COVID-19 Pandemic · 9:55am Apr 7th, 2020
As some of you might know, I studied biomedical engineering while I was at Vanderbilt. That was more than a decade ago now, which is crazy to think about.
One of the classes I took there was in molecular virology. Among other things that happened in that class, we read a book about the Spanish Flu epidemic, The Great Influenza, and also had someone from the CDC come in who talked to us about SARS and coronaviruses. I know that this probably came out of nowhere for a lot of people, but scientists have been aware for quite some time that coronaviruses in bats in China could well cross over the species barrier, and that many close relatives of SARS were found amongst bats. SARS itself died out, but the CDC scientist who came into our class believed that we had not truly stopped SARS, but that SARS itself had mutated or had some other issue that made it increasingly less virulent the more it was transmitted, and that the next time, it would be bad if the virus didn't conveniently off itself.
They were absolutely right.
I don't have any special insight on this pandemic, but I do have some things I'd like to note, that perhaps have not been covered well in the media. I probably should have spoken up before - I don't have the largest platform here, but I do have 1500 or so followers, so maybe I can help at least some of you, and maybe you can share with other people.
Wear Masks
Anything is better than nothing. Encourage everyone else to wear masks, too. While the virus can be aersolized (meaning that it can be dispersed through the air), even a cloth mask will trap some water droplets that might carry the virus. Obviously a properly-fitted N95 respirator would be better, or better still, a full-face respirator, any sort of barrier will probably lower transmission.
However, masks have several other important properties as well beyond this.
The first, and honestly most important function they have, is stopping you from transmitting the disease. When you cough or sneeze, you spray particles all throughout the air. But even normal breathing puts out little microdroplets of humidity. Wearing a mask makes it a lot harder for the virus to escape from you to infect other people nearby. Non-respirator masks may not provide a ton of protection from aerosolized particles, but if your mask captures the virus that is escaping from you, you're much, much less likely to infect other nearby people. The present social distancing is nowhere near distant enough (especially indoors), but with masks, it becomes less bad, and might be quasi-acceptable.
People who are presymptomatic (that is to say, have caught the disease but who are not yet showing symptoms) can still infect others. Indeed, most of the "asymptomatic" people you've heard about in the press are actually presymptomatic. If everyone wears masks - even home-made cloth ones, or scarves over their face, or bandannas, or whatever else - it will help. This is probably why South Korea and Japan have had better results than a lot of Western countries.
Yeah, this isn't exactly an inspiring reason to wear a mask, but if everyone does it, we will all benefit from it.
The second is that they stop you from touching your face and putting stuff in your mouth.
I know you've all been told, repeatedly, not to touch your face. And I know you're still doing it. It's reflexive. People telling people not to touch their face have licked their fingers to turn the page of the speech they were giving while warning people not to touch their faces. You should try to break yourself of the habit, but you're going to screw it up.
Masks mess with your ability to touch your face, particularly around your nose and mouth, which is a major vector of transmission - you touch some contaminated surface, then you touch your face, and then it gets into your mouth or nose and potentially infects you.
If you put on a mask before you go out, leave it on while you're out, and then take it off when you come home, never taking it off that whole time, and then wash your hands with soap and water after you take it off (because the front of your mask may be contaminated with virus particles), this will probably help you avoid getting infected. Even a lot of doctors screw this up - I've seen many doctors and dentists put on or take off their masks incorrectly, and probably contaminate themselves. But it isn't horribly complicated, and it can potentially keep you safe.
Oh, and if you do use a cloth mask, washing it with soap and water afterwards and then letting it dry out for a few days is probably fine.
If everyone wears masks, hopefully we can reduce transmission, and it might also help keep you safe as an added bonus.
Wear Gloves
This is probably less important, but wearing gloves can also help remind you not to touch your face. Also, if you have open cuts or cracks in your skin on your hands, wearing gloves makes it much less likely that the virus will get into your system that way. We don't know if the virus actually can get into your system in this way, but there's really no point in taking the risk as wearing gloves is very easy. Honestly, even wearing just normal gloves may well be enough, as long as you aren't like, sticking your hands into people's body cavities or something.
Six Feet Isn't Really Enough
I've seen this whole "six foot" thing over and over again, and I've seen pictures of "social distancing" beers online where the neighborhood dads all stood out in the cul de sac in some city and stood six feet apart drinking beer.
This is probably bad.
Six feet is really less "enough" and more "the largest amount that health authorities think people will actually obey". In reality, outside, it's probably better to be 20-30 feet away from other people. And indoors, because of the air being circulated and recirculated... well, you're probably screwed even if you are standing well apart. This is why many restaurants and stores aren't even allowing customers inside, and instead taking stuff out to them.
Six feet is better than 0 feet, but the further apart you are, the better. And again, indoors, while standing further apart is better, any sort of indoor space, even if people are spaced out, is potentially hazardous.
Avoid Contact With As Many People As Possible. Especially People From Other Communities
This seems self-evident, but it is actually really really important, and I haven't seen many media reports explaining this well at all.
Ever heard of the concept of six degrees of separation? This is the idea that any person in the world is only six steps away from any other person in the world. This is oftentimes said to be Kevin Bacon, because specificity is funny.
Viruses love this, and epidemiologists hate this.
The smaller the number of people you come into contact with during the pandemic, the fewer chances that the virus has to spread. But this is also multiplicative; you are two steps away from every person who has come into contact with every person around you, and three steps away from every person who has come into contact with them, ect.
