Re: Covfefe-19 2020 part the second: Wash Your Hands
You're describing my own situation right now. Have had cold symptoms for about a week. No fever at any time just stuffy nose, sore throat, breathing felt a little different, bit of a cough last night. Haven't coughed this morning but just laying here in bed. Supposed to go see dr this afternoon. But should I even do that? My thought is I don't wanna shrug it off when pneumonia is a possibility. My sister thinks it's flu b but considering I am laying here in no significant pain do they want me coming in? At the same time I want to stay ahead of it the best I can.
Work from home if you can. For at least two weeks after symptoms subside. Many studies are coming out that you can still shed fairly significant amounts of the virus up to 6-8 weeks after symptoms subside. Other people test negative in significantly less than that.
Your best bet is to treat the cold like covid, manage symptoms at home, if you need to seek escalated care due to worsening symptoms, do so. If it’s the cold, no big deal. Worst case is you’ve prevented someone from the stress and anxiety of getting sick during this outbreak possibly saving medical resources like testing or time at the doctors potentially exposing them to someone else. Best case? You don’t infect someone you love who dies.
Just remember this is no longer about you or me, it’s about us. We all have to fight this. We don’t want a nationwide lockdown like Italy. The only way to avoid that is lean heavily and enthusiastically into the most cautious approach.
I know that means you and I will be inconvenienced. It sucks. But just remember, when people like me get a cold (just a cold, not the flu, not covid) I am laid up in bed with breathing problems because I have asthma. This virus scares the ever living **** out of me. And if we get to a wartime triage situation where ventilators are given only to healthy, young people without preexisitng conditions like asthma and I’m denied one if I need it, I likely die.
That’s why this is scary. Because we only have 65,000 ventilators. For everyone in the nation. That’s about the enrollment at the University of Minnesota. That’s a moderately sized city in Minnesota. That’s smaller than Nebraska’s average football attendance the last 30 years.
I’m guessing you’re under 40-50. Neither of us has ever lived through anything like this. Not since Hong Kong Flu, though, that’s probably a term that’s going to fall out of favor soon. So 1968* Flu Pandemic. That killed about a million people and had an estimated CFR of only 0.5%. Less than 1/6th that of our best guesses. Most nations with early and very aggressive responses with widespread testing converge to around 0.5-1.0% CFR. Nations that don’t roll out aggressive testing are all converting between 3-5%. We have not only not a slow roll out, we have literally stopped testing so the numbers don’t seem that bad. No other nation, maybe Iran, has done that. Iran is now digging mass graves and forcing families to watch their loved ones buried from 100m away.
Think of it like a Cat 2 hurricane. (That was its pandemic severity index.) This one is playing out like a Cat 5 maybe Cat 4. Even if it’s a Cat 3, it’s still going to be really really bad. Unlike anything you or I have seen. I think that calls for a different kind of approach.
