Surviving the coronavirus, then testing positive again
latimes.com
latimes.com
1. Is it possible to get COVID-19 twice?
2. If (1) is true, are the symptoms the same (if applicable)?
3. If (1) is true are you still contagious?
4. There's evidence that there are multiple strains, can you get both strains?
5. What's the likelihood that a mutation will occur once treatment is more widespread?
6. Does the heat make it significantly less likely for you to get COVID-19?
My impression so far is that we'll never get rid of this thing, and at best this will be something like the seasonal flu, where we'll just have to live with it and great shots yearly.
No, doesn't seem to be, but you might still have "viral shedding" for a bit even after you are "recovered". meaning you could still be contagious.
4. There's evidence that there are multiple strains, can you get both strains?
You shouldn't think about them as multiple strains, as of now it is 1 disease.
5. What's the likelihood that a mutation will occur once treatment is more widespread?
Mutations occur all the time, there are already 10's of known mutations of virus, it doesn't mean there are 10 separate diseases.
6. Does the heat make it significantly less likely for you to get COVID-19?
There's some evidence warm weather slows spread for viruses like this, but we can't assume that about this virus yet. A good counterpoint is Qatar adding 258 cases in one day, it's hot there.
That's odd to me because I associate warm and wet with uncleanliness and festering cesspools.
Anyway apparently hot and wet is good for bacteria, but cold is better for viruses. The bit that made it click for me is that viruses aren't metabolising anything outside of the host-cell, so the best a virus can hope for is to not be destroyed -- and cold is a better preservative.
I'm still not sure whether hot and humid is better than hot and dry though? I think I read that hot and dry is worse, because it increases evaporation.
That's not true for every type of virus, but it is true for corona viruses.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.livescience.com/amp/27533-f...
I know that in places like Qatar and India, there is a tendency to use artificial cooling. (I'm pretty sure India is the single biggest growth market for air conditioning on the planet.) I'm just thinking, if a bunch of people gather in an air conditioned theater, would it even matter if it was 95 degrees outside? Just a thought.
I guess to really know, we'd have to wait and see what happens in places where it is hot, and humid, and artificial cooling is not so widespread? Like Sub-Saharan Africa.
Re 6: this is an interesting question. My layman's understanding is that heat usually reduces the spread of disease in temperate climates both because the disease can't survive as well and because people spend more time outdoors and in less people-dense spaces. In somewhere really hot like Qatar, we would expect to see the opposite of the second effect; I'd think people would spend more time indoors with A/C when it's excessively hot outside, increasing transmission rates as the outside temperature rises.
I used to live in that part of the world. Air conditioning and active cooling is pervasive there. In a sense, people's exposure to the overwhelming heat of the day is perhaps much more limited than you might expect.
There are surprisingly few cases in Africa (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2236760-we-dont-know-wh...) and Africa is a poorer continent in general, and perhaps aircon is much more limited there than that area of Arabia. Maybe there's a link.
You also have to add all the other patologies that will get affected by the lack of ICUs. All in all, 10% is a safe estimate. That's why flattening the curve is extremely important. The actual percentage in need of ICU will surely vary with time, but that's the important metric, because that's how many people will die when the health system saturates.
Moreover, deaths from lack of capacity will not be limited to covid cases. And many of the current non-covid icu cases may be exposed to medical staff who are not being tested (in the USA) and die that way. This is what happens in nursing facilities like Seattle.
https://www.linkiesta.it/it/article/2020/03/11/italia-corona...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/italy-coronaviru...
https://www.newnotizie.it/2020/03/12/coronavirus-posti-letto...
2000x 20 year olds 2000x 60 year olds...and you're gonna have highly different results for CFR.
I'd say it's somewhere in the middle of both... maybe something like 1.5. But I'm not an epidemiologist, but if the age gaps matter then it could be about that... just my thoughts.
If he reduces spread, it will be helpful on the margin and may help flatten the curve
Air conditioning tends to produce a very dry environment which should also cause the droplets to evaporate very quickly.
Also cold weather has lower humidity.
