Coronavirus and Pandemics

So why won't we pass we legislation that protects the elderly.All these trillions, down the toilet. And so go the lives of old and sick.Cuomo sent the positive cases from the hospital to old people homes with negatives. Sick.Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.

Yeah, just pass legislation.It's not all that easy.I'm 71, somewhat obese, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, A-fib (seemingly fixed by a cardiac ablation).My daughter-in-law lives with me and teaches elementary school art. If she's called back to work, she'll be seeing near 200 kids per day. In a normal year we have an endless round of colds and sometimes flu during the winter.My 3-year-old granddaughter and 2-year-old grandson live with me and are both up for preschool, where they'll see about 20 other kids each.My son is fine, he's the stay-at-home dad.How do you intend to protect me? Wanna tell me how to convince a 2-year old and a 3-year old to keep a mask on? How do we prevent airborne transmission? Or contact transmission? Edited by JonF, : No reason given.

The solution I had in mind was NOT based on regulations, but spending money on programs.I would be happy to have the government build big mansions for a group of, say, 20 elderly folks to live in, until the threat passes. Keep a fair amount of isolation, as a rule, and have rigorous testing for residents and the well regulated visitors.We need to open the economy and protect the elderly BOTHNOTE that it is construction season, by coincidence. Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.

Republicans would never buy it. That would cost far more money than cannon fodder like us are worth to them.

Here's more in my continuing series on why you do not want to catch this virus, taken from Doctors express glimmers of hope as they try out new approaches against coronavirus.While it's not impossible it could happen earlier, in all likelihood there will not be a vaccine until early next year at the earliest. Even after a vaccine is developed, tested and deemed safe there will still be the problem of ramping up manufacturing to hundreds of millions of doses.The best that we can probably reasonably hope for is for a toolbox of drugs and treatments by fall that diminish the virus's risks to an acceptable level so that we can completely reopen the country and simply treat people as they catch it. In the meantime, this is a very dangerous virus, and here are some of the reasons why:

• The body's own immune system can be sent into overdrive, attacking the very body it is intended to protect.
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• The virus attacks the walls of the bloodstream, creating clots that can lodge in any organ and cause catastrophic and even fatal problems.
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• A partial list or organs the virus can attack: kidneys, liver, intestines, skin, brain.
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• The virus can cause unusual clots in patients as young as in their 30's and 40's.
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• The virus can cause "an unusual pattern of high carbon dioxide levels." This is one reason why one moment patients seem to be breathing comfortably on their own and the next are dying with a team of doctors trying desperately to save their lives.
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• If the virus attacks the kidneys and dialysis is required, something about the virus can cause dialysis machines to clog.
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• The virus can cause throat inflammation, an additional hinder to breathing.
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• "The havoc cause by the virus seems to last a long time - in some patients two, three or even six weeks."

This virus is not just the flu with a bigger whack. It's not even in the same virus family as the flu. It is virulent and dangerous at the current level of medical knowledge and expertise.--Percy

Here's today's graph of deaths per day from The Washington Post Coronavirus Page, 83,614 so far. It still appears to show a clear downward trend. They've added a 7-day moving average: Here's the bar graph of new cases from ArcGIS Dashboards Classic as of yesterday. There's still a clear downward trend in this graph too: Will this downward trend continue? Given that nothing has changed in terms of testing and contact tracing, and given that a vaccine is still far off, the number of cases should start ramping up again in another week or two. And given that no new treatments for those infected have become available, the number of deaths should begin ramping up within a few weeks after that.Other countries that began loosening up before we did are already beginning to see new outbreaks. There's no reason to expect that won't happen here. The Wisconsin Supreme Court just yesterday struck down the governor's stay-at-home order, and reports say that bars and restaurants are jammed. The eventual outcome is predictable.Here in New Hampshire reopenings have begun. Malls, retail stores, hair salons and golf courses reopened this week. Restaurants can open for outdoor seating next week. Beaches will remain closed. There's been no ruling one way or the other on public tennis courts, but most of the local courts are locked or the nets haven't been put up yet. Tennis clubs are closed, but a consortium of clubs in the state have appealed to the governor to reopen.--Percy

indeed, and the people should be tracked with the phone GPS locations so we can show the causes of new hotspots. While it is nice to see the downward trends this still means lots of people dying and not cured. What we have is an increasing population of people that have survived. We don't know if they are immune or can become carriers.What is the proportion of people who have survived from those that were positive?I won' feel completely safe until the death rate is near zero.

