***NON-POLITICAL COVID-19 Discussion Thread***

[JakeF]

A couple of reminders...

Originally Posted by Bwana

Once again, don't come in this thread with some kind of political agenda, or you will be shown the door. If you want to go that route, there is a thread about this in DC.

Originally Posted by Dartgod

People, there is a lot of good information in this thread, let's try to keep the petty bickering to a minimum.

We all have varying opinions about the impact of this, the numbers, etc. We will all never agree with each other. But we can all keep it civil.

Thanks!

Click here for the original OP:

Spoiler!

Apparently the CoronaVirus can survive on a inanimate objects, such as door knobs, for 9 days.

California coronavirus case could be first spread within U.S. community, CDC says
By SOUMYA KARLAMANGLA, JACLYN COSGROVE
FEB. 26, 2020 8:04 PM

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating what could be the first case of novel coronavirus in the United States involving a patient in California who neither recently traveled out of the country nor was in contact with someone who did.

“At this time, the patient’s exposure is unknown. It’s possible this could be an instance of community spread of COVID-19, which would be the first time this has happened in the United States,” the CDC said in a statement. “Community spread means spread of an illness for which the source of infection is unknown. It’s also possible, however, that the patient may have been exposed to a returned traveler who was infected.”

The individual is a resident of Solano County and is receiving medical care in Sacramento County, according to the state Department of Public Health.

The CDC said the “case was detected through the U.S. public health system — picked up by astute clinicians.”

Officials at UC Davis Medical Center expanded on what the federal agency might have meant by that in an email sent Wednesday, as reported by the Davis Enterprise newspaper.

The patient arrived at UC Davis Medical Center from another hospital Feb. 19 and “had already been intubated, was on a ventilator, and given droplet protection orders because of an undiagnosed and suspected viral condition,” according to an email sent by UC Davis officials that was obtained by the Davis Enterprise.

The staff at UC Davis requested COVID-19 testing by the CDC, but because the patient didn’t fit the CDC’s existing criteria for the virus, a test wasn’t immediately administered, according to the email. The CDC then ordered the test Sunday, and results were announced Wednesday. Hospital administrators reportedly said in the email that despite these issues, there has been minimal exposure at the hospital because of safety protocols they have in place.

A UC Davis Health spokesperson declined Wednesday evening to share the email with The Times.

Since Feb. 2, more than 8,400 returning travelers from China have entered California, according to the state health department. They have been advised to self-quarantine for 14 days and limit interactions with others as much as possible, officials said.

“This is a new virus, and while we are still learning about it, there is a lot we already know,” Dr. Sonia Angell, director of the California Department of Public Health, said in a statement. “We have been anticipating the potential for such a case in the U.S., and given our close familial, social and business relationships with China, it is not unexpected that the first case in the U.S. would be in California.”

It is not clear how the person became infected, but public health workers could not identify any contacts with people who had traveled to China or other areas where the virus is widespread. That raises concern that the virus is spreading in the United States, creating a challenge for public health officials, experts say.

“It’s the first signal that we could be having silent transmission in the community,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. “It probably means there are many more cases out there, and it probably means this individual has infected others, and now it’s a race to try to find out who that person has infected.”

On Tuesday, the CDC offered its most serious warning to date that the United States should expect and prepare for the coronavirus to become a more widespread health issue.

“Ultimately, we expect we will see coronavirus spread in this country,” said Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. “It’s not so much a question of if, but a question of when.”

According to the CDC’s latest count Wednesday morning, 59 U.S. residents have tested positive for the new strain of coronavirus — 42 of whom are repatriated citizens from a Diamond Princess cruise. That number has grown by two since Messonnier’s last count Tuesday, although the CDC was not immediately available to offer details on the additional cases.

More than 82,000 cases of coronavirus have been reported globally, and more than 2,700 people have died, with the majority in mainland China, the epicenter of the outbreak.

But public health leaders have repeatedly reminded residents that the health risk from the novel coronavirus to the general public remains low.

