Majority of Americans now say they approve of Trump's handling of coronavirus: poll

The Hill ^ | 03 20 2020 | Marty Johnson

[fireman15]

Thank you for your kind comment.

The most likely conclusion that will be revealed in the coming months for the area in East King County where my wife and I live is that the Chinese virus began spreading through the community here in December. The way that testing is conducted and more deaths will initially make it appear that the problem is getting worse, but in fact we are more likely to already be on the down slope side of the graph. Other areas, where the virus was not introduced until January or February may peak after us.

The hysteria is mostly based on worst case projections that are likely to be off by a factor of ten, twenty or more. The reason this thing spread so quickly through our community is that it has a long incubation period and so many people are asymptomatic or have symptoms so slight that they ignore them. Tens of thousands of people came back from affected areas of China and mixed with their ethnic population and then it branched out into the general population here. It seemed that we were having a pretty bad flu season but it was actually something new. It was not detected until the vulnerable people at the Life Care Center in Kirkland became infected that the actual virus was identified.

[SunkenCiv]

...in 2010 there were 684 million cases of norovirus, of which more than 200,000 people died. Dengue fever annually infects up to 100 million people and killed more than 40,000 in 2017. Even the seasonal flu, which can often be vaccinated against in many parts of the world, kills 300,000 to 650,000 people every year. It is not possible yet to estimate how many cases of the new coronavirus there will be by the end of this year, but they are highly unlikely to reach these dimensions.

Why coronavirus fears are disproportionate compared with other health risks



Uh-oh -- the chart shows "Wuhan coronavirus" and "Yellow fever", both racist terms. /s

[nwrep]

Thank you for your service and your story.

It is pathetic that those people were able to circumvent the travel ban so easily.

However, if one believes the statistics, the CFR (Case Fatality Rate) of this disease is 10 or 20 or 30 times worse than the common flu, and because of our lack of immunity to this, containment is needed. This is the expert opinion of every single virologist and epidemiologist who has chosen to opine on it. Some countries have disregarded those warnings knowingly or unknowingly, and the results can be seen in Italy and Iran.

This is at its heart a mathematical and statistical game. The virus will expand at a certain rate, and increase infections and deaths at a certain rate that exceeds the flu. One must figure out what to do about it, and each country has chosen extremely constrictive containment measures at great political and economic cost.

All of these are facts stated not by politicians and media figures, but by medical experts (virologists and epidemiologists) in the major countries. The politicians and media figures are repeating what the medical professionals are saying about this. So this is not driven by politicians, but rather by medical advice.

[fireman15]

This is at its heart a mathematical and statistical game. The virus will expand at a certain rate, and increase infections and deaths at a certain rate that exceeds the flu.

I agree, but the numbers you appear to be relying on are based on incomplete information and worst case scenarios. So far in almost every case the more complete the information, the less serious the numbers indicate this issue will become. The expert virologists and epidemiologists that you believe all support your catastrophic view of this problem typically do not, but they are very cautious about how they word their opinions and of course most of the media seek out those who are willing to make shocking yet unlikely predictions.

It may be more contagious than the flu largely because it has a long incubation period and approximately half of infected people have no symptoms and another 30% have symptoms that are so mild that they are able to ignore them, so people who are contagious to others. It may have a higher mortality rate than the flu, but we really do not have enough good information at this time to know for sure. More accurate numbers will become more available as time goes on, but we are still going to have people in charge of compiling the numbers who have a vested interest in not showing that their predictions were wildly exaggerated. I can tell you that the medical professionals that I have talked with personally mostly have a point of view that is fairly close to mine.

We have the example of Italy which has the oldest population, the worst run socialized medical system and the largest number of recent Chinese immigrants in all of Europe. They do not have enough ventilators to go around so their triage system denies life saving treatment to the old and people with medical histories that indicate they have poor chances of survival. It is a death sentence. There are many reasons why Coronavirus has spread more quickly in Italy than in other areas.

[fireman15]

typo: people who are contagious to others can be found out in the public.