Posted on 03/17/2020 8:05:53 AM PDT by Paladin2
Good news.
Sounds like it wasn’t the CV-19.
Thanks for the info again. I made a screenshot of this post and your earlier one, and went to the CDC link you provided. Yeah, I don’t think we’ll see apocalyptic numbers as some in the health field are predicting. There will be plenty of debate when all this has ended!
No fever either, but I did spend the greater part of one day in bed under a mountain of covers.
The living will bury the dead. BAU since the last ice age at least.
In epidemiology, a disease vector is any agent which carries and transmits an infectious pathogen into another living organism; most agents regarded as vectors are organisms, such as intermediate parasites or microbes, but it could be an inanimate medium of infection such as dust particles.
There are more than 200 cold viruses. Here are the most common cold viruses:
Rhinovirus - Cause 10-40% of colds
Coronavirus - Cause about 20% of colds
RSV and parainfluenza - Cause about 20% of colds
Note: There are more than 30 kinds of coronavirus, but only three or four affect people.
There are also a lot of viruses that doctors haven't identified. About 20%-30% of colds in adults are caused by these "unknown" bugs.
What remains unknown is if summer will make it dissipate:
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?
I know I have throw a lot at you, so I will stop here for sure. 8>)
I mean, this is clear, right? We can’t vaccinate anybody for at least a year. I happen to think a lot of people have actual immunity, but we don’t know that yet. We can get immunity by getting the virus and building up antibodies, but that requires that we catch it, which means it must spread to us first.
Or, we can try to keep it from spreading. We can’t eliminate it, not with thousands of people in each of 100 different countries having it; no matter how much we isolate, it will spread. If we locked down the entire world for 4 weeks, it would probably be gone, but we can’t do that.
But if we keep it from spreading now, it will spread as soon as we stop trying to contain it. Do we keep people isolated, or go to less intrusive measures, that is the question.
In the summer, spread should be a lot less, but do we just let it run it’s course? We go back to business as usual, so we don’t all go broke, and accept that we’ll have full hospitals for the entire summer, but by the fall, 100 million of us will be essentially vaccinated?
Does the virus mutate to a harmless type, and since we can’t test for it because if isn’t doing symptoms, it spreads and we all get that one? That would be the optimal outcome. I happen to think there is a version that is like that, and that it is possible that up to 98% of us will never get sick from this virus. That 98% number is a guess, but I can run numbers that make that entirely consistent with every actual number we have before us right now, including China, Iran, and South Korea.
My hope is we quarantine for a month, ease up, the summer months keep the spread low enough nobody panics, the old people keep protecting themselves, and the virus sweeps through the young population, without hardly anybody noticing, because 99.9% of the cases we are seeing in people under 30 are like the common cold.
Then in the fall, when we prep for an uptick, we don’t get one, because 20% of us are already “vaccinated”.
None of this will happen while we are in severe isolation, it won’t spread enough. Unless it already has a mutation that is so benign that people get it, spread it in their small circle, never notice it, and they spread it to their small circles.
Which is why I hope we do some random testing protocol in a month, to see what percentage of the population might have been exposed — except I think random testing only finds active cases, not whether someone already fought the disease and won.
While we protect all of our over-70 population from this, 1.8 million of them will die anyway. Probably 30% of those who died in the nursing home in Washington were going to die this year of their underlying illnesses.
everybody dies. If an 85-year-old with COPD dies this year from pnemonia caused by CV, they won’t die next year from pnemonia caused by the flu.
If we get a good treatment for the worst cases, meaning we find a treatment that cures 90% of the serious/critical cases, and reduces hospital stays to an average of 3 days, this gets the ICU and ventilator problem solved. At that point, I think we let the virus rip. Old people protect themselves until they can get a vaccine, and the rest of us just get the CV, build natural immunity, and move on.
The ONLY reason we care about this thing is that for the 10% that get really sick, they don’t die right away, 90% can be save, but it takes 2 weeks on a ventilator in an ICU bed, and we just don’t have that many of them. If we had a million ICU beds, we would probably accept the death rate.
I don’t believe the graphs, for most of this country.
We are like 50 small countries. We have two countries right now that are “severe”, and neither are close to what Italy is seeing.
We have one country that managed to avoid the whole thing, because apparently west virginians are backwards hicks that never travel to italy.
We have 40 countries that will never have a serious outbreak, and unlike EU countries, will happily lend their equipment and hospital beds to patients from the other countries that need them.
We also can drag up to 220,000 ventilators into service, and that’s before we pay manufacturers to ramp up, which they are already doing anyway. Apparently making 10,000 ventilators is a big deal though.
I’m waiting for some science geek to post plans for a 3-d printed ventilator. :)
I’m seriously waiting for the first “how to convert a CPAP to a ventilator using common materials”, because we have 8 million people who use CPAP machines, and I bet 4 million of them are NOT using them, because they hate them, and I bet we could make another 4 million if we wanted.
It is not the deaths that are making us isolate. It is the fear that we run out of hospital beds, and that people die who would not have otherwise died.
We are somewhat crass people, but not that crass. Plus, if a person dies of pnemonia, we accept it. If we hear that a person died because they were refused treatment because some politician didn’t do something and we ran out of hospital beds, the politician will be gone.
So, we have to endure this stupid isolation for a month, in the hopes that it will slow the curve enough that when we lift it, the number of cases only goes up slowly, and we can handle it.
