If anyone has any ideas about how to communicate about this with them, I am all ears.
30 min/weekday a science journalist talks to Christian Drosten, a world-renowned expert on Coronaviruses, who explains things in a very concise manner. Yesterdays episode was „We have to protect the elderly“, where Drosten talked about the high risk for the sick and elderly and trying to fully get this point across to his own father over the weekend. He also mentioned that we should work on hopefully achieving a broader societal awareness of this over the next week or two.
I talked to my mother and father a bit first, sent my mother a link to this episode and told her to put me on speakerphone. We then listened to it together and discussed it a bit afterwards. I found this to be really helpful.
My mother was in denial until 2 weeks ago, when she went a bit hysterical for a day and has been concerned (but okay) since. My father was mostly in denial until today. He also bailed out soon after the podcast ended, because it was a bit much for him. But overall he took it quite well and is taking it more seriously now.
Overall I am very happy with the way this went. Sorry, this isn‘t very helpful if you don‘t speak German. But maybe you are able to find a similar thing in your native language.
It sounds like you need to convince her of two things: (1) she is vulnerable; and (2) she must change.
How about focusing on #2?
Instead of asking her to change for herself, perhaps suggest this could protect friends and others around her who may be more vulnerable. An appropriate analogy may be secondhand smoke. Maybe her lungs are resilient enough to withstand the toxic effects of smoking, but what about the lungs of all her loved ones?
Hopefully others can chime in with better ideas. I hope you and your family, and we all, can remain safe and healthy during this crisis.
First of all, respect them. Even if they might be wrong, they are adults, who have the right, to make their own decisions. You can stress the point, how worried you are and provide them with a good article etc., that in this case some caution is advised, but try not to push them.
Also, eventually everybody has to die. When you are 70+ it can happen any moment. I can understand to not want my last years to live in fear of every disease there is. And there are plenty of them, which are especially dangerous for old people, because .. they are older and weaker.
Your parents are on death's doorstep as is everyone in their later years. It may be more meaningful to figure out what experiences you'd like to share with them in the limited time you have left instead of trying to prolong their existence at the cost of straining the relationship.
In other words don't put off whatever you might potentially regret not having done if they were to pass away suddenly - with each passing day, the inevitable conclusion every human being shares only draws closer.
"Please take this seriously" is not a request. It's barely even english. It also contains an out of context judgement which you should also try to avoid. Use objective observations instead. So rather than saying "I think you're irresponsible", tell them the actual concrete things they said or did, that led you to that assessment. Something like "I notice you rode the bus during peak hours five times last week." is an example of an objective observation, devoid of judgement or criticism.
The overriding public health concern is slowing the spread as much as possible. Even if in the asymptote the same number of people are infected, spreading that burden out over a protracted time period minimizes overloading on the healthcare system.
If even a small percent of the population became "bug-chasers", it would supercharge the rate of transmission. Especially because the incubation period is so long. The same unhygienic behavior of trying to acquire the disease, would very likely also spread the disease by the asymptomatic.
If you put any ethical weight on the consideration of other human beings, then the very minor plausible individuals benefits are more than outweighed by the massive social harm.
Now there are a lot more people in those time slots all competing for the same doctors and hospital beds, etc.
Congratulations, you made the curve a little less flat :(
Odds are decent an even more effective treatment will be found in the coming months, and if you can stave off your infection date till then you'll be better off (which of course presumes that you will get the virus at all, which is far from a given).
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/wuhan-coronavirus-risk-of-re...
If the reality is that only a small fraction of people would think like that, the we don't need to worry about that line of reasoning.
But I agree with your point that it's moot due to the potential for reinfection.
Over the long haul, reinfection is quite possible, since immunity wears off with time. It is not considered unlikely that this disease will be with us forever. In that case, vaccination will perhaps be our best tool to manage it.
The more practical problem is that the growth is exponential, so the window between "no one has it, it's safe to get it now" and "everyone has it, mass quarantine" is just a few weeks. Add to that that the virus has a 5-6 day incubation period and it basically doesn't work. Statistically, by the time you know someone sick from whom you can infect yourself, the number of people with still-incubating cases (who are AHEAD of you in the "queue"!) is probably enough to overwhelm health care facilities anyway.
Don't do this.
Even with that there seem bureaucratic type delays till it gets used. I just took some as a prophylactic which is totally unproven but as a clinical treatment it seems to work well in trials.
> Don’t be that person. It might not be about you but it is everyone’s problem. Don’t be careless in the hopes you get sick when you can “avoid the rush.” There is zero benefit to individuals or the population to getting sick early in the pandemic. You would be putting the lives of others at risk. It is not just that people are dying, but how they are dying. To say nothing of the physical trauma, emotionally speaking this is the opposite of a “good death”. People are dying alone, quarantined from those they love.
> Early reports are that people who recover develop antibodies that provide immunity if they are infected with the same strain again. However, this is great news for vaccine development, so flatten the curve and wait it out.
> This can get very serious; one person described the pain as feeling like her lungs were being put through a pasta maker. 10% of cases require ICU care and mechanical ventilation. Even if autopsy reports from China have been misrepresented or overstated, there is a possibility of long term or permanent lung damage if you do get sick and recover. There are lot of gaps in the information about lung damage, mostly because everyone qualified to let the public know exactly what is going on is already very busy saving lives and putting their own at risk.
If you're under 60 or so, it's quite likely you won't need any medical attention at all after contraction.
This is why it's spreading -- most middle-aged and younger people feel like they have the common cold.
Is that actually the case? Don't the details look like a low grade flu? It's not sore throat or sniffles, it's still a cough and a fever.
Untreated, it's basically like playing Russian Roulette. 5 out of 6 times, nothing bad happens. 1 out of 6, you die. The disparity in outcomes is probably what makes this so insidious: a lot of folks look at the numeric outcomes for healthy people in the presence of ventilators and ICUs and reasonably think "Oh, I have a 1 in 500 chance of dying, it's no big deal". Medical professionals look at the exponential infection curve, the capacity to overwhelm health care systems, and the number of patients requiring hospitalization and think "this is the scariest disease I've ever seen".
South Korea is a better dataset because they have tested so many people.
Basically, I saw that this domain was available and saw the increasing talk of “flattening the curve” on Twitter. I grabbed it and wanted to do something helpful, like post just the pic of the tall and flat graph that was making the rounds, because I loved how simple the visual was, and how powerful the point it made. I thought at least people could share the concept easily.
But then someone shared Julie’s post, which was living on a gdoc at the time, and even that was struggling with the amount of readers... and was very much not an easily shareable link.
So I reached out and asked if she’d like to have it live at flattenthecurve.com, and promised to give her a login to update and add more info etc.
She said yes and I got the site live in half a day mostly spent reformatting the gdoc into WP.
I’m thrilled that the domain is really living up to its best use!
I hope you have something like cloudflare behind it -- or at least static HTML. That sucker is "going viral", no pun intended.