Coronavirus thread

[blues]

Dude, you are in for a really rude awakening very, very soon.

[Nephrology]

I'm a pretty pessimistic person by nature, so I tend to accept what you have been saying as the truth.

But man is it depressing. Got any optimistic news?

Social distancing...?

The really dire forecasts we've read basically assume no change in the trajectory of disease from the time they were calculated. If we can get people to stay put and minimize the propagation of this disease, it will help.

I am encouraged that our federal government seems to finally be gearing up to step in. I heard from another friend of mine, USAF family med resident, that he and ~50 of his co residents were all ordered to leave their current rotations and report to a tertiary care center to be a pair of hands. If the whole of the US military follows suit, this will give us a lot of much needed personnel.

[Borderland]

Not really sure how to interpret this comment, but there is nothing unique about their population or healthcare system that would predispose them to younger folks being ventilated in the ICU. If anything, given the rates of obesity/HTN/diabetes/etc in the US, along with the relative scarcity of hospital beds (we have 3.2 per person, they have 6 per person) we are poised to fare much worse.

We have ~2100 cases as of this AM, I suspect we will be at ~4500 cases or more in 4-5 days (assuming our testing picks up speed). We will be there before we know it.

Still, Spain, Italy, France and Germany combined which is a relatively small land mass, and some common borders, has 35,000 cases. So far the US only has 2500 cases roughly. I think it's going to be pretty hard to catch the European numbers of cases per population. There are roughly 100 million more people in the US. We're at one case for 131,000 people. They're at one case for 7300 people.

Of course there may be a saturation point of say one case for every 1000 people, or something like that. If that happens it doesn't matter what the numbers look like today.

[Nephrology]

So the first case in NC was a man who was exposed at one of the infamous nursing homes in Washington State. He then flew commercial to NC. Most recent case got sick in another state and flew commercial to NC.

Any thoughts as to should we shut down air travel like after 9-11, or take other steps??

I mean we're cancelling concerts and other get togethers with more than 25 people


cc

Seems inevitable to me. It will take a bunch more bodies before we finally break the glass, however. I am just praying it won't be too late.

[Nephrology]

Still, Spain, Italy, France and Germany combined which is a relatively small land mass, and some common borders, has 35,000 cases. So far the US only has 2500 cases roughly. I think it's going to be pretty hard to catch the European numbers of cases per population. There are roughly 100 million more people in the US. We're at one case for 131,000 people. They're at one case for 7300 people.

Of course there may be a saturation point of say one case for every 1000 people, or something like that. If that happens it doesn't matter what the numbers look like today.

Keep in mind our numbers are substantially reduced because of our limited testing capacity. I would basically take existing case numbers and multiply by at least 10 for an estimate of how many are truly out there. SK, on the other hand, is testing 10k people a day, and their case numbers are likely much close to the real deal.

[shootist26]

Still, Spain, Italy, France and Germany combined which is a relatively small land mass, and some common borders, has 35,000 cases. So far the US only has 2500 cases roughly. I think it's going to be pretty hard to catch the European numbers of cases per population. There are roughly 100 million more people in the US. We're at one case for 131,000 people. They're at one case for 7300 people.

Of course there may be a saturation point of say one case for every 1000 people, or something like that. If that happens it doesn't matter what the numbers look like today.

We only have 2500 "confirmed" cases, that low number has completely to do with barely any testing performed.

in MA, we had a cluster 2+ weeks ago where 2 infected italian employees were at a company conference in Boston. Of the (as of today) 138 cases in the state, 100+ were tied directly to that conference. But it wasn't until last week that you could even get tested unless you had symptoms AND had recently traveled to China/Italy or had direct contact with a known positive person. Ridiculous right? Many employees began feeling symptomatic immediately after the conference and were told they could not be tested. As of Friday MA has only tested 475 people total in the state labs...this is really intolerable

[Robert Mitchum]

Wife went this morning to grab a few extra perishables. She said even at 8am this morning it was chaos.

Most importantly and a very serious problem - the store was out of bacon.

If there is a bacon shortage because of this - we're done as a society.

[Poconnor]

IIRC I read about the 1918 flu epidemic that the deaths were in clusters. One small town had only a few cases and another small town everybody got it and died. As in everyone left moved away and most of the town ended up in a mass grave

[Nephrology]

IIRC I read about the 1918 flu epidemic that the deaths were in clusters. One small town had only a few cases and another small town everybody got it and died. As in everyone left moved away and most of the town ended up in a mass grave

That may be what happens here, it's far too early to tell. USA was a lot less densely populated back then.

Iran is already digging mass graves.

[ccmdfd]

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/14/healt...ead/index.html

Infected people without symptoms might be driving the spread of coronavirus more than we realized
By Elizabeth Cohen, Senior Medical Correspondent

Feels like a no-shit-Sherlock moment to me. I didn't realize .gov was downplaying asymptomatic spread.

cc