861

Let’s be real, sex, age, and race are not complicated things for a hospital to note, collecting information on who a pandemic is killing is pretty much a goal, and it is not invasive, impossible, complicated or an invasion of family privacy.

Medicine and counter measures can’t advance if we don’t know who is dying from whatever.

Who is at greatest risk is the first thing the public needs to know, and we also need to know the reasons one country is having such terrible results while another isn’t.

862

I’m not surprised at all, my posts are about why the media is hyping this and driving all this overreaction and panic and economic destruction and disruption of lives. I’m still comparing this to the flu, or at least if it starts killing people it will be similar to the flu.

863

It is killing people and it is not similar to the flu in that that death rate is much higher. Why are you implying that it hasn’t been killing people?

864

This isn’t much of a death rate for the end of the world.

I don’t see this becoming one of the great killers in American history, but this reaction will become historical.

It’s the scale of things, these few deaths we have seen aren’t earth shattering and we can eliminate whatever the heck goes on in Communist China and Iran. Malaria still kills many hundreds of thousands and you know how those lists of global deaths go, even traffic accidents.

I’m a long way from calling America as suffering from a great or meaningful death toll related to C-19.

865

I’ve seen some folks (elsewhere) make your argument about covid-19 being an overblown concern by using deaths from alcohol, drugs and tobacco as a comparisson. That thousands die in the US from those three and few people raise an eyebrow. However, those and many other causes of death have an element of choice. If you choose to smoke, abuse alcohol or drugs you will most likely be contributing to your own death. Covid-19 does not offer us much a choice. I can easily take steps to prevent malaria. I can take certain steps to reduce the likelihood of auto accident injuries. I can take those steps without disruppting my left very much. Not so easy to do with something as contagious as covid-19; something with no magic drug tas a cure or a preventive measure. I think you are making light of something that is having a huge imapct on the world.

866

My intention was not to make comparisons to bad living habits but to this hysteria and how we are panicking at this new thing while we are still in the flu season, malaria seasons, Ebola still killing and so on.

I’m still wondering when this big time killer starts, so far in America it has killed fewer than 50 and I seriously doubt it will equal our bad flu years.

867

Think I 7-8 years ago got a worse flu than the Corona virus. Took me 5-6 weeks to recuperate 100 . Actually think I never recuperated to more than 85. Before that I could go 10 years almost never sick.

868

Hopefully this “big time killer” will never start in the U.S. … because of all the social distancing, precautions and canceled events.

The Coronavirus is supposedly at least as contagious than the flu and has a MUCH higher mortality rate. And unlike the flu there’s no flu-shot for the Coronavirus we can take.

If the country simply ignored the Coronavirus, kept all events running, and treated it as business as usual … what could happen? We might end up with several hundred thousand Americans dead in 1 year. Just because the Coronavirus hasn’t yet wracked