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Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

joshuaweissburg.com

61–70 of 232 posts

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#61

I think the risks shouldn't be downplayed, but the news media, aka advertising industry, frenzy over this pandemic is disgusting. Nobody that contracts this virus should fear death, yet that is what the mainstream media is selling and people are consuming: fear, death, uncertainty.

If you are elderly than you should definitely fear death. But yes if you are under 50 it's more likely you will be killed driving to the hospital than by the virus.

> if you are under 50 it's more likely you will be killed driving to the hospital than by the virus.

Apologies if this was intended to be hyperbole, but it is not true according to our current knowledge. Estimated fatality rate for adults 20-30 is 0.03%, 30-40 is 0.08%, and 40-50 and 0.16% [1]

The probability of dying from one single vehicle ride to the hospital is several orders of magnitude less than 0.1% or even 0.01%. There are 1.25 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles driven in the USA [2]. Even if the hospital is 100 miles away, your odds of dying on the way there are 0.000125%.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019#Progn...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are elderly than you should definitely fear death. But yes if you are under 50 it's more likely you will be killed driving to the hospital than by the virus.

Wait what? Assuming a 10 mile journey, the probability of death is 1.25E-7. CFR for 20-49 age group is 0.3% (probability 3E-3) So either my math is wrong or you are wrong by only 4 orders of magnitude.

Keep in mind that CFR takes into account only those that are confirmed positive (which are mostly people who already have severe symptoms).

That said, parent comment's math is still way off (see my sibling comment).

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#63

> I asked him about his experience, which was very much like mine. This was a different kind of encouragement than my friends and family could provide who did not share my experience. A little more useful than "it'll be fine"? eh? I honestly hate the empty empathy from people with no say in the matter. Its cultural and I think it develops into a mental issue of denial. Saying "you'll die if you don't breathe, I don't…

Empathy often feels more genuine and less awkward than sympathy.

It's actually really hard to express sympathy usefully. I always feel like a robot when trying.

Yet once you've lived it, empathy is somehow natural

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#64

I'm also in CO and had COVID-19 like symptoms about a month ago (fever and GI issues without any other major symptoms for a week progressing into a dry cough/heavy breathing -- completely unlike any other flu I've had). I never got tested due to lack of test kits here in CO at the time and because my symptoms stayed manageable I never saw a health care provider beyond a virtual meeting to get a rescue inhaler. At the…

How do you think you caught it?

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#65
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which would in fact be good news in a certain way, because either it's as deadly as reported and nowhere near as contagious as your last paragraph suggests, or its far more contagious and widespread but thus nowhere near as deadly as is being seen from case fatality rates derived from known cases. I'm not stating anything new with this really, but your case is likely one of many, many others in which a person felt my…

The problem with this interpretation is that whatever the combination of deadly/contagious the virus is, we already have direct evidence that when it spreads without any containment it causes unacceptably extreme amounts of sickness and death. So exactly where the virus ends up on the grid of mortality/contagiousness doesn't seem to be all that important because it is well beyond the frontier of being problematic. Ho…

Yes, but.

If we go with the highest realistic-seeming estimates of contagiousness and (and thus lowest of deadliness), then we can say that what NY and Italy saw was something close to worst-case. One reasoned estimate had 20% of Italians -- and almost 40% of Northern Italians -- infected in a six-week period.

If that estimate is correct, then even if Italy completely unlocked tomorrow, and held mass hug-ins and cough-ins at every gathering place, it still would probably only get back to as bad as it was 3 weeks ago, and probably only stay there for a month or so.

That would be incredibly tragic, but not world endingly so.

On the other hand, if you take the maximal estimate the other way, and say that Italy and NY at the peak were detecting 1/3-1/2 of their cases (it kinda can't be more than that), then there is the potential for outbreaks 5x as bad and 10x as long unless they stay socially distant until there is a vaccine in widepsread use -- and even so, hundreds of thousands more will inevitably die along the way.

Myself, I think the evidence points to higher contagiousness than this, but the difference does actually matter, even if that still outs us beyond the "threshold of ignorability"

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#66

I'm also in CO and had COVID-19 like symptoms about a month ago (fever and GI issues without any other major symptoms for a week progressing into a dry cough/heavy breathing -- completely unlike any other flu I've had). I never got tested due to lack of test kits here in CO at the time and because my symptoms stayed manageable I never saw a health care provider beyond a virtual meeting to get a rescue inhaler. At the…

How do you think you caught it?

