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 :
The proposals multiply almost as fast as the coronavirus: The NHL can play in North Dakota! The NBA can play on a cruise ship! MLB can play in a biodome! The NFL can play in its stadiums, with 70,000 fans packed in!
These are fun thought experiments, at least as good a way to spend time in isolation as watching Tiger King. And everyone wants to believe we will be buying peanuts and cracker jack this summer. But fans deserve a reality check: According to the experts—medical experts, not the money-making experts in league offices—we will not have sports any time soon. And when we do, we will not attend the games.
Most of these ideas are essentially the same: The players live in quarantine, shuttling from the hotel to the stadium, for the duration of the season. They undergo daily COVID-19 tests. They bring joy to a terrified country. That seems reasonable on the surface. But look closer.
First, let’s do away with the suggestion, put forth by President Donald Trump, that football season could go on as normal, beginning on time in September and unfolding in front of crowded stadiums.
"We will not have sporting events with fans until we have a vaccine," says Zach Binney, a PhD in epidemiology who wrote his dissertation on injuries in the NFL and now teaches at Emory. Barring a medical miracle, the process of developing and widely distributing a vaccine is likely to take 12 to 18 months.
Until the vast majority of the population is immune to COVID-19, the disease the virus causes, any gathering as large as an NFL game risks setting off a biological bomb. That may sound like hyperbole, but that's the exact phrase a doctor in Bergamo, Italy’s hardest hit city, used to describe a Feb. 19 soccer match between hometown Atalanta and Spain’s Valencia, which super-charged the virus’s spread.
O.K., but what about empty stadiums?
“The idea of a quarantined sports league that can still go on sounds really good in theory,” says Binney. “But it’s a lot harder to pull off in practice than most people appreciate.”
Conversations with experts painted a picture of what exactly it would take to make these sports vacuums a reality. Before any of this can begin, every person who would have access to the facilities will need to be isolated separately for two weeks to ensure that no infection could enter. That’s players and coaches, athletic trainers and interpreters, reporters and broadcasters, plus housekeeping and security personnel. No one can come in or out. Food will have to be delivered. Hotel and stadium employees will have to be paid enough to compensate for their time away from their families. Everyone onsite will have to be tested multiple times during this initial period.
That brings us to the question of testing. At the moment, screening is scarce enough that many healthcare facilities cannot even clear their employees. Asymptomatic professional athletes are not high on anyone’s priority list. But here Carl Bergstrom, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Washington, offers some hope. Testing is not technologically difficult, he says. There are supply chain issues—we will eventually run out of the long Q-tips required for the nasopharyngeal swab, for example—and questions of bureaucracy, but he is cautiously optimistic that we might have ubiquitous COVID-19 testing by the end of May.
All right, so the 14-day period is over and everyone has tested negative at least twice. Now they are allowed to begin spending time around one another—but not too much time. If one person gets it, he or she will begin spreading it immediately, so everyone will have to continue practicing social distancing. That probably means using a new ball for each play. It probably means seating players in stands rather than on benches or in dugouts. It certainly means banning high-fives.
All personnel must continue to be tested daily. We will be unlikely to have enough rapid testing by then, so they will probably have to settle for the tests that take several hours to produce results. That means the testing will probably run a day behind.
Any major sporting event hires ambulances, stocked with EMTs, to idle outside in case of injury. If a player needs treatment by outside medical personnel, even just for a sprained ankle, he or she has left the secure area and will need to isolate for 14 days before returning to it. And, of course, medical resources need to be abundant enough that society can afford to have ambulances and EMTs on call for games, plus doctors and nurses—clad in currently-scarce protective equipment—who can tend to sports injuries.
Minor leagues cannot afford to play to empty stadiums, so you also need a taxi squad of players practicing in isolation in case someone gets hurt. And because players recognize that a championship won under these circumstances will be seen as tainted, expect them to be less likely to play through injury.