If everyone comes into contact with 20 people, that means that they're all two steps away from about 400 people, and three steps away from about 8,000 people. If everyone instead comes into contact with 10 people, that means that they're all two steps away from only 100 people, and three steps away from 1,000 people. Every halving of the number of people you come into contact with reduces the number of people by a factor of 4 at the second level, 8 at the third level, ect.
But there's another level to this as well. There's not an infinite number of people - the more steps you go out, the more overlap there is. There's only 7 billion people in the world, so even if each person had contact with only 10 people, you'd still be less than 10 steps away from everyone on the Planet Earth. But in real life, this is not the case. Most of your in-person contacts are with people from your own community, and so it is with them, so in a town like the one I live in, you can only go about five steps before you're in contact with literally everyone, and then it can't go up any more in that community.
Thus, reducing between-community contacts is also key. This is why discouraging people from travelling is so important. If you reduce the number of contacts between communities, the number of levels the virus has to go through to get to you goes up substantially. If you live in a town of 50,000 people, then after five levels of 10 contacts each, you're probably close to 50,000 and can't go much higher. If one person in your personal layer has contact with another community of 50,000 however, then suddenly at the fifth level of contact you can instead be at 60,000, and at the sixth level, 100,000. If every one of your contacts is from a different community, then at the fifth level of contact, you could well have 100,000 contacts, and then at the seventh level, 500,000. And if all of them have contacts in other communities...
Well, you can see the problem.
Thus, the less people move between communities, the more we restrict this level of the virus spreading as well, and the easier it becomes to contain.
Discourage people from travelling. Even if you only come into contact with as many people while travelling as you did at the grocery store, you're exposing them and yourself to a much higher level of risk because they're all from different communities.
Speak Up If Something Is Wrong
I work for the US Census. The US Census was doing a bunch of training for temporary workers in mid-March. I showed up at one of these meetings and, lo and behold, it was far more than 10 people, all in a small room. And all of us doing non-essential work - yes, the Census is important, but it isn't urgent.
I immediately contacted several higher ups at the census, including the director and assistant director (I managed to find their emails through the Census's system), as well as the people who are in charge of dealing with Census problems internally, as well as multiple senators and Congresspeople, and I emailed the White House and the CDC. The next day, the Census suspended operations.
Did I do that?
I have no idea.
But someone, somewhere, did it. I got two follow-up phone calls from the offices of the senators I contacted as well about the issue as well (albeit several days later), so obviously they were paying attention (which I know from personal experience - while a lot of people think that the government doesn't listen to people, a lot of politicians very much do care about what gets in their inboxes and what their staff has to respond to on the phones. Politicians who completely ignore their constituents do so at their own peril, while helping people is likely to win you their vote, or at least win you less hate from them).
It only takes one person being heard to make a difference, so when you see things like violations of social distancing guidelines, or a business or government agency or something not doing the right thing, speaking up about it - to them, to state authorities, and to anyone else who listens - makes it much more likely it will solve the problem.
Young People Get Very Sick and Die Too
I keep hearing people talk about "high risk groups" on the news.
I've heard a lot of people speak as if young people have nothing to fear from this disease.
This is dead wrong.
The problem is one of terminology. The "high risk group" is merely a higher risk group.
In China, about 15% of people under the age of 50 who developed COVID-19 had to be hospitalized.
The Spanish saw a similar rate, about 12-20% for the same age groups.
A 12-20% of being hospitalized is, by any reasonable definition, a high risk indeed.
These numbers only go up modestly as you get older, until being approximately double that at the highest age group (80+).
Some of those people die, no matter what medical treatment we give them - probably somewhere between 1 in 200 and 1 in 400 young people who get COVID-19 die, with a higher percentage of old people, particularly the elderly, succumbing. And it may be worse than that - we still don't have reliable recovery information from developed countries, as many people are still sick, and China's numbers are suspected of understating the severity of the disease there.
And when the medical system gets overwhelmed, those numbers are likely to go up, possibly considerably.
You do not want this disease, even if you are young. You might have to go to the hospital, and you may very well die - and the more people get sick, the more overwhelmed the system will be, and the higher your odds of death become.
A Lot of Asymptomatic People Are Actually Presymptomatic
You may have heard that Iceland has gone crazy with testing and has tested vast swaths of the population and found that there's a fair number of "asymptomatic" cases - maybe even as much as half of the people "with the virus" are asymptomatic!
The problem is, a lot of these people are actually presymptomatic - which is to say, they're just in the first week or so of getting the virus, and they haven't developed COVID-19 symptoms yet. The doctors of Iceland have noted this, but the media being the media often fails to get the details right, or people just don't bother reading past the headlines.
Moreover, there's some false positives on these tests, so some of the people who "tested positive" may well not have the virus at all.
People who tell you that the virus is usually asymptomatic are selling you false hope - while there might be some people who get the virus and fight it off without ever showing any symptoms, it's well below half of people, and may well be almost nothing.
Don't Take Weird Remedies You Heard About Online Or On Fox News
I've seen all sorts of extremely dumb internet rumors about treatments for the Coronavirus, and a disturbing number of them have been outright dangerous. This is a mixture of bad actors spreading disinformation purposefully (intelligence agencies suggest that Iran, China, and Russia have all been deliberately spreading misinformation about the coronavirus online), people scamming people, and people being stupid.
I've seen some far right sources suggest drinking a "Miracle Mineral Solution", whose primary ingredient is Chlorine dioxide. This is absolutely 100% a scam, and extremely dangerous. The FDA has been fighting this even before the present pandemic, but hucksters are promoting this for the coronavirus as well, as it is supposedly a "cure-all".
