Breathtaking!

[shiny!]

Re: Breathtaking!

Instead of shutting down EVERYTHING and ravaging the world economy, why didn't the medical community that's dictating to governments decide instead to simply isolate the people most vulnerable to Covid-19? Isolate the elderly and those with complicating medical conditions while providing them with food delivery and etc.. Then let the virus run through the rest of the population and burn itself out. Keep the stores and restaurants open, don't incite panic. There would be no economic crash, no panic hoarding, just life pretty much as usual while caring for the most vulnerable.

Instead they're trying to shut down the entire world with no regard for the effects of massive unemployment, deflation, etc...

Not that the world wasn't ready for a giant economic cleansing, but really. This is nuts.

[shiny!]

Silver Lining

Fedex has decided to stop making people sign for deliveries on those filthy, germ-infested signature pads. It's about time someone aknowledged that those nasty things are disease vectors. If there's any silver lining be had from this virus, perhaps it will be that those damn things fall into disuse everywhere, forever. Especially in drug stores and checkout lines, where the person in line in front of you just sneezed into their hands before touching it.

[jk]

Re: Breathtaking!

Instead of shutting down EVERYTHING and ravaging the world economy, why didn't the medical community that's dictating to governments decide instead to simply isolate the people most vulnerable to Covid-19? Isolate the elderly and those with complicating medical conditions while providing them with food delivery and etc.. Then let the virus run through the rest of the population and burn itself out. Keep the stores and restaurants open, don't incite panic. There would be no economic crash, no panic hoarding, just life pretty much as usual while caring for the most vulnerable.

Instead they're trying to shut down the entire world with no regard for the effects of massive unemployment, deflation, etc...

Not that the world wasn't ready for a giant economic cleansing, but really. This is nuts.

1. i don't think the medical community is dictating anything. otherwise we would have reacted to the pandemic threat earlier and more strongly.
2. i'm not sure that segregating the elderly but letting nature take its course with the rest of the population would succeed- although the fatality rate goes up sharply with age, younger people can die and, more importantly, many can get severely ill without eventually succumbing. thus you'd be faced with the same problem of overwhelming the medical system.
3. what it boils down to is that you could choose to let a lot of people die relatively quickly, over a few months, and get the pandemic over with, essentially, with less economic displacement except in the medical system.

[shiny!]

Re: Breathtaking!

1. i don't think the medical community is dictating anything. otherwise we would have reacted to the pandemic threat earlier and more strongly.
2. i'm not sure that segregating the elderly but letting nature take its course with the rest of the population would succeed- although the fatality rate goes up sharply with age, younger people can die and, more importantly, many can get severely ill without eventually succumbing. thus you'd be faced with the same problem of overwhelming the medical system.
3. what it boils down to is that you could choose to let a lot of people die relatively quickly, over a few months, and get the pandemic over with, essentially, with less economic displacement except in the medical system.

Thanks, jk.

Now that we've had it here for awhile, what are your thoughts as to the severity of this virus and the effect it's going to have on our hospitals and clinics?

[jk]

Re: Breathtaking!

btw, just came across the following headline, which speaks to my item #2
Younger Adults Comprise Big Portion of Coronavirus Hospitalizations in U.S.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/h...ng-people.html


re your question- the hospitals are already becoming overwhelmed, and a lot of medical personnel are ill to one degree or another. we had some time, some warning, and we wasted it because the administration didn;t take it seriously and saw it as a p.r. problem instead of a medical one. even now, the only reason i think this administration is paying attention to it is because the stock market is crashing and they're worried a recession will hurt them in november.

our lack of testing, or even the capacity for testing, is a disgrace. testing has finally increased somewhat, but as of wed morning the u.s. has tested 56,590.
south korea has tested more than 270,000.

[shiny!]

Re: Breathtaking!

Thank you for your perspective. With so many opinions from "it's nothing, overblown hype" to "it's TEOTWAWKI" i don't know who to believe. But you I believe.

Disgrace is absolutely right. I am beyond furious. I passed furious about a hundred miles back.

After decades of misallocated capital, this is chickens coming home to roost. As a matter of national security we should have been prepared and stockpiled for an epidemic at local, state and national levels. As it is, the government has done NOTHING to prepare for anything like this. Medical staff on the front lines are being handed expired masks if they can even get those, and told to use one mask per shift. What if this had been Ebola?

[Woodsman]

Re: Breathtaking!

I share your frustration, Shiny. And while this hasn't yet proven to be our public health authorities most auspicious moment, the entity with the largest share of responsibility is the Chinese Communist Party. It was their focus on public relations face saving and refusal to share critical information with the rest of the world that has laid us low and brought globe to the brink of chaos. There will be a settling of accounts with the ChiComs and their paid quislings here and abroad, but that's for a time after we resolve this crisis.