After each game, everyone will need to be transported back to the hotel. If the NBA plays in Las Vegas, as has been proposed, the personnel might be able to walk from the court to their rooms. If MLB plays at spring training sites in Arizona, as it is considering, the league will have to hire bus drivers—who will, of course, also have to be isolated. And then once they are back in their rooms, every person involved will have to follow rules. You can’t take your kids to the park. You can’t run to the grocery store. You can’t invite your Bumble match up to your room. These are humans, so the leagues would surely require insurance: That means security personnel (another group that would need to isolate) or invasive cell phone tracking (good luck getting that by the players’ union). If your wife gives birth or your father dies of cancer and you want to be there, that’s another 14-day reentry period.
And ethically, Bergstrom says, “you need informed consent.” That means everyone has to opt in and no one’s paycheck can hang in the balance.
Fine. So no one touches anyone else or goes anywhere. Experts agree that if everything goes perfectly, the leagues could theoretically pull this off. Baseball has the advantage of little in-game contact between players. Basketball and hockey have the advantage of being able to skip ahead to the playoffs and eliminate teams quickly. Football has the advantage of time. Individual sports such as golf and tennis might have the best chance of all, given the smaller number of participants and relative ease of keeping them separate.
But there are a million ways the Jenga stack could fall: What if the person delivering groceries to the biodome walks by someone who coughs on the lettuce and a week later, a player tests positive? Is there an option other than shutting down the whole operation for 14 days?
“No,” says Bergstrom.
And that’s really the end of the conversation. Even if we can start this, we almost certainly can’t finish it. Just look at South Korea and Japan, which both believed they had the outbreak under control and have since pushed back the start dates of their professional baseball seasons. In response to ESPN's reporting on the MLB biodome scenario this week, former Medicare and Medicaid head Andy Slavitt tweeted, “I’m as big a sports fan as anybody, but this is reckless. Leagues need to follow the science & do the right thing.”
The leagues know how farfetched their ideas are. So do the players’ unions. They continue to explore options because they would be remiss not to. But fans should understand how unlikely this all is.
No one wants to acknowledge how far we are from ordinary life, says Kimberley Miner, a professor at the University of Maine who develops risk assessment for the U.S. Army. “It’s hard to stomach a lot of this information, so it’s not being widely shared,” she explains.
But the reality is that even after we pass the initial peak of infection, the virus is still active. We have already lost more than 16,000 Americans to this disease. Bringing back sports soon would give people a reason to stay inside, a reason to feel hopeful. It would probably also cost more lives.
“If people just decide to let it burn in most areas and we do lose a couple million people it’d probably be over by the fall,” says Binney. “You’d have football. You’d also have two million dead people. And let’s talk about that number. We’re really bad at dealing with big numbers. That is a Super Bowl blown up by terrorists, killing every single person in the building, 24 times in six months. It’s 9/11 every day for 18 months. What freedoms have we given up, what wars have we fought, what blood have we shed, what money have we spent in the interest of stopping one more 9/11? This is 9/11 every day for 18 months.”
The peanuts and crackerjack will be waiting for us when sports are ready to come back. Only the virus will determine when that is.
Am I Going To Wake Up Because I Have 3 Young Children At Home?'
The last words of coronavirus patients before they are placed on ventilators stick with a Long Island health care worker.
LONG ISLAND, NY A Long Island respiratory therapist opened up about her experiences during the new coronavirus outbreak, where she has seen firsthand the suffering of COVID-19 patients including the deaths of some.
The health care worker, who asked that she and her hospital remain anonymous, said she's never seen anything like the coronavirus pandemic. She has overheard phone calls patients have made to their families before she inserts a ventilation tube into them. Some, she said, feel "fine" and have a full phone conversation, but others may have spoken their last words. Some patients are so short of breath that a nurse will call their family for them. And sometimes, there's no time for a phone call the patient has to be rushed to be intubated.