In all fairness, it is almost certainly true that concentrated chlorine dioxide will kill the coronavirus, HIV, and many other viruses and bacteria. This is because it is a chlorine-releasing compound, and thus, a potent disinfectant.
If you know anything about chemistry, you know that chlorine is a horrible, nasty reactive chemical that can kill just about anything - including you.
Chlorine dioxide is a type of industrial bleach.
Don't drink bleach.
Meanwhile in Iran, anywhere from several dozen to several hundred people have supposedly died after drinking methanol. Again, concentrated methanol will kill the coronavirus, but the concentration necessary to kill the virus is at least an order of magnitude above what will be fatal for you, personally.
Some of this even includes the leaders of countries - Donald Trump has been promoting hydroxychloroquine. This is probably because he and his family own stock in the company that produces it.
Hydroxychloroquine is a real medicine. But the problem is, while it was originally developed to treat malaria, it is more frequently used to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthiritis here in the United States. For those of you with medical knowledge, this should immediately set off several alarm bells, as those are auto-immune diseases that cause inflammation.
Hydroxychloroquine's anti-inflammatory properties come because it is an immunosuppressant.
Some people are indeed trying to use it in the hopes that it can work to help prevent the immune reaction which causes your lungs to fill up with fluid during a severe case of COVID-19 as a side effect of the immune response - but obviously, taking something that suppresses your immune system can also increase your odds of getting other secondary infections, especially in hospital settings where people who are dying from COVID-19 are likely to be located. And worse still, there's not actually any evidence it helps against COVID-19.
It might help prevent that cascade, but it probably doesn't, it might even make things worse (because it hurts your immune system's ability to fight off the disease), and many doctors have already discontinued its use due to seeing severe side effects from its use. It may well be killing people.
This is why medical trials are so important - drugs can, in fact, hurt your ability to fight off disease. Trump asked, "What do you have to lose?" The answer is your life.
Pretty much anything you hear being promoted as a COVID-19 cure is probably a scam, people actively trying to hurt you, or desperate people looking for anything. While there are some medical trials going on with a variety of drugs and other treatments, including with extracting antibodies for the virus from recovered patients and trying to inject them into sick ones, none of them have yet yielded results.
Right now, there's no evidence that any drug we use helps against this disease. Whether you live or die is probably dependent on your own personal immune response, and going to the hospital if you have trouble breathing, as the hospital might be able to give you some supplemental oxygen to keep you going. They might be able to keep your body alive while it fights off the infection via breathing assistance.
Or they might not. While most people survive, the more intervention is required, the more likely you are to die. People on supplemental oxygen usually recover, but the odds of getting worse go way up at that point. And if you have to be intubated for a mechanical respirator to pump oxygen into your lungs, it's a coinflip as to whether or not you'll die.
Though of course, if you are one of those unfortunate enough to need a respirator, the odds of dying are 100% without medical attention, as without it, you will drown in your own bodily fluids, which is why it is so important to keep our medical system from being overloaded, by preventing people from being infected.
Our best shot is to prevent the disease entirely. There are some vaccine trials going on right now, but we won't know for many months if any of them work.
Thus, the best way to stop this disease is quarantine.
Avoid unnecessary contact with other people, and try to figure out as many ways as possible to keep from being exposed. Wear face masks, wear gloves, wash your hands. Try not to get sick, and try not to infect other people. Stay at home if you feel sick.
Please, try to stay safe.
Why I can't upvote a blog!
A huge THUMBS-UP!
Thanks a lot. This is a ton of good information. This thing is very real and even tiny towns like the one I live in are showing cases. So living in BFE, small rural towns, where the larger problems of cities don't usually take root, isn't necessarily going to protect you. We all need to do our part to contain this thing.
Incidentally, while I'm unaware of any medical authority suggesting that this is helpful, on the very rare occasions where I've been leaving my house and going around other people, I've taken a shower right after I got home. I take off all my potentially contaminated clothing and put it in the laundry, then take a shower and wash my whole body with soap and water.
While I don't know that this helps at all, my thought process is basically that my entire exposed surface area might have infectious particles clinging to it - medical professionals gown up in hospitals in part to keep infectious particles off their skin and clothes, and it is common for people to be encouraged to bathe prior to surgery to reduce the number of germs on their skin that might get into their body.
My thought is that if I remove my clothing and decontaminate my entire body after I get home, I have less of a chance of inadvertently touching some part of myself that is contaminated, or contaminating other objects in my house, and then touching my face.
Does it help? I'm not aware of any medical study that says it does, so I can't really recommend that others do it from any sort of scientific perspective. But I figure that I need to take a shower anyway, so I might as well do it when it might be helpful.
This is very good info, and at least scientists are working on treatments
Some incredibly valuable information here. Thank you for it, TD.
5237742
No, I've definitely heard that once before. It sounds extreme, but it seems more and more like extreme measures are really necessary in this situation.
Agree with nearly all of this, and can't hammer enough, low risk is not no risk. Risk factors that multiply are overweight, age, pre-diabetic, immune suppressed, being in my house... Well, it sure seems that way, because every other factor is pointing in our direction.
With that in mind, people please draw a firm line between panic and pandemic. For God's sake, don't drink fish tank cleaner no matter what crazy crap you see on the internet or network news. That goes for bleach gargling, garlic treatments, and about a thousand other quack treatments. (And don't blame Trump if you do, because that's just compounding stupidity with being a total idiot.)