Meanwhile, this summary of a report by the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team attempts to lay out the rationale leading to the extreme measures we've begun to implement this week. It's pretty damn chilling and is a Devil's banquet of bad options. Using epidemic modeling software with numbers based on China, Korea, and Italy, they ran a simulation over a series of possible responses. According to the team, treating COVID-19 like the flu and letting the virus take its course would have resulted in an estimated 2.2 million American deaths from the virus alone, with a total of 4 million dead after accounting for the concomitant effects on the healthcare system.

The number of dead from the virus alone would have exceeded the combined wartime deaths of all American soldiers going back to the Civil War. There's not a politician or bureaucrat in the world - outside of Maoist China and the Stalinist USSR - who could contemplate even a percentage of that under their watch.

Synopsis: https://twitter.com/jeremycyoung/sta...75682643357696

Study results: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imp...16-03-2020.pdf

[santafe2]

Re: Breathtaking!

Instead of shutting down EVERYTHING and ravaging the world economy, why didn't the medical community that's dictating to governments decide instead to simply isolate the people most vulnerable to Covid-19?

As jk noted, the medical community is doing it's best to manage a less than excellent politically and profit based medical system in the US. Governments dictate to the medical community. In the US, insurance companies will do their best to mitigate their costs. Our government's support of this structure has little to do with patient care, it's focused on profit. If our federal government had taken this CV issue seriously even a month ago we would have relied on our medical experts and not our political hacks. Unfortunately, like Italy, we've taken most of the best choices off the table and shutting down is a choice between massive infections and exponentially more deaths or a massive financial shutdown. I suspect the goofball in charge has decided in the last 2 days that he can BS the financial crisis better than his 37% losing grandma.

Please never again blame doctors or any other medical professionals for the system in which they find themselves working.

[GRG55]

Re: Breathtaking!

Thank you for your perspective. With so many opinions from "it's nothing, overblown hype" to "it's TEOTWAWKI" i don't know who to believe. But you I believe.

Disgrace is absolutely right. I am beyond furious. I passed furious about a hundred miles back.

After decades of misallocated capital, this is chickens coming home to roost. As a matter of national security we should have been prepared and stockpiled for an epidemic at local, state and national levels. As it is, the government has done NOTHING to prepare for anything like this. Medical staff on the front lines are being handed expired masks if they can even get those, and told to use one mask per shift. What if this had been Ebola?

If anybody wants to study what appears to be the absolute best national response to 2019-nCoV perhaps Taiwan is the standout success.

[shiny!]

Re: Breathtaking!

If anybody wants to study what appears to be the absolute best national response to 2019-nCoV perhaps Taiwan is the standout success.

Agree. A large part of their success is because wearing masks in public is such a culturally accepted practice. Not so much to protect oneself but to protect others you might otherwise infect.

[geodrome]

Re: Breathtaking!

I am not a specialist, but I came across this study...Chest CT Findings in Cases from the Cruise Ship “Diamond Princess” with Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)

https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/10.1148/ryct.2020200110

“Of 112 cases, 82 (73%) were asymptomatic, 44 (54%) of which had lung opacities on CT. Other 30 (27%) cases were symptomatic, 24 (80%) of which had abnormal CT findings. Symptomatic cases showed lung opacities and airway abnormalities on CT more frequently than asymptomatic cases [lung opacity; 24 (80%) vs 44 (54%), airway abnormalities; 15 (50%) vs 15 (18%)]. Asymptomatic cases showed more GGO over consolidation (80%), while symptomatic cases more frequently showed consolidation over GGO (38%). The CT severity score was higher in symptomatic cases than asymptomatic cases, particularly in the lower lobes [symptomatic vs asymptomatic cases; right lower lobe: 2 ± 1 (0-4) vs 1 ± 1 (0-4); left lower lobe: 2 ± 1 (0-3) vs 1 ± 1 (0-3); total score: 7 ± 4 (1-17) vs 4 ± 2 (1-11)].”

---

Can someone with some medical expertise comment? Do these CT findings = permanent lung damage?

[jk]

Re: Breathtaking!

turns out simple x-rays are as good as ct scans for dx; the pattern shown with infection is pretty specific/diagnostic; and cleaning ct facilities after each scan is prohibitively time-consuming.

i don't believe the findings predict permanent damage. they show acute inflammatory effects.

[geodrome]

Re: Breathtaking!

turns out simple x-rays are as good as ct scans for dx; the pattern shown with infection is pretty specific/diagnostic; and cleaning ct facilities after each scan is prohibitively time-consuming.

i don't believe the findings predict permanent damage. they show acute inflammatory effects.

Thanks. That's reassuring.