Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

Except for School closures, which started the 13th in this district, due to spring break, Florida looks to be more closely following Tennessee than Kentucky. We just closed beaches and restaurants yesterday ...

 

Actually, my wife and I had a similar experience while visiting London in late December. She started a mild cough, which within 24 hours escalated into a high fever and coughing up bloody mucous. We came *this* close to taking her to a hospital in the middle of the night. She was huddled up under blankets crying, saying the sheets hurt where they touched her skin. The fever broke overnight, and she slept nearly 20 hours. Upon return to the states (yes, we flew home a few days later, thinking it was just a "normal" flu) her Dr said her lungs sounded like a rattle can, and put her on antibiotics. They didn't cause any magic recovery... It still took a few weeks for her to recover fully. Meanwhile, I got the mild cough at the end of our trip, but in me it did not escalate to a major fever or lung issues. All chest, no sinus pain, congestion, or runny nose for either of us.

Fortunately, we were both home for several days after returning home, so we kind of accidentally self quarantined. In retrospect, I'm glad we didn't rush back to our offices...

 

Maybe some good news for Florida. Early research shows humidity and Warm weather may slow the spread.

Warmer temperatures and higher humidity may slow spread of COVID-19

 

I am glad everyone in these posts recovered, praise God for that.

Maybe this is coincidence maybe it's not, but just to piggy back:

My wife back in late February woke up with a major headache and went to work and at 1 pm that same day the headache was so bad she went home from work. She had a terrible cough and I remember she called me crying to hurry home w meds and because our puppy was a handful. She couldn't get out of bed. She felt extremely weak and feverish. She had slept for that night and either the day after or two days later her voice was completely gone. I'm not saying it was or was not covid-19 what if? I had 0 symptoms. We're both in our 30's. Her lack of voice lasted a few days. Maybe someone more intelligent than I could give their .02¢. God bless everyone.

 

In early December I sneezed. Now I’m thinking I must have had Coronovirus even though there’s no evidence of the virus in the US at that time

 

Just trying to post something some-what positive, definitely nothing concrete:

Warmer temperatures and higher humidity may slow spread of COVID-19

 

Surely you do not believe they only had that many cases or deaths. There were people over there that were stating the small hospitals were having delivered up to a 100 body bags daily. I would not base anything on China’s numbers. Now S. Korea’s numbers I believe and are encouraging.
I also believe this virus will be affected, like the others, by the onset of warmer weather. That’s not to say there will be areas of the United States in which the medical community will be stretched beyond its limits (some are already approaching it). But it is irresponsible to report there will be 1 to 3 million deaths in the US. I also think those who think there will be less than 10,000 deaths from this will be reevaluating their thinking in a couple of weeks. The people I follow believe we will see the curve begin to flatten in a couple of weeks. The medical experts, in the public arena, are going to lean to the more severe side so that the public will be more vigilant in their behavior. Many of the college age kids really are not taking this seriously so we will need to overcome that somehow. Time will tell.

 

Cornoaviruses cause common colds. COVID-19 is a lower respiratory infection.

 

Now the naive NV Governor shutting down big time over a couple of deaths with a BS crying wolf excuse for going that far even though they have a really low number of inpatients. Crazy - hopefully Gov DeSantis doesn't get conned into going that far.

 

Hi all, as some may know I'm a physician working in an endemic area. I can't reply to all the posts so I'll just post this one and try to address a few things that commonly pop up.

1) Symptoms of COVID19 are non-specific. Fever and cough are cardinal initial symptoms, but not everyone has them. For example, up to almost half of the people who present to the hospital don't have a fever initially (though up to 85% develop it eventually). Testing is also not 100%. In fact, a single nasal swab is only about 70-75% sensitive. Many of you have reported symptoms that are highly suggestive of a COVID19 infection, but many other viruses can cause them as well. We don't typically test for them because there is no treatment and mortality/morbidity is very limited, so there's nothing to do with the result of the test.

2) Case numbers ase #'s are heavily dependent on testing. For example, yesterday NYC ran a huge batch of tests, hence a huge rise in the # of cases. Cases didn't rise that rapidly, and if it increases a bit slower today it doesn't mean the disease has slowed down.

3) Mortality numbers are also not simple to interpret. For one, mortality #'s are not only dependent on testing, but also lags significantly behind # of cases. Take a look at this screenshot of a recent UCSF grand grounds on COVID19 that investigated the disease course of those who recover vs those who died:

Deaths usually occur almost 3 weeks after start of symptoms, and about 10 days after hospitalization. Take SK for example, its death rate has continuously climbed from 0.7% to now almost 1.2% over the past 2 weeks despite far fewer new cases than before. On a side note, what's also interesting about this chart is that if you compare the two graphs, their symptom course is about the same until about 2 weeks after the start of symptoms, then one group just crumps.

4) Whatever measures we take right now won't show any effect until many weeks down the line. The typical incubation period is usually ~5 days, though the usual range is 4-14 days and in extreme cases can be as much as 2-24 days. After displaying symptoms, as mentioned above it's another 2 weeks before we know which way this disease will turn, and another week or more until resolution is reached in the group that turned south. In China, it took about a month of hard quarantine to get the situation under control. In SK it was similar, though with a far less draconian approach.

 

Coronavirus would have been an improvement in the way I felt in December.

 

They found the guy with all the answers! Great job CNN.

 

lol, not sure why anyone gives a shit what he says. The guy has already proven his opinion isn’t worth the oxygen it takes to say it.

 

Are you a cnn/msnbc story creator?

 

Looking at some other curves the daily deaths seem to lag case increases by a few days just a little but with this ramped up testing in the US we might see the opposite where daily deaths start going down before new cases do even though the true number of people with it may be going down imo.

 

Another thing I would like to add is that I do suspect climate to play a role in viral activity. No, the evidence is not scientific, but IMO there's a clear trend. For one, it's been much slower to spread in warmer countries. Warm weather and humidity doesn't kill it, so warmer countries/states still need to take it seriously, but they're likely less impacted.

Look at Europe, for example. Italy is the first to spike, then Spain, and shortly thereafter France, then Germany. The UK is the least affected thus far. I know Germany has similar number of cases as say France right now, but IMO that's due to wider testing. As the stickied thread by sflgator suggests, mortality is likely the most accurate estimation of prevalence right now, and the # of deaths in Germany suggests they're fairly early in the disease course since it's highly unlikely that Germany's healthcare system is THAT much better than all other developed countries.

 

I'll put it like this, we should hope that our *over-reaction* leads to our situation falling far far far far short of the worst case scenario. It is not hysteria that is occurring, however, other than some people running out and buying tp and hand sanitizer in bulk (and some of that has been opportunistic dirt merchants looking to capitalize).

Another way to put it, if the numbers keep rising exponentially, we are in for a world of hurt. You should appreciate that there are folks who know a hella lot more about infectious disease than you or I or others here do who are ringing this bell. Obsessive media blaming, otoh, is imo lazy and prevents people from seeing this situation clearly

 

As far as Germany they may just not have a high of rate as we think like you suggest and are testing a ton of people like NY state now. NY state has driven their death rate down to .48% with all that wildfire testing and the whole country is now down to like 1.2% death rate much of that because of NY ramping that testing up big time.

Generally that weather thing has definitely been the case so far with just a few exceptions that had possible reasons for why.

 

NY state hasn't driven anything down. It's too early to claim that. Let's say 1000 test positive today and tomorrow there are zero deaths doesn't mean that zero will die in 3 weeks.