Source: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
> Mutations occur all the time, there are already 10's of known mutations of virus, it doesn't mean there are 10 separate diseases.
I agree, but I'd like to add more details. Most mutations are irrelevant, and if you have antibodies for the original version, the same antibody is useful for the new version.
From time to time, the mutation is in the part that encodes the part that is recognized by the antibody, and then you may be infected by the new version.
[There are a lot of other mutations. A lot of mutations just make the virus not able to reproduce, or break some important part, so the mutated version just disappear. Another mutations make the virus more effective or less effective, so they change how bad the symptoms are.]
This is actually one of the reasons that viruses generally become less deadly the longer they circulate through a population. A less-deadly version will spread faster (by not killing it's hosts), and will tend to outcompete a deadlier version
For the northern hemisphere it’s much less humid in winter, but that’s not true everywhere.
https://www.livescience.com/27533-flu-transmission-humidity....
We really should be increasing humidity in hospitals and offices in the winter. Newer planes have already been moving in that direction (to increase comfort).
As explained to me by an M.D. this is why flu infections go down in the summer
The winter break put an an incidental isolation in place that slowed the person-to-person spread down.
This is why schools have to close now to control the spread of COVID-19.
Winter break usually refers to the break that includes Christmas and New Years Day.
In Massachusetts they instituted a second break in February, in addition to spring break in April, in order to cut the flu season.
Flu always seems to be during the winter though.
Absolute humidity (the amount of water in the air) is low in winter because cold air doesn't hold as much moisture.
Relative humidity does not depend on temperature since it is a ratio of the absolute humidity to the max absolute humidity at the given temperature.
This 2019 paper says that (i) in higher relative humidity, the fine droplets stay larger (larger size after evaporation down to the equilibrium size, given by Kelvin equation) and thus linger in the air for a shorter time. And (ii) higher temperatures, virus proteins denaturate a bit faster. The compound effect of higher relative humidity and higher temperature then makes it look like it correlates to higher absolute humidity.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsif.201...
https://ccdd.hsph.harvard.edu/will-covid-19-go-away-on-its-o...
When a warmer spring month rolls around, I think that I must’ve escaped getting sick with the flu, then, bam!, I get hit with it, and get knocked out for a few days.
The annoying flu is during the summer, when it’s hot, and you’re sick, so you just become more miserable.
Comparing speed of distribution in different countries is extremely difficult, as there are too many factors at play. The 258 cases in Qatar might have been 500 if it was colder there, no one can proof or refute that.
It certainly means hot weather won’t “stop” the virus, just slow it by (in your example) 50%. That’s not a lot of comfort, although it would buy some time.
There is actually another part of the world where it's summer. Australia's case count graph is displaying the standard hockey stick shape, so based on the typical growth rate we should know in a week or two.
Not this week. Temperature is below 30° celsius, more around 20°. Summer has yet to come.
This disease would spread the same in any weather but most countries would be able to cope better, hospitals have more space and people's immune systems would be stronger in the summer.
Abstract: This paper investigates how air temperature and humidity influence the transmission of COVID-19. After estimating the serial interval of COVID-19 from 105 pairs of the virus carrier and the infected, we calculate the daily effective reproductive number, R, for each of all 100 Chinese cities with more than 40 cases. Using the daily R values from January 21 to 23, 2020 as proxies of non-intervened transmission intensity, we find, under a linear regression framework for 100 Chinese cities, high temperature and high relative humidity significantly reduce the transmission of COVID-19, respectively, even after controlling for population density and GDP per capita of cities. One degree Celsius increase in temperature and one percent increase in relative humidity lower R by 0.0383 and 0.0224, respectively. This result is consistent with the fact that the high temperature and high humidity significantly reduce the transmission of influenza. It indicates that the arrival of summer and rainy season in the northern hemisphere can effectively reduce the transmission of the COVID-19.
I didn’t see in that study much consideration of other variables and the p-value used for relative humidity was on the high side by publication standards (up to 10%)
For virus that can spread before any symptoms and long after symptoms disappear and survive so long on the objects and in the air I think there will be no evolutionary pressure to get milder.
