Wash your hands, stay safe.
Nonsense! Unless we can count every death caused by the virus, and correctly diagnose every infection, then this is a ridiculous (and irresponsible) guess. The number for "all cases" comes from the CCDC paper:
> A total of 72,314 patient records—44,672 (61.8%) confirmed cases, 16,186 (22.4%) suspected cases, 10,567 (14.6%) clinically diagnosed cases (Hubei Province only), and 889 asymptomatic cases (1.2%)—contributed data for the analysis.
Another more recent study guesses that 86% of cases are asymptomatic and/or otherwise undocumented:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/03/13/scie...
Until we have antibody tests, the PCR-based tests we're using will only tell us if you actively have the disease not if you had it ages ago and already recovered. This disease could have easily spread unnoticed (due to the overwhelmingly mild flulike symptoms most people get) for months. Due to its highly-contageous nature, it probably did.
Until we calm down and analyze what all actually happened my guess is just as good as anyone else.
It almost certainly jumped hosts to humans in November of 2019[1]. It has not been circulating in humans for long.
Indeed, several scientific publications have come out in the past decade that more or less predicted that a similar strain of SARS would jump hosts and become a pandemic disease[2].
Also, technically the Spanish Flu was just a bad flu season, right? Now, few believe now that Covid-19 will be nearly as bad as the 1918 pandemic (at least in its current mutation), but it will almost certainly worse than the 1957 flu pandemic, which was bad enough and which resulted in many governmental edicts similar to today, with many school and library closings.
I agree we need to keep cool and not overreact or panic, but we also need to take this thing very seriously. Even the experts are trying to figure this thing out. Disease modeling has come a long way since 1918, but modelers are not seers.
1. https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/24/dna-sleuths-read-coronav...
2. https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985
3. https://www.encyclopedia.com/media/educational-magazines/inf...
Also I am 32yo male on day 5 of Covid-19 symptoms and have hopefully been through the worst part (immune response in lungs). AMA.
I have a suspicion that I may have had it even longer than a week in advance and it spread more in the lungs than normal.
today is a 2.5
it kind of sucks, do your best to avoid it.
Fever, body aches for a couple days. Felt like I was going to cough up a lung.
but no real sneezing or congestion.
The youngest of the UK's >100 confirmed COVID-19 fatalities was in his forties and already terminally ill. Young people aren't totally safe and should certainly avoid contracting it if possible with a view to protecting the people they come into contact with and not taking up a hospital bed if they're at the unlucky end of the spectrum, but relatively speaking they're a tiny fraction of the overall casualties, and probably have more exposure to the virus than the elderly due to more active social/work lives.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/13/world/asia/co...
In Italy only 5 people under 40 have died, out of approx. 2500 deaths so far, and every one of the 5 had an existing serious illness.
This relentless focus only on the people who died misses the point: covid-19 puts people in hospital, sometimes into intensive care, and many of those people end up with damaged lungs.
I'm in Kirkland/Redmond, so the risk is higher here than elsewhere at the moment.
I’m not sure why you’re comparing the all-age mortality of flu to the age-specific mortality of COVID-19.
The relevant metric would be about 0.02% [1]
Thanks for the age specific number. That shows my point even more.
But it's not a betrayal to acknowledge their pain while recognizing nothing feasible can be done.
Who is right?
A mask does work in the sense of reducing your transmission to others if you are infected (and may not know it), by keeping your moisture-laden exhalations confined.
A mask can reduce your risk by reminding you not to touch your face after having contacted potentially infectious surfaces.
And there are different types of masks. Simple cotton patches aren't what the medical establishment needs, they don't filter micron-size virus particles. There are surgical-grade masks that do, and that's what medical workers need.
Surgical masks are useless for protecting the wearer from infected people, however they help protect others from an infected wearer.
If used properly, a respirator will help protect the wearer from infected people, as it will block them from inhaling virus-containing droplets.
They are not useless for protecting the wearer, and this anti-vaxer level dangerous misinformation needs to stop. It's like saying condoms are useless for protecting the wearer from HIV because they sometimes break.
The lie that masks don't work was spread because there weren't enough masks. Sad that people are still falling for it/spreading it.
Frankly I see no downside to people wearing homemade masks.
Edit: More friendly article that references the paper I'm talking about.
https://smartairfilters.com/en/blog/best-materials-make-diy-...
If it's not 'in your face', just pretty close, then a lot of the droplets will be too small for the simple surgical mask to filter out. Especially as it leaves a lot of gaps around your nose and mouth. Not to talk about your eyes, where you can get infected just as easily. (Yes, you could wear protective glasses too.)
But... if almost everyone wears these in public places, which actually just became compulsory in Czech that should give pretty good protection to everyone (by filtering the emission of the asymptomatic infected).
And if we think about this use case, then actually it makes no point telling people that it won't protect them because if they think it will they are more likely to wear it.
If a surgical mask can stop germs from going out of the mouth, then I better hear a more rigorous reason why that same mask doesn't work in the opposite direction.
One word: leakage.
Watch this:
Healthcare - Mask vs. Respirator Video - 3M Worker Health and Safety
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200317150116.h...
That indicates airborne transmission is a vector.
If the virus can stay "alive" in the air for 3 hours [1], why wouldn't airborne be a transmission method?
Smaller lighter particles can just float around in the air for hours and linger, then you just have to breath them in. With covid you'd have to touch a surface that droplets fell onto, and then touch your face or something.
Verify this info before counting on it for anything serious, I am a lay person with possible misunderstandings.
Masks work. Telling the public they didn't need them in order to conserve them for doctors and nurses was a mistake.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-...
What's worrying about that though, is that the high survival of healthy people under 50 seems to be conditional on the availability of ventilators and ecmo. Few countries can guarantee that in all scenarios.
- 48.5% of people who died had three or more other illnesses
- 25.6% of people who died had two other illnesses
- 25.1% of people who died had one other illness
- Overall, 99.2% of people who died had at least one other illness
- Average age of those that died was 79.5
Of the 2500 or so people that have died:
- only 17 people were under 50
- only 5 people were under 40 and all 5 had an existing serious illness
https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-C...
I do wonder if at 39 i am in fact young enough to be in the most-likely-to-survive-if-exposed group.