The Hydroxychloriquine/Z-pac/Zinc treatment is one of those. Trump comes out and says "Hey, it has potential and deserves to be tried." A certain fraction of idiots promptly declare it to be The Cure And End All To This Plague (See fish tank cleaner point above). A similar group (who if Trump cured cancer, would bemoan all the doctors put out of work) promptly declare it verboten and ban the use. (See Governor of AZ, and the most amazing 180 I've seen in politics) Then the black helicopter crowd starts howling, and all heck breaks loose. The fact is the treatment has been used, it has resulted in some really astonishing nearly-dead-to-cured turnarounds, but it is not a Oh-thank-God-cure for every case. However, if we go by FDA rules and put it through normal channels, it will be a minimum of five years before it clears all the peer-reviewed trials and testing, so it's being tried, it's working in some/most cases, there are probably better solutions we'll find in the next six-nine months so we're saving health and lives, and that's what counts.
FYI: The New York Times article you linked to mischaracterizes this:
"Mr. Trump himself has a small personal financial interest in Sanofi, the French drugmaker that makes Plaquenil, the brand-name version of hydroxychloroquine."
Financial disclosure documents in their trust established when he took office show the Trump family owns $110k in the Dodge and Cox mutual fund, which has 2.9% of it in Sanofi, which works out to about... $3,100 in Sanofi. Really. I'm shocked. That's about enough to buy a faucet in one of his hotels, but it's sufficient for the NYT to flack twice in the same article as if it's some sort of terrible dark secret.
The main thing I got from this is that I'm going to report my local Walmart for not obeying corporate social distancing orders and practicing lip service at best.
And also that this is the year I learn to sew a mask, I guess.
Some people die during the plague. You came back to life.
Very reasonable advice. I've missed you.
I feel attacked. But, um, good blog.
5237776
Trump pressured the FDA to approve the use of the drug to treat COVID-19 apart from the clinical trials process. There are people shilling it on Fox News. Multiple government agencies have purchased large amounts of the drug since March 26th, and Navarro has been on TV promoting it.
That is not "Hey, it has potential and deserves to be tried." That's acting like it actually works.
Politicians should not be promoting drugs that are unproven and very possibly dangerous, and if they do, they are responsible for what happens if they fail. Because they will surely claim that they are responsible for it if it succeeds.
The reality is that we should absolutely not be applying this drug to people willy-nilly, and should be engaging in clinical trials, because this drug presents a very real risk to patients and there's not good evidence that it works.
Trump literally asked, "What do you have to lose?" in a news conference, even though this has been explained to him repeatedly, there was an argument about this in front of him in the closed-doors situation room meeting, and he blocked Fauci from contradicting him in public, so he even knows that there's problems.
The reality is that it is possible that this drug's side effects (or heck, just its effects) may harm or kill people with COVID-19, and that there's little evidence for its efficacy.
Using immunosuppressants on people who are experiencing disease symptoms is very dangerous. People who are being treated for lupus or rheumatoid arthritis are often effectively immunocompromised, and sometimes develop pneumonia or other severe complications after being infected with ordinarily minor illnesses, like the common cold (which is, lest we forget, another coronavirus!). This is exactly what we're trying to prevent.
In fact, many doctors advise that people with these conditions stop taking immunosuppressants if they get infected for this very reason.
And that's ignoring the fact that this drug can literally just flat-out kill you. It can cause lethal heart arrhythmia, and its use is contraindicated in people with some medical conditions as the odds of that go way up.
I'm afraid this is almost certainly fake news.
There was a small-scale trial in China of 62 patients which found somewhat positive results, but the data on the efficacy is questionable; they basically claim that it lowers the duration of hospitalization by about a day, which is great if true, but is certainly far from astonishing.
The most "astonishing" results are from Gautret et. al., who claimed that a mixture of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin caused them all to have cleared nasal swabs within a short period of time... in a sample size of 6 patients. This was 57.5% in 14 patients only administered hydroxychloroquine and 12.5% in the control group... of 16 people. Moreover, and this is really important, the study was not randomized, which is necessary to prevent, say, putting all the sickest patients in one group and all the least sick patients in another. Moreover, the patients weren't particularly sick, so it's not really surprising they recovered.
They then did a follow-up of 80 patients. Only 15% of the patients in that trial even had a fever, which is a telltale sign of the virus. Their symptoms were in many cases fairly mild, with most (92%) having NEWS scores of 0-4. 45% of the patients were under the age of 50. Moreover, because there are false positives in COVID-19 tests, it's entirely possible that some of these people weren't actually suffering from COVID-19 at all, and their "clearance" of the disease was because the subsequent test properly returned a negative. The result?
With a group of patients like this, this is pretty much what you'd expect if the treatment did nothing, though it also suggests it probably won't kill massive numbers of people either (as they didn't die in droves).
Because of the small size of the first Gautret study and the "unexpected" nature of the first set of results (100%? Really?), another group in France immediately did a follow-up study on severely ill patients who definitely had the disease. They did not see good results. Another group in China that did a pilot study on the drug did not find any clear results, with no real difference between the control and treatment groups.
If the drug actually had astonishing properties, this would be consistently showing up in these studies as at least a moderate effect. The fact that many of these studies are failing to show even that suggests that at best, it only has relatively modest effects, and it probably does nothing at all.
It's worth remembering that a lot of "scientific studies" are wrong, and that false positives are much more common than false negatives due to publication bias. In fact, most published studies are probably wrong. And shoddily done studies with very small sample sizes and no randomization that claim extreme results are almost always wrong. This is why you hear a lot of stories about promising drugs and never hear about them again - the promising drug didn't pan out when greater scrutiny was applied. About 90% of "promising new drugs" don't pan out.
Indeed, ISAC, who published the Gautret study, has itself said that "The ISAC Board believes the article does not meet the Society’s expected standard, especially relating to the lack of better explanations of the inclusion criteria and the triage of patients to ensure patient safety."
