China has every reason to lie about its involvement in the virus and the US is in the middle of a presidential election that the news outlets have a stake in. So I don't think we can believe anything we hear. I don't mean that everyone is lying to us but that we don't know who we can believe. Since what we hear on the news is almost always way worse than the facts suggest, I am thinking that it's not as bad as they want us to believe. We can't know, though. When they lie to us about everything else, even the weather, we can only guess or put trust in people who have proven untrustworthy.
Today, I received an email from our Representative (probably sent to all registered voters) and it said that yes, the virus will spread, (just like any flu or cold virus does), and so far , it has not been as serious as they thought it might be, and no worse than a cold of flu would be , except for someone who is elderly with other health issues, or even younger, but with breathing/lung issues. What I have read is that the ones who died in Seattle were elderly, over 80+ years old, and in a nursing home due to their poor health; so likely that any kind of virus would have been the same kind of problem with them. It does worry me about New York sending out National Guard to quarantine a whole area though. Once they start doing that, we could have more areas quarantined, whether it was necessary or not. Does anyone know why it was necessary to send the National Guard in to enforce the quarantine ? https://www.rt.com/usa/482782-national-guard-coronavirus-cuomo/
My boy came home to-day with a flyer from the school about the corona virus with basic information. I put it with the other flyers that have come home in the last few years on Chikungunya virus, Dengue virus, Zika virus, Malaria. We have them plus many more and Dominican Republic population is still growing.
Until they get a handle on what the death rate actually would be here, in the US, they are being (perhaps) overly cautious. Suppose the death rate is only 1%. If 50,000 people die every year from flu, then 500,000 would die, on average, from COVID-19. If the rate were really 3.4%, like preliminary data suggested, then 1.7 million people would die. That's a heck of a lot of people either way. They only have data from China, Korea, Italy, Iran to go on, and they don't know how reliable it is. This started in early December in China, and we did not begin testing until February, and still aren't up to speed. Imagine if all the sudden hospitals were inundated with patients that need intensive care. Imagine how difficult it would be just to quarantine people. What if the health care providers become infected? The sad thing is, if their measures were successful, people will just say it was all a hoax to begin with. You can't win for losing.
People who are recovering from the virus describe it as being much like any other mild to medium to severe cold. For most people, it doesn't seem that it requires any heroic efforts or breakthrough new medicines. They say that rest and plenty of Vitamin C does the trick for those who are otherwise reasonably healthy. Besides political and media-promotional reasons, the fuss seems to be concentrated on the ease at which it is spread, given a long incubation period. However, I don't think I have ever gotten through a winter without catching at least one cold. By the way, the common cold is a coronavirus and its relationship to the seasons is uncertain, although it may be related to the fact that people in northern areas tend to suffer from the stress of extreme winter conditions, and there is a theory that our immune systems don't work as well in cold temperatures. Plus, those who do not remain in their own houses during the winter might tend to congregate indoors, at restaurants or indoor sports, school, and church events, where they can catch the virus from others. It might also be that some of these viruses are suppressed by higher temperatures. Of course, no one knows whether this new strain of the coronavirus is going to be seasonal or not. I am still fairly certain that we're mostly hearing about it because it's the political season.
Again, just to put it into perspective. Of course, more and more people are going to be found to have it, given that, due to the scare, more people are going to be tested for it. The CDC estimates that most adults catch a cold 2-3 times a year, yet we don't panic.
While we were at my wife's PCP yesterday, a check-in clerk told us that she isn't worried at all about the virus. "I don't get caught up in all of the hype about it. Will conduct my life as usual." She appeared to be from the Millennial Generation. Come to find out, very few people here watch local or national news and just seem not to care about what's happening with this virus. That could definitely turn out to be a bad thing.
What I'm wondering about: A person gets tested for the virus and it comes back negative, who's to say they won't get the virus later?
Any virus is unwelcome at any time. There has never been a good time for a virus and a disease. A harmful virus is a nuisance whatever you may just be doing or expecting. If it's not an election then it's way more important things than an election and for millions of people these are football matches, for example. Just because there is that viral threat there're now gonna be a lot of ghost games, which is regarded as the real catastrophy. A virus can be as fatal as it may be, soccer games are always and under any circumstances more important than anything else in the world. There mustn't be ghost games in national leagues. IOW, let's first have the soccer games (and carnival) and then we might or might not care about the virus. Only when players got infected they finally stopped Champions League competition as of today. Catastrophic conditions in Italy, a country cordoned off completely. Health care system facing breakdown. They simply can't stop the virus spreading and the mortality rate is way too high. Breaking news: Patients aged 80 will not be treated any longer. A shortage of antibiotics in Europe. Clinics are being forced to produce at least some of them themselves for their own use. Outsourcing its production and relying on just two factories in China and India has come home to roost. Much better data in Asian countries close to China: Vietnam, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan due to early and determined countermeasures.
During the 2009-2010 swine flu (H1N1) epidemic, nearly a billion and a half people caught the disease, with a global population of less than seven billion. The swine flu resulted in the deaths of 12,469 Americans. Most people in the US don't even remember it today, although they may recall having heard of it. Professional sports leagues didn't cancel their seasons and, states didn't ban public gatherings, and, while the media reported on it, they assured their listeners that things were well under control. This is because one of their favorite Democrats was in office, so they did their best to ensure their viewers and their listeners that the government had their backs. Yet, 12,469 Americans died. The difference between then and now is that the media's most hated president, Donald Trump, is in office and it's an election year. Despite the fact that the US was acknowledged to have been better prepared than most other countries, you wouldn't know that from the media, since they are saying just the opposite. By the way, today the CDC refers to the swine flu as very rare, with fewer than 20,000 cases per year in the US. How many cases of COVID-19 have been diagnosed in the US? Every day, we will hear of more people being diagnosed with COVID-19, but this is mostly because more people are being tested every day, as the test kits are made available, and as the hype scares people into seeking medical attention whenever they get the sniffles. The more people who are tested, the more people who will be diagnosed with it. In a sensible world, this would be a good thing. In this election year, it's used to foster more panic. This too will pass, and I don't know that the media is going to be able to keep it up all the way to the election, so I expect they'll get as much play out of it as they can but, come summer, when the Coronavirus is on the wane, they'll come up with something else that we're all supposed to panic about, and most people will dutifully comply.
Well, Ken, with what is being cancelled, and will be cancelled, there must be something to this panic. Or, let's put it this way, I've never washed my hands with soft-soap and put hand sanitizer on as much as I have been.
Yesterday I heard an explanation for all the seemingly drastic precautions that makes more sense. It's to slow down the spread of this virus so there won't be a huge peak of cases all at once, which we won't have the capacity to handle. Then hopefully some will recover as new ones become infected and we can cope with the serious cases. It seems they are implying that a large percentage of people WILL eventually be infected. Also heard that people have become somewhat immune to those viruses that are associated with the annual flu, because they are related, and so many have had the flu over the decades. They claim this one is new and different, and they don't know enough about it yet. I wish they would explain why it is different in more detail, even if you couldn't understand it completely. Whether this virus is different or not, I would bet ONE DAY a virus will come along that will be catastrophic, unless they develop some new approaches. Maybe not in our lifetimes.