"We stand around their bed, [patients] are horrified, the anesthesiologist behind them, me at the side of their head with a caring smile they can't see because of [my] mask, hoping they can see it in my eyes," she said.
The medication goes in, the patient goes to sleep, the health care workers insert the tube, place the person on a ventilator, and from there, they try their hardest to keep them alive, she said.
She went into detail on some of the conversations she's overheard:
83-year-old woman; a mother and grandmother who's short of breath: "Please help me, I'm going to die."
55-year-old woman; a registered nurse and mom with oxygen saturation on 100 percent oxygen, slightly short of breath:"Please, no. Just let me call my son"
40-year-old man who's nonverbal, has special needs, and is a son; low oxygen saturation on 100 percent: Stares at [health care workers] with the look of fear in his eyes as multiple people in mask, shields, gowns, surround him and try to calm him down.
61-year-old man; a physician, husband and father who's extremely short of breath: "Please, please, I can't do this. Just intubate me. Are you ready? Tell my wife I love her."
63-year-old man; a husband and father with low saturation on 100 percent oxygen: "Please no, I'm scared. Do we have to?"
51-year-old man; a husband and father with low saturation on 100 percent oxygen and increased work of breathing: "How does this work?" "Am I going to sleep?" "Am I going to wake up, because I have three young children at home?"
55-year-old man; a husband and father, on a ventilator for the second time after being re-intubated. His wife calls to check on him, a worker tells the wife "I understand m'am, we are doing the best we can, he is my patient but he is your family," to which the wife replied, "No he is not my family, he is my world."
"A lot of time we are trying everything, and nothing is working, we lose the battle & it hurts because you remember that conversation, who they were before COVID took them," she said.
Most people who are placed on ventilators, a last resort for the most critical patients, never recover. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently estimated that just 20 percent of patients placed on ventilators survive, USA Today reported.
The worker said health care workers are tired both emotionally and physically.
"We try our hardest, and we get some wins, and we also get some losses. The Respiratory Therapist, the Nurses, the Doctors, the front-line, WE ARE TRYING but every loss hurts. Every number you see on T.V. is someone's loved one. Remember that, always and forever. This virus is nasty. These conversations will stay with a lot of us forever, these faces will too."
The hardest part, she told Patch, is that patients' loved ones cannot be at their bedside.
"They are scared, sick, and even more heartbreaking is that some are dying without their families being by there. So my heart feels for those patients and the family members that can't be there, it's hard."
The staff tries their best to connect patients and their families through phone calls, video chats and by comforting them.
"But you can't replace family in those final moments."
There have been nights when multiple patients have had to be intubated, and the worker said hospital staff have had to manage more ventilators than she ever could've imagined.
"Some nights are so hectic, we cry, we get stressed, we run around doing the most we can. But it's amazing to see how the staff comes together for each other and even more for the patients."
She credited her hospital and Northwell Health for offering mental health services for all staff members, saying they've been great.
The front-liner pleaded with people to stay home to avoid spreading the coronavirus.
"Hopefully we will overcome this soon, but until then, just stay home." [Reply]
Originally Posted by :
It’s not just a disease of the lungs that we’re seeing; it’s also a disease of the kidney. We’re seeing around 80 percent of critically ill patients experiencing kidney failure. We’re finding that to be a very poor prognostic indicator. Upwards of 80 to 90 percent of patients with kidney failure have died. We don’t have enough dialysis machines to take care of these patients.
That's not all that surprising. Usually, when a patient starts circling the drain multiple organ systems fail, not just one. From early reports, sepsis was common in serious illness. Septic shock, circulatory collapse, and renal failure are hand-in-hand. [Reply]
Its funny that the people constantly bickering with Pete and referencing him in other posts as well try to put off an image of being superior to him and just being noble in correcting him all while junking up the thread way worst than his initial post ever could. [Reply]
Originally Posted by mr. tegu:
Its funny that the people constantly bickering with Pete and referencing him in other posts as well try to put off an image of being superior to him and just being noble in correcting him all while junking up the thread way worst than his initial post ever could.