And we can get harsher version just by random chance because this virus is so infectious that it has a lot of leniency whether and when to kill the host.
While I don't believe SARS-CoV-2 is quite as bad as the media frenzy is making it out to be, it's absolutely a good idea to do everything you can to avoid getting it. The same goes for the flu and for colds. If you catch any of these, you may be OK, but you risk spreading it to people who won't be.
That's ~1 out of every 100 people. This isn't just a media frenzy, by the end of this you WILL know someone who died as a result of (complications of) Coronavirus.
Especially South Korea, which has been very transparent and done a ton of testing.
In general, populations as a whole develop herd immunity to viruses reasonably quickly. This process is understood. Individual case data is always crazy.
So: 1. Sometimes, 2. Probably, 3. Yes, 4. Maybe, 5. It'll definitely happen eventually, 6. Yes, almost certainly.
And indeed, it will never go away, just like H1N1 flus have continued to circulate ever since the 1918 pandemic. But after a while, immune response and vaccination regimes will turn it into a nuisance.
I don't think it's very common to be that unlucky in your own body's development of a suitable antibody.
At least, this is my understanding based on a recent microbiology course I took. Immune response is a fantastically complex thing.
That Chinese paper suggesting two strains has been withdrawn for lack of evidence.
Enveloped Coronaviruses have RNA proofreading mechanisms to lessen mutations, so it is unlikely there are multiple strains.
Is it truly "twice", is my question.
Or is it just the same event, lasting longer than expected.
I've posted a transcript of the relevant portion here: [1]
Here is an article on how they can see the DNA changing in different patients so can track the path of infections. https://bedford.io/blog/ncov-cryptic-transmission/
They talked for 2 hours and pretty much covered a bunch of questions about this subject, there is so much misinformation and panic going around
Here is a youtube link if anyone is interested @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWNuDT4t-TM
Also a Pastebin with the highlights https://pastebin.com/8juyjNFq
---
Dr. Vincent Racaniello, Ph.D. (@profvrr on twitter) is Higgins Professor of Microbiology & Immunology at Columbia University Medical Center. He has been studying viruses for over 40 years.
They've had a series of episodes on COVID-19 recently, all highly informative. Episode 590, the most recent one, debunked the "two strains" rumor that's been going around.
You can hear the episode here: [1] and read a transcript of the portion of the episode where the rumor was debunked here: [2]
That said, it is possible that people co-infected with another RNA virus expressing reverse transcriptase would allow the coronavirus to incorporate into the host genome
I honestly do not know what you mean by this. Can you please elaborate?
Viruses are an inevitability because they exploit vulnerabilities in those mechanisms. Viruses are not alive. Instead a virus causes "live" modifications to a living organism which causes it to simply reproduce more of the virus. When you have a virus you are essentially one with the virus; a modified organism.
Retroviruses go one step further by permanently making that modification. Now you are forever modified with the extra functionality of producing more of that virus.
But the really beautiful thing is how minimal these viruses are. If you've played code golf you'll appreciate it. In the smaller RNA viruses like influenza and HIV, each virion carries around exactly what it needs to make those modifications and not much more. They consist of proteins which cause our cells to accept them as well as the genome which causes our cells to make more of those proteins. They also cause our cells to reproduce the genome itself too. Eventually the cells become full of virus stuff and somehow the viruses assemble themselves back into virion, the cell dies and releases the new virions.
The HIV genome is incredibly compact. It's the closest thing to design I've ever seen in biology. It packs more information into its genome than would normally be possible by utilising overlapping genes on the forward and reverse strand. It's quite remarkable just how clever, minimal and perfect it is.
This is why you can always have HSV, chicken pox (singles), Epstein-Bar...
Granted, Coronavirus is an RNA virus, and RNA is much shorter lived and more susceptible to mutation than DNA.
What actually matters is whether or not you have virus replicating in you. The presence of viral nucleic acid is an imperfect proxy for that.
