I was an adult back then, but maybe I just dont remember - was there any sort of a reaction like this to the swine flu (H1N1) 11 years ago? Because that saw over 60 million US infected and over 12,000 US deaths. While this outbreak is well less than 0.1% (one tenth of one percent) of those numbers and society is falling apart?
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Maybe I’m more upset about those $200 on a week where our net worth took a $300k hit. Kinda feels like adding insult to injury hehe.
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As far as I can remember, H1N1 was just another strain of regular flu and it was actually incorporated in into regular flu vaccine later on.
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I don’t remember it being this bad in terms of market swings or general panic, but based from your numbers it’s also much less deadly.
Not my numbers, CDC numbers. And that’s an estimated total infections, as opposed to today’s only including actual confirmed cases.
With minimal testing the mortality rate is going to appear very high, because the cases being confirmed include nearly everyone who has got knocked down hard by it. All the “off-the-books” un-diagnosed cases (which could total tens or hundreds of thousands at this point) have virtually a 0% death rate and are using virtually none of our healthcare capacity.
If you dont limit yourself to confirmed cases and instead look at the whole picture, the worst case projections everyone panics over would require every single person in the US being infected multiple times over the course of a year, to achieve those death and hospitalization numbers.
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This is so true!! And of course, despite Trump’s multiple lies, testing availability and volume here in the USA is abysmal.
There are exceptions which the media loves to trumpet. But by and large for persons south of 60, and free of certain underlying complicating medical conditions, recovery is virtually assured.
Problem is, those younger people are carriers and can act as guided missiles, angels of death, in the presence of older folks who are highly susceptible to this virus.
Widespread testing is a fallacy, and driven by our obsession with knowledge and desperate need to feel in control. There’s very little gained, beyond having more accurate stats. Targeted testing is what’s productive - when there’s a “hot spot”, use testing to ensure it remains contained. The goal should be to isolate the illness, not isolate healthy people.
All these temporary school closings - I hope they’re planning to test every single student and staff member to ensure everyone is “clean” when re-opening the school, or they’ll be right back to where they were when deciding to close. If they feel that there’s no reason to test everyone upon return, there was no reason to close the school in the first place.
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. . . but only when you accurately can identify your targets. Until then widespread testing is safest and is, in fact, the only option.
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With over 325 million people, a nationwide search and destroy mission seems like it’d be pretty futile. More what it’d accomplish is calming fears and remove a lot of panic in areas that are uninfected. But even then, it’s only for a few days before the unknown risks return.
I’ll agree that there should be a wider net than what “targeted” might generally imply. But that net still needs some focused direction.
Head to /r/WS
Since the guidelines prohibited all but severe symptoms AND known travel/ contacts, Yes it’s a higher than actual percent. But it’s highly unlikely the numbers “include nearly everyone” because of the other requirements to have even requested a test and no test availability.
I’d wager the “vast majority” of deaths from covid 19 here have not been counted. Either “natural causes” or generic pneumonia/flu is what they’re counted under.
At this point, yes. There’s 99% likely way too much community spread.
Hot spots and contact tracing is right approach. However, the other needed component would have been randomized testing so that those areas could be detected before they had weeks/month+ to multiply and grow to too large of numbers to have available resources to contain.
Several places including the U.K. and Seattle region have given up on the virus and are just planning to treat people. Ie no testing because regardless if you think you’re sick, stay home and if it gets bad show up to the hospital. They’re saving the testing for people where the recommended treatment might vary based on results.
Of course if they had more tests sooner, they could have contained it or had better chances at that, but now it’s just damage control with the assumption 1/2 to 3/4 of the world will get it and a small fraction of them will die and that’s just too bad for them. Surely we won’t see any politicians taking responsibility for their inaction over this, but maybe voters will hold them to it next time around if the virus doesn’t get ‘em first.
If we “flatten the curve” of infections, just maybe avoid overwhelming the healthcare system. I’ve seen articles suggesting that’s the main difference from <1% to ~5% death rates.
I think to fully avoid we’d have to slow/ spread it out to multiple months. If you flatten the curve enough, you possibly also reduce overall infections through herd immunity (assuming “recovered” patients have at least a multi-month resistance to re-infection) – if r0 can be pushed below 1.
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I think they are closing the schools for Spring Break honestly. They know many kids will travel with a higher chance than usual to be in contact with infected people. Down here, the school are coincidentally closed until two weeks after the end of Spring Break, just enough time for kids to show symptoms after contracting it. That’s assuming that transmission from asymptomatic people is much lower.
As far as death rate, a lot of people contest by how much more deadly it is than the flu by using the argument that asymptomatic infected people are not tested. That is true but to be fair, that’s also the case for the flu. If I have moderate symptoms (maybe due to vaccine or what not), I’m not gonna go see my doctor. So while the exact death rate is pretty debatable in accuracy, the simple fact that there is no vaccine available and the initial numbers seem to point to coronavirus being more serious than the regular flu.
True with temporary. But nothing says they won’t extend.
The goal now is to slow (not stop) spread. So that the limited capability healthcare system can treat more of those 20% requiring hospitalization.
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Now that we’re supposed to limit travel, I naturally see gas at $1.83. 
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The point of closing schools and such right now is to slow the spread.
It contains the growth of the virus so that it won’t overwhelm the system. We need to slow the growth so that it can be contained and better dealt with.
Closing schools alone isn’t expected or intended to stop the disease entirely. I think its just basically pumping the breaks on the virus spread.
I don’t expect they’ll reopen schools until things are better under control.
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A challenge with just closing all elementary schools is that businesses arent closed (at least not here, currently). So who will take care of the kids, who may be carriers already? Grandma and grandpa. Even if the kids aren’t currently infected, the grandparents are likely to “yolo, I’m old and going to die anyways sometime, I’m gonna take the kids to the park!” and induce more spread.
Or, alternately, who will feed the kids who now have parents without income?
Congress hopefully will address the second one at least (unemployment beefed up significantly), although I don’t think we’re on the path to do the first (pause all non-critical business activity).
IMO, the The payroll tax cut is just nonsense (not allocated at all at the right areas) but I’m sure it will also be in there since it’s T’s “idea”/campaigning bribe…
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yeah closing the schools is a big deal and childcare problems are significant.
Our public schools are at least offering meals to kids who need them. (I’m not sure how that works exactly but I presume they’d do something to limit exposure between kids during meals)
Not to mention that the kids lose out on learning for weeks or months too and I presume that probably won’t really be made up for later.
I also agree with that too. We definitely need more targeted testing to identify who’s actually sick so we can effectively contain it.