Originally Posted by Bwana:
Once again, don't come in this thread with some kind of political agenda, or you will be shown the door. If you want to go that route, there is a thread about this in DC.
Originally Posted by Dartgod:
People, there is a lot of good information in this thread, let's try to keep the petty bickering to a minimum.
We all have varying opinions about the impact of this, the numbers, etc. We will all never agree with each other. But we can all keep it civil.
Thanks!
Click here for the original OP:
Spoiler!
Apparently the CoronaVirus can survive on a inanimate objects, such as door knobs, for 9 days.
California coronavirus case could be first spread within U.S. community, CDC says
By SOUMYA KARLAMANGLA, JACLYN COSGROVE
FEB. 26, 2020 8:04 PM
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating what could be the first case of novel coronavirus in the United States involving a patient in California who neither recently traveled out of the country nor was in contact with someone who did.
“At this time, the patient’s exposure is unknown. It’s possible this could be an instance of community spread of COVID-19, which would be the first time this has happened in the United States,” the CDC said in a statement. “Community spread means spread of an illness for which the source of infection is unknown. It’s also possible, however, that the patient may have been exposed to a returned traveler who was infected.”
The individual is a resident of Solano County and is receiving medical care in Sacramento County, according to the state Department of Public Health.
The CDC said the “case was detected through the U.S. public health system — picked up by astute clinicians.”
Officials at UC Davis Medical Center expanded on what the federal agency might have meant by that in an email sent Wednesday, as reported by the Davis Enterprise newspaper.
The patient arrived at UC Davis Medical Center from another hospital Feb. 19 and “had already been intubated, was on a ventilator, and given droplet protection orders because of an undiagnosed and suspected viral condition,” according to an email sent by UC Davis officials that was obtained by the Davis Enterprise.
The staff at UC Davis requested COVID-19 testing by the CDC, but because the patient didn’t fit the CDC’s existing criteria for the virus, a test wasn’t immediately administered, according to the email. The CDC then ordered the test Sunday, and results were announced Wednesday. Hospital administrators reportedly said in the email that despite these issues, there has been minimal exposure at the hospital because of safety protocols they have in place.
A UC Davis Health spokesperson declined Wednesday evening to share the email with The Times.
Since Feb. 2, more than 8,400 returning travelers from China have entered California, according to the state health department. They have been advised to self-quarantine for 14 days and limit interactions with others as much as possible, officials said.
“This is a new virus, and while we are still learning about it, there is a lot we already know,” Dr. Sonia Angell, director of the California Department of Public Health, said in a statement. “We have been anticipating the potential for such a case in the U.S., and given our close familial, social and business relationships with China, it is not unexpected that the first case in the U.S. would be in California.”
It is not clear how the person became infected, but public health workers could not identify any contacts with people who had traveled to China or other areas where the virus is widespread. That raises concern that the virus is spreading in the United States, creating a challenge for public health officials, experts say.
“It’s the first signal that we could be having silent transmission in the community,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. “It probably means there are many more cases out there, and it probably means this individual has infected others, and now it’s a race to try to find out who that person has infected.”
On Tuesday, the CDC offered its most serious warning to date that the United States should expect and prepare for the coronavirus to become a more widespread health issue.
“Ultimately, we expect we will see coronavirus spread in this country,” said Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. “It’s not so much a question of if, but a question of when.”
According to the CDC’s latest count Wednesday morning, 59 U.S. residents have tested positive for the new strain of coronavirus — 42 of whom are repatriated citizens from a Diamond Princess cruise. That number has grown by two since Messonnier’s last count Tuesday, although the CDC was not immediately available to offer details on the additional cases.
More than 82,000 cases of coronavirus have been reported globally, and more than 2,700 people have died, with the majority in mainland China, the epicenter of the outbreak.
But public health leaders have repeatedly reminded residents that the health risk from the novel coronavirus to the general public remains low.
