343) deaths (WHO SITREP 55)
US 1,678 cases, 41 deaths
Laboratories approved to test for COVID-19 no longer need CDC confirmatory test.
CDC recommends for the next 8-weeks, organizations should cancel or postpone in-person events that involve 50 or more people.
HHS has complete initial worldwide modeling for the spread of the disease, making assumptions consistent with limited experience with the virus:
- At the current rate, the doubling time of cases will be 6.5 days
- 60% of population will eventually be infected
- 50% of those infected will be symptomatic (i.e. 30% of population)
- Of the symptomatic cases 3% will be hospitalized (higher for older age group)
- Of the symptomatic cases 0.25% will die (higher for older age group)