Originally Posted by BigRedChief:
Am I Going To Wake Up Because I Have 3 Young Children At Home?'
The last words of coronavirus patients before they are placed on ventilators stick with a Long Island health care worker.
LONG ISLAND, NY A Long Island respiratory therapist opened up about her experiences during the new coronavirus outbreak, where she has seen firsthand the suffering of COVID-19 patients including the deaths of some.
The health care worker, who asked that she and her hospital remain anonymous, said she's never seen anything like the coronavirus pandemic. She has overheard phone calls patients have made to their families before she inserts a ventilation tube into them. Some, she said, feel "fine" and have a full phone conversation, but others may have spoken their last words. Some patients are so short of breath that a nurse will call their family for them. And sometimes, there's no time for a phone call the patient has to be rushed to be intubated.
"We stand around their bed, [patients] are horrified, the anesthesiologist behind them, me at the side of their head with a caring smile they can't see because of [my] mask, hoping they can see it in my eyes," she said.
The medication goes in, the patient goes to sleep, the health care workers insert the tube, place the person on a ventilator, and from there, they try their hardest to keep them alive, she said.
She went into detail on some of the conversations she's overheard:
83-year-old woman; a mother and grandmother who's short of breath: "Please help me, I'm going to die."
55-year-old woman; a registered nurse and mom with oxygen saturation on 100 percent oxygen, slightly short of breath:"Please, no. Just let me call my son"
40-year-old man who's nonverbal, has special needs, and is a son; low oxygen saturation on 100 percent: Stares at [health care workers] with the look of fear in his eyes as multiple people in mask, shields, gowns, surround him and try to calm him down.
61-year-old man; a physician, husband and father who's extremely short of breath: "Please, please, I can't do this. Just intubate me. Are you ready? Tell my wife I love her."
63-year-old man; a husband and father with low saturation on 100 percent oxygen: "Please no, I'm scared. Do we have to?"
51-year-old man; a husband and father with low saturation on 100 percent oxygen and increased work of breathing: "How does this work?" "Am I going to sleep?" "Am I going to wake up, because I have three young children at home?"
55-year-old man; a husband and father, on a ventilator for the second time after being re-intubated. His wife calls to check on him, a worker tells the wife "I understand m'am, we are doing the best we can, he is my patient but he is your family," to which the wife replied, "No he is not my family, he is my world."
"A lot of time we are trying everything, and nothing is working, we lose the battle & it hurts because you remember that conversation, who they were before COVID took them," she said.
Most people who are placed on ventilators, a last resort for the most critical patients, never recover. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently estimated that just 20 percent of patients placed on ventilators survive, USA Today reported.
The worker said health care workers are tired both emotionally and physically.
"We try our hardest, and we get some wins, and we also get some losses. The Respiratory Therapist, the Nurses, the Doctors, the front-line, WE ARE TRYING but every loss hurts. Every number you see on T.V. is someone's loved one. Remember that, always and forever. This virus is nasty. These conversations will stay with a lot of us forever, these faces will too."
The hardest part, she told Patch, is that patients' loved ones cannot be at their bedside.
"They are scared, sick, and even more heartbreaking is that some are dying without their families being by there. So my heart feels for those patients and the family members that can't be there, it's hard."
The staff tries their best to connect patients and their families through phone calls, video chats and by comforting them.
"But you can't replace family in those final moments."
There have been nights when multiple patients have had to be intubated, and the worker said hospital staff have had to manage more ventilators than she ever could've imagined.
"Some nights are so hectic, we cry, we get stressed, we run around doing the most we can. But it's amazing to see how the staff comes together for each other and even more for the patients."
She credited her hospital and Northwell Health for offering mental health services for all staff members, saying they've been great.
The front-liner pleaded with people to stay home to avoid spreading the coronavirus.
"Hopefully we will overcome this soon, but until then, just stay home."