What’s funny is that he complains about the free market charging a price for useful information. What a socialist!!
Most influenza viruses ( orthomyxoviridae) are spread through respiratory droplets. Influenza virus activity peaks in cooler months - there are a bunch of theories as to why, that mostly focus on behavior of humans during cooler months (ie, school, windows closed in houses, etc). But there’s no conclusive studies linking influenza outbreaks to temperature. It is known that influenza viruses live longer at slightly cooler room temperatures (72F vs 68F), but the epidemiology i have read did not state this was the proven reason for influenza outbreaks’ seasonality.
Corona viruses we have dealt with before (SARS and MERS) were also spread through respiratory droplets. While those droplets can live on surfaces, only airborn inhalation, or direct touching of the virus (ie, being coughed on, or touching a surface with fresh droplets from coughing/breathing) Seems to be causing infection. The data isn’t perfect, and there’s still questions about how long the virus survives on surfaces. But the CDC currently discounts that as a major vector.
Here is the main CDC page
And their “how it spreads” page
And the US infection count page:
highlights:
14 cases who got sick in the US - 12 from travellers, 2 who caught it from those twelve.
39 people were repatriated to the US and have tested positive (3 from Wuhan and 36 from the diamond princess cruise ship).
To give some comparison, my ER saw more people with influenza A THIS WEEKEND than have CorVid19 in the entire USA.
So the corona virus is pretty under control in the USA*. For now.
But… bc this is a novel virus (like H1N1 was a few years back) NO ONE has built in immunity. Anyone can catch it - there’s no cross immunity from past years (unless you happened to have caught and lived through MERS or SARS, and even then there’s no proff that you have any immunity, it is simply slightly sorta possible). Also, there is no vaccine. So even us vaxxers can catch this until someone invents a vaccine.
More Also:
From the WHO
“Most estimates of the incubation period for COVID-19 range from 1-14 days, most commonly around five days.”
Also from the WHO
"Studies suggest that coronaviruses (including preliminary information on the COVID-19 virus) may persist on surfaces for a few hours or up to several days. "
*Just bc Trump said something that is basically correct for this small moment in time, please do not take that to mean I support his presidency, intelligence, or decision making. But that part of his quote was pretty technically correct. For now.
A broken clock and all that.
the word “control” implies some sort of action which has been taken which has caused the current situation.
the action the administration* has taken of “travel bans” has been specifically called out by the most recent who panel as not useful in controlling the virus. and the action of overriding the quarantine to fly infected people back with uninfected people is the opposite of sane.
id suggest it’s not so much “under control” here, as simply we haven’t been exposed yet. there are after all advantages in being geographically isolated, even if connected via air travel.
*the people who developed infections here after traveling were cared for by local hospitals so far as i understand, and the administration has had no role in managing those people’s illnesses.
Yeah, I think people are systematically missing that the informational epidemiology of this situation is totally new. We’re not hearing about it the same way we heard about SARS (for example).
Reporting on plagues was pretty bad when news outlets were only competing with each other, but at least the more sober publications could slightly resist the lure of fearmongering one-upmanship. But now, thanks to f**book, they have a billion competitors in the war for our attention, and no one can stand against that tide. The NYT could try to play it cool, but their readers already know from aunts and coworkers that doom is moments away, so they’d just roll their eyes and click to Fox or CNN or whoever has the panic-inducing take they’re primed to demand.
So, I’m actively filtering anything I read about coronavirus through the knowledge that it will always be the worst possible interpretation that doesn’t totally contradict the facts.
@RickMycroft I’ve thought before about referring to Turmp as President Pakled, but I didn’t want it to be misinterpreted as racist remark
Nice summary.
The lack of actual known knowns of this virus makes any assumptions questionable. I have seen reports of incubation anywhere from 0 to 27 days, and recently there are reports of a possible 48 hour period of infectivity prior to onset of symptoms. And the truth is we just do not know yet. With mortality rates reported anywhere from <1% (China outside of Wuhan) to >20% (Iran) and up to 20% of those infected requiring intensive care, the potential is there for a truly bad outcome. But we just don’t know. We assume respiratory droplet spread, that seems to match the pattern best. If it works like influenza, we could be screwed. But it might not. Too many unknowns. I hate that.
This is very insulting to Pakleds.
May be the UV in sunlight, more than heat, though both may be a factor.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/10/18/658335490/grandma-was-right-sunshine-helps-kill-germs-indoors (more bacteria than viruses, actually, but interesting)
Virus study, looking at theoretical effect of sunlight on weaponized viruses, but relevant.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1280232/
Since sunlight helps kill virus, Seattle, Buffalo and Binghamton may be places to stay away from in an epidemic.
Agreed. As is so often the case in science and medicine, assumption is the mother of fuckup.
Why yes, i’ll trust the word of an man who said turbines causes cancer but asbestos doesn’t and was behind this brilliant moment
The patient zero that transmitted the virus from humans to collies has been identified as “enkidoodler”.
- Trump’s very first budget proposal contained proposed cuts to the CDC that former director Tom Frieden warned were “unsafe at any level of enactment.”
- Congress mercifully didn’t agree to any such cuts, but as recently as February 11 — in the midst of the outbreak — Trump proposed huge cuts to both the CDC and the National Institutes of Health.
- Perhaps because his budget officials were in the middle of proposing cuts to disease response, it’s only over this past weekend that they pivoted and started getting ready to ask for the additional money that coping with Covid-19 is clearly going to cost. But experts say they’re still lowballing it.
- In early 2018, my colleague Julia Belluz argued that Trump was “setting up the US to botch a pandemic response” by, for example, forcing US government agencies to retreat from 39 of the 49 low-income countries they were working in on tasks like training disease detectives and building emergency operations centers.
- Instead of taking such warnings to heart, later that year, “the Trump administration fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure,” according to Laurie Garrett, a journalist and former senior fellow in global public health at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Gotta love this gross incompetence…
Good News, everyone:
- didn’t claim the virus did not exist
- didn’t claim PRC developed it to harm the US
- didn’t claim it is Hillary’s fault
- didn’t claim it is Obama’s fault
- didn’t claim he (personally) invented a cure
Seriously, as things are, this is good news.
Currently.
I’d have thought he’d have embraced the freshly demised demographic and voted the grave yard.
But he will (almost certainly) embrace Rush’s conspiracy theory that it is a plot to weaken his reelection campaign. Just hide and watch.
But we got to the gub’mit like a BIDNESS!!! /s
And (like the guy from Miami who went to be tested after he thought he may have been exposed), insurance companies will refuse to pay and people will be stuck with large bills.
Other people will hear about this and say “fuck it” and go about their lives and some will infect others.
Our health care “system” is not at all set up to deal with things like this where public needs outweigh individual concerns.