Unsure. I work from home so my exposure to germs is already pretty minimal, however, I did take a trip to SF about two weeks before I showed symptoms. My girlfriend is also a school teacher so she ends up bringing a lot of colds home. She never (and still hasn't) showed any major symptoms other than a small fever that lasted just a day or two a week after we got back from SF (although she could have been an asymptomatic carrier).

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#67

I'm also in CO and had COVID-19 like symptoms about a month ago (fever and GI issues without any other major symptoms for a week progressing into a dry cough/heavy breathing -- completely unlike any other flu I've had). I never got tested due to lack of test kits here in CO at the time and because my symptoms stayed manageable I never saw a health care provider beyond a virtual meeting to get a rescue inhaler. At the…

How did you know what your blood oxygen level was? What did you use for that and where did you get it and why did you have it earlier? Is this something that people with rescue inhalers also typically have?

Oximeter. They're cheap, you can grab one on Amazon for $40. My friend who mailed me the medicine supplies (who is married to a doctor) insisted I have it and that I measure it regularly.

> Is this something that people with rescue inhalers also typically have?

I'm not sure. I usually get a rescue inhaler prescribed roughly once a year to help get over a cold. I have light asthma and bad allergies. The breathing here in Denver is definitely more challenging in general as well.

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#68

I'm also in CO and had COVID-19 like symptoms about a month ago (fever and GI issues without any other major symptoms for a week progressing into a dry cough/heavy breathing -- completely unlike any other flu I've had). I never got tested due to lack of test kits here in CO at the time and because my symptoms stayed manageable I never saw a health care provider beyond a virtual meeting to get a rescue inhaler. At the…

Any lingering aftereffects?

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#69
post #38

Things you can do if you have symptoms: - Sleep, it help your body build it's defense against virus - Zinc supplements, it slow down the virus propagation (you may also look into zinc rich food) The cloriquine is actualy helping zinc get into your cells and thus blocking the reproduction of the virus - Force fever in a hot bath: fever tell your body to go into virus defence mode (covid-19 has mechanism that calm your…

What you recommend probably doesn't hurt, but I don't think it has been shown to work either. You should maybe be careful with giving out medical advice on the Internet.

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#70

When I was in high school I was deeply afraid of death and thought about it daily. Then a few times over that period I got sick. Not unusually, or deathly sick, but feeling like utter garbage and perhaps enough to wonder if there was a very remote chance that the illness could threaten my life. And everytime I wondered that I realized that I had no fear of death which struck me as really odd given that I would otherw…

When I was younger, I was like you describe. I'd lay awake nights kinda freaked out that I would die some day.

I remember looking up life expectancy and comforting myself that I had more than 75% or whatever left. When that wasn't enough, I'd think about how far away I was from graduation, and how, even after that, I'd have whatever-percent left.

I knew it didn't work that way, and it was irrational, but it helped me sleep, so I did it.

I'd absolutely panic if I had a fight with a family member at night and didn't have a chance to make up before bed -- what if I died before morning!

But, illnesses never scared me much.

Then one day.

One day, I was at the doctor's office, having a minor outpatient surgery performed. Very minor, local anesthetic only, procedure takes 10 minutes.

And the doc stuck me with the needle for the anesthetic, and it hurt just a little more than expected, and vasovagal reaction, and I fainted. Tunnel vision, echoing sound, sense of impending doom, blackness.

I was awake again before I finished falling back on the exam table, but I had a major panic attack. Never happened before in my life, but suddenly I was in an unimaginable blind panic, hyperventilating like mad, hands and feet starting to tingle and feel like they were vibrating.

Took two hours to calm down enough that they let me leave.

From that day on, anxiety attacks were a part of my life. For awhile, they were uncontrollable, and I started down the path that leads to agoraphobia. Before I locked myself in my dorm room forever, I got the anxiety just barely enough under control to keep living. I learned to talk about my anxiety very frankly with anyone who would stand still long enough to listen. This might be awkward oversharing, but it prevented me from getting stuck in the feedback loop that keeps people locked at home -- fear of the embarrassment of a panic attack being enough to start one.

I eventually learned to repeat my anxiety mantra aloud: "if every time I felt short of breath was really a heart attacks, I'd already have died long ago -- so these are not heart attacks"

Anyway, long story, but the result is that 20 years later, I rarely have attacks anymore, though I'm still a bit of an anxious soul. I don't often have that existential angst that used to lead me to count lifespans as a teen.

But I do get massively panicky when I'm sick, now.

I'm not sure what you said that compelled me to write this, but... it needed to get out.

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