“While COVID-19 has a high transmission rate, it has a low mortality rate,” the state Department of Public Health said in a statement Wednesday. “From the international data we have, of those who have tested positive for COVID-19, approximately 80% do not exhibit symptoms that would require hospitalization. There have been no confirmed deaths related to COVID-19 in the United States to date.”
CDC officials have also warned that although the virus is likely to spread in U.S. communities, the flu still poses a greater risk.
Gostin said the news of potential silent transmission does not eliminate the possibility of containing the virus in the U.S. and preventing an outbreak.
“There are few enough cases that we should at least try,” he said. “Most of us are not optimistic that that will be successful, but we’re still in the position to try.”
Originally Posted by Hammock Parties:
I'm sorry, but this is a thread for pandemic-related news.
Looting IS HAPPENING. It's in the the freakin' news.
I'm not "starting shit." I have no idea why you don't want to read the news.
I sure do, so I share it. Please let me know if you see more news of looting. I hope it stops.
Thanks.
Nobody who's been around for more than a week believes that. You're stirring shit like you always do, tiptoeing the line and feigning innocence. Nothing new... [Reply]
THE LATEST: The Center for Vaccine Research at Pitt has successfully taken a portion of the virus that leads to COVID-19 and attached it to a genetically modified measles vaccine that has been used for years. https://t.co/KpocIwlLV7
Originally Posted by arrowheadnation:
I haven't left my house in a week and a half. I'm fortunate to be able to work from home. Today, I ventured out at around 9am to go to Dollar General (I figured the supermarket would be ransacked). I only wanted to get some diet mt. dew and milk. I went in, grabbed a 12 pack of mt dew and a gallon of milk and then thought, I wonder if they have any lysol, so I ran back to the cleaning supplies and they were out. No biggie. I start walking down the main aisle to the front of the store so I can get the hell out of there and all of the sudden an employee walks out of one of the aisles and coughs twice without covering her damn mouth like 2 feet away from me (she mumbled excuse me as she walked bye like it was no big deal). I'm not the type to lose my cool so I immediately held my breath clear up to the counter, checked out, drove straight home, and took a shower. It's the closest I've ever come to bitching someone out in public. There are only 2 people in my county that have it (officially) and I would think at this point someone would have the decency not to come to work if they had all the symptoms, but I've of course been worried/paranoid all day. It sucks that we have to live like this now.
if you don't go to work you don't get paid. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Fat Elvis:
A) Those numbers don't match what is coming out of John Hopkins
B) If the rate of increase holds steady (+~38% today from John Hopkins stats), we'll hit 60K by Tuesday
C) Those numbers are only for those tested, actual numbers will be much higher (but much lower severity, on average)
From Nate Silver:
For the time being, 1) the large (perhaps very large) majority of coronavirus positives are undetected and 2) test capacity is ramping up at extremely fast rates, far faster than coronavirus itself would spread even under worst-case assumptions.
So long as those two things hold, the rate of increase in the number of *detected* cases is primarily a function of the rate of increase in the number of *tests* and does not tell us that much about how fast the actual *infection* is spreading [Reply]
That's about N95 masks. You realize surgical masks are completely different right? I've said that like 5 times already. I don't think people understand.
This is an N95 mask:
N95 masks are primarily to protect the wearer - especially when in a high-risk environment like around a hospital. They have to be fitted. You can't have a beard. They can certainly protect others from the wearer as well. If people have them they wear them.
This is a surgical mask:
Surgical masks are primarily to protect others from the wearer. They don't have to be perfect but if they knock down 90% of the tiny breath droplets that come out of asymptomatic people, or sputum droplets that come out of symptomatic people - that's a big win. A surgical mask doesn't have to be that precise. This is what there are billions of in Asia, not N95.
I work at a university where lots of Asian students wear these - even before all this happened. Most of them are wearing plain old surgical masks, not N95.
This is what's working in Japan:
@oliverbeige@jemenger@naval@balajis@MarikaKatanuma Hi, I’m an American living in Japan. This is my on-the-ground report of Japan’s corona situation—what the rest of the world can learn from Japan, and what Japan needs to still be concerned about.