Another in my continuing series of why you do not want to catch this virus: Coronavirus May Pose a New Risk to Younger Patients: Strokes - The New York Times. This NYT article tells the story of 27-year old medical technician Ravi Sharma who was sheltering at home with the virus when he suffered a stroke. He spent a month in the hospital, more than half on a ventilator, and is still relearning how to walk and regaining his energy.--Percy

Another in the continuing series, "Why you do not want to catch this virus," again from the NYT: Opinion | Coronavirus Is Making Young People Very Sick. I Was One of Them. - The New York Times. This one's very moving. A couple excerpts:

quote:

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I want Americans to understand that this virus is making otherwise young, healthy people very, very sick. I want them to know, this is no flu.
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Maybe you don’t live in a big city. Maybe you don’t know anybody who is sick. Maybe you think we are crazy for living in New York. That’s fine. You don’t have to live like us or vote like us. But please learn from us. Please take this virus seriously.
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Many of my neighbors didn’t make it. I know because I heard the ambulances come for them late at night. The reports from the city’s heroic E.M.T. force suggest that for many of these New Yorkers, it was already too late.

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--Percy

One of the obvious questions about the coronavirus is what viral load is necessary to cause an infection. Viral load is the amount of virus taken in through a droplet or similar means. This comment from Can You Catch the Virus Outdoors? Here's What We Know - The New York Times offers a slight amount of clarification:

quote:

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The virus load is important, said Eugene Chudnovsky, a physicist at Lehman College and the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. A single virus will not make anyone sick; it will be immediately destroyed by the immune system. The belief is that one needs a few hundred to a few thousand of SARS-CoV-2 viruses to overwhelm the immune response.

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I also read a couple days ago that when a sample tests positive for the viral RNA that it doesn't tell you how much live virus there are. Dead virus still cause tests to indicate positive because of the presence of the dead virus's RNA. The article said that it is common for only one out of a thousand virus to be live when the test is positive.I would treat this information as interesting but not helpful because of how much information is missing. For example, it didn't say how much virus is live in a nasal swab versus on a grocery store cereal box a half hour after someone sneezed on it. That is, how fast does the virus die once outside the body? We already know that the virus can survive up to three days on plastic, but virus begin dying right away once outside the body. Is the decline in the number of live virus slow and gradual and mostly linear, or is it fairly rapid initially and mostly exponential?--Percy

Here's today's graph of deaths per day from The Washington Post Coronavirus Page. There is a clear downward trend: Here's the bar graph of new cases from ArcGIS Dashboards Classic as of yesterday. There's still a clear downward trend in this graph too: I did the grocery shopping this morning and the number of people wearing masks appeared little changed from last week. Almost everyone was wearing a mask. There were maybe 2 or 3 employees without masks, and maybe 2 or 3 customers.--Percy

That downward trend is driven by New York (particularly New York City) which has by far the largest number of cases and deaths and dominates those graphs. If you look at the graphs that exclude New York you will see a steadily rising trend. And some mid-western and southern states have rapidly rising trends (e. g., Iowa, South Dakota, Arkansas). Because of their small populations, they have little impact on the total US numbers, but on a per population basis, they are starting to show the worst trends in the US.(Can someone please explain how to use the EvC datadropsite to show a graph or image?)

I was about to post the same observation, though I also heard it brought up in the news (not in the Fake News Network).NYC and environs has been a significant contributor of the overall statistics (ie, raw data points), which by their sheer volume can swamp the analysis on the national scale. We need to also be looking at individual regions of the US to see what's happening there. Relative stability in major population centers on the coasts can easily mask alarming increases of cases in the rural MidWest and other less-populated regions which already lack the healthcare infrastructure needed to handle those cases.We need to see what's happened region-by-region. Until every region has been stabilized, nobody's safe.

I've been looking at the NY Times Coronavirus pages which are free for the duration.The Covid-19 Pandemic - The New York TimesThis particular page has state by state trends, map of hot spots by county level per capita, some articles on hot spots.For those who think that coronavirus is only a problem for the filthy cities, not for the clean living country folk, Dakota County Nebraska is a current hot spot due to massive infection rate at the local meat plant. The Nebraska rate is twice the highest any county in New York reached.World data and maps are also available.For me the scary exercise is to sort the table of cases and deaths by country and apply the highest rate to the US.
San Marino cases is 1 out of 52 people with deaths at 1 out of 824 peopleFor the 328,200,000 people in US that is 6.3 million infected and almost 400K dead.The rates are based on reported numbers so excess deaths for other causes or unidentified virus deaths would be even worse.

We have plenty of counties out here with no hospital, no clinics, and some with no doctors or nurse practitioners. My county, with ~16000 population, has run a whoppin’ 200+ tests, two of them positive. We have a prison here with ~1600 inmates and a bunch of guards. They report no Covid cases, but they also have not reported if they have done any testing there.Yeah, there’s a problem in the boonies of America. We’re going to find out how big a problem as this opening up continues. I’m staying in.