"Health officials are struggling with a complicated message — more people can get tested, but those with mild symptoms should stay home and practice social distancing. Some go so far as to warn that widespread testing at this point could threaten the U.S. response by burning through precious supplies just as a tidal wave of sick people descend on the system — a message at odds with administration announcements that millions of test kits are finally becoming available."
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03/21/coronavirus...
But, if the virus is capable of mutating at the rate of the common cold and reinfect - I see no way out from under this other than a new way of life.
They aren't done with the virus, but the worst seems to be past. Whereas if it could easily re-infect then I would expect the case numbers to strictly increase.
If we assume this will become endemic and a vaccine is a ways off, it would seem like the best approach is to flatten the curve just under the healthcare system capacity and get it to "pass through" most of society quickly (i.e. everyone who is at lower risk gets infected and quarantines until viral shedding stops).
Doing this would allow us to return the economy back to normal as quickly as possible and prevent all the fallout from an indefinitely stopped economy. Once most people have had it, we'll essentially end up in a state of herd immunity and it becomes statistically less likely than other health concerns at-risk populations had before COVID-19 was even a thing.
Meanwhile China, being on lockdown the entire time is still susceptible to having it become a pandemic within their own population as soon as they lift the lockdown and try to return to normal because they citizens haven't had the opportunity to develop antibodies as broadly.
A U-shaped recovery would be bad for a lot of people, especially if prolonged. Last thing we want is an L-shaped market with no real recovery.
This was an interesting point from a Guardian article where he defends the plan:
“If you suppress something very, very hard, when you release those measures it bounces back and it bounces back at the wrong time,” he said. The government is concerned that if not enough people catch the virus now, it will re-emerge in the winter, when the NHS is already overstretched. [0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/13/coronavirus-sc...
The condition can ONLY improve in terms of new cases, not deaths, 1) if there is a vaccine, 2) 40-50% people get infected and develop immunity, or 3) people start living in bubbles, including masks and gloves and stay away from each other, that there spread is controlled.
We know 1 and 2 have not happened. So either China is still in lockdown and this lockdown is how the life will be till there is a vaccine, or the data is not correct.
With that even at 1% 6-8 million would have died. Even with filtered data, it is doubtful that they would have been able to hide so many dead.
A few weeks ago we didn’t even know there were asymptomatic carriers. My prediction is that when all is said and done and the IFR is closer to 0.01% that this will all look very stupid.
Experts in Ohio say they suspect that 1% of people are infected. OK, so where are the hospital cases?
You cannot have 100,000 cases with even a 1% hospitalization rate without at least... on the order of 250 hospitalizations.
That number assumes a homogeneous distribution. As deaths are observed mostly in the elderly and China's demographics tapers off rapidly beyond 60yo, the incidence would be far lower than 1% of the total population.
https://www.indexmundi.com/graphs/population-pyramids/china-...
That is a very good point. I think you're right, focusing on R0 is the right thing and that might just be the key since estimated R0 was ~1.x-3.x, so perhaps masks, gloves and some common sense can indeed bring it down to <1.
Not a useful short term solution but I don't see why not for the long term. It just becomes another infliction that we prepare for and handle the best we can.
It's not just a bed problem.
Buildings can be constructed, beds and associated equipment and I did mean beds as in hospital beds with associated equipment (ICU or otherwise) - where are you going to educated and train doctors and nurses to manage 3X.
Also, a common argument would be 3X is for such black swan events. What will happen to those beds, hospitals and manpower in a normal situation, especially with costs associated with educating and training medical professionals.
Don't get me wrong, I'm onboard with the fact that something fundamentally needs to change all over the world.
I suggest introducing a medical equivalent of military reserve forces/organized militias. These would be volunteers who train several times a year with medical professionals, to be called up in emergencies. Training would be limited to the skills most important in a pandemic. To incentivize volunteering, they could be given priority for medical treatment when resources are limited.
(Nano-technology sector should also see a huge boost in investment, says my crystal ball.)
It means that you can get reinfected and a vaccine is near impossible.
