But with each outbreak more people will acquire immunity, and eventually the peaks will be lower than capacity.
But it's going to be a rough road to get there, and we'll all suffer on some level. This isn't going to be "over" for quite some time.
China sending equipment to Italy now is a good sign.
If you’re under 30 without any other health issues, you should be fine? Might not realize you have it?
I wonder if it would be easier to create a low dosage vaccine for younger people, thus creating a bit of a firewall so it doesn’t spread as rapidly.
I know nothing about medicine so this may be silly.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/08/health/fauci-coronavirus....
We have a ways to go before a vaccine is available.
iirc he reiterated this to congress this morning before hearings were terminated to allow Trump to hold a press conference. Witnesses were told to stop their testimony and leave immediately.
> “This morning we were informed that President Trump and Vice President Pence have called our witnesses to an emergency meeting at the White House,” Maloney said. “We don't know the details, just that it is extremely urgent.”
> At about 11:30 a.m., she ended questioning from lawmakers, saying she received notice from the White House that the witnesses needed to leave “now.”
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/487014-trump-officials-cu...
If you have that, you give it to everybody you can.
I guess deciding what safe enough is can be a problem (for many people the bar will be "getting the vaccine has better odds for a good outcome than getting the infection", but that is sort of a minimum).
I think people are underestimating what an over-capacity, health care system looks like and the increase in risk of other infections can have.
Also patient 1 in Italy was a healthy marathon runner who at least ended up in intensive care, not sure if dead yet or not.
You basically get in real trouble if you need a respirator - they're pretty much out of those and they have to assess your chance of survival to decide if they can tube you.
Interestingly ERs are seeing much less load because people have stopped going there for stupid reasons, because they are afraid of catching COVID-19. All medical stuff is still busting their ass if course, a lot of them have been lended to ICUs, rooms have been repurposed, etc.
This is not to say that the situation isn't bad. It's really bad. And if you think that your country has such a good health care system that it will hold better, you should know that Lombardy hospitals are top notch.
Whatever your age, stop traveling. If there's been a single case in your region, stop risky behaviors now: don't go shopping, have it delivered. Work from home. Don't use public transit. Teach your parents how to shop online and force them to stay home. Don't shake hands and wash them often.
As someone living in Milano, I'm afraid that if the panic in the government (as opposed to the population) keeps on going on, this won't be possible when they shut down almost everything (given that the rules change every 24h and no one knows how to properly follow them, let alone evaluate the effect of them).
I hope so, but
- it will kill some number of younger people, even healthy ones.
- it’s also worth considering that we don’t (AFAIK) have a clear picture about potential long-term complications (eg lung damage). We should not simply assume there won’t be these.
I’m saying this to emphasize the seriousness of the situation.
I'm sorry, but that's a stupid assumption to make.
I'm "only" 29 and last year I managed to catch a parvovirus B19 from someone - it's a virus that's relatively common in children, but has very mild symptoms - it's almost unheard of in adults, mostly because you either already have immunity, or there are no symptoms/the symptoms are no worse than a mild cold/flu. Well, except that in about 10% of adults it causes severe response with a high fever that last weeks, with arthretic swelling of joints - and in 10% of those the joint issues don't go away for years. Well, it's been nearly a year now and my knees and other joints are still fucked from the virus, I'm constantly on steroids just to control the inflammation.
So no, this has changed my "I'm young so I'll be fine" outlook on this - the chances are not always in your favour.
I hope you get better soon.
Note that assumes that such containment measures would have been enacted many more times over the last decade, incurring inconveniences [which you can model as "life energy and time lost", even if few lives are lost from them] if the containment criteria were tight enough to stop the initial outbreak of a virus that has relatively high transmissibility, many infected who feel relatively mild symptoms, those symptoms mimic other common diseases, and a week or more incubation period before serious symptoms show up.
It would have been sensible to close our borders and halt international travel 8-12 weeks ago, and begin widespread screening of suspect individuals. But at the time everyone said that was nuts, you want to tank our economy over some virus that's barely even outside Wuhan!?
Right now we could still contain it with radical isolation measures like Italy is doing. Nobody leaves their house without a good reason, everything comes to a halt, we perform mass testing on everybody and if you're infected you get an even stronger quarantine. But you want to shut down our economy over just a few hundred "isolated cases"!?
