Regarding the virus · 1:18am Mar 26th, 2020
For anyone who is dealing with Covid-19, I am so sorry. For anyone dealing with a disease which might need eventual or even temporary hospitalization, I am so sorry. For anyone who is injured in the next few months, I am so sorry.
Right now, and for some time to come, things will be poor.
Don't stockpile toilet paper. Stockpile food. Acquire a cheap bidet. Bed Bath and Beyond probably still has a few if your local one is open. If not, you can jury rig one with a bottle and a straw. Acquire a weapon and know how to use it.
I'm going to give you some hard, fast, and incredibly unpleasant numbers. Not that you haven't been paying attention. It's physically impossible not to pay attention right now, if you are at all connected to our society.
1. Twelve to eighteen - This is how many months it will take for a vaccine to be developed, tested for safety, and mass deployed. Any cure developed between now and then will take approximately the same amount of time.
2.Forty six million - That's 46,000,000. That's the total dead if this virus has a 1% mortality rate and 60% of humanity becomes infected. In the best case scenario, if only 20% are infected and we apply a global, immediate, China style lockdown and quarantine, ignoring the civil rights of every people on Earth...we might get that down by a lot. However, this is unlikely. There are too many countries and not enough inclination to fix this situation.
If the actual mortality rate is higher, do the math yourself.
3.Thirty percent - 30% - the Federal Reserve Bank's estimated total unemployment rate as a result of Covid-19, in America.
4.Six Months - the predicted period of time remaining until every hospital in America is overloaded and collapses as a result of Covid-19 if a shelter-in-place order is not issued for all 50 states and remains in place until the viral spread is reduced.
5.Eighteen days - The period of time Donald Trump wants the economy to remain shuttered before re-opening it entirely, leading to a 'worst case scenario' infection rate (I.E. all hospitals in America at 200% capacity or more, 20% with severe conditions requiring heavy treatment which will massively increase the mortality rate if they cannot get it).
6. 17 days - The length of time the Covid-19 virus managed to remain aboard the Princess Cruise ship and remain infectiously potent on surfaces after there were no longer any people aboard.
7. 15 Percent - the average mortality rate of Covid-19 among people 70 and over.
Now, there is a word which is extremely important which I feel the media often ignores or fails to define properly for people when talking about Covid-19.
That word is 'Novel'. You've probably heard the virus described as 'novel' by a number of people, but that is not just a general descriptor. In virology, a novel virus is something very particular. What the word 'novel' means in this context is there is no immunity to it. You cannot be immune to Covid-19 right now in the way if you catch one version of the flu, you may have an immune reaction to another version.
This. Is. Not. The. Flu.
You will viral shed whether you have symptoms or not. If you catch it, you are viral shedding. You will not know. There's no way for you to know except to get the test. Presume you are already infected and act accordingly.
There is no way to properly contain this virus except a global effort and there will be multiple waves of it which will recur, month on month, until herd immunity is reached. This is only the first wave and we are on the up-slope of an oncoming disaster whose peak we cannot even begin to fathom.
Millions will die. In all likelihood, more than died in World War One. If we do not respond correctly, more than died at the hands of Stalin.
Grieve, but prepare while you do.
-Chessie
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At least one other person understands the implications jfc some says I feel like I'm talking to a wall.
5228748 People aren't panicking hard enough or we'd already have begun the general strike, shutting down the entire country until demands for universal healthcare and a massive diversion of military funds and resources to building national healthcare infrastructure were met.
Since just saying that makes me sound crazy to a lot of people, it doesn't take much imagination to realize our leadership is going to allow a worst-case scenario.
-Chessie
Good info.
I'm as prepared as I can be.
Stay safe.
5228758
Ever since February I knew this would be the worst year for the world in some time, and I’m glad to see other recognize the threat this virus presents.
I have hope that it will not be as bad as the estimates say, that really is all that we can do, aside from prepping.
Some of your details aren't right but they don't need to be right for the gist of your warning to be totally valid. Not like people are able to imagine the results of viruses being contagious on surfaces for closer to a week (not just RNA strands identifiable as former virus) or a death chance closer to one in twenty for those older than 70. I actually think it'll be way sooner than six months before hospitals are overwhelmed, that's one where your take on things is less strident than mine.
