Posted on 03/17/2020 7:00:52 AM PDT by fireman15
OK, here are my questions. We had a perfect petri-dish coronavirus disease (COVID-19) experiment with the cruise ship “Diamond Princess”. That’s the cruise ship that ended up in quarantine for a number of weeks after a number of people tested positive for the coronavirus. I got to wondering what the outcome of the experiment was.
So I dug around and found an analysis of the situation, with the catchy title of Estimating the infection and case fatality ratio for COVID-19 using age-adjusted data from the outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship (PDF), so I could see what the outcomes were.
As you might imagine, before they knew it was a problem, the epidemic raged on the ship, with infected crew members cooking and cleaning for the guests, people all eating together, close living quarters, lots of social interaction, and a generally older population. Seems like a perfect situation for an overwhelming majority of the passengers to become infected.
And despite that, some 83% (82.7% – 83.9%) of the passengers never got the disease at all … why
(Excerpt) Read more at wattsupwiththat.com ...
Let”s all take a number to our heads and be scanned for the Virus
I’m no epidemiologist, but wouldn’t the fatality rate in the beginning of an epidemic be much lower than later on because all the advanced care, medical equipment, and healthy doctors and nurses is available and concentrated on few patients?
As the system gets more and more loaded, there is less and less care for each individual patient until you reach the triage point where the oldest and weakest patients get zero care.
Even the oldest people on Diamond Princess got the best available care in the hospitals. Today, the oldest infected Italians are told “there’s nothing we can do for you. Enjoy your slow death.”
Remember, the first doctor that saw this and sounded the alarm had seen only 4 patients and recognized this was something new and serious. Respiratory failure is how this disease is going to present as people are being told “stay home”.
I just now remembered my first experience with a real “blue person” in the ER in Panama at Georgia’s Hospital. A National Guard Unit had deployed into the Darien and a company of our guys supported them. Our guys took the Chloroquine. Someone on their team forgot to take care of their people and none ever asked what those pills our guys were taking were for. I was there the Saturday afternoon when they started rolling in with Malaria. Like you, I had seen “plenty of blue people”. Malaria impressed me. I knew in 2 seconds this was something new (to me). I’m sure this Chinese doctor was similarly impressed.
And. You can’t tell me in 25 years you never arrived at the ER with a blue patient? I can remember vividly at least several occasions getting a blue person out of the ambulance with pink foam spraying out of the ET tube.
Sorry for the typos!
To add to my previous post ~
Cruised mid - November for 17 days. Many stops throughout Italy.
CVS pharmacy clerks have done that for years. At my local one the lead tech often has two on. I don’t ask why. She is faster than a machine a filling scripts, amazing to watch.
Anyone who yells “hoax” at any rational analysis is part of the problem.
This article does not call the outbreak a hoax. It uses known, valid numbers to analyze the big unknown for corona - the infectivity rate, and the derivative mortality rate.
Italy has 400,000 legal Chinese workers just in the affected areas and an unknown number of illegals. They have the worst run socialized medical system in all of Europe and their population is by far the oldest. Not to mention that Italians have a long tradition of grabbing and kissing each other. Need I go on? Because I can.
I agree. President Trump’s hands are tied. He had no choice other than to do what he has done.
Great find! Thanks for posting that!
And Italians, like much of Europe, have high alcohol consumption and smoke, both of which compromise the immunity system
I work in hospitals exclusively. I will be happy to keep people posted... I have already been blasted for my refusal to panic.....
In 2 more weeks of economic devastation, but less deaths than seasonal flu...
Media- “guess that was a false alarm (relative to the risk), our bad, so sad”
Economy in depression.
Media- “Trump’s fault, we’ll never recover from this depression, orange man bad... how about that Russia thing”.
It was our department's policy to over oxygenate for most of my career. We brought dead people in to the hospital that were pinked up with aggressive CPR. In the last few years it was decided that some of our patients were having poor outcomes because we raised their O2 levels too much.
But sure some people still looked blue when we delivered them; I just never heard people use the term “blue people” to describe them. But we tended to hang out more with the ambulance and medic crews than the ER staff so maybe I missed something. I understand your point and am sorry for reacting the way that I did.
And it will backfire on them "bigly". Trump will be viewed as a successful "war president" in spite of the economic downturn. Remember FDR's unprecedented number of terms. Americans won't "change horses" if Trump is remotely successful in ameliorating the disease course.
Thanks for doing it. I remember when I was a Neurosurgery Resident we started seeing all these middle aged guys come in with cerebral toxo and no one knew what it was. It was clearly contagious. I remember one guy whose mother wouldn’t go in his room without gloves. Before we even started isolating them. Nurses asked me if I wasn’t concerned about getting it in the OR. It hadn’t really even occurred to me and I remember thinking, “it’s the job”. You asked for it. How many doctors died from malaria? That was my attitude all along. It’s a privilege.
Now I’m retired I wonder, though. Maybe I should have thought about my family a little more. Maybe I was just lucky I got away with it. You are taking risks. There’s one doctor on a vent right now over it. Your perspective changes over time, maybe.
Exactly.
Blue people is something that occurred to me yesterday. Like with the malaria deal. How many US doctors have seen malaria? I have. One afternoon I saw a whole bunch of malaria. Malaria impressed the hell out of me. This disease impressed that first doctor that recognized it.
Maybe. I’m a relative oldtimer as well. I had the same experience as you did. When I was in med school there was something called GRID (gay related immunodeficiency). By the time I was an intern it was called AIDS. We still weren’t sure of the causative agent or how it was transmitted but knew it was uniformly fatal and i. a rather nasty way.... I was admitting 2 and 3 patients a day with it. If i couldn’t handle it I would have quit then.
it is part of practicing medicine and you learn to deal with it or you get out. At this point I am high risk. I am 60 with asthma. I’m still not afraid my life is firmly in Gods hands and I trust Him. That said so far I have not see. anything that justifies the widespread panic we are seeing
CVS pharmacy clerks have done that for years.
It is hard to say what impressed the first doctor who saw it. Even in this country every news story that I ever was involved in was somehow screwed up by the media even the newspapers. As a young person before I was hired by the Fire Department I used to have lunch with an old guy who had once been the editor of our local newspaper. He told me that journalism was dying 40 years ago.
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