It's possible that this was simply because of chance publication bias - positive results are more likely to be reported than negative ones, so if you have a thousand doctors out there all trying random different things, at least one of them will, by chance, see a positive result, and then publish it, but most doctors won't "waste" time publishing negative results until after others have published positive ones, even though knowing that something doesn't work and has been tested is really helpful.
It could also be a doctor trying many things and, being as incompetent at science as many doctors are, simply saying "Oh, this combination worked well!" without recognizing that they are experiencing the green jelly bean phenomenon.
It's also possible this is simply the result of wishful thinking, wanting to promote a miracle cure because they desperately want to believe in it.
Some people also believe in random drugs being "cure alls". Quinine-type drugs (which this drug falls under) and tonic water are frequently recommended for questionable reasons by bad doctors for all sorts of things that they probably don't help with, which makes this even more problematic, as this is exactly the sort of thing that quacks promote (and indeed, are presently promoting).
Of course, real science is also done on these drugs because some of them do have interesting properties. However, this is also sometimes a dangerous signal, as it can indicate that these drugs are "pet" drugs that people try out on everything because they believe they are cure-alls or, at the very least, cure-lots. For example, there was a study on HIV and hydroxychloroquine back in 2012. It did not yield positive results, either, and given the mechanism of action, I wouldn't have expected it to.
There's no particular reason to believe that this drug is any more efficacious than any other drug being tested.
Accelerated testing of these things is fine, and obviously we don't have five years for full long-term clinical trials. I think it's entirely appropriate for doctors to be running lots of trials and seeing if anything shows promise.
But we should be doing testing, not saying "Oh, yeah, you can use this on patients." Because it may do nothing, and it may well kill some people, and there are patients who really do need these drugs for other medical conditions.
When Trump says things like:
"What do you have to lose? Take it,"
"I really think they should take it. But it's their choice. And it's their doctor's choice or the doctors in the hospital. But hydroxychloroquine. Try it, if you'd like."
That's not saying "Hey, it has potential and it deserves to be tried." That's him outright promoting the drug and pressuring people to take it.
There's apparently already shortages of the drug for people who actually need it. The financial times has noted the same.
And this isn't the first drug that had a run on it after some questionable claims that it can help with COVID-19. Some anti-HIV drugs were also touted as such briefly, before follow-up studies showed no benefit. But in that time span, vast amounts of the drug were bought up. That's an entirely foreseeable outcome of promoting a questionable drug - that people who need it may not be able to get it.
And he is responsible for that.
5237779
There are online patterns for making your own masks. I can ask my mom where she got her patterns, as she's been making masks.
And yes, you should absolutely report your local WalMart if they're not following proper social distancing guidelines! There's a good chance it will help.
All the grocery stores here have actually put up plexiglass shields between the cashiers and the customers to avoid them getting directly coughed on, and many have put tape on the floor to try and keep people apart.
Thanks for the great info. Some of it is on the news but its easy to see it drown out or ignored by commentators pretending to be news reporters. Good luck with the Census . I'm full time military with a house back in my home state. I made sure to do the census for both locations. Still, I don't envy you with hunting down all the locations that didn't do the census.
If I could favorite a blog post this would be it thank you so much.
5238040
Thank you for completing your Census forms!
We are very, very, very hopeful that as many people as possible fill out the Census online and/or by mail, as right now our ability to go out into the field to deal with this stuff is pretty much nil because we'd be pretty much ideal vectors for the disease, so pretty much everyone who is in field operations is presently at home instead. Even if we suited up, we could potentially carry it from house to house, making us everyone's favorite plague carriers.
At present the Census is claiming field operations will be starting May 28th, but I have some real doubts about that. We'll see, I suppose.
My job is in field operations, so despite me being assured that I still have my job (as they are very worried that people will go and try and find other jobs, or just be too scared to deal with field operations and quit... because a lot of people have already done so), I am not actually doing any work right now. Which is convenient from a health and safety perspective, though I'm presently looking at other things I can get a job helping out with.
I wonder when serological testing is going to happen. Do you have any insight on that?
5238084
Companies are starting to produce serological tests. They're expecting to ramp up to maybe 1 million tests a week in May here in the US.
One major problem is that we still don't actually know if catching this thing makes you immune to it afterwards, so even if we do roll out that testing, it may be of limited value (though if we could test everyone for the antibodies, we could get some idea of how badly we undercounted the number of sick people).
5238033 So glad we agree. The Right to Try legislation passed by bipartisan majorities back in 2017 has saved lives, in particular Robert McDowell and Democrat Michigan state representative Karen Witsett. We can't see the future, but I'm willing to bet C-19 will have a verified, peer-reviewed, effective treatment within five years which will in all odds give far better results than the three-ingredient test being done now, which will be of great comfort to anybody who gets sick five years from now.
This is all valuable advice, and I thank you for it. Do you have any advice about convincing other people to take this seriously? Some way to show them that this is actually dangerous? I'm skeptical they will listen to reason, but there may be some angle I have not tried.
Or failing that, are there any precautions that need to be taken if people in your own home are not taking proper precautions?
5238100
Four times as many people have died from this as died in 9/11 in just the US alone. And the rate of deaths is going up; at present, we're at a 9/11 every two days.
By next week, we might see as many people as who died in 9/11 every single day.
The latest projection suggests that 82,000 people will die by August in just the US.
Global deaths are over 81,000, and that's probably low by tens of thousands of people, as Iran and China probably have lowballed their deaths.
The US government sent out postcards to everyone talking about how dangerous this is. What was the last time that happened?