Buckle in because we don't have a choice. Stay safe and communicate by the internet (or indeed phone etc). The part of this that I most strongly cosign is that our leaders (certainly the US executive branch and Senate, not sure about the House) and the leaders of other countries (looking suspiciously at the Tories in the UK here, and at whatever Putin calls his government in Russia) are setting out to commit genocide because they think they can wipe out the poors and undesirables.
I don't know what's going to happen, but I find it really hard to look away. However, good advice for revolutionaries is to avert your eyes some of the time, lest the horrors blind you. We're gonna need to do some of that. (I don't know how much I can help but I'm getting together a cover for a tenth Trixieverse book and at some point that will go live and begin updating. I have the story, but it's the cover that is toughest for me to get together)
Oh, I know we're in a very special hell right now, and we didn't even talk during the movie previews.
I'm a transit worker manager. With already damaged lungs, And "essential". Coughing? I cough up blood normally just by pushing myself too hard on occasion, but I'm usually good about that.
I just sent one of my people home for two weeks because she's 1) older, 2) rides the bus to work (amazingly, our system is still running at full capacity even as everyone else's is barely running at all for essential people only) and 3) her family was begging her to come home and would take care of her and her husband (who got furloughed, he works at a hotel so you can guess what it's like there).
Every day for me is Russian Roulette. But I won't go until the people under me get told to go home, or I get sick myself. I had to bloody well write cleaning protocols for my shops that promptly got copy-pasted across DC/Maryland/Virginia because nobody else had thought to do it. So far, nobody's gotten sick, nobody's shown signs of COVID-19, or if they got infected, we're all damn lucky and they're asymptomatic. Eventually, I'm going to pull the trigger on a full chamber and hope I don't end up damaged further, on oxygen for life, or a respirator if I'm really unlucky.
We are well and truly up the creek, drifting towards the waterfall without a paddle and a hungry swarm of piranha under the leaky canoe.
5228751
I'm so glad I'm not an idiot who hasn't planned for scenarios like this for literal years
Not saying I'm a prepper, but I at least HAD A PLAN IN ADVANCE and EXECUTED IT INTELLIGENTLY.
This is from the cdc a mortailty rate of 27% for those 85 or older, 11% for those between 65 and 84, 3% for those between 55 and 64, less than 1% for those between 20 and 54, and not a single recorded deaths for those 19 and under.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6912e2.htm
Use the CDC & WHO for information on the diease the media is twisting the facts to make it seem worst than it is. We had ebola which had the same potential of spread and a mortality rate up to 90% and we still don't know where the diease came from.
5228881 Heh, you'll have gotten used to people calling you a 'doomsayer' by now, I imagine. I hate that word so much. Planning ahead doesn't make a person hysterical, and yet our society is so short-sighted that you can get labeled that way awful easily.
-Chessie
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5228881
5228919
No history major would bat an eye...
Well, none of that sounds very pleasant at all. Hopefully that second number can be reduced before this is all through, I rather like when people don't die.
Good luck, Chessie; stay safe.
5228937
Or anyone who understands the concept of exponential growth
Appreciate the numbers and you're right, this is a very bad situation. I work at a local hospital and I see the number of tests for the virus increase daily. However at this time we are not admitting many people. I imagine they are saving space for if a worst case moment does occur. Between that and elective surgeries being cancelled we have about half the amount of patients we normally do in house, especially considering this is still Flu season.
Each day we have probably 15 or more emails on the situation, changes in policy, etc. and what we're told to do one day is often irrelevant the next. Personally I wonder how long till my area starts really getting hit hard along with myself since, well, I have Cystic Fibrosis and am technically more vulnerable to respiratory infections.
5228898
Those numbers you listed are still catastrophic. The media isn't making anything 'seem worse than it is'. There are warehouses full of coffins in Italy. China's cell-phone carriers have inexplicably lost 21 million customers across all the various companies in a little over a month - Yes, accounting for the transition to 5G. Spain has nursing homes full of corpses.
There is no 'worse than it seems' here. The media is, if anything, underplaying precisely what is about to happen.
-Chessie
5229724
Italy triaged patients giving care to young people without preexisting conditions, instead of focusing on the elderly and ones with a preexisting condition which is why they have so many dead. If you are young and healthy with no issues with your lungs or immune system, do not go to hospital you have the highest chance of recovering on your own.