Meanwhile, now that we are protecting nursing homes (Trump directed NHS to do full inspections of old folks places to make sure the disaster in washington is not repeated, it looks like the number of serious and critical cases we are getting is extremely low. We seem to have a LOT of somewhat younger people picking up the virus, not very many old people (the opposite of Italy), so we are not using hospitals as much, and maybe we won’t ever.
I assume the “good reason” was that they saw Trump was going to shut off flights here, that the world was against it, and that a lot of smart people told them it was stupid.
Boris may have actually been right, but if his plan failed, he’d have killed his entire political party. I imagine they don’t want that.
And the problem with burn-thru is, it is an excellent strategy to get to the other side, but if you are halfway through the pain, and someone announces a treatment that fixes 90% of your critical patients, you look like an idiot.
I saw a study suggesting of the total cases, we only know about 32%, and the other 68% are people who are infected and have no symptoms or such minor symptoms they didn’t even think about it.
I’ve also run numbers showing that if you had a 98% immunity, and a 2% death rate for those who were not immune, you’d see numbers exactly like what we are seeing from China and South Korea. When Italy breaks their curve, I am betting their numbers will come in under my calculations, but this doesn’t mean I’m right, it is just statistics.
That is what I am waiting for, a nationwide random sampling of anti-body tests, to see how many of us actually had the virus and never knew.
You run into problems when you begin to utilize subjective, personal measurements. What is your threshold for "crass"; is it any different from my opinion that we shouldn't put people in nursing homes? Why not spend hundreds of $billions affording the elderly with continued, participatory lives? Oh, you say there's some arbitrary age, maybe 75-80, were we diminish direct, individual support and begin warehousing them? OK, well, you have your number and I have mine.
Ok, for arguments sake, I accept your argument that it's not primarily CV deaths, but severe illness that, due to excess demand, may result in higher than usual mortality rates. Please be aware that I'm well versed in the logic - if you check my posting history, I spent a lot of time attempting to educate people on these very issues of exponential growth.
So, we get back to the essential cost-benefit analysis, which in your estimation is "crass" if it surpasses a certain, arbitrary threshold. May I ask what your opinion is about government leaders, who 60-70 years ago calculated expected casualty rates in the event of nuclear war with the USSR. Were they "crass" in addressing this fundamental, existential issue, all the while making preparations for government continuity? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_government_continuity_of_operations
At some point, all the adults are going to have to put on their big-boy pants, and have a real, meaningful discussion about the price of freedom. Are we to compromise our core civil liberties, including private property, freedom of assembly/movement, due process, etc for an exchange of presumed safety? If we were never going to accept Soviet victory/domination at any price, then why would we accept a virtual collective gulag guarded by recently empowered bureaucrats?
I'm not necessarily dismissing the prospect of 1-5-10-15 million dead, but who/why were leaders from previous generations able to make these kinds of decisions with our continued freedoms protected for posterity in mind?
We had to destroy the village in order to save it. 67-68 ‘Nam.
VDH wrote a good article today describing how the cure can be worse than the disease. We are allowing the technocrats of Deep State to drive public policy. I remain skeptical of the data and the modeling. We are being stampeded into some very bad decisions.
IMO expanded testing in the US will reveal that the Coronavirus is not much different than the generic flu. A bit more deadly and infectious, but not warranting the extreme measures now being undertaken.
We are all “Crass”, it means we will entertain cost/benefit analysis, even if it means people die.
But my “that crass” was specifically dealing with choosing a path that would purposely lead to a shortage of treatment, when there was another path that would not. And that does not mean that doing that would actually be the wrong choice, it’s just that I don’t think the public as a whole would accept the daily stream of “my mother died sitting in a hospital bed waiting for a ventilator” stories, and they would assign blame to someone for that, even if you convinced them that the alternative was they would be begging on the streets.
It’s the same logic that doomed some health care reform, because in the end, no matter how much you think people should be responsible for their own lives, you will never convince the majority of americans to allow someone to die on the sidewalk in front of an emergency room, simply because they bought a big screen TV instead of insurance.
Did the Cold war planners quibble over 5-15-50% mortality rates in a war gamed nuclear exchange? As the projected numbers got higher and higher, was there a point where they collectively decided that it would be preferable to live under Soviet rule? Did they ever contemplate telling the American people that, actually, there was a certain price where freedom was too dear?
That's why I allow the most extreme measures for the sake of argument. It's not the potential gross number of dead and damaged, it's the destruction of a way of life established - with the sacrifice of millions - to protect and promote individual liberty and freedom.
Once you get people to begin thinking & agreeing along these lines, you've won 95% of the debate. The rest is easy; just frosting on the cake. As the "real" (lower) numbers begin to come in, we'll see public sentiment abandon support for top down imposed controls (quarantines, curfews and travel) and begin to embrace personal responsibility. Give people the necessary capabilities to make their own informed decision about acceptable risk, while working quickly to establish care facilities for the expected casualties.
Which is why this type of decision needs a national discussion, and not a unilateral, top down command.
People accepted controls during WWII because **Congress** - the voice of the People - declared war, and by so doing voluntarily accepted the resulting outcomes.
But that could have been changed at any point by the electorate. Their lives, their choices.
So too this time around. Trump better get on the ball about enabling personal choice and responsibility before the push back really begins to gather steam.
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