“While COVID-19 has a high transmission rate, it has a low mortality rate,” the state Department of Public Health said in a statement Wednesday. “From the international data we have, of those who have tested positive for COVID-19, approximately 80% do not exhibit symptoms that would require hospitalization. There have been no confirmed deaths related to COVID-19 in the United States to date.”

CDC officials have also warned that although the virus is likely to spread in U.S. communities, the flu still poses a greater risk.

Gostin said the news of potential silent transmission does not eliminate the possibility of containing the virus in the U.S. and preventing an outbreak.

“There are few enough cases that we should at least try,” he said. “Most of us are not optimistic that that will be successful, but we’re still in the position to try.”

[suzzer99]

Originally Posted by arrowheadnation

Why don't we copy whatever China did to head this off? They only had 14 new cases yesterday (12 of which were from people returning home form other countries), and their last pop-up hospital dedicated to COVID-19 closed today due to low demand. Shanghai Disneyland has begun the process of re-opening (currently opened in a limited capacity) They were by far the worst off. And they did it without buying enough toilet paper to last them til 2025. This can be done.

We are to some degree. They shut everything down. Except their version of shut down is one person per household goes out once a week for food. That's impossible to imagine here.

Also they test a ton more. We definitely need to do that. S. Korea is doing 10k tests/day and isolating anyone who tests positive - even from their family. They haven't even had to close all their restaurants.

We need to test like 20k people a day and isolate positives. We've done 14k tests total.

[suzzer99]

Originally Posted by staylor26

No, he’s right. That guy is doom and gloom 24/7 every single post. It’s ridiculous.

You mean like at the beginning of this thread when half the posters still thought this was going to turn out to be nothing and me and a bunch of others were disagreeing with them and trying to convince people this was a real crisis? Yeah sorry for the doom and gloom on that.

[suzzer99]

Originally Posted by Strongside

Some of you know my mothers situation. Nurse Practitioner at Menorah, came down with classic CV symptoms a couple days after the first JOCO patient was diagnosed, but the state refused to test her due to her having not “been in contact with someone infected or traveled internationally.”

She is still self-quarantining and, though feeling much better, has not fully recovered.

The night before she got sick, she stayed at my brothers house.

He, his fiancée, and both of their kids now have a 100+ Fever and a dry cough.

My brother refuses to go to the doctor, saying it’s just the flu and they’ll ride it out. He doesn’t make much money and is concerned about the costs associated with going in.

This is why our system is ****ing broken. This is why we won’t contain this thing until it runs its course. People fear our expensive as **** healthcare system more than they utilize it.

I’ve tried to get the kid to go in and get tested. He isn’t budging.

I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.

That really sucks. I hope everyone pulls through.

[EPodolak]

Originally Posted by suzzer99

You mean like at the beginning of this thread when half the posters still thought this was going to turn out to be nothing and me and a bunch of others were disagreeing with them and trying to convince people this was a real crisis? Yeah sorry for the doom and gloom on that.

This sounds like a summary of every football thread before January 2020.

[suzzer99]

Originally Posted by Bugeater

The thing that bothers me about these Twitter posts is I have no idea who the hell most of them are and therefore have no idea how credible their information is. So I disregard nearly all of them.

The twitter post was just a link to a CNN article: https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/14/healt...ead/index.html

On Tuesday, Dr. Sandra Ciesek, director of the Institute of Medical Virology in Frankfurt, Germany, tested 24 passengers who had just flown in from Israel.

Seven of the 24 passengers tested positive for coronavirus. Four of those had no symptoms, and Ciesek was surprised to find that the viral load of the specimens from the asymptomatic patients was higher than the viral load of the specimens from the three patients who did have symptoms.

Viral load is a measure of the concentration of the virus in someone's respiratory secretions. A higher load means that someone is more likely to spread the infection to other people.

