TSpoke wrote: ↑Fri Mar 13, 2020 3:19 pm
LanderPoke wrote: ↑Thu Mar 12, 2020 6:08 pm
Asmodeanreborn wrote: ↑Thu Mar 12, 2020 10:29 am
ItSucksToBeACSURam wrote: ↑Thu Mar 12, 2020 10:23 am
If only society cared about Heart Disease or Obesity or curing cancer as much as they do for 2020's flavor of the month apocalyptic virus scare....
I mean, we spend a crap ton of money on those already and they also don't spread from person to person, so that's a pretty terrible comparison.
Why worry about the plague when people are dying from traffic accidents?
Are you saying we shouldn't attempt preventing the spread of something that currently has a 3.5% mortality rate? It spreads very similar to the flu, which 30-50 Million people a year get in the United States. Thankfully, the normal flu has a very low mortality rate.
But there's also the secondary concern... 20% of those getting COVID-19 get hospitalized, which means a full-blown spread will kill more Cancer and Heart patients that now won't have access to healthcare.
Once again, I'm not advocating panic. I'm just saying that maybe limiting large conferences and sporting events isn't a dumb idea.
I guarantee that mortality rate is inflated by about a factor of 10
That's a pretty bold guarantee for a virus we know next to nothing about. Why do you blelive this?(well more than believe, know it apparently)
The thing is, if these precautions work we will never know and it will look like an over reaction. This is a serious thing. It isn't the end of the world and we shouldn't be panicking but still take it serious.
1. Yes, we should certainly take this seriously. It is more serious than anyone thought it would be. Its a good thing the flu doesn't overwhelm the system every year like this has.
2. The death rate is not 3.5% (I know it was a while ago that you wrote this, now things are lower) -- but at any rate, this is just of confirmed cases. Epidemiologists feel that there likely were thousands of unknown cases in the US before any of the confirmed cases popped up in Washington. We have not been testing people and have no idea how many people have had it. In fact, the policy of the UCHealth system right now is to counsel families to stay home if they have any cold-like symptoms and only come to the clinic or the emergency room if there is a high fever or significant shortness of breath. If you don't need oxygen when you walk in the door, you will be sent home until you do. All we know is that we are aware of the serious cases.
An abstract for an article set to be released in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases says:
"Abstract
We estimated the case-fatality risk for 2019 novel coronavirus disease cases in China (3.5%); China, excluding Hubei Province (0.8%); 82 countries, territories, and areas (4.2%); and on a cruise ship (0.6%).
Lower estimates might be closest to the true value, but a broad range of 0.25%–3.0% probably should be considered."
They still don't know yet because we don't know who's had it. What will push the fatality rate up, however, is if our system gets pushed much further past its capacity to care for serious cases.