This is a once in a century event, on par with the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918, which killed somewhere in the range of 1-3% of the global population. Hopefully, with modern medical science and a better understanding of how to manage disease outbreaks, this won't be that bad. But if people fail to act, it could be.
In the UK, Boris Johnson is presently getting supplemental oxygen in the ICU because he can't breathe well enough on his own because of this disease.
There's a Kurzgesagt video on the coronavirus which explains it pretty well:
The news is wall to wall coverage of the coronavirus now because it has consumed everything else. The economy of the developed world is shut down because millions of people would die otherwise.
Really, I don't know what to tell them.
Why do they think this isn't a big deal? What's their reasoning?
I mean, there's things you can do - avoid being around them as much as possible, wear a mask, wash your hands after handling stuff in public spaces, keep them out of wherever it is that you sleep, ect. Same thing as general social distancing, just within a household.
It's basically literally avoiding someone in your own home. If that sounds pretty antisocial and offputting, that's because it is.
5238089
I know this is upsetting you to, but you're being manipulated. The fact that you're citing a website that is using the phrase "Orange Man Bad" and "Trump Derangement Syndrome" should be an immediate sign that you have taken a one-way trip to propaganda town.
The reason why people are leery of hydroxychloroquine is because of lack of evidence of efficacy, and because it has potentially serious and even fatal side effects in some patients, not because Orange Man Bad.
The reason why people dislike Trump is not because "Orange Man Bad", it's because he lies incessantly about everything and has a long history of criminal behavior.
He's been lying about the coronavirus the whole time.
Heck, he's lying about there not being a shortage of tests right now, just as he has throughout this entire crisis.
His failure to close the borders in early January have resulted in the deaths of over 12,000 Americans, and will likely, by the end of this, result in the deaths of five to ten times that many.
His disbanding of the CDC Pandemic task force in 2018 has resulted in the CDC lacking a dedicated group to respond to this.
There are always politicians who believe in stupid shit. There are politicians who don't accept the reality of evolution. There are politicians who believe that crystals and homeopathic medicine work.
That doesn't mean those things work. It means they're dangerously incompetent morons who should be kept well away from the reigns of power. And when they promote these things publicly, it is entirely fair to blame them for it.
When they fail to react appropriately to stuff, it is entirely fair to blame them for it.
And it is obviously foolish to believe the words of someone who lies brazenly and incessantly.
Let's look at his response to this mess.
From January:
And later on in January:
In February, he claimed he shut it down from China.
On February 12th:
On February 24th:
On February 26th:
In early March, he claimed that Obama did nothing about the Swine Flu in a clear case of Whataboutism, and also lying:
Of course, Obama did respond to the Swine Flu by increasing vaccination rates and spending billions of dollars on health care. But the Swine Flu, for all its media presence, wasn't actually that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. The borders weren't closed because it was not a particularly lethal variant of the flu, so shutting down international commerce and travel would have been disproportionate. The CDC estimated that ultimately somewhere between 151,700 and 575,400 people died globally, which is on par with WHO estimates of the seasonal flu global mortality toll, which is 250,000 to 500,000 people people a year.
We don't close down international borders for the season flu every year because that would be dumb and it isn't at all worth it.
And the lethality rate of the flu is quite low. It's estimated that about 60 million Americans caught the Swine Flu, of which about 12,500 died. That's a mortality rate of 0.02%.
COVID-19 has a mortality rate of somewhere between 1% and 5%. In subpopulations where everyone was tested for the disease, it seems to be around 1.4%. China claims a higher rate of about 3.6%, though their numbers are not viewed as reliable. But even at 1.4%, that would make COVID-19 approximately 70 times more lethal than the seasonal flu. At 3.6%, it would be 180x more lethal.
But COVID-19 is also approximately twice as infectious as the seasonal flu. Each person who gets the seasonal flu spreads it to about 1.3 people on average. Each person who gets COVID-19 spreads it to about 2.5 people on average. And we may be underestimating the infectiousness of COVID-19, as we are missing many cases.
This is why COVID-19 would kill many millions of Americans if left unchecked. Indeed, COVID-19 has already by this point killed more Americans than died from the Swine Flu.
He also blamed Obama for testing problems, because, you know, he lies incessantly. Of course, the change he was being whiny about actually happened under Dubya, and it could have been changed. And while it is true that Obama had not changed it, Trump hadn't done so either, and he had several years to do so, if it was, in fact, an issue that he cared about.
He did not.
When the Grand Princess was going to debark on March 6th, he said:
And he later went on to say:
Of course, these tests actually have a 10-30% false negative rate. And of course, there was, and remains, a massive test shortage to this very day.
But of course, according to him:
And of course, on March 9th:
Of course, by March 17th, he's claiming:
And now he's being whiny about China lying and downplaying the virus, just like he did. Quite the contrast to him thanking China and praising them for their response and transparency, eh?
So yeah.
South Korea is presently sitting at 192 deaths and just north of 10,000 cases.
Japan is at only 81 deaths.
Meanwhile, here in Oregon, where we locked down a while ago, people have been told to follow social distancing guidelines and are actually doing it pretty well, the number of infections appears to be pretty flat. And we are doing a lot of testing, as you can see from the tab, though we'd like to do even more.
It turns out that with even semi-competent leadership and clear messaging, you can, in fact, control the spread of the virus.
The US is at 12,758 deaths, and the country as a whole is not expected to peak for another 10 days.
Tens of thousands of Americans are going to die as a result of his lies and incompetence. This could have been stopped at a very small number of deaths with swift action and competent leadership.