While Ciesek has not yet published this finding, on February 18, she published a letter in the New England Journal of Medicine about two passengers who returned to Germany from Wuhan, China, and tested positive for coronavirus.

One of these positive passengers had no symptoms and the other had a faint rash and a mild sore throat. When she took their testing samples back to the lab, she successfully infected a cell culture with the patients' swabs.

"We can conclude that both patients [were] shedding virus that is able to infect cells, and, most likely, other humans," Ciesek wrote in an email to CNN.

Early, large-scale studies using mathematical modelling of outbreaks in Tianjin, China, and Singapore in January and February have also found significant amounts of spread by people who had not yet developed symptoms.

Both studies were posted on MedRxiv, a pre-print server founded by Yale University, the medical journal BMJ and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. Articles on this server have not been reviewed by the authors' scientific peers.

A study posted Sunday by Belgian and Dutch researchers shows that between 48% and 66% of the 91 people in the Singapore cluster contracted the infection from someone who was pre-symptomatic. Of the 135 people in the Tianjin cluster, between 62% and 77% caught it from someone was pre-symptomatic.

One of the study's lead authors, Tapiwa Ganyani at the Data Science Institute at Hasselt University in Belgium, noted in an email to CNN that these are estimates with uncertainties.

Canadian, Dutch and Singaporean researchers looked at the same outbreaks in Tianjin and Singapore and found that infection was transmitted on average 2.55 days and 2.89 days before symptom onset respectively in each location.

"Our analysis would suggest that presymptomatic transmission is pretty commonplace," said the study's lead author, Caroline Colijn, who leads the mathematics, genomics and prediction in infection and evolution research group at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.

[srvy]

Originally Posted by suzzer99

It's CNN you dipshit.



Seriously stop following me around and trolling every post I make. You've never once added any useful content. Whatever grudge you have get over it. I'm putting you on ignore for good.

neither have you chicken little.

[suzzer99]

Can't see your post. I deleted mine. Never replying to you again. Troll away.

[srvy]

[suzzer99]

The first shipment of masks and coronavirus test kits to the US is taking off from Shanghai. All the best to our friends in America. �� pic.twitter.com/LTn26gvlOl

— Jack Ma (@JackMa) March 16, 2020

Here's some good news.

[Bugeater]

Originally Posted by suzzer99

The twitter post was just a link to a CNN article: https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/14/healt...ead/index.html

Read the damn post and completely missed the link.

Anyway, if true, that really sucks. It means the only way to get this under control is to test everyone (not happening) or isolating everyone (not happening).

[suzzer99]

We’re 10 days behind what happened to Italy and people are still out partying and helping this thing spread to the vulnerable . #StayTheFHome pic.twitter.com/QVjH7MYL2V

— Vinny Guadagnino (@VINNYGUADAGNINO) March 16, 2020

This might actually be some good news too. At least we're taking major measures to slow the spread now. And we're a bigger country. Maybe we can just sneak in under the hospital crunch in most cities. Although we're also barely testing, so we know our actual cases are much higher than Italy's actual cases at the same day.

Then if we could just get S. Korea level testing - we could probably let some economic activity resume in maybe a month or something. Although my boss said the experience from China is to expect 2 months minimum.

[suzzer99]

Originally Posted by Bugeater

Read the damn post and completely missed the link.

Anyway, if true, that really sucks. It means the only way to get this under control is to test everyone (not happening) or isolating everyone (not happening).

Maybe if we get it to calm down, and then test and isolate like crazy like S. Korea.

[Bugeater]

Originally Posted by suzzer99

Here's some good news.

I was kidding with my earlier post but I'll take it.

[Demonpenz]

My entire family got home from italy last Wednesday. They are getting calls everyday to by the (GOV?) to see if they are sick.

[Bugeater]

Originally Posted by suzzer99

Maybe if we get it to calm down, and then test and isolate like crazy like S. Korea.

Absolutely. And the testing needs to begin with health care workers. We can't have them in fear of coming to work. Strongside's story is not sitting well with me at all.