Loading ...The change in the method to count cases will again increase the infodemic and panic about the illness. But we have to keep in mind that this epidemic is in fact relatively mild. Most people on the younger side who come in contact the virus will never develop any symptoms and for those people who develop the COVID-19 disease the symptoms are not severe at all:
[T]he virus’s destructive potential has overshadowed one encouraging aspect of this outbreak: So far, about 82 percent of the cases — including all 14 in the United States — have been mild, with symptoms that require little or no medical intervention. And that proportion may be an undercount.
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“The fact that there are so many mild cases is a real hallmark of this disease and makes it so different from SARS,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Health Security. “It’s also really challenging. Most of our surveillance is oriented around finding people who require medical intervention.”
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“This looks to be a bad, heightened cold — I think that’s a rational way of thinking about it,” said Matthew Frieman, a virologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
To keep the numbers from China in perspective one can point at the current statistics the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provides for the U.S.:
CDC estimates that so far this season there have been at least 22 million flu illnesses, 210,000 hospitalizations and 12,000 deaths from flu.
COVID-19 is still far from producing such high numbers. It likely never will come near to them as the resources China throws at it are overwhelming.
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You’re nuts. The total case count went up *and* the deaths went up. Everything still at 2% dead. You’re saying that the new deaths weren’t from CORVID-19? Well, how did they pick out the deaths so that it came out to 2%. They want to scare people? I daresay not.
I have been following some medical experts about this virus and two things they agree on is that there are still a lot of unknowns and it definitely looks like a world-wide pandemic 1918 style. The reason is that it is a fast spreading virus that does not need droplets but rather it can spread through aerosol. So air handling systems on cruise ships and airplanes are great ways for it to multiply. In addition, asymptomatic virus production is common. So temperature monitoring of travelers is of little value.
The good news is like most new viruses, at first it can be brutal with a high death rate, but in order to spread easily, the virus becomes less deadly over time. So if we are lucky, by the time it gets here in a big way, it should be much milder.
The current death rate is from 1% to 18% depending upon the definition of the group. There are a lot of experts dealing with this now and there is not much use for us to speculate.
I know the normalcy bias is strong in most people, but a thing like this does happen from time to time. I believe that this is the real thing. China is having problems
Posted by: Bill | Feb 13 2020 21:23 utc | 15