You can also determine how dangerous diseases are based on how doctors treat patients. With covid-19 you are getting hands on treatment all they wear is a n95 mask, a faceshield and some gloves. With ebola where every fluid your body produced was contagious they gave you an I.V in at minimum a level b suit and hoped you made it they did not make contact with you beyond switching bags and giving some words of encouragement.
China is not a good basis for anything they have a history of suppressing bad pr about them or making things seem worse for sympathy. At the moment they are trying to convince their citizens that america caused the pandemic and not their inability to tell the world when the virus shows up. Remember they waited a month to report the virus. And all of the dead are the already severely sick or the elderly the ones who had a high chance of dieing from the flu if it came around.
The media is making it worse where I am we have a doctor on the news saying you are going to become infected it's impossible to avoid and washing your hands isn't going to help. He might as well be saying the only way to not die from the virus is to go to the hospital and get quarantined. The CDC has also said taking care of family members at home is safe, something that have not said about other serious illnesses.
5229785 Italy has had 45 of their doctors die of Covid-19. Fit, capable, medical professionals who died of this virus.
China is may not be a 'good basis for anything', except they're where the virus started and they've been consistently fabricating their numbers of infected. Now we have a statistical anomaly which proves they are probably lying about how many infected they've had which would also line up with the exponential growth and infection rates seen in other countries. China's presence on the world stage will mean unless they close their borders to travel in both directions, they'll continue to infect the globe.
There are millions of 'sick and elderly' in the world. Millions. Letting them die is in no way a solution to this crisis. Suggesting that letting them die is 'not so bad' as a means of making this situation seem less horrid than it is is disgusting.
The comparison to the flu is also patently false. The lethality rate and infection rates of the flu do not line up with the lethality or infection rates of Covid-19. Flu causes approximately 650,000 deaths a year, globally. We're looking at twice or three times that in America alone.
Covid-19, according to current numbers, could be as much as 3%. That's 3 people in 100 infected who'll die. If it's 1 in 100, that's still obscene and those with medical complications will overload every hospital on Earth, even if they survive to recover. This is not to speak of the 20% who experience complications severe enough to warrant hospitalization.
Once the hospitals are overloaded, the likelihood of death skyrockets if you are one of the 20% of infected who experience complications. You want to then talk about the tangential deaths. The millions of people who get injured in minor ways that modern medicine could fix...if it were available and if going to the hospital didn't mean potentially catching Covid-19.
Stop downplaying. You're not helping.
-C
5229808
I never said let the elderly and sick die, I was saying if you are young and healthy do not prioritize your health over theirs they need to go to hospital to get treated people like wandering and sheik need the medical attention more than we do that is why so many are dead in Italy the young prioritized themselves and the Italian government decided to thin the herd of elderly and sick.
5229822 The Italian government decided nothing of the sort. There was no 'thin the herd' directive nor anything like that.
They have a higher population of elderly than almost anywhere else in Europe. Nearly 24% of their population is over 65. Compare that to the US where only 15% is over 65.
Your advice will lead to deaths.
-Chessie
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I guess the CDCs advice of treat yourself with isolation and nutrients unless it becomes severe is trying to kill people.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/if-you-are-sick/steps-when-sick.html
5229838
The CDC's advice is for people with non-life-threatening symptoms. It does not include the percentage of the population who will have severe symptoms. Most of those infected will not have symptoms severe enough to warrant major attention, but those who do will need a hospital bed. There simply do not exist enough hospital beds if even 20% of the 20% of the population requires one over the next 18 months.
If the number who require hospital beds ends up being higher (say, 40-60% of the population become infected and 20% of that number need one) then those people are shit out of luck.
The shit out of luck ones will either die or have life-long injuries/complications as a result of Covid-19 without treatment. This virus can cause permanently reduced lung capacity, long-term pneumonia, throat damage, and a raft of other real unpleasant things.
-C
"If you're at all connected to our society." That's kind of hard right now, with so many people putting their hands to their ears and going "la la I can't hear you everything's going to be fine."
Still, thank you very much for this message. It's something more folks need to hear.
Also, Tailstalker? Now there's a familiar-sounding name. Any relation to a certain four-legged, two-armed felinoid? Not that we've ever met, simply curious.
5230368
Heh, no, probably not. It's an extremely old handle I used back in the 90's in the furry community, but I wasn't a chakat.
-C
Where are we going; and why are we in a handbasket?