Coronavirus and You - Page 18

On March 10 2020 18:37 Belisarius wrote:
If everyone everywhere wore them they would help a lot because people with the virus would end up coughing into their masks instead of the air, but we just don't have enough to do this.

On March 10 2020 19:12 KwarK wrote:
Main benefit of masks is for asymptomatic infected during the period before diagnosis. They’re spreading during that time. But if there aren’t enough masks to go around, and there aren’t, they shouldn’t be wasted on people who appear healthy. Medical professionals working with vulnerable patients need those.

On March 10 2020 20:18 Manit0u wrote:
Not confirmed but I got contacted by my godmother who lives in Seattle and it seems there's been around a dozen deaths there due to ncov. Also, they lost half of their life savings due to market crash. Tough times.

On March 10 2020 07:31 BlackJack wrote:


As far as I know WHO still has the mortality rate at 3.4% which means if 10% of the US population were infected it would kill 1 million people. It's some multiplier more deadly than the flu. It's not the beginning of the apocalypse but to say it's not really dangerous is inconsiderate of those at risk, i.e the elderly and immunocompromised.

But as the poster you were implying to stated, the real danger here is overwhelming our Healthcare system. I just lost 4 more coworkers yesterday to quarantine despite CDC releasing new guidelines to only quarantine workers that are symptomatic. We are down 10+ staff now.

On March 10 2020 08:33 LegalLord wrote:

It definitely is. The reason that Russia didn't want a supply cut seems to be heavily influenced by the fact that the coronavirus has led to a pretty serious demand shock, for which a supply cut is not a good answer.


Though it seems to garner widespread praise in the mediaverse, I question if the quarantine approach is really the right way to stem the outbreak. It seems very likely to me that not only does this lead to some very troublesome places, but also it's hard to imagine the willingness to support full nation quarantine lasting long enough to really let the disease to stop spreading. I suppose one day we will know how accurate China's numbers are, and that will help to really understand how effective this was. I suspect it might not be quite so easy to stop something like this.

On March 11 2020 00:41 Veldril wrote:


The main reason for the nationwide quarantine is not to stem the outbreak (I.e. prevent new infections), but to delay the number of patients coming and stressing the healthcare system too much that would render it nonfunctional. The main threat of a Covid-19 is not its mortality rate but it’s ability to over stress the healthcare system due to it’s being highly contagious and many people who contact it require hospitalization. If it’s spread too fast, then the healthcare system would collapse and look like Wuhan at the beginning. Korea has low mortality rate because they have enough capacity to deal with the cases that popping up so the mortality rate is low, while Wuhan at the beginning got overwhelmed and not having enough capacity to deal with the disease and result in a very high mortality rate.

What Italy did was “flattening out the curve”.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/this-one-chart-shows-why-minimizing-coronavirus-impact-is-a-race-against-time/

We might still get the same number of cases overall but it would be spread over a longer period of time so the healthcare system would not get overwhelmed and could save a lot more people. From reddit, it seems that currently the hospital is at an over capacity and doctors even have to run the triage protocol, which means doctor have to choose who has the higher chance of survival and help them first. Quarantine the entire country could help reduce the rate of disease spreading and allow doctors to deal with the disease better.

Also, don’t forget that normal disease would still happen during the Clovis-19 pandemic and those also need medical treatments. If the hospital system is at full capacity because of Covid-19, then there might be no space for people who got heart attack and require an intensive care or people who are in accidents but can’t get the life saving injury because they need resources to deal with Covid-19. If that happens, Clovis-19 would also affect the mortality rate of other disease too.

On March 11 2020 06:57 L1ghtning wrote:

Korea have a low death rate because they have pretty much tested everybody who they suspected might have the virus. Their overall rate of health and healthcare quality might have contributed, but this is a minor factor at best. They have a lot of positive cases who show very mild or no symptoms at all. Korea is the example to follow.
The reason why Europe and North America is failing to contain the spread is because of their lackluster testing, especially during the first week of the outbreak. Here in Sweden, the government health agency even said that those who had returned abroad from Italy and Iran should go back to work or school if they show no symptoms. This kind of idiocy and our hospital's refusal to test those who were in a high risk group of being infected is what is allowing it to spread. They're only testing those who are sick, but at that point they have already infected others. There are those who have been responsible enough to voluntarily self-contain themselves even without having symptoms, but the problem is those who haven't done that. By testing everybody, you eliminate the option of taking this calculated risk, because then they know if they carry it or not.

South Korea is a great benchmark for how deadly the virus is, currently at 0.5-1% death rate. It's probably lower than that since it's impossible to catch everybody, but that death rate can be used for estimating the actual spread in other countries.

On March 11 2020 06:57 L1ghtning wrote:

Korea have a low death rate because they have pretty much tested everybody who they suspected might have the virus. Their overall rate of health and healthcare quality might have contributed, but this is a minor factor at best. They have a lot of positive cases who show very mild or no symptoms at all. Korea is the example to follow.
The reason why Europe and North America is failing to contain the spread is because of their lackluster testing, especially during the first week of the outbreak. Here in Sweden, the government health agency even said that those who had returned abroad from Italy and Iran should go back to work or school if they show no symptoms. This kind of idiocy and our hospital's refusal to test those who were in a high risk group of being infected is what is allowing it to spread. They're only testing those who are sick, but at that point they have already infected others. There are those who have been responsible enough to voluntarily self-contain themselves even without having symptoms, but the problem is those who haven't done that. By testing everybody, you eliminate the option of taking this calculated risk, because then they know if they carry it or not.

South Korea is a great benchmark for how deadly the virus is, currently at 0.5-1% death rate. It's probably lower than that since it's impossible to catch everybody, but that death rate can be used for estimating the actual spread in other countries.

“Right now in Lombardy, we do not have free beds in intensive care units,” Casani says. He added that doctors “have to make this horrible choice and decide who is going to survive and who is not going to survive…who is going to get a monitor, a respirator and the attention they need.”

Newspapers and WhatsApp groups are rife with personal accounts from doctors on the front lines of the epidemic. When new patients come in with pneumonia, a symptom of advanced coronavirus infections, doctors have little time to decide whether to assign them intensive-care beds, ventilation machines or respirators that could make the difference between life and death.

Some doctors have said that they sometimes make the call on who gets treatment based on the age of the patient. In some areas, hospitals are suspending other treatments to focus personnel on the contagion.