Coronavirus Outbreak

[PegLeg45]

My cousin's daughter is a nurse (in north GA) and tested positive earlier this week. She also exposed her four kids but so far none show symptoms. She reported today that her symptoms were milder than many others and she is already feeling better.
Many healthy people who get the virus are reporting mild symptoms compared to something like the flu virus which seems to have more symptoms than C-19.


As a side note: Albany, GA (about 35 miles west of me) just jumped to the #4 C-19 hotspot for deaths per capita. Mainly attributed to the fact that after the PotUS and governor made the shelter-in directives the idiot inhabitants of the metro area (just under 90k) proceeded to have block parties and massive cookouts and basically disregarded any and all requests by authorities to take precautions.
While I am thoroughly convinced that some of the instituted measures were over-hyped, panic-led and less effective than thought, I also feel that many of the personal precautions that we as individuals can take (sanitizing and hand washing and avoiding unnecessary physical contact etc) is essential in mitigating spread.....and Albany did none of it.
Like I said.... IDIOTS.

[TAB]

My cousin's daughter is a nurse (in north GA) and tested positive earlier this week. She also exposed her four kids but so far none show symptoms. She reported today that her symptoms were milder than many others and she is already feeling better.
Many healthy people who get the virus are reporting mild symptoms compared to something like the flu virus which seems to have more symptoms than C-19.


As a side note: Albany, GA (about 35 miles west of me) just jumped to the #4 C-19 hotspot for deaths per capita. Mainly attributed to the fact that after the PotUS and governor made the shelter-in directives the idiot inhabitants of the metro area (just under 90k) proceeded to have block parties and massive cookouts and basically disregarded any and all requests by authorities to take precautions.
While I am thoroughly convinced that some of the instituted measures were over-hyped, panic-led and less effective than thought, I also feel that many of the personal precautions that we as individuals can take (sanitizing and hand washing and avoiding unnecessary physical contact etc) is essential in mitigating spread.....and Albany did none of it.
Like I said.... IDIOTS.I

Sounds like the idiots in my home town, they all kept going to church and even upped thr number of meetings.  Out of a congregation  of about 500, 70 of them died from it.   All of thrm were over 65.


Dont get me wrong i think most of what we are doing is ineffective, but stopping 100s of people intermingling  several times a week is not one of those things.   Common sense is not very common.

[les snyder]

if I had a better crystal ball, now would be the time to tell your college bound kids to look into the field of epidemiology... there is going to be a 24/7 monitoring and reporting staff withing every US Embassy and Legation around the world, with their own secure dedicated reporting line

and never again rely on the WHO for intelligence

[Big Frank]

The CDC has a Coronavirus Self-Checker where you just check the boxes for things like what symptoms you have, if you've been around people with COVID-19, are you a healthcare worker, etc., and it advises you what to do. I got an email from Blue Cross today saying they're waiving fees for COVID-19 testing even if it's done out of network, and they're waiving some other fees and things too. I think I'll call my doctor tomorrow and see what she says about getting tested. If she can't do I'll go somewhere else because I want to know why this cough just won't go away. And if I have COVID-19, I don't want to give it to my family or friends, or anyone for that matter. Well, maybe I'd like a couple of people who've done me wrong to suffer.

The problem in the U.S. is we were never prepared for an epidemic, much less a pandemic, even though doctors and scientists at WHO, CDC, and elsewhere kept saying it's not a matter of if, but when, it happens. This is a walk in the park compared to what the next outbreak could be like. We won't be ready for that one either. Whoever got it this year isn't likely to have built up any kind of immunity to the next one either because viruses mutate so rapidly. It isn't likely to kill half of the world's population like the Black Death, but it could kill 50 million like the Spanish Flu.

[MikeBjerum]

How simple it is for a hotspot to get established:

In February, family members gathered for a Chicago-area funeral. A family friend who had been out of state attended and was just a bit sick with mild respiratory symptoms.

Before long, 16 people between the ages of 5 and 86 had been infected with the novel coronavirus (seven confirmed and nine probable), and three had died.

The CDC report begins the night before the funeral. The traveling friend ? dubbed ?Patient A1.1? as the first patient in the first transmission ?generation? in the first cluster discovered ? shared a takeout meal eaten from common serving dishes with two family members of the deceased at their home. The meal lasted about three hours.

At the funeral, Patient A1.1 hugged the friends who had been at the dinner and other family members to ?express condolences.?

Two days later, one of the dinner hosts showed symptoms of the coronavirus. Two days after that, the other host got sick, too. A third family member who had hugged Patient A1.1 at the funeral also got sick.

Sign up for our Coronavirus Updates newsletter to track the outbreak. All stories linked in the newsletter are free to access.