We won't know about ADE because of the strict lockdown conditions that are still going on in China. If we start seeing more and more reinfections when things are relaxed, then we're in trouble.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006291X1...
"We also generated monoclonal antibodies against SARS-CoV spike proteins and observed that most of them promoted SARS-CoV infection. Combined, our results suggest that antibodies against SARS-CoV spike proteins may trigger ADE effects. The data raise new questions regarding a potential SARS-CoV vaccine, while shedding light on mechanisms involved in SARS pathogenesis."
[0] https://www.osha.gov/SLTC/covid-19/medicalinformation.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingles
"Can You Get Coronavirus Again After You've Already Had It?"
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/can-you-get-coronavir...
Edit: Also, Fortune:
"Why are patients who recover from coronavirus testing positive again?"
https://fortune.com/2020/03/06/coronavirus-recover-test-posi...
So, for example, I have a hypothesis that this is mainly baseline lung damage causing severe cases. That said, I cannot claim that is what it is.
I'm sure I have been sloppy and pushed this idea some without being clear it is just a hypothesis of mine. That said, I try and be clear with that message.
The part of Italy hit also has air quality, per aqi searches, that is comparable to the region in China that was hit hard.
Have people looked that it is not age, but baseline damage to your lungs that is the main factor in serious cases? Older people will have more exposure to local air pollution, just from having lived longer. That existing damage can be what contributes to complications, right?
To clarify further, it doesn't actually test for the virus. It tests for DNA / RNA presence. It's a proxy.
Not being critical, etc. Simply nailing down loose ends.
The virus is nothing but DNA or RNA.
The snippet testing establishes a statistical baseline that rules in the presence of the specific dna/rna of the virus to within the required certainty.
In other words, you don't have to feel every inch of an elephant to know for sure you've got a hold of one. Just enough features to make it unique to just elephants.
1.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S128645792...
Also, false positives could happen as a result of bad logistics and management of the specimens.
Some useful sources that seem to validate the occurrence of false positives:
- This research on testing specifically calls out the fact that their method didn't yield false positives in trials: https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.E..., which seems to indicate that it's common for false positives to occur when developing testing methods for new viruses.
- This research talks about false positives in asymptomatic patients: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32133832. "In the close contacts of COVID-19 patients, nearly half or even more of the 'asymptomatic infected individuals' reported in the active nucleic acid test screening might be false positives."
- This guy in Egypt is apparently a false-positive, likely due to a mismanaged testing protocol: https://www.livescience.com/matt-swider-stuck-in-egypt-coron...
80% might be the probability that an asymptomatic patient who tests positive is actually clear, but that's not what the statistic "false positive rate" means.
Because the latest research shows that there are two strains of COVID and reinfections are happening because of the other strain infecting you.
https://academic.oup.com/nsr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/nsr...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/04/coronavirus-chinese-scientis...
Individuals should self quarantine at any sign of illness. Critical patients should be admitted to hospitals. Everyone else should do everything in their power to slow the spread. You got a cough? Stay home. You feel tired or run down? Stay home. You have a fever and it went away? Stay home for the next 14 days. If your employer will not let you work from home, email them that you believe you are an asymptotic carrier of the COVID-19 virus and if they will not let you take paid sick leave or work from home you will be in the office immediately. Tell all your coworkers you requested to stay home and management wouldn't let you... Let the lawyers sort it out with HR.
This is a ridiculous thing to say after talking about test accuracy.
You can't improve what you can't quantify. Also your assumption that so many people have a job they can do from home or over email is ridiculous.
No, they don’t help you cure anything. We dont have a cure!
Tests help you quarantine and mitigate.
That's obviously false.
Also quantifying after the fact isn't what we're talking about so I could test and verify that indeed you did improved something 10 years ago and you made that improvement without quantifying anything yourself.
Also you don't know that you rolled a six, the probability is high that you did, that's very different. If you don't know where you rolled the number you wanted, how can you repeat it? If you can't repeat it how can you build on top of that?