By the time people are dying en masse and hospitals are overwhelmed, it's too late. There's nothing you can really do at that point.
The basic problem is that people don't understand quadratic or exponential curves. If you have a pond that starts with one lily pad and they double in number each day, and it takes one month to fill the pond completely, then when is the pond 50% full? The answer is the day before. And the lesson is - exponential growth requires extrapolating from "who cares, it's just a few cases" to what could happen if it's allowed to grow unchecked. Which humans are incredibly bad at doing.
http://jonathanbecher.com/2016/01/31/lily-pads-and-exponenti...
Types easy; is hard.
11 weeks ago was Christmas. How many Americans were overseas on holidays for Christmas? How many Americans with Chinese relatives were in China? How many Chinese students of American universities were home on break? Is flying Boston to Seattle meaningfully different than flying Boston to Toronto? If you halt international travel and close the borders, where do the stranded travelers now live? For how long? Who pays for it? Do they lose their jobs/have to quit college? On average, nearly half of international travelers are on their way home, not out. These are real people.
> But at the time everyone said that was nuts, you want to tank our economy over some virus that's barely even outside Wuhan!?
If you set the system parameters tightly enough to prevent the virus from leaving Wuhan, I think you're basically closing travel all the time. How many people get sick and die of random, novel things? How many of those have the theoretical potential to be silently but exponentially transmissible? How can you set a system tight enough to prevent all of them while having travel and commerce?
It seems quite possible that such a tight system would be a cure that's worse than the disease. I'm not suggesting that we're doing all that we can or that we shouldn't have taken some of today's steps last week, but I am saying that I think it's completely unrealistic to think we could prevent this entirely in any sane way.
We had 6 weeks to prepare for this, and we did nothing, and we're still not doing nearly enough.
That was a month ago. Managed to get done most of the preparations designed for a quarantine of about a month length as predicated by Chinese data. And a few extras. Not exactly hoarding food levels.
What I didn't consider was how strict and well executed were the containment measures applied by China. Without these, we'll probably get much longer, three month run. The measures I've taken definitely will help but potentially are not enough.
But for the last month I knew it was coming. Everyone who was paying attention knew this was coming. This crisis has been happening in slow motion.
We're still not doing enough now, and we know it's coming and Italy has shown us exactly how bad it going to be.
https://www.fox9.com/news/minnesota-confirms-3rd-coronavirus...
> the risk of death among young adults would be smaller than that of older adults, e.g., at most 0.1%–0.2%. Whether to perceive this estimate as severe or moderate is a matter for discussion, but we consider 0.1%–0.2% among young adults to be unusually high.
> https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/9/2/580
So although it is not as deadly as SARS (which had 20% fatality rate), you definitely don't want to catch it.
To put that into perspective that’s the mortality rate of measles [1] and our grandparents were still going to measls parties.
Our grandparents went to measles parties because they knew that they'd eventually be exposed and wanted to do it under controlled conditions where they knew treatment was available and had a plan for early detection of symptoms.
The situation with COVID-19 is that people who get sick are going to do so in an environment where they and their government are surprised as "how fast it grew" and where all the hospital beds (and oxygen masks, and ventilators, and intubation kits, and doctors, and nurses, and...) are going to be filled by other sick people.
And a lot of them are going to die, who didn't need to if we had just taken this seriously and not told people "it's just like measles".
To that teambayleaf pointed out that it comes at high individual risk.
But in the past this was done for measles at similar risk.
Last time I checked there are at least 3 or 4 different strains circulating now. That's why some folks who got cured got it again. So don't have such naive hopes that all will be rosy on its own soon.
If the story will be similar to flu, we're pretty much fucked - every year the strain is so different that prior vaccinations/immunity doesn't work on them. I certainly hope that's not the case, too early to tell.
Plus thinking that when we have few (even if 2) variants of the virus within first 3 months there won't be any more mutations is a bit naive IMHO.
But strains don't correlate perfectly to immune respnse, so the upthread point about reinfection risk remains speculation. We just don't know yet. But all endemic viruses eventually reach equilibrium with the population immune response (and vaccination regime), even if it requires regular updates a-la the yearly change in flu shots.