I’ve got mostly reasonable responses. Not panic, but what might we do questions. Perhaps it’s because the local small town college has 6 students back on campus from China and they decided NOT to quarantine for the incubation period. Because it’s so close, it’s been a bit easier to discuss. We have an insider monitoring to let us know at once if one of them gets sick.
In the larger, nearby university city, I also hear it discussed both as the question how serious is this and then as the what should I do now, with no cases locally.
We do have suspected carriers locally and a know case about 100 mi away. People seem to be waiting 2 weeks to see if there are secondary cases. Medical facilities are asking 1) have you traveled and 2) are you sick? if so how. It’s too bad we don’t systematically segregate emergency rooms into sick areas and injured areas. Nothing like breaking a bone and catching something from the emergency room.
Of course in a major epidemic, even if you did try to separate out those with symptoms, people would just lie to stay out of the quarantine area.
The corona expert is cited as posting the following:
“has unusual middle segment never seen before in any coronavirus. 4) Not from recent mixing. 5) That mystery middle segment encodes protein responsible for entry into host cells.— Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) January 28, 2020
https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1222010300859371522
At the same time, zero hedge has an unbelievable mind blowing report of how a Chinese corona virus expert was hired to study specifically that same DNA segment after being hired to study the very narrow area of “bats to research the molecular mechanism that allows Ebola and SARS-associated coronaviruses to lie dormant for a long time without causing diseases.” at a brand new P4 facility about 20 miles away from the alleged “source” of the virus. I normally dont believe most of what is posted in ZeroHedge but this is seemingly black and white, and shows the actual job posting notice from the Virology Institute located a few subway stops away from the bat soup that non-experts instantly blamed for creating the unusual new virus.
This is serious information. Either this is CIA planted information to attack China, or it means what the deductive logic implies. It will be very interesting to see if the bat corona virus researcher in Wuhan gets suicided, unfortunate accident or simply disappears without explanation.
I am sure that many already understand this, but I’ll point it out again.
When someone say X number out of Y number of patients died giving a fatality rate of Z%. The denominator Y, the population group studied, has to be defined clearly.
Is the denominator Y people who:
-were slightly sick, but not sick enough to seek medical care. (Yeah, I coughed twice....) -sick enough to go to the doctors office with a symptoms complex suggestive of this disease and were diagnosed clinically. -sick enough to go to the doctors office and had clinical and lab confirmation of etiologic agent. -sick (or scared) enough to check into the emergency department. -sick enough to be admitted to the hospital. -sick enough to be admitted to the ICU. -sick enough to be transferred to the regional tertiary care hospital specializing in that disease.The excellent Lancet article is this last group--people from a tertiary care hospital specializing in the disease.
There was very little information on this in the article, but I was able to determine:
- age 60+: 7 deaths / 37 patients = 19%
- age 59-: 4 deaths 62 patient, 6.5%
The medical ICU I work has only a capacity of 20 beds. We can float patients to other units but it is very limited. We were at max capacity when H1N1 it, like movies about pandemics and the numbers of sick were not that bad. There is no cushion if numbers were worse. Still, most of our patients HAD other health problems. So if you are not immune suppressed or morbidly obese don’t worry about being in the ICU, you’re not gonna be there. Your bigger worries will be how other worldly functions will go on without a hitch.
I want to thank John Barry for taking the time to speak about this, and also thank Adam for taking the time to interview him. I LOVED The Great Influenza. I learned so much not just about flu but about the whole arc of medical science in US history. I tried to get everyone I knew to read it. They were mostly just strangely uninterested. Weirdos.
Jesus.
I did have the passing thought that perhaps I should find someone infected and get the process started before access to all the ICU beds is gone.
I’m 72 years old with breathing issues from radiation therapy 7 years ago. I am self-isolating on a rural farm. If I get the Coronavirus I do not think I will survive, hospital or not. If there are no respirators there is little chance of survival for a person like me. I am prepared to meet the Lord, and that brings me the most comfort and security I could want.