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COVID-19 milestone

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.
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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 09 2020, @12:58PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 09 2020, @12:58PM (#968476) Journal
    Notice I said "public health systems" not "health care systems". While it can make a significant difference how many respirators and like there are, the real gain is in reducing the spread of the disease and other things like coming up with an effective vaccine. Even simple things like canceling public gatherings can significantly contribute.

    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.

    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.