right, as I understand the information from Italy right now emergency services are basically shut down because system overburdened. So as a healthy 30 year old, don't go do any of those healthy sports you like because you might get an injury and that's it then.
Also patient 1 in Italy was a healthy marathon runner who at least ended up in intensive care, not sure if dead yet or not.
In Lombardy, the only region where the situation is critical at the moment, emergency service have NOT shut down. Non urgent procedures are suspended, both to spare doctors and nurses and to avoid creating new emergencies in case those procedures go wrong. ERs are not overwhelmed, ICUs are.
You basically get in real trouble if you need a respirator - they're pretty much out of those and they have to assess your chance of survival to decide if they can tube you.
Interestingly ERs are seeing much less load because people have stopped going there for stupid reasons, because they are afraid of catching COVID-19. All medical stuff is still busting their ass if course, a lot of them have been lended to ICUs, rooms have been repurposed, etc.
This is not to say that the situation isn't bad. It's really bad. And if you think that your country has such a good health care system that it will hold better, you should know that Lombardy hospitals are top notch.
Whatever your age, stop traveling. If there's been a single case in your region, stop risky behaviors now: don't go shopping, have it delivered. Work from home. Don't use public transit. Teach your parents how to shop online and force them to stay home. Don't shake hands and wash them often.
> stop risky behaviors now: don't go shopping, have it delivered.
As someone living in Milano, I'm afraid that if the panic in the government (as opposed to the population) keeps on going on, this won't be possible when they shut down almost everything (given that the rules change every 24h and no one knows how to properly follow them, let alone evaluate the effect of them).
Just to clarify, my advice is for people living in barely affected zones. If your are in the middle of the emergency, things obviously change. It might not be possible to have food delivered within a reasonable time.
The mortality rate of COVID-19 is estimated to be around ~0.1% for young people, which is five times higher than seasonal flu.
> the risk of death among young adults would be smaller than that of older adults, e.g., at most 0.1%–0.2%. Whether to perceive this estimate as severe or moderate is a matter for discussion, but we consider 0.1%–0.2% among young adults to be unusually high.
But measles wasn't a pandemic! Everyone keeps thinking this is about individual risk and trying to downplay things, and it's not like that.
Our grandparents went to measles parties because they knew that they'd eventually be exposed and wanted to do it under controlled conditions where they knew treatment was available and had a plan for early detection of symptoms.
The situation with COVID-19 is that people who get sick are going to do so in an environment where they and their government are surprised as "how fast it grew" and where all the hospital beds (and oxygen masks, and ventilators, and intubation kits, and doctors, and nurses, and...) are going to be filled by other sick people.
And a lot of them are going to die, who didn't need to if we had just taken this seriously and not told people "it's just like measles".
Im 34 so I'll be fine, and I probably won't lose any friends. But I may lose a parent and I'll definitely have a friend who loses a parent. And that seems pretty awful especially considering how preventable this all was.
I'm sorry, but that's a stupid assumption to make.
I'm "only" 29 and last year I managed to catch a parvovirus B19 from someone - it's a virus that's relatively common in children, but has very mild symptoms - it's almost unheard of in adults, mostly because you either already have immunity, or there are no symptoms/the symptoms are no worse than a mild cold/flu. Well, except that in about 10% of adults it causes severe response with a high fever that last weeks, with arthretic swelling of joints - and in 10% of those the joint issues don't go away for years. Well, it's been nearly a year now and my knees and other joints are still fucked from the virus, I'm constantly on steroids just to control the inflammation.
So no, this has changed my "I'm young so I'll be fine" outlook on this - the chances are not always in your favour.
Sorry to hear that. I wish the insight you have could spread further (what a sorrowful irony) but it seems wisdom is rarely won without painful experience, the blasé attitude of some is not helping right now.
I'm not so sure that this was "preventable" in a meaningful way. We may well find out (and I suspect) that there was no obvious, sensible moment for radical containment measures to be enacted that wouldn't have been far worse than the outbreak.
Note that assumes that such containment measures would have been enacted many more times over the last decade, incurring inconveniences [which you can model as "life energy and time lost", even if few lives are lost from them] if the containment criteria were tight enough to stop the initial outbreak of a virus that has relatively high transmissibility, many infected who feel relatively mild symptoms, those symptoms mimic other common diseases, and a week or more incubation period before serious symptoms show up.
The problem, from a non-medical expert layman, is that the "sensible" measures only appear so in hindsight.
It would have been sensible to close our borders and halt international travel 8-12 weeks ago, and begin widespread screening of suspect individuals. But at the time everyone said that was nuts, you want to tank our economy over some virus that's barely even outside Wuhan!?
Right now we could still contain it with radical isolation measures like Italy is doing. Nobody leaves their house without a good reason, everything comes to a halt, we perform mass testing on everybody and if you're infected you get an even stronger quarantine. But you want to shut down our economy over just a few hundred "isolated cases"!?
By the time people are dying en masse and hospitals are overwhelmed, it's too late. There's nothing you can really do at that point.