13/ As a result, large % of population already wearing masks at time of outbreak. Initial news of outbreak only increased mask wearing ahead of viral spread in Japan.
Everyone puts on a mask before going outside. Masks work. Even homemade ones. This is especially important on the subway as people get into close proximity. This limits a lot of asymptomatic transmission. The US has to become OK...
Even homemade is ok. My boss told me how her family in Chongqing reuses the surgical masks by putting a paper towel around them and throwing the paper towel away.
China requires everyone to wear masks (not N95) outside right now. Czechoslovakia is requiring everyone to wear masks. The Chinese expert who's in Italy is telling them they need to have everyone wearing masks. But literally a bandana or homemade mask is much better than nothing.
Originally Posted by :
Fourth, the W.H.O. and the C.D.C. told the public to wear masks if they were sick. However, there is increasing evidence of asymptomatic transmission, especially through younger people who have milder cases and don’t know they are sick but are still infectious. Since the W.H.O. and the C.D.C. do say that masks lessen the chances that infected people will infect others, then everyone should use masks. If the public is told that only the sick people are to wear masks, then those who do wear them will be stigmatized and people may well avoid wearing them if it screams “I’m sick.” Further, it’s very difficult to be tested for Covid-19 in the United States. How are people supposed to know for sure when to mask up?
Fifth, places like Hong Kong and Taiwan that jumped to action early with social distancing and universal mask wearing have the pandemic under much greater control, despite having significant travel from mainland China. Hong Kong health officials credit universal mask wearing as part of the solution and recommend universal mask wearing. In fact, Taiwan responded to the coronavirus by immediately ramping up mask production.
When we open back up again we have to require something over your mouth until this thing is gone imo. I assume (hope) our govt knows this, they just don't want to cause a panic run on masks right now (understandable). [Reply]
Originally Posted by Rain Man:
I'd never put the pieces together, but I knew that my grandfather had a brother who died as a young child. I always assumed that he was stillborn or it was some "normal" childhood illness, but I learned this week that he died in the Spanish Flu epidemic. Apparently my great-grandmother was very sick with it and didn't know he had died until after he was buried.
I did remember the same great-grandmother going to check on their neighbors on the next farm since no one had heard from them in a while, and when she went to their house the entire family was dead.
It must've been a heckuva thing. 1918 is the only year in the 20th century when America's total population declined http://demographia.com/db-uspop1900.htm.
Originally Posted by :
A health care worker at a hospital in Indiana described a Kafkaesque scenario: medical staffers can only get the masks when a patient has tested positive for the virus, but the facility has no way to confirm a case.
“There are many possible exposures in my hospital but are not equipped with the testing devices in order to confirm the cases,” the worker wrote. “We are then not allowed to wear proper PPE because they are not ‘positive’ and because our hospital is short on the PPE. We are also told that we are expected to keep the N-95 masks for several days and several patients and that they can be disinfected with Sanicloth wipes.”
“We do not have N95 masks, so we are being asked to intubate patients (which exposes us to entire airway) with normal masks,” wrote the pregnant nurse from Ohio. “It is unacceptable. We are supposed to treat every patient as suspected positive but we are unable to protect ourselves.”
Well it looks like there's still a major shortage. [Reply]
ITALY’S CORONAVIRUS NIGHTMARE COULD HAPPEN IN U.S. WITHIN DAYS OR WEEKS, EX-CDC CHIEF SAYS
ITALY’S REPORTED CORONAVIRUS death toll grew to more than 4,000 on Friday, outpacing China, a country with more than 20 times its population. The Italian health care system is now buckling under the weight of the pandemic. Health care professionals are working day and night to keep critically ill Covid-19 patients alive, while wartime triage conditions have left doctors to decide who lives and who dies. The crematorium in the hard-hit city of Bergamo is so overwhelmed that the army was brought in to deal with the corpses.
It could be a matter of weeks — or even days — before something similar happens here, Dr. Tom Frieden, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told The Intercept.