Do you think that the "news sites" you are reading are any different from the Chinese news sites that constantly praise Xi for his great leadership during this whole mess, constantly trying to highlight his successes and ignore his failures while accusing anyone who opposes him of just mindless opposition because China Man Bad?
Also:
FYI, it's very unlikely that it has saved a single life, as the whole thing is premised on lies.
The reality is that not only did the FDA pretty much always approve such treatments , but the reality is that companies don't want their extremely early phase drugs to be given out to random desperate people because they have no idea how safe they are and they want FDA oversight, as well as the fact that they obviously don't want very sick patients to very publicly die on their experimental drug. Early phase drugs are also extremely difficult to produce because they're produced in small quantities rather than via mass manufacturing process, because industrial scale manufacturing of a drug is a big investment and most drugs fail during trials, either being ineffective, worse than existing treatments, or having too many dangerous side effects.
Most doctors won't prescribe them and most insurance companies won't pay for them, either, because, again, there's no evidence that they work at that point. The last time I checked, back in 2019, all of two people were on experimental treatments under the law. As was stated by Scott Gottlieb, who served as FDA commissioner under Trump:
Indeed, he told Congress that about 99% of such requests were approved by the FDA. Many companies refuse to issue drugs under the "right to try" legislation, instead preferring to distribute them under the existing umbrella of the FDA's expanded access program.
Off-label drug use has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the "Right to Try" law; off-label drug use is the use of FDA approved drugs for conditions other than what they were approved for, and is legal (and unfortunately, far more common than it should be).
If you think that you have had Covid 19, how do you inform anyone, or insist on a test of they ever come out?
5238205
What country are you from? Different countries have their own guidelines for what you should do if you get sick. though as far as personal treatment goes, they're pretty much all the same.
The CDC has guidelines for what you should do if you get sick.
To sum it up: stay at home, avoid contact with other people and animals, wear a mask if you are around other people (even at home!), and if you need in-person medical care, call the doctor ahead of time to warn them that you think you have the virus and follow their instructions. Seek medical attention immediately if you have trouble breathing, have bluish coloration, have persistent chest pain, or find yourself feeling confused or hard to wake up. It's probably worth contacting your doctor if you're feeling sick and suspect you might have been infected.
As for contacting people you were in contact with at the time - that's certainly the polite thing to do. You should also contact whatever the local health authority is to inform them that you suspect you have the virus, as they might want to do contact tracing.
If you had it weeks ago and have since recovered, there's not much that can be done at that point - anyone who would have gotten sick would have already done so, so there's not a lot you can do at that point, unfortunately. You might still ask about getting tested, but you'll probably be fairly low priority; some regions have enough tests for everyone, but others don't, so it probably depends on where you live. Some people remain positive for the virus even after the symptoms recede, while others show a post-viral cough even though they have recovered from the disease itself.
Getting a serum test whenever they come out might confirm that you had it previously, but I don't know what is going to happen with that; we're probably not going to test everyone, at least not right away.
5238218
I'm in America in Massachusetts, got a cold or something for the first time in two years around February 18th. I did stay home, but did go the the doctors twice because the symptoms were getting bad, but they didn't bring up testing and I didn't think I could have gotten it at the time. I contacted my doctors, a week ago asking about the possibility of eventually getting serological test, but they responded as if I was asking for testing now.
5237742 I can't speak to its efficacy, but I've been doing this as well. It may sound silly or excessive, but better to be as cautious as possible in times like this. I have also been washing my groceries, or leaving them in my car for three days after purchase.
5238142
I wish I had a proper answer; that might help me convince them of the danger of it. We've already had several arguments about it, and they've only offered deflections and non-arguments.
I think it's a combination of wilful ignorance and the classic "bad things only happen to other people" fallacy. Despite being in their twenties, my siblings (the people in question), still act like dumb teenagers; egocentrism and delusions of invincibility included.
I like to believe that many situations can be resolved with compromise and education; that everyone is willing to listen to reason and a thorough explanation will cause people to examine new viewpoints. But this crisis has certainly shown me the folly of those ideals.
Regardless, thank you greatly for the advice. Thankfully, it lines up with what I've been doing already.
5238229
At this point, you very likely wouldn't show up positive for the virus even if you had caught the disease, so there's not much point in being tested using present tests for viral RNA. The blood serum antibody tests might be able to determine if you caught the virus or not, but I'm not sure what their availability is right now. That said, they might be looking for blood donations for some of the antibody treatments they're talking about, so that might be one option; that said, I think they're looking for people who actually tested positive for the virus.
5238185 Correcting misconceptions:
The Obama administration expanded the National Security Council from 100 to 236, leaving an enormous number of his appointees in positions where they could (and did) spike the incoming administration. National Security Council adviser Tim Morrison makes this perfectly clear in his interview. As part of an effort to slim down the historically bloated National Security Council, the directorate of global health and biodefense was merged with two other positions—not eliminated—according to Morrison.
Because it does, or at least has high potential, according to no less a far-right rag as the National Institute of Health
Yes, indeed. Let's look at what he does rather than what he says. Actions speak louder than words, after all. (that includes Twitter) and hindsight is always 20/20 for people who did not have to make decisions with incomplete information at the time. Quick summary: China lied, has lied, and will continue to lie. WHO likewise. Former Obama administration officials, most certainly. The press, of course. At the same time the President was being impeached on bogus charges, criticized at every turn by both Dems and the press, and constantly under threat of new impeachment charges as Dems in the House went on record as wanting multiple times, he shut off air travel with China (for which he was criticized for over-reacting), declared a public health emergency (for which he was criticized extensively again), pressured the FDA and CDC on testing (which they fell down on, seriously), etc...
