Social distancing is the only way to stop the coronavirus
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Odds are pretty high we are headed for the next William Henry Harrison situation.
That said, what I've yet to hear about is what the end game looks like?
Do you cancel everything for a month or two, and then go back to normal? Wouldn't the virus just take hold again? So do we go on a routine monthly quarantine every quarter?
Do we cancel everything until we find a vaccine?
Do we quarantine the "at risk" and actually have everyone else interact even more so that all the healthy people get it quickly and recover to develop immunity?
If anyone knows, I'd be curious, what kind of end game are we looking at here?
As that page says, "Relative to Other Countries, US Labor and Healthcare Policies are a Perfect Storm for Pandemics". Small businesses in Seattle are already closing shop for good, in anticipation of the next month. I'm an hourly worker who depends on people going out, and I have zero upcoming work.
Social Distancing is an excellent short-term plan. It's not an end game.
The drastic measures take in China seem to be working.[1] China had 507 million people in full or partial lockdown at peak. "In the Hubei city of Huanggang, people caught in public without a mask or wandering outside without authorization have to pay a 1,000 yuan ($140) fine, and a fee of 40 yuan a day for two weeks of “forced study” classes, which are conducted in a sports stadium with students seated far apart, Huanggang residents said in interviews." Tracking of travel from phone info. Tracking devices on people's doors. Followup by cops and local Communist Party committees to keep people in line.
New infections in China are dropping rapidly.[2] Restrictions are being slowly lifted and life is returning to normal. Yesterday, the only new infections found outside Wuhan came from people entering China.
There's a good chance China will be mostly back to normal in a month, but with lots of testing to keep infections from getting going again.
[1] http://archive.is/qWmFw [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-...
Correct, or at least possibly so. But by flattening the curve you can greatly increase then number of people that survive. Entering respiratory distress because of serious case of corona virus in a overburdened hospital is likely to be fatal. Much less so if there's a bed in the pneumonia ward for you.
Also early treatments are showing promise, in particular zinc + the malaria drug.
Which was just a wham line for me.
Iron lungs are superior. They avoid throat injury caused by tubes, they allow semi-normal talking and eating (time it right), and they generally make people more comfortable.
We got rid of iron lungs for cost reasons. They are physically huge and heavy. They slow down all patient care that doesn't involve the head.
There is a new device that is even better than an iron lung, but it is extremely uncommon. It operates the same way, but it is in the form of a body-conforming shell (like a turtle) and it has a push-pull action. It even has a button to request coughing, which turns out to be important.
I feel that we ought to somehow pressure hospitals to upgrade. It isn't right that people have to suffer with tubes jammed down their throats when far superior alternatives are available.
That's an understatement. The entire body is in a pressure vessel and is inaccessible. You can't even easily give medication or draw blood. I wouldn't say iron lungs are "superior"; they're no longer used for good reasons that don't just boil down to cost/bulkiness reasons. Also, modern ventilators aren't that cheap anyway.
However they're a maintenance pain, esp. disinfection.
If you were to be the patient, I think you would say iron lungs are "superior". The alternative is tubes jammed down your throat, which is horrible torture. I had a relative who literally chose death over the tubes. He would fight to rip them out, despite knowing that he needed them. Finally the hospital gave in, and now he's dead.
I think we will return to a more moderate social distancing, where appropriate, after tests have been deployed and we have a better sense of the actual rates of infection in different regions.
"One large-scale review, published in 2012, found that annual physical exams do nothing to improve a person’s disease and mortality risks" [1], while costing us billions of dollars, and taking doctors' time away from patients who actually need it.
[1]: https://time.com/5095920/annual-physical-exam/
If people have health issues that need treating, then absolutely go see a doctor when you can. If it's simply been a year and they're not in a high-risk population and have no reason to believe anything has changed, then don't bother.
You cancel things until the virus is gone.
Not by a time limit.
Everything else is only trying to slow the spreading. It is not useless though.
And keep in mind that without a vaccine, there is a fair chance for the virus to come back another winter (assuming it stops spreading in the summer).
But yet, I have always gotten sick during the winters at work, in an office setting. Always.
The only winter where I didn’t get sick, was when I stayed home all winter, and avoided most public contact. And miraculously, I didn’t get sick that season.
So the flu virus or whatever I caught, was likely, always via airborne transmissions. Either I was in the same room as someone that sneezed or coughed, and the virus diffused through the air inside, or it got transmitted through the ventilation system.
Keeping your hands from your eyes, nose, and mouth, is important, but so is the usage of a face mask. If anything, it should at least try to stop or slow down some airborne viruses. And face masks will work better, when everyone is using it, so their germs stay localized to themselves.
The second point is that the less you have fat on your hand skin, the shorter lived is the virus when it lands on it. That is the rational behind "wash your hands often" messages.
EDIT - Let me clarify. If I get the virus, I will quarantine (of course), but I'm not going to prematurely ruin my life in fear of this event, which is in itself not a death sentence - only 0.2% of those under 40 die at worst case https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...
Everyone needs to RELAX
I don't want you to be afraid - I want you to minimize the risk that you get coronavirus and become another infection vector, endangering the at-risk populations around you.
I want you to do that because it is the socially responsible thing to do, and it will decrease the chance of someone who is far more at risk of serious complications from the disease catching it.
Having had a compromised immune system I don't wish it on anyone. But hey maybe if more people were casual about these things then they too can learn the hard way.
You end up passing it along to someone who’s not as fortunate as you, that’s what.
“Cancel everything” isn’t about saving you. It’s about saving all the people around you.
Sounds a lot like "this is fine" when considering the less optimistic death and injury rates are surpassing the flu by multiples of ten.
Everything in China was normal 2 months ago, everything in Italy was normal 2 weeks ago.
I can't say anything good about this decision of yours.
The current low infection rates are because people are changing their behaviour, not because the virus isn't a serious problem. This effort is slightly thwarted by selfish randos who ignore the risks.
Will social distancing really work over the long term though? We can't live in caves forever, eventually we have to come out.
>Everyone needs to RELAX
You need to understand how hypocritical this sentiment comes off as. Some people are panicking - however, most people and sources (that I am exposed to) are advocating for responses within the range of reason (and there is room for a range of opinions within the range of reason). If you want to spread reason, support the fight against price gouging and against people who buy far too much bulk supplies. But please don't tell random threads full of people to just generally "relax" in all capital, italic letters, while at the same time throwing out wild hyperbole like "I'm not going to ruin my life". It's a very mixed message.
A German report that came out today indicated that there is significant pre-symptomatic viral shedding. So you could be not showing any symptoms yet unknowingly pass the disease on to the people around you that you care about. This is, of course, not an issue if there are not people around you that you care about...