“Right now, the major concern that I have, and that other public health experts have, is the risk of outstripping health care capacity,” said Frieden, who is currently a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations. “This would be catastrophic. It’s what we’re seeing in Italy now, and it’s what we could see in communities around the U.S. soon.”
Frieden stressed the importance for healthy individuals of regular hand-washing and called for the medically vulnerable to self-isolate and stay 6 feet away from almost everyone. “We’ve seen terrible examples from Italy and Wuhan [in China] of thousands of health care workers getting infected, and we know that in the U.S. now, many health care workers have become infected.”
New modeling and estimates point to a nightmare scenario in which there could be a tenfold greater need in the United States for intensive-care beds and ventilators than are available, Frieden said. “What we’re hoping is that kind of peak that outstrips the health care system [as in Italy] does not come here,” he told The Intercept. “If it did, it could come in a matter of days to weeks.”
Last week, Frieden published a worst-case — but not implausible — scenario in which he warned that Covid-19 could potentially cause 1 million deaths in the United States alone.
Whether the U.S. health care system buckles like Italy’s “really depends on how vigorously and promptly we do social distancing,” said Frieden, who was also a former commissioner of the New York City Health Department. “The models suggest that you have about a week from where there is unlinked community transmission to have everyone hunker down and stay home, stop working, [and] stop interacting socially.
Many Americans have ignored these proscriptions, packing bars in Nashville and beaches in Miami.
With the uk shutting down.
it's starting to feel like the US is standing alone on island. [Reply]
Summit, IBM's supercomputer, ran thousands of simulations to analyze which drug compounds might effectively stop the coronavirus from infecting host cells.
The supercomputer identified 77. It's a promising step toward creating the most effective vaccine. https://t.co/XLSf8kkJM0
ITALY’S CORONAVIRUS NIGHTMARE COULD HAPPEN IN U.S. WITHIN DAYS OR WEEKS, EX-CDC CHIEF SAYS
ITALY’S REPORTED CORONAVIRUS death toll grew to more than 4,000 on Friday, outpacing China, a country with more than 20 times its population. The Italian health care system is now buckling under the weight of the pandemic. Health care professionals are working day and night to keep critically ill Covid-19 patients alive, while wartime triage conditions have left doctors to decide who lives and who dies. The crematorium in the hard-hit city of Bergamo is so overwhelmed that the army was brought in to deal with the corpses.
It could be a matter of weeks — or even days — before something similar happens here, Dr. Tom Frieden, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told The Intercept.
“Right now, the major concern that I have, and that other public health experts have, is the risk of outstripping health care capacity,” said Frieden, who is currently a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations. “This would be catastrophic. It’s what we’re seeing in Italy now, and it’s what we could see in communities around the U.S. soon.”
Frieden stressed the importance for healthy individuals of regular hand-washing and called for the medically vulnerable to self-isolate and stay 6 feet away from almost everyone. “We’ve seen terrible examples from Italy and Wuhan [in China] of thousands of health care workers getting infected, and we know that in the U.S. now, many health care workers have become infected.”
New modeling and estimates point to a nightmare scenario in which there could be a tenfold greater need in the United States for intensive-care beds and ventilators than are available, Frieden said. “What we’re hoping is that kind of peak that outstrips the health care system [as in Italy] does not come here,” he told The Intercept. “If it did, it could come in a matter of days to weeks.”
Last week, Frieden published a worst-case — but not implausible — scenario in which he warned that Covid-19 could potentially cause 1 million deaths in the United States alone.
Whether the U.S. health care system buckles like Italy’s “really depends on how vigorously and promptly we do social distancing,” said Frieden, who was also a former commissioner of the New York City Health Department. “The models suggest that you have about a week from where there is unlinked community transmission to have everyone hunker down and stay home, stop working, [and] stop interacting socially.
Many Americans have ignored these proscriptions, packing bars in Nashville and beaches in Miami.
With the uk shutting down.
it's starting to feel like the US is standing alone on island.
I wonder how many non covid related deaths just due to lack of available care from the pandemic. [Reply]