By that standard you don't know anything about the world at all - gravity may stop working the next minute - it's unlikely but not impossible. We don't have a proof it won't - we only have assumptions(models) supported by statistics. For me the standards that physics use is good enough - I say I know gravity works and I know I rolled a 6 when I rolled 1000 d6. You might call that differently but I'm pretty sure you won't jump out of a cliff and you won't bet money on NOT rolling a 6 in 1000 tries.
> Too bad we don't have 1000 societies to randomly try things on.
That's exactly why we shouldn't wait for results.
We have data from 1000s of people though and several countries that tried various strategies. Social isolation works best so we should do that, immediately.
With exponential growth doing the right thing NOW is more important than making sure you're doing it in an optimal way but a week later.
> If you don't know where you rolled the number you wanted, how can you repeat it? If you can't repeat it how can you build on top of that?
In the case of this disease we know how to prevent it overwhelming our healthcare systems so that less than 1% of population dies instead of over 5%. That's the most important thing, producing the vaccine and drugs, calculating the exact number of people sick, discovering the exact properties of the sickness - these things come after the fact. We won't have a vaccine nor drugs in time anyway.
People arguing to measure and then act in case of a disease that infects 1000 times more people every month are insane. In 3 months the whole world population would be sick and most of it AT ONCE. Who will treat the 5-10% of patients that need help? Nobody - that's who. So they will die.
This is not the same as saying that from some technical extreme semantic definition that something can be improved without testing results. In a complex system you need to know your results to inform your path forward. Trying to come up with some super narrow, reductive, irrelevant definition on your own is worthless in this context.
I have no medical training but below is my observation
Your points are valid (not regarding false positive rates), but the population still thinks the numbers put out are valid. So if we could ramp up testing very quickly (which seems to be possible given what the Cleveland Clinic is able to do) it would be beneficial for the public to see how bad the situation is. I haven't been able to convince anyone with symptoms that they are in fact likely to have it. (it could also be useful for hospitals to apply specific treatment regimens, when they get more defined)
Testing is critical for contact tracing which still plays a fundamental role even in mitigation phase.
Infinite social distancing isn't practical. Some people still need to work and we need to know who has just a damn cold vs covid-19.
But seriously, the only way to get ahead of this is to test everyone. Didn't you learn anything in epidemiology?
This is just wrong on so many levels.
First, on an individual level, if doctors know you're infected with COVID-19, and your illness is severe enough, they might be willing to try an experimental treatment (like chloroquine) that they wouldn't for seasonal influenza or some other illness.
You might also be offered to participate in one of the hundreds of research studies that are ongoing in trying to find a treatment for this disease. You would not be a candidate for those studies unless they knew that you did in fact have COVID-19.
If doctors know you are infected with COVID-19, they are also more likely to isolate you and wear protective equipment that is essential to keep the disease from spreading to our precious medical personnel and vulnerable hospital populations.
Then, on the public health level, we need to understand how this disease is spreading, who is the most vulnerable and who is the least vulnerable and why. We also need to understand who has recovered and why they've done so, and if people have gotten sick again from re-infection, and why. Alternatively, maybe people have had been re-exposed to the disease but not gotten sick. Why is that?
We need to effectively plan for future outbreaks, to allocate precious resources to places that are the most affected, to quarantine areas that are hardest hit.
None of that can be done unless we have a better grasp on who has the disease and who doesn't.
Testing is critically important for all of this and more.
To advocate for the abandonment of testing simply because it's not perfect is madness. It's better to drive with one eye open than both eyes closed.
Most people who think they have it actually have a cold or flu.
A danger is that so much outrage has built up over the US’s failure to test that lobbying for testing will result in too many resources devoted to testing long after it’s still useful.
I'm glad to see someone say this. The over reaction is causing more problems than the actual virus. With every other recent potential pandemic, there was a reasonable response, the severity of the diseases were responded to accordingly, panic was at a minimum, especially considering more recent scares have been with viruses that cause far more serious diseases than this latest one.
This time, there's been an extreme focus on infection rates and zero focus on actual symptoms, which from every account i've seen so far, do not seem to be very terrifying for 99% of the population, yet the reaction has been just over the top everywhere.
