Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Covid-19: Not as deadly as we thought....

This. 40 times higher fatality rate than the flu? I really, really doubt that is remotely true.

Somewhere around 30 million got the typical flu this season with about 20,000 deaths in the USA alone. Where was the panic for this?

Exactly......

Trump spoke today to try to calm things down with the market and people in general. I watched the CBS news tonight just to see what spin they had. All I saw was them trying to ramp up the fear and panic again. All the talking heads of course were Dimocrates. I won't be surprised the see the market to dive again tomorrow.

It ain't just the MSM ramping things up. Look at all thr chicken littles on here.

Hand wringers...... the sky is falling.

Dude, I would love nothing more than for you to be right and to call us all out when this all blows over. I’ll happily take my licks with humility.

Marty Makary, MD, MPH
While it’s well known that China and Iran have under-reported their COVID-19 statistics, Italy has been fully transparent. What we are learning is very concerning. The Lombardy province alone has experienced a surge in deaths due to the coronavirus— from 20 to 66 deaths in just one day. Analyzing data for the country as a whole, new diagnoses and deaths are doubling every few days. At this rate, Italy’s entire healthcare system will be overwhelmed by next week. Remember that two weeks ago, Italy had reported seven deaths.
Italy is a preview of what we may see in the U.S. very soon.
In a recent statement, the American Hospital Association projects strain on U.S. hospitals and is requesting congressional funding for new hospital construction and increased housing for patients. Doing the math, the U.S. currently has approximately 100,000 ICU beds with most hospitals already functioning at full or near-full capacity. According the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, 200,000 to as many as 2.9 million patients could present to U.S. hospitals with coronavirus. It’s time we increase the capacity of our medical centers before the infection ramps up.
Wuhan was overrun even with 19 field hospitals set up for the pandemic. Healthcare workers are at the highest risk of getting infected, not only representing a risk to our lives but a strain to our capacity to care for the tsunami of patients expected. U.S. hospitals and health professionals are on track to soon be overrun with patients, following the pattern of hospitals overseas who describe rationing respiratory support. Within weeks, U.S. hospitals may be significantly under-resourced and deal with major staffing shortages. Washington State is already scrambling to hire hundreds of travel nurses to help staff the influx of infected patients.
If the virus stays on its current trajectory, what happened in Wuhan will happen in the U.S. There is no strong scientific argument to suggest otherwise. While we all hope the virus demonstrates an unexpected heat-sensitivity or mutates to a less virulent form, the virus has, so far, followed a highly predictable course. That path was mapped out over 3 week ago by Marc Lipsitch, PhD, of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Despite his dire warning that 40%-70% of the population could be infected, little was done to prepare for the pending crisis beyond standard handwashing and coughing instructions — a routine done every flu season. We need to mobilize quickly. In a national survey of 6,500 nurses in 48 states released last week, 63% of nurses report that they do not have access to N95 respirators in their units and many said they haven't been fitted or trained on how to properly use them. At the same time, first responders are underprepared and most have not been given the protective gear they need to treat infected patients.
Unfortunately, we live in an era of people spouting opinions on social media and cable news with no knowledge of a topic. TV pundits with no knowledge of virology, public health, or pandemic history are crowding out medical experts. Twitter, which promotes shouting over listening, is also loaded with comments ignorant the to the data. News networks should push aside legacy political commentators and put infectious diseases physicians on the air to warn the public about the pandemic. Now more than ever, physicians need to speak up about the pending health crisis in the U.S.
Arguments about the exact case fatality rate (CFR) have become a distraction from the real issue at hand — preparedness. While it’s a worthy exercise to determine if CFR estimates are including mild or asymptomatic patients in the denominator, it does not change our need to prepare or how we treat individual patients. Data from Italy suggests the CFR may be as high as 3%-4%. Adding an assumption that roughly half of people with mild or no symptoms were not tested, it may be closer to 1.5%-2%, just below that of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic which killed 30 million people. The Diamond Princess ship was a controlled case study: 705 people tested positive for the virus, and seven died, suggesting a 1% CFR, albeit a slightly older skewed population. Regardless of where the true CFR is between 1% and 3.4% as the WHO is reporting, this is, at best, at least 10 times worse than a bad flu season and at worst, a pandemic that could claim millions of American lives.
Further hindering public health efforts, the concept of American exceptionalism has morphed into a societal arrogance that somehow the immune systems of Americans are stronger than those of the Chinese. And even though other countries have enacted very strict quarantine practices, including martial law and a shutdown of schools, there is a misleading perception that the U.S. would have less community transmission because of a better health care system and better hygiene. Another barrier has been the exaggerated notion that COVID-19 is only a danger to old people and that young people are entirely resilient.
Italy has now quarantined approximately 60 million people, and closed all nightclubs, gyms, and sporting events. I respect NIAID Director Anthony Fauci and admired his leadership as a clinical voice of reason amidst of our AIDS, SARS, and Ebola epidemics, but I’m concerned he has not yet introduced contingency plans for any of these major preventive measures. Instead, he is re-iterating a popular view that there is a lot we don’t know and that anything is possible. His only strong warning has been directed at to those considering cruise ship travel. Based on the current trajectory of the pandemic, all U.S. schools are at risk and may need to be closed, public gatherings like NCAA tournament games may need to be postponed, businesses should have their employees work from home whenever possible, and hospitals should staff up. I don’t like it, but that’s what the data are telling us to do.
At the current rate of spread, we can expect members of Congress, and even presidential candidates, to be infected with the virus within 6-8 weeks. In fact, President Xi Jinping of China has not been seen in public for weeks, and many of Iran’s leaders have the infection. Already, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and several House members have announced they will self-quarantine after shaking hands with an infected individual. Many more are likely infected but a we have been using a false pretense that confirmed cases are the only cases out there, despite that fact that testing has been extremely limited at best. It’s time we dispel the notion that this virus is somehow contained. It is at large.
The main talking points issued on this topic have been that we simply don’t know what this virus will do -- but COVID-19's course has already played out in other parts of the world. We just need to listen to data and put medical experts out in front of this instead of broadcasting opinions. We need to plan for the worst and hope for the best. Considering the implications for public health, and particularly for our older patients and those with underlying risk factors, we should act swiftly on the data rather than risk a delayed response we might regret.
Marty Makary, MD, MPH, is MedPage Today’s Editor-in-Chief as well as professor of health policy & management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Click here to see all of MedPage Today’s COVID-19 coronavirus coverage.
Last Updated March 10, 2020

