It’s certainly going to be China’s 9/11 at this point no matter what. What it means for the rest of the world still depends on how well containment strategies work.
Can confirm Contagion holds up and is an excellent movie. Most unrealistic thing in the film appears to be 15-year-olds listening to U2 in 2011 on their impromptu quarantined prom night.
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Scary time to be sick, a child, old or a medical professional. Or a human of any kind. This looks really bad.
@j8i3h289dn3x7 or whoever:
Are there any good technical sources to get up to speed on the epidemiology in relatively short order?
Way too soon to see where this is all going.
My best guess (I have a tourists interest in epidemiology which might just make me just informed enough to be dangerous) is that this is going to be bad, but not BAD. The incubation factor is concerning - people appear to have a significant lag time in terms of developing symptoms (which of course is the “best strategy” for a viral illness - I was one of our key people tasked with the Ebola scare back in the day, and it looked pretty quickly that it was going to die out, because people just got too goddam sick to quickly). The numbers seem to be all over the place in terms of % infected/ %seriously ill and a couple of dozen other things that will take at least a few weeks to shake out IMHO. Thus far, there’s been no obvious evidence of the 1918 pandemic sort of problems, where young healthy people died within 24 hours due to some sore of idiosyncratic reaction to what really should have been a “standard” flu virus. I’d be much more concerned with the very young (maybe 2 yrs or less), the very old and possibly with generally older patients with significant preexisting chronic issues - renal failure patients tend to do poorly pretty much around anything that hits them. Hopefully, it’s going to be a super-shitty flu type illness, with sporadic people doing badly for a bunch of reasons that may or may not really to be determinable yet - and certainly not acutely. There are a bunch of cultural factors that may need to be sorted out to - lot going on.
Wash you hands, etc. etc. - I still believe (at least in the majority of the world) that by far the thing still most likely to kill you is driving to the grocery store to pick up a six-pack and chips on the way home. But I could be easily wrong - it’s a fluid situation, for sure.
MM MD
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I’m pretty shook and I’m in bumfuck Midwest. Mostly because I have a 3 year old. Are there any steps I should be taking now?
Fourth case reported in the US (in Los Angeles). https://6abc.com/health/4th-case-of-new-coronavirus-confirmed-in-us/5879796/
I have a 10 month old so this has me pretty damn shook.
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Same. I want to put my kid in a damn bubble. His day care provider is going on a cruise in Mexico through LAX next week…
In regards to the discussion earlier about “eating bats,” this quote has the best explanation I’ve seen for why it’s the animal markets themselves that are the problem, and not necessarily the eating of the animals:
[QUOTE] However, wet markets, especially those selling live animals, could be another contributing factor to the outbreak.
A mixture of urine, faeces and other bodily fluids from live, wild creatures ends up mixing with blood from butchered animals, providing ideal opportunities for viruses and bacteria to thrive, it is reported. [/QUOTE]
Source: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/coronavirus-victim-writes-around-shakes-21362578
Seems kinda pedantic, the two are obviously linked. “Stop eating snakes and bats” seems like a reasonable shorthand for “stop catching, transporting, and selling wild snakes and bats for people to consume as food.”
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Maybe we can all agree that wheatrich pleads it down to racially insensitive and move on? I think it’s important to keep watch for anti-Chinese sentiment generally, though, as this develops.
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Well I meant more like quickly learning the fundamentals of epidemiology regarding contagion for someone with a science but not epidemiology background. When I was in grad school we had people that would double up on biostats / epi degrees but outside of sleeping through a few talks, I never looked at it.
Not just this in particular, but what’s the treatment for the flu anyway? You just treat the symptoms? Is there any medication that really works? (theraflu?) Is there anything at all to do before someone gets to a some distressed stage?
Thanks for your post. I hope you keep posting in this thread. Even if it isn’t your specialty it’s cool to have a doctors insight.
Jman trying to give me a heart attack.
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For the flu taking an antiviral like Tamifly can lessen the severity, but I think you have to take it early on in symptoms.
Question for the docs: are antivirals tailored to the virus, or could Tamiflu or something help with this?
Not a good time to live in CA and have kids with health anxiety, eh MB?
Yeah, and my health anxiety kid and her bf seem to have the flu right now. My kid is getting better I think.
I disagree. If chickens and cows were slaughtered in the same conditions we’d have the same problems. Sometimes they are, and sometimes we do. The problem isn’t the animals, it’s the Upton Sinclair method in which we’re slaughtering and processing them.
I recently had the flu. Lots of people have had it where I’m at in CA. So it’s probably just that. High fever for 4ish days and lots of congestion.
Either way hope your family is ok.
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Tamiflu is specific to influenza virus, which is a different type of virus, so it won’t be effective against this at all. That said Tamiflu is not particularly good even for influenza and the treatment for most viruses is just supportive care.
I’m definitely shaken because this has the potential to be very bad (most of the other “scares” we’ve lived through -SARS, Ebola, MERS - were overblown from the start, the avian and swine flus had potential to go badly l but I think we ended up being relatively well prepared for them and they weren’t particularly lethal), although it’s really hard to say anything this early. I could see it going especially badly in the US because places just hate closing here so everyone going to be in close proximity until it’s too late; no way we take precautions like closing schools preemptively. I’m screwed either way because I work in a hospital but would be nice if my wife could keep our daughter home from daycare if it spreads our direction.