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Journal by khallow
Sometime today, there will be more active, reported coronavirus cases outside of China than inside. The cat is out of the bag for sure. I think at this point, it's only a matter of time till a good portion of us catch the disease, barring a vaccine in the next few months. Good luck to you and your loved ones.
Moving on, this appears to me to be a real world test of various countries' public health systems, with such things as how accurate the above reports are, or how many people are infected or die due to this coronavirus.
Moving on, this appears to me to be a real world test of various countries' public health systems, with such things as how accurate the above reports are, or how many people are infected or die due to this coronavirus.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
All good ideas look like bad ideas to those who are losers.
-- Dilbert
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2020, @04:05PM (3 children)
People overestimate the value of healthcare systems.
For a viral infection - such as the corona virus is, there's not a whole heck of a lot that a hospital can do. They can keep you hydrated, give you decongestants, and keep your fever down - mostly using the exact same centuries old drugs you can buy for a few bucks at any pharmacy. If you reach the point of being too weak to consume liquids on your own then they can give you an IV and intravenous drugs, but if you reach that point - you already stand a good chance of dying regardless of whether you're at a state of the art facility being treated by the best money can buy, or at a bodunk improvised treatment clinic. And whether you get there or not is not dependent on some ultra expensive state of the art treatment or whatever - but basically whether or not your immune system is functioning well.
Similar for hopes of a vaccine. There was a "vaccine" developed for SARS. Not only did it not work especially well, but if you took the vaccine and then later caught SARS it was vastly more nasty than usual.
99% of our most effective treatments are many decades old at this point. The trillions spent since then have been mostly to try to move the decimal place a spot or two with, at best, mixed results. Although pharmaceutical companies have become stupidly rich in the process of making everybody ("everybody" mostly meaning the US - one of only two developed nations in the world where direct to consumer pharmaceutical advertising is legal) think otherwise.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2020, @07:16PM
Of the ~20% of cases needing hospitalization, most require oxygen and many assistive breathing machines - no country will have enough. Italy just reported 1,492 new cases and this pattern will now repeat across Europe and the US. Los Almos dropped the bomb [statnews.com] when they reverse engineered the initial outbreak finding R0 to be between 4.7 and 6 with the Re being 2.4. This is a sum I like to show to "just the flu" bro's with a base of 10.
The R0 of seasonal flu is just 1.2.
There are two strains of SARS-CoV-2 [contagionlive.com] which raises the possibility of ADE [wikipedia.org] (where an antibody facilitates infection by binding to the antigen without being able to neutralize the different strain). The only time I'll ever admit anti-vaxxers may have a point. Ongoing treatment will be required [news.com.au] for a sizable part of the population. There was a video out of China showing children recovered from COVID-19 exhibiting emphysema-like breathing difficulties.
Event 201 was a pandemic preparedness simulation run by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in October 2019 (100 years after the Spanish flu pandemic) and their recommendations [centerforhealthsecurity.org] are laughable. Politicized and centralized control of the outbreak by the CPP and WHO failed, the WHO didn't even recommend basic ingress checks (temperature readings) at ports of entry. The internet was decentralized by design to avoid these single points of failure and the responsibility for dealing with pandemics must be similarly decentralized to the state level.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 09 2020, @12:58PM
Still doesn't mean that the vaccine doesn't work well. Note the conditional "if you took the vaccine and then later caught SARS". That may well mean that you would have caught a vastly more nasty than usual SARS case anyway, say due to a weak immune system (and yes, I recognize that studies on the vaccine may have attempted to filter for that). If you can come up with a vaccine that reduces the infection rate enough that the disease no longer is exponential growth (when combined with the other public health measures in place), then that is good enough.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 09 2020, @01:34PM