Li
Likewise.
I just don’t understand the panic when thousands of people are all ready dying from the flu.
Shouldn’t we be panicking because of it?

Blah 🙄

Maybe Marty is right and not biased. But would be interesting to know if he is Republican or Democrat or neither.

The difference here is I’m rooting for you! Haha! I’m not panicking, but I’m definitely preparing for worst case scenario.

631 dead now in Italy from the virus.

One of my classmates is the mayor of New Rochelle, New York. It is an epicenter or disease cluster in New York. This is his email out to the community.

To mitigate the spread of coronavirus in our community and elsehwere, State public health authorities have established a one-mile containment area from the epicenter of the outbreak within which large gatherings will be prohibited. This affects several public and private schools, houses of worship, and potentially other large institutions in the Wykagyl area of New Rochelle’s North End. To emphasize, this is purely a limitation on large gatherings; it is not a quarantine or exclusion zone, and it does not apply to individual residents and families or to individual businesses. We are still collaborating with State authorities to create a complete list of affected facilities and to provide appropriate guidance to them.
Additionally:
The City is assisting in the distribution of hand sanitizer from New York State to large institutions throughout New Rochelle, especially those serving seniors. At present, however, hand sanitizer is not available for the general public.
We are informed that the National Guard will be assisting with logistical and operational challenges in our community, including cleaning and the distribution of meals to students who rely on school lunches and breakfasts at schools that are closed. The Guard will not be engaged in military or Policing functions. The City stands ready to coordinate with and support the Guard’s efforts in any constructive fashion, and has activated our emergency operations center in order to be fully prepared for any requests.
As a reminder: public health experts have been clear that the great majority of those who contract coronavirus will recover without difficulty, and that we can protect ourselves and our families by following common sense public health guidelines. If you experience symptoms, please consult your doctor or health care provider.
New Rochelle is a strong and resilient community. Although this is a major challenge, we will meet it calmly, with seriousness of purpose, and with support for and from all of our neighbors

I’m rooting for you as well and I hope I’m right.
I really hope this doesn’t turn in to a world wide pandemic.
However, it’s a flu........ and thousands have already died from the “flu”......

Curious why kids are not being affected by it. Maybe cause they have already been vaccinated?

6 degrees of Kevin Bacon. I am only 2 degrees from it as of yesterday...

This is what aggravates me so much............because our great and fearless leader said it was no worse than a common cold, there are those who swallow his every word as fact, and believe that the corona virus is a Democrat conspiracy.

One's political persuasion will not matter if you contact the virus. Politics doesn't have a damn thing to do with it, and could only make it worse if our politicians keep using it as a political pawn.

I don't know, as does anyone else what the future holds. This thing may run it's course, and end up being just another in a long line of things that we have been told are going to infect and kill off half the population of the world. Or, it may continue to spread and indeed end up being the 21st century's version of the Plague. We just don't know, but we don't need to be making it political. I do know that.

laffin’

Out of just over 10,000 infected. That's a 6% mortality rate. Today they had the single highest death total of any nation for a single day. They have not yet peaked.

I changed my mind.
We’re all going to die.