Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths

It's more severe and the ease of how it spreads is what is alarming.

Any virus that really cannot be controlled other than quarantine is never an over-reaction, infact often is the case people under-react to them.

People are dying, at a low rate, but they are dying, so it's much better to be pro-active.

This is the email I sent my team last night.

We should consider working from home.

You may all have seen the news by now. A patient was just diagnosed with COVID-19 at UC Davis after having no known contact with anyone travelling. Importantly, they were diagnosed after being intubated already for 7 days. It is suspected that this is the first known case of public transmission of the virus in the US. From what we know about the incubation times and progression of the illness, that means they contracted it sometime between 14-21 days ago. This is the letter UC Davis sent to their staff.

If the virus has already been in the wild in California for 3 weeks, it seems likely to me that it has or will reach the bay area, and given the limited testing capability that has been reported, we may not know until the first cases end up in the ICU, weeks after exposure.

The death rate for young healthy people is relatively low, around 0.2%. It is much higher for older people, who it kills in double digit percentages. Still, 20% of the people it infects need intensive hospital care. Many epidemiologists now suspect that it is likely to become endemic, and that 40-70% of the world's population will contract it. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/02/covid-vac...

So what can we do?

The most important thing to keep the death rate low is to reduce the burden on the hospital system so that they don't end up with more cases needing critical care than they can handle. And the most important thing for reducing the burden on hospitals is to slow the spread of the virus, so that even if it ends up infecting all of us, it doesn't infect all of us at once.

We're fortunate enough that aside from impromptu collaboration and whiteboarding, all of our concrete tasks can be done at home. Most workers will not be in this situation, and will have to come to work to keep the economy running. For those of you familiar with random graph theory, the average number of edges in a graph has an exponential effect on its diameter, and so the best thing we can do is to avoid as much contact as we can. https://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~novozhil/Teaching/767%20Data/ch...

For people coming to the office, the WHO has a document on getting your workplace ready for COVID-19 that I'd encourage you to read and internalize. https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/getting...

I'm already conveniently WFH with a cold, which I hope is just a cold, but I think we should consider making this the norm, at least until we have more clarity on what the situation is.

> Why exactly would you distrust China, besides racism?

Because, historically, they have not been trustworthy with this sort of thing?

Not trusting the Chinese government is way different than not trusting a Chinese person.

Not OP, but: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/02/coron...

I personally have trust that at least in the US, a whistleblower would speak out to media if the official announcement doesn't agree with the records s/he can see. Maybe this is also blind faith that the system still works in the US. Who knows if Trump has installed loyalists that deep, who will only report good news: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/26/johnny-mcent...

The mortality rate may seem very low, but the symptoms are far more severe. When you get the flu it's rare you get pneumonia, not so much with this virus. The biggest problem is that it spreads without symptoms. That is, you can be infected & contagious for days (some Dr's suspect up to 3 weeks) and not have a clue because you seem perfectly healthy. So this has the potential to spread like wild fire. Further, 2 days ago some numbers out of China stated that up to 14% of previously infected became infected again. Lastly, a recent report also mentioned that detections in hospital were only able to detect 45% of the cases on the first try. So many are given clean bill of health and go on to infect many more.

Watch Italy and South Korea carefully, this thing is about to spread like crazy, even if mortality rates are negligible for young and healthy.

Lastly, SARs supposedly left some people with lung and brain lesions, it is unknown what the long term effects of this one will be.