While lots of hospital workers in (Hubei Province) seem to have caught Covid19, they were at a grave disadvantage - they were treating ill people before the disease was identified and droplet precautions were urged. That gives our health care workers a little bit of an advantage - we know the precautions to use (or we think so!). While we aren’t perfect at infection control, we’re pretty good with terrible infections when we know ahead of time what to do.
WRT to asymptomaitc transmission - there’s a chance that there are asymptomatic infections (carriers, in common parlance), but no one can be sure. There’s just not enough data yet.
Either she means she has 97 ICU beds available TOTAL, or she’s blatantly telling a lie in saying she has 97 open ICU beds at any one time. No hospital in the USA has 97 open ICU beds. None. She probably means the hospital has a 97 ICU bed capacity
If a hospital stopped doing elective admissions and elective surgeries for a few weeks, that would open up a bit of total capacity. For hospitals that have backlogs created by not enough floor beds, which leaves pts in ICU longer than needed, cutting elective admissions could open a bunch of ICU beds. But “a bunch” these days might mean 4.
Transmissability has not yet been totally determined. The lack of any previous individual immunity, nor any herd immunity to the virus, might make transmissability seem far higher.
Why are we afraid and wanting desperately to prepare?
There’s this which I saw on the news today and found explained further on the STAT website. “The new case in California makes it clear the virus is spreading undetected in at least one area of one state. The woman is not believed to have traveled outside the country and had no contact with a known case. As her condition worsened — she is on a ventilator — health officials in California asked the CDC to test her for the virus. Because she had not been to China and had not been a contact of a known case, the agency said no.” This is in no way a result of fear mongering, this is something to be truly afraid of.
Not that we can see with current data. R0 of about 2.3, comparable to flu at 1.3-1.5. That number is very preliminary and will undergo lots of revisions.
You do not want to run out of that. In Japan, that is one of the first thing hoarders buy up in a panic - something which dates back to the oil shock of the 1970s.
Today, everyone flipped and ran out and cleared out all the shops. (I stocked up a month ago. Nothing excessive, but I’ll be fine and able to spare a roll or two to friends and neighbors.)
I cannot imagine any hospital have 97 excess ICU beds. They have got to be meaning a total capacity of 97 beds. The question is how many of those beds are unoccupied at any given time, which in most places will approach zero.
Yes, it’s possible to imagine frightening outcomes. It is also possible to imagine less frightening outcomes. The luridness of a particular scenario tells us nothing about how likely it is.
There does seem to be a good chance that covid-19 will become a real, non-theoretical thing in happy mutants’ lives. But that’s exactly why we should recognise at this point that overreacting is also a possibility.
I can imagine more horror stories of Turmp’s America overreacting to a disease than I can imagine for the disease itself.
This is true. It is also worth realistically evaluating this as a very real threat and making reasonable arrangements to minimize the impact on yourself, your family and your community. Unfortunately our leaders seem to have no settings outside of “nothing to see here, move along” and abject panic and terror. Panic is absolutely never productive, but refusal to deal with this thing is not necessarily better. Your comfort level is where you find it, but I feel better knowing that we have some cushion if things get bad.
Of course if Covid -19 does become a pandemic, we may be reduced to something like the medical care of 100 years ago. There aren’t enough hospital beds, medical staff, drugs, ventilators, or even masks if we end up with 14-20% of cases being serious enough to require medical intervention.
The problem with the flu vaccine is that flu viruses change very quickly. Due to production lead times (flu vaccine is tedious to make), when we need to decide what strains of virus this year’s flu vaccine should contain, it’s not easy to tell what the prevalent virus strains will be once the flu season actually comes around. Also, not enough people actually get the flu vaccine for herd immunity to be a factor – you’d be looking at 70% or so of the population for that to kick in. (Which doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be vaccinated because it does help to protect you as well as the people around you.)
A vaccine for the novel coronavirus is currently being tested on animals and may be available for people in a year or two. In the meantime we will have to hang in there. (The nice thing is that the new coronaviruses is one of seven types of coronavirus that we know of that can infect people. The others are MERS and SARS and four types of coronavirus that basically cause versions of the common cold. Who knows, if the Covid-19 vaccine pans out, perhaps we’ll get a vaccine against the common cold as a by-product?)
On the other hand, the Spanish Flu hit a very stressed population, because of the war, which would have had lowered immunity.
An interesting data point from the Chinese fatalities, they’re disproportionately older males – and it was noted that this is the demographic that smokes heavily, and thus has compromised respiratory systems.
Except that kids seem to be more resistant, and it is theorized that this may be because they typically have recently had other corona viruses (aquired, as any parent can attest, with regularity in the petri-dishes that are daycares and kindergartens) and are still carrying antibodies. Obviously this is just theoretical, but it does suggest that there may actually be some resistance in humans, even if it is a new form of virus.
Oh I’ve got bad anxiety, panic is pretty much my only setting. And you’re right, it is the least productive thing in the world. I wonder if I’ll need some Xanax in my prepper stash (luckily I’m already stocked for quite a bit but I don’t have 2 weeks worth of toilet paper).
I hope so. My daughter spent two nights in the hospital with the flu last year and that was scary enough (she was 3 at the time, and for the record, did have a flu shot). The bill was pretty scary too. Now she’s in preschool so maybe all these lovely germs we’ve had lately will come in handy (two kids at two different schools is just a rollercoaster of viruses).
That sort of thing can happen. Especially last year’s flu vaccine wasn’t really a great fit for the actual flu virus strains that were making the rounds, so it didn’t work out quite as well as in previous years.
Flu vaccination is always a roll of the dice, but that’s not a reason not to do it – even if the strains in the vaccine aren’t an exact match for the actual strains, chances are that if you do get the flu it’ll not be as bad as it would be if you weren’t vaccinated at all.