This is going to spread around the world, we'll either get it or we won't, it's not going anywhere, it's out in the world, as soon as the first person got sick and spread it, it was inevitable. There's so much effort globally going into trying to stop or hide from this and I still don't really understand why.
When I was a kid, it was a regular thing to expose kids to chickenpox because it was just better to get it and get it over with, chickenpox sucked a whole lot. A whole lot more than having covid-19 would be from what I can tell.
It's the symptoms of a disease that scare me, not whether i'll get it. Personally, I was a lot more worried about the recent flu virus from a few years back that was killing young healthy people, than this disease that's not much more than a bad cold unless you're knocking on death's door already or in your 80's.
If people that get it, don't even realize they have it and nothing bad is really happening to them, then why should I be losing my shit and freaking out? Why should I be scared of getting a disease that's about the same as something I get nearly every year anyway?
Let's start with widespread complacency opposed to requests to take distancing measures: people (not me, but .. read FB comments from regular people on news stories) are mad at sports events being canceled because "nobody has the virus". So we don't get the social distancing response needed.
If on the other hand we had some testing data from the general population, or even from just mildly sick people, then the requests for social distancing could be presented with "and we know this thing is here now, so these measures are going to have a significant effect".
Furthermore, this would put a strain on medical resources if the number of patients is higher than medical capacity. Suddenly all the treatable conditions that require medical supervision become deadly because there aren't enough medical personnel and resources to treat everyone. Got in an accident requiring emergency care? Maybe you won't be able to get it now.
More still, all the medical personnel who would otherwise have gotten a flu shot and been immune to its spread now have to worry about catching COVID-19 and having medical resources spread even more thin, at the worst time.
You can't just think of yourself, you have an ethical duty to consider the externalities of your actions.
Edit: Maybe I should point out that panicking or worrying about it does no good and that should be minimized as much as possible. However, if people are not treating it as seriously as they should, then maybe a little bit of panic and worry would be a good thing to get people into a proper state of mind about what is going to happen.
This is a dangerously bad take. The death rate is in the 2-3% range. Hospitalization in China was 15%, with 5% in critical care.
Even if you are not personally vulnerable, please understand that those who are also actual humans, and have actual humans as family members. And if you can't manage to care about that, recognize that a pandemic of this magnitude could easily overwhelm the US hospital system: https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/10/simple-math-alarming-ans...
As we're seeing in Italy, an overwhelmed hospital system leads to increase death rates from many other causes, because suddenly the level of care goes down. If all the ICU beds are full and you, say, get hit by a truck, you'll be triaged along with all the other people needing ICU. If a COVID-19 patient looks more likely to recover than you, well, you'll be left out in the hallway.
Also the difference in asymptomatic incubation is a lot higher than the flu so people can spread it w/o realizing it. I read flu has max of 4 days incubation with typical period of 1.5 whereas this has a mean of 5 and max of 14, and possible shedding during asymptomatic period so you could be infecting people a lot longer before you get sick and its harder to trace all contacts.
That is what has happened in Italy.
But you should still avoid getting it and spreading it to others. Having a slower, more controlled growth gives us significantly more time to find a vaccine and learn more about the virus.
People who are immunocompromised, whether by age or otherwise, are a vulnerable part of our society worth protecting.
This virus isn’t an inconvenience like the chickenpox, it is killing people.
We have it easy we can trivially work from home and no one will fire us during this crisis. So don't wait just do it.
There are many businesses out there that are going to be suffering heavily from the total collapse of tourism, downtown office work, community events, etc; I wouldn’t assume any job is sacrosanct given that level of belt tightening.
In agree with the rest of your message, however.
Just because the tests are not 100% accurate does not mean they are useless.
"if you think you have it you got it" This is patently false.
Given potential asymptomatic spread, widespread testing is the only way to limit the virus like what South Korea did
This might be right, iff testing were some kind of binary choice that needed to be made one way or the other. But why should the tool of testing be politicized and debated, rather than it simply being one resource available to doctors to use as they see fit?