A study from Germany said that by day 10, all patients had produced antibodies against coronavirus. The key to treatment is to make sure that the patients don’t have severe symptoms before then and then the body will naturally fight it off. If the body gets overwhelmed before day 10 then it becomes more severe and possibly fatal.
Is It a Pandemic Yet?
131–140 of 289 posts
Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?
#132I will probably be downvoted for saying this, but... The seasonal flu alone kills half a million people every year. So any mild disease that is as contagious and barely twice as fatal will kill 1 million. And that's what's going to happen with COVID19. It is far more severe than the flu. We know COVID19 is as contagious, given how fast it's spreading and how unstoppable it is (R0>2, asymptomatic transmission, airborn…
[edited to change linked article]
Fortunately we know a lot more about viruses today than we did in 1918. The virus has already been mapped genetically, and many labs around the world are hard at work on an anti-viral treatment. We shouldn't get complacent of course, but it's likely that this thing can be contained and treated eventually.
I read today about a device[1] from Israel that helps the lungs quickly clear phlegm, thus reducing the coughing behavior that spreads the disease. The Chinese are starting to manufacture and deploy it, so hopefully it will cut back on the spread at least a bit.
1. https://www.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/New-Israeli-invention-u...
Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?
#133I feel fairly uncertain as to how seriously I should /personally/ take COVID19 living in a large American city as a healthy young person with no upcoming travel. I see some friends seriously taking precautions (like buying masks) already, which up-to-this-point I've found a little absurd. Could anyone who knows better perhaps enlighten me on how I ought to be reacting to this?
Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I stopped worrying a few weeks back after I saw the mortality rate. It's basically a highly virulent flu with the same risk factors. Not on the same level as sars and the like.
That's a pretty cavalier attitude even if we take your assumptions to be true. If it's a virulent flu, the last time we had a pandemic with comparable stats was 1918, when we had much less global travel but much worse medical infrastructure. The 1918 Spanish flu infected potentially 1/4 of the world (500 million people at the time) and killed around 2% (variable depending on sources) of the global population - ~40 mi…
Absolutely incomparable to the Spanish flu. Back then we knew literally nothing about the flu, we sent sick soldiers on public trains to hospitals which very quickly spread the virus to other sick/injured people. We took the exact opposite actions of what we now know is correct. We did everything wrong. It’s not even remotely comparable. Scientists learned about the corona virus category in the late 1960s, 40 years after the Spanish flu.
It’s also not spreading unlike anything before? You can look at the graphs of SARS/MERS/etc and see at times it’s spreading quicker, but not remotely in the realm of never before seen.
Good advice I suppose, but traveling is still fine according to the WHO.
Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?
#135A study from Germany said that by day 10, all patients had produced antibodies against coronavirus. The key to treatment is to make sure that the patients don’t have severe symptoms before then and then the body will naturally fight it off. If the body gets overwhelmed before day 10 then it becomes more severe and possibly fatal.
can you link me to the source?
Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?
#136Thankfully, this is a relatively mild virus. Part of what makes it hard to detect is that most cases (>80%) are mild, and many are actually asymptomatic: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-asia... The vast majority of people who have died have been elderly and/or infirm. The death rate under 60 is well under 1%. If you’re young and healthy, this is a chest cold. The biggest thing the media needs…
So only 1 or two people I know will die of it? How is that 'mild' exactly? Relative to what? The plague?
0.8% of the people you know die every year anyway. If all of the people you know get infected it might bump it to 3%. Not that radical in my opinion.
Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?
#137Can someone explain to me why coronavirus is getting so much coverage? According to Wikipedia, Coronavirus has killed about 2000 people. Each year smoking kills 480,000 people in the US. In two days smoking will have killed more people in the US than coronavirus has worldwide. Shouldn't we have headlines about this every day? Or any of the other far more deadly things (traffic accidents, heart disease, suicide, etc.)…
If I had to guess it's uncertainty. If coronavirus infects half the world by the time it's run its course that would be 77 million people dead, on top of however many normally die in that time frame. I have no idea how likely a 50% infection rate is but it's a lot more likely than an equivalent 11x jump in the rate of deaths from smoking over the same time span.
Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
I noticed the same thing. As numbers continue to grow, we run the real risk of even top of the line health care systems being overwhelmed and people passing from lack of access to care. Couple numbers that jump out for me are China with ~3% mortality rate but also rumors of these numbers being vastly unreported. Iran with a 19% mortality rate (on a small scale)! Also the mortality rate appears to be 3.2% where for a…
Given that it can take N weeks to die, wouldn't it make sense to calculate the mortality rate at a given time t as the number of deaths at time t divided by the number of reported infected people at time t-Nweeks ? (I am using N =3 for my back-of-the-envelope calculations).
No, since not everyone who dies will have had a confirmed case 3 weeks back - both because the actual time the disease takes is (almost surely) variable and because detection isn't perfect. The mortality rate in Iran is infinity by that metric, for example.
Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has the ability to affect the global economy in ways that the others dont. If people don't want to go to work due to an increased risk of mortality, business will shut down. If everyone is forced to go to work and they all get sick and are unable to work for several weeks, business shuts down. Finally if everyone gets sick and 3% of your workforce then dies, that again causes massive economic disruption. This is a…
But couldn't the same thing apply to traffic deaths? In 2018, in the US, over 36,000 people died in car accidents. That's higher than coronavirus deaths, so logically shouldn't we all stay off the roads and quit going to work? Wouldn't that have the same impact? Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-autos-traffic-deaths-...
Sure, and I think it is a good comparison in that the numbers are large and it is unexpected. The difference is that we as a society have come to regard them as an acceptable risk. In addition, they are isolated, so while they are common, the odds of 10 people you know dying in a car crash are very low. With a virus, an entire office could get sick or even worse an entire school. For me this is my primary fear. My kids entire school gets infected and kids start dying or being hospitalized in large numbers.
This also adds to the economic impact. Its the clustering aspect of this that drives fear and uncertainty.
Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?
#140I read a lot about this virus lately, and it looks like the mortality rate depends a lot on the availability of intensive care. If that's the case, slowing down the diffusion of the infection could be really important in keeping down the total number of deaths.
I noticed the same thing. As numbers continue to grow, we run the real risk of even top of the line health care systems being overwhelmed and people passing from lack of access to care. Couple numbers that jump out for me are China with ~3% mortality rate but also rumors of these numbers being vastly unreported. Iran with a 19% mortality rate (on a small scale)! Also the mortality rate appears to be 3.2% where for a…
Iran's mortality rate is almost certainly much lower than 19%, since there's reason to believe the total infection rate is much higher than they're claiming. We wouldn't expect nearly so many travellers from Iran to be infected if coronavirus was as rare there as their figures make it out to be.