Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

So the heck what? This was be a reversal of a trend, which means a few hundred million more than normal would die.

 

Disney to shut California parks through March over coronavirus

 

I was set to do an acoustic version of it at an open mic tue but I got sick (yikes!). Flav just got booted over a dispute about Bernie!
Flavor Flav doesn't approve of Bernie Sanders using Public Enemy likeness for campaign event, attorney says - CNN

 

MLB canceled spring training, NBA suspended season. All NCAA winter championships canceled. The hurt is going to continue.

 

I want to tell all of our Too Hot readers that I wish them all well in this short time of crisis. I wish everyone good health during this Coronavirus breakout.


Edited: Yes, even 'optimistic' GatorJMDZ too... Lol.

 

Lots of updated graphs, excellent info

 

from above link.

Why its important to cancel everything

 

Coronavirus school closings: Ohio, Maryland shut all K-12 schools

 

If you keep up with that type of growth rate for just a week, this is what you get:

 

Based upon data reported by MSN, death rate is 3.2% of confirmed cases and 1% if Washington state is excluded.

US coronavirus cases: a state-by-state breakdown

 

We are bad, but I wonder what the hell Belgium and Switzerland are doing. I wouldn't have guessed them being negligent in addressing this.

 

The vaccines are ineffective due to mutations.

Trucker and I had the Swine Flu in the late summer of 1978, 2 years after it first appeared in an outbreak at Fort Dix, NJ in 1976. We were living in New Jersey at the time. I cannot begin to adequately describe how sick we were. When he was placed in a tub of cool water to bring down his fever, he heated the water and required 2 shots of adrenaline. He thought he was dying.

I was 6 weeks pregnant with our third child and so sick I wanted to die. My mother cared for me through my illness and never became sick herself. But she had the Spanish flu when she was 5 years old and apparently retained enough immunity to keep her from contracting the newer swine mutation. Her mother died from it. Our 2 older children, 3 and 5 never contracted it. Not even a cold.

More details on the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 ... 1918 Pandemic (H1N1 virus) | Pandemic Influenza (Flu) | CDC

The 1918 influenza pandemic was the most severe pandemic in recent history. It was caused by an H1N1 virus with genes of avian origin. Although there is not universal consensus regarding where the virus originated, it spread worldwide during 1918-1919. In the United States, it was first identified in military personnel in spring 1918. It is estimated that about 500 million people or one-third of the world’s population became infected with this virus. The number of deaths was estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide with about 675,000 occurring in the United States.

Mortality was high in people younger than 5 years old, 20-40 years old, and 65 years and older. The high mortality in healthy people, including those in the 20-40 year age group, was a unique feature of this pandemic. While the 1918 H1N1 virus has been synthesized and evaluated, the properties that made it so devastating are not well understood. With no vaccine to protect against influenza infection and no antibiotics to treat secondary bacterial infections that can be associated with influenza infections, control efforts worldwide were limited to non-pharmaceutical interventions such as isolation, quarantine, good personal hygiene, use of disinfectants, and limitations of public gatherings, which were applied unevenly.

https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/1918-flu-pandemic

Spanish Flu Pandemic Ends
By the summer of 1919, the flu pandemic came to an end, as those that were infected either died or developed immunity.

Almost 90 years later, in 2008, researchers announced they’d discovered what made the 1918 flu so deadly: A group of three genes enabled the virus to weaken a victim’s bronchial tubes and lungs and clear the way for bacterial pneumonia.

Since 1918, there have been several other influenza pandemics, although none as deadly. A flu pandemic from 1957 to 1958 killed around 2 million people worldwide, including some 70,000 people in the United States, and a pandemic from 1968 to 1969 killed approximately 1 million people, including some 34,000 Americans.

More than 12,000 Americans perished during the H1N1 (or “swine flu”) pandemic that occurred from 2009 to 2010. The modern day pandemics brought renewed interest in and attention to the Spanish Flu, or “forgotten pandemic,” so-named because its spread was overshadowed by the deadliness of WWI and covered up by news blackouts and poor record-keeping.

 

They could be better at diagnosing. Just a guess

 

I think it is a percentage anomaly. They have 399 reported cases.

Belgian government says schools, restaurants, clubs to close due to coronavirus

 

Good point, I suppose "number of confirmed new cases" (or derivative growth rate thereof) is a meaningless figure to look at in the early phase when testing is just getting up to speed (or almost non-existent, as in the U.S).

If we had abundant tests suddenly released to the wild tomorrow and ANYONE who was potentially exposed could get it right away even without symptoms, our "confirmed cases" could easily go up 10x in a day. But that wouldn't mean anything either, other than confirm a wide spread, and confirm the test was successfully discovering people that needed to be asked to quarantine pre-emptively.

 

I saw where tests in the US at a hospital were $100-$500 if you were insured, and $1600 if you were uninsured. Lack of universal healthcare is a huge issue in a pandemic situation.

 

Yeah, I saw somewhere else $1200.

That is absolutely insane. Even if you aren't a proponent of universal healthcare, surely we must recognize that for public health reasons at least the testing on something like this should all be FREE and widely available (as in, required to be 100% costs covered by somebody, either insurance or the govt). The figures should be tabulated publicly, so that the appropriate authorities can address the outbreak hotspots.

Who the heck is producing these tests and how was the contract awarded to them? Why did the CDC drop the ball, why isn't there a national test or why didn't we go with the WHO test or the process South Korea is using? Those questions are all going to have to be sorted out.

 

Some information on this topic:



Namely, the CDC has some existing fiscal authority.

 

This from a UF researcher. Go Gators.

 

Again, all those charts are pretty, but because of poor testing we don't even know accurate the numbers are in the United States.