Re:London will be overwhelmed by Covid in a fortnight says l...
by ben_w on Thursday January 07, 2021 @01:51PM
(#25675411)
Sometimes COVID gets compared to flu. Thing is, most people underestimate what flu is like (I suspect this is because of the tendency to say “XYZ got the flu” when they had a common cold).
This is what COVID is like — First roll two D4: If you rolled a 1 in the first, you now have a liver injury; If you rolled a 1 on the other, you lose your sense of smell.
Now roll a D20:
• 1-4: asymptotic but still infectious
• 5-16: somewhere up to “mild pneumonia”
• 17-19: severe symptoms (dyspnea, hypoxia, etc)
• 20: critical symptoms (respiratory failure, shock, or multiorgan dysfunction)
And that’s with treatment. All that “flattening the curve” talk early last year was about making sure people could still get treatment — if you exceed the capacity of the healthcare system, you don’t get to save all the people whose conditions would have been well within your capacity in a non-overloaded system.
This is what COVID is like — First roll two D4: If you rolled a 1 in the first, you now have a liver injury; If you rolled a 1 on the other, you lose your sense of smell.
Now roll a D20:
• 1-4: asymptotic but still infectious
• 5-16: somewhere up to “mild pneumonia”
• 17-19: severe symptoms (dyspnea, hypoxia, etc)
• 20: critical symptoms (respiratory failure, shock, or multiorgan dysfunction)
And that’s with treatment. All that “flattening the curve” talk early last year was about making sure people could still get treatment — if you exceed the capacity of the healthcare system, you don’t get to save all the people whose conditions would have been well within your capacity in a non-overloaded system.