God knows he's not perfect, but I'm just thankful we don't have President Hillary (brrr). And I'm guaranteeing that when the economy is opened back up again and people go back to work, the first person who passes away from this virus after that will be proclaimed from every media outlet as all Trump's fault, worthy of being impeached over, et al...
Two additional pieces of advice you didn’t mention:
– buy copper tape and put it above all door handles and light switches where you live
– take vitamin D supplements if you have a natural shortage
(source)
I’m assuming both of them would get your approval.
5238685
Copper tape?
Yeah, I had hoped that this would have ended already. A month or so ago I thought it would have, but a month ago we weren't even the #1 country with cases.
Probably still aren't. 0% chance China is being fully honest with their numbers. I wouldn't be surprised if they still had the most cases by a considerable amount. Not like Communist dictatorships are known for their transparency and truthfulness. North Korea is insisting that it's only had a few cases, even though it shares a border with China. It's also telling that whenever China is sending masks and other medical equipment to different countries, they're largely being returned for being defective and just plain not working.
Either way, the international portion of it is kind of moot for me. All I know is that my wife and I are without jobs, I've applied for unemployment, we never leave the apartment except to get groceries and to take walks because it's how I get my one year old to sleep, and we're all going nuts. My wife's family and us did the usual Easter egg dyeing event via webcam. We wipe down all of our groceries before we put them away.
On the plus side, my wife and I have done a lot to clean our apartment. Still, I'd rather have steady income and see people. I love my wife and son, but sometimes I need conversations with other people! I've heard that this will likely start slowing down in August, which would suck. I don't expect it to start slowing down next week, but my family and I can't do this for another four freaking months. I've heard as high as eighteen months, actually. That sure as heck can't happen.
But hey, in good news for you, I did my part of the census. In bad news for me, my computer is possibly starting to show its age. It keeps shutting down, and it's not like I can just take it somewhere to have it looked at. Ugh. I have several stories of mine that I'm working on getting into print, and now I have the time to work on it some more, but I'd feel bad publishing them during a time when a lot of people are out of work.
I wonder what the ultimate fallout of this is going to be once everything gets stable again. Is the whole world going to look at China and say "We've had enough of your BS, guys. Your crap just got hundreds of thousands of people killed. You had a medical lab a mile away from a wet market."
In any case, we'll see what happens. Just hoping this all ends in time for football season.
They're doing the draft through livestream this year.
5240863
I don't know what country you live in, but I know a lot of US state governments are doing mass hiring of temporary employees to process unemployment claims. Seeing as the Census field operations are presently shut down indefinitely, even though I still have my job whenever that restarts (and the higher ups have made that very clear - they're actually worried a lot of people are going to quit because they aren't going to want to go out and do Census work), I actually applied for a temporary job at the state processing unemployment applications on Tuesday, and I have an interview next Tuesday. I don't really need the money, but I figured that I might as well do something during this whole mess, and someone has to process the record high number of applications.
To be fair, no one has any excuse not to read them right now, right?
3-4 months of lockdown is a reasonable estimate, but things won't go all the way back to normal after that point; social distancing measures will still be in effect, but people will probalby be able to go out and do some stuff again, though I expect everyone to be expected to wear masks and gloves and to try and keep distant from one another as much as possible until we develop a vaccine, which will probably take 12-24 months before it is ready for mass deployment.
5238685
I mean, taking vitamins won't hurt, but unless you're deficient, it probably won't make much of a difference. Just make sure you don't like, megadose.
While copper and silver surfaces have antimicrobial properties, it won't really help much unless it is coating the actual surface you're contacting. While there are some claims of a "halo effect", the most likely cause of it (if it even is real, which is dubious) is simply that sinks are often fairly friendly to microbes, so making the sink itself hostile to microbes probably reduces the microbes being splattered onto stuff nearby from people washing their hands in the sinks (as I know I splatter water sometimes when I am washing stuff).
Sticking copper tape above stuff very likely won't help, and honestly, sticking it on surfaces is unlikely to make much of a positive difference in general, as I suspect that the adhesive material probably is better at trapping microbes than copper is at killing them, and it's easier to sanitize surfaces that don't have a bunch of tape stuck on them. I've never seen any studies on whether or not copper tape is effective at killing microbes.
We really should make all door handles and whatnot out of materials coated with (or simply made out of) copper or silver or similar substances, and pretty much everything in hospitals should be made out of antimicrobial materials, but they're not.
5240873
I'm just looking forward to the day when I can go back to work and not have to worry about any of this. Lord knows when that'll be.
Also, I'm from Colorado. We're in the upper-middle amount of cases. Little less than 7000 cases last I saw. 16th most in the country, I believe. I have no idea what's going to happen with New York going forward. It'll be changed for good in a few ways for sure.
5240878
Not following you here. You put it around doorhandles and above light switches. The virus doesn’t survive on copper (as you said, and there’s studies linked, too). So why wouldn’t it work? If it traps the virus below the tape, who cares? You’re not touching below the tape. You couldn’t do that even if you tried. The tape is super thin and sticky.
That might be better, but it’s not something you can do by yourself.
Only relevant if you actually do that, Most people don’t. And you probably don’t need to sanitize it anymore if it’s a copper surface. In any case, you’ll never do it often enough to have as good of an effect as copper gives you.
5240277
Ye, sticky tape with an extremely thin copper surface.
5238252
Almost two months since this post, and I still can't find out if I have had Covid-19. :/
5273549
I'm sorry to hear that. I was hoping they'd get these things out sooner, but it seems like they've been having a lot of problems with the antibody test.