Replies

Coronavirus: Italian’s chilling warning to the world as he urges ‘don’t do what we did’

Something does not add up completely with the Italian situation. Over 60 million people live in Italy. During the 2017 - 2018 flu season “the number of influenza-attributable excess deaths was 24,981”, from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971219303285

As of two days ago it was reported there were 1255 deaths this year from the Coronavirus during this flu season. Did we have the same type of breathless reporting during the 2017-18 flu season when there were 20 times more deaths from the flu?

Why didn't an infectious resperatory illness. with nearly the same symptoms that caused approximately 20 times more deaths cause the same type of chaos? Something does not add up.

"Why didn't an infectious resperatory illness. with nearly the same symptoms that caused approximately 20 times more deaths cause the same type of chaos?"

The answers to questions like that are simple for those who have had enough time to search around for information and process that information analytically and not emotionally. Many people don't have the time.

The estimates from extrapolations for flu statistics were concluded long after the end of the flu season. The coronavirus epidemic is only trying to get started, while governments try frantically to stop it.

Why are they so afraid? A very high percentage of people with symptoms are needing hospitalization in Italy, for example, and they're not all old. Ventilation is for people under age 60 there in some places now, if those policies haven't been further changed in the last day or so to fit new situations.

As for here, in the U.S.A.? We don't know. Maybe our weather or something else in our environment will slow it down. We won't know, until the further along one way or another. Find today's numbers of positives and negatives for your state, and check those every day.

The solutions for each of us to know what to do are not so simple. Each of us have different situations (older people or people with conditions in households, owners of restaurants employing drug addicts, medical workers terrified about meeting more infected patients than usual, etc.). The best that I can offer is to avoid fear enough to watch the situation, and be ready to make hard personal decisions if necessary.

I hope our weather will be too humid then too warm for the virus to continue spreading. We'll see.

The best that I can tell from reading about situations in places with large outbreaks is this. An outbreak will happen in a community with a hospital. The cases with severe symptoms and bodies pile up there.

It scares the people who see it firsthand. Can’t stop them from telling others. Other people in that community and people in surrounding communities button up and try to avoid catching it.

A few other communities are affected more or less the same way. After a certain threshold is reached (varies from individual to individual in authority), a national government tries to shut down the spread. Increasing restrictions follow. That wasn’t done with any of the many flu strains.

Hope that helps.