The basic problem is that people don't understand quadratic or exponential curves. If you have a pond that starts with one lily pad and they double in number each day, and it takes one month to fill the pond completely, then when is the pond 50% full? The answer is the day before. And the lesson is - exponential growth requires extrapolating from "who cares, it's just a few cases" to what could happen if it's allowed to grow unchecked. Which humans are incredibly bad at doing.
> It would have been sensible to close our borders and halt international travel 8-12 weeks ago, and begin widespread screening of suspect individuals.
Types easy; is hard.
11 weeks ago was Christmas. How many Americans were overseas on holidays for Christmas? How many Americans with Chinese relatives were in China? How many Chinese students of American universities were home on break? Is flying Boston to Seattle meaningfully different than flying Boston to Toronto? If you halt international travel and close the borders, where do the stranded travelers now live? For how long? Who pays for it? Do they lose their jobs/have to quit college? On average, nearly half of international travelers are on their way home, not out. These are real people.
> But at the time everyone said that was nuts, you want to tank our economy over some virus that's barely even outside Wuhan!?
If you set the system parameters tightly enough to prevent the virus from leaving Wuhan, I think you're basically closing travel all the time. How many people get sick and die of random, novel things? How many of those have the theoretical potential to be silently but exponentially transmissible? How can you set a system tight enough to prevent all of them while having travel and commerce?
It seems quite possible that such a tight system would be a cure that's worse than the disease. I'm not suggesting that we're doing all that we can or that we shouldn't have taken some of today's steps last week, but I am saying that I think it's completely unrealistic to think we could prevent this entirely in any sane way.
No one said it was going to be easy, or convenient. But most estimates say 70% of the population could become infected and with Italy's mortality rate of 6% that's 13.7 million deaths in the U.S. alone.
We had 6 weeks to prepare for this, and we did nothing, and we're still not doing nearly enough.
With due respect, telling Americans that they can't come back home from Christmas holidays is quite a bit more than "well, it won't be easy or convenient."
I got the initial wake up call after it became clear this is much more contagious than SARS/MERS. (Reused parameters and initial data for contagion simulation.)
That was a month ago. Managed to get done most of the preparations designed for a quarantine of about a month length as predicated by Chinese data. And a few extras. Not exactly hoarding food levels.
What I didn't consider was how strict and well executed were the containment measures applied by China. Without these, we'll probably get much longer, three month run. The measures I've taken definitely will help but potentially are not enough.
Italy's patient 1 is 38 and was in excellent health before catching the virus (he ran two half marathons in a week just before getting sick). Then he spent 20 days in an ICU attached to a ventilator.
Uggh, that reminds me that I better take it easy when the weather breaks. I like to take LONG bike rides (typically 80-100 km) when the weather is nice. Yes, exercise is good for me, but inadvertently overtaxing myself would not be good.
- it will kill some number of younger people, even healthy ones.
- it’s also worth considering that we don’t (AFAIK) have a clear picture about potential long-term complications (eg lung damage). We should not simply assume there won’t be these.
I’m saying this to emphasize the seriousness of the situation.
But you'll need to hope that you don't need a hospital for anything at all for a while - so avoid accidents, keep living with that little surgical problem, etc. You may be relatively safe from COVID-19 but it's in addition to all of the other medical conditions that trouble our species, and you may need to just cope with them.
An otherwise healthy thirtysomething in Minnesota is in critical condition right now - it's not time to panic but you probably want to avoid getting this if you can.
Not completely true. It can apparently spread to a lower respiratory problem in ANYONE (where it is VERY deadly, 50% mortality rate) it just tends not to do it very often in persons 10-30 yrs old.
I've never seen this 50% figure, looking at people in critical condition data, even that's not 50%, more like 20% mortality. Please provide a source, or delete your comment.
Generally speaking, all vaccines are low dosage. Everyone having the vaccine would be better, starting with those most at risk. If we had a vaccine, we would give it to 80 year olds first, then go down the chain.
We have a ways to go before a vaccine is available.
iirc he reiterated this to congress this morning before hearings were terminated to allow Trump to hold a press conference. Witnesses were told to stop their testimony and leave immediately.
> “This morning we were informed that President Trump and Vice President Pence have called our witnesses to an emergency meeting at the White House,” Maloney said. “We don't know the details, just that it is extremely urgent.”
> At about 11:30 a.m., she ended questioning from lawmakers, saying she received notice from the White House that the witnesses needed to leave “now.”
The current goal is to create any vaccine that is safe and effective.
If you have that, you give it to everybody you can.
I guess deciding what safe enough is can be a problem (for many people the bar will be "getting the vaccine has better odds for a good outcome than getting the infection", but that is sort of a minimum).
yeah, I agree that this is no problem if hospitals stop taking anyone over 40 with respiratory issues and leave them to die at home. Letality might approach 10-20% then (from all we know), but hey, we are young!
If you’re under 30 without any other health issues, you should be fine? Might not realize you have it?
I wonder if it would be easier to create a low dosage vaccine for younger people, thus creating a bit of a firewall so it doesn’t spread as rapidly.
I know nothing about medicine so this may be silly.