Around the same time, Patient A1.1, who was then still experiencing mild respiratory symptoms, attended a birthday party with nine other people. They hugged and shared food at the three-hour party. Seven of the attendees soon became ill.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/04/08/funeral-birthday-party-hugs-covid-19/

[Sponsor]

[MikeBjerum]

Three videos - Watch the last first, and then the first as you scroll through (that is the order they were posted over the week.

http://wgntv.com/news/coronavirus/cook-county-prepares-refrigerated-warehouse-as-makeshift-mourge/

[PegLeg45]

The problem is, the exact same thing with hot-spots also happen with the flu to an extent...even with vaccines because the vaccine every year only covers the top couple of strains that the "experts" feel will be most prevalent.
All things on the table, the flu every year will still kill six times more people than this virus. So what are we going to do when flu season starts up this year, shut down everything like they did with this because by CDC stats the flu is more deadly?

Heck, the surgeon general stated that while we absolutely do need to be cautious (and I do agree) and take the best common sense measures we can but cigarette smoking will kill more people in the US this year than the Wuhan virus.

Many experts feel the virus was already here last year before Christmas because of so many folks reporting that they experienced the symptoms while testing negative for the flu. Doctors chalked it up to severe upper respiratory infections.
If that's the case, then we have unknowingly been beneficially building a herd immunity to it the same way we have the flu over the years. I hope that is the case so when a date (based on whatever expert info they base their decisions on) is finally picked for everyone to come out of their hidey-holes there won't be a large spike in new cases for the immune naive. Because just like the flu virus and the common cold, a cure is probably not on the horizon.

So at the end of the day, just like flu season, it is going to have to run its course while we try to lessen the effects on those most at risk.... and hope it doesn't bounce back.

[Big Frank]

IIRC they have to start making next year's flu vaccine before this year's flu season starts. It takes time to grow all the viruses, then kill them and make a vaccine out of them. A year ago no one knew the COVID-19 virus, SARS-CoV-2, even existed. It seems to be closely related to the SARS-CoV virus that caused SARS, but that hasn't been seen in 17 years or so.

My guess is that SARS-CoV or a similar virus had hot kinky sex with another virus, (okay, I know that's not how it works) and exchanged genetic material. Yeah, baby, yeah! A combination of two or more viruses, probably more, was strong enough to survive and replicate. That probably happened in bats since they already have a virus very much like SARS-CoV. Then it mutated until a strain existed that could infect people. However it happened SARS-CoV-2 was born and now, no one knows if COVID-19 will be around forever like the flu, or if it will die out.

When I first started reading about COVID-19, they compared last year's flu in the U.S. to COVID-19 in Wuhan. They said at that time it looked like the infection rate was twice as high as it was for the flu, so a lot more people were likely to get it. And the mortality rate for people in my age group was twice as high as it was for the flu. Twice as infectious x twice as lethal = 4 times as deadly as the flu for people my age. But we aren't living in Wuhan, and most of us are taking at least some kind of precautions.

[PegLeg45]

Yeah. Some precautions do work more effectively than others.

While you can't eliminate any virus, especially by letting 60% of the population do business as normal while telling the other 40% to stay home unless necessary (everyone has a different aspect of necessary, and there are a;so the idiots) you absolutely can slow some of the spread.

The same common sense precautions like above average hand washing and sanitizing along with picking better times to shop in the usually more populated stores would also work for the spread of flu, strep, cold and many other things if people did it all the time and not just when told to. Maybe we could reduce the flu deaths from nearly 60k some years. A simple fact of the matter with covid is that a very high percentage of the folks who have died of covid had underlying comorbidities and would have died from the flu and some from the common cold.

Many people are going foolishly overboard with PPE and understand nothing about cross-contamination also. I see people wearing gloves and masks but constantly touching things and then the mask and personal belongings. I saw a guy come out of the grocery store with gloves and mask on carrying several bags. When he got to the truck, he unlocked it handling his keys, touched three of four door handles, grabbed the steering wheel, touched multiple surfaces inside the truck all while still wearing the contaminated gloves from being inside the store. He'd have been better off just sanitizing several times inside and outside the store. Everything he touched with the gloved hands was now on everything he touched outside.

[Timothy]

I treat everything and anybody as contaminated as I did working 11 years in nuclear power!

I am also trained to quantify and fit test respiratory equipment.

Most are clueless!  A surgical mask does NOTHING to protect the wearer.  It is designed to prevent contamination of a wound or surgical site...

Until we ALL have access to N95 type protection, wearing a surgical mask just prevents the wearer from spewing droplets on others, just as the CDC has instructed.  I?ve been wearing one due to a smokers cough when I?m forced to enter the market so I do not frighten folks when I cough.

I have plenty of supplies and generally always do, including hand sanitizer.