my concern is that it's trained many people (especial those living paycheck to paycheck) to simply not seek medical services unless their condition demands the emergency room.
I feel this economic reality will create conditions advantagous to the spread of Covid 19 in the United States.
>90% of people have healthcare coverage in the U.S.[1]. Those that don't are likely illegal or homeless or in some way don't qualify for medical coverage (I also don't know how prisoners are counted in the data).
Many people I know visit the doctor way more often than they need to or should (I know those who receive it free to purchase it to use employer insurance - like myself).
People will seek medical treatment and in this case will overwhelm the system if they get nervous they have this disease.
[1] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2019/demo/p60-26...
But that's when they go to the doctor. A lot avoid going at all. When I suspected I had strep throat a couple months ago, I went to an in-network doctor and was charged ~$70. Additionally, that charge was unpredictable--when I went there, I had no idea if it would be free or $200, and when I left, they told me it was $0. They sent the bill a few weeks after dealing with my insurance.
To a lot of Americans, "this will cost somewhere between $0 and $200" is not something they can just shrug their shoulders at. It can actually affects their short-term finances in a significant way.
(Also, before anyone chimes in with "this is because they're irresponsible with budgeting", that's irrelevant to the point being raised here: A lot of Americans will avoid the doctor to avoid these bills. It doesn't matter whether we blame them or not--the effect is the same.)
And some extra bad news: It's not chiefly software engineers in this situation. I live with a teacher, a teaching assistant, and several food service workers. They're the ones who fall in the "doctor visits are too expensive" category.
I would be really interested in getting some take-home test packages that could be done for situations like these.
It would be irresponsible to go to a doctors office where elderly people could become infected.
Does anyone know if they exist ?!
If you develop severe symptoms, wear a mask (either sterilize it or use disposables), call the hospital and talk with them about it. If they tell you to come in, they will take the necessary precautions to make sure you don't infect anyone else.
Yes it is. But it is usually required. Required madness.
The concept of herding sick people in a waiting room in close distance is the best way, to get all the slightly sick people really sick with various other diseases.
I probably would have to be half dying, to get me into an doctors waiting room in the flu season. And then I would just go straight to the hospital.
It's a huge opportunity for a startup/company to create a home test kit for COVID-19. Massive global market for the product and growing exponentially.
Doing well & doing good at the same time.
If someone has a list of materials thatwould be required to pull these affordable tests something could be put together for sure.
the worrying thing is to keep the costs down, one would think a lot of those materials and components would need to come from Chine to be cost effective.. The tangled web.
Edit: the problem wil step from China's supply chain being slowed down.
The flu is less virulent, less deadly, and most people get flu shots which creates herd immunity.
So just because their current flu countermeasures don't include the measures proposed doesn't mean that it's not rational to consider them. Their prior actions could actually be irrational, and the context shift is just allowing them to adjust their perception and actions.
The second is that since WFH is an preventative measure designed to minimize the probability of COVID-19 reaching flu transmission rates, you can't simply say that "the current risk is low", you have to try to consider the likelyhood of risk significantly increasing without action.
Let's be real here, even if COVID-19 was literally exactly a different flu, it would be still be a problem and we should be planning for it carefully. North American hospitals are cost conscious and therefore typically only have enough resources to just about cover a normal flu season spike. Doubling (say nothing about 10x) the amount the hospitalizations required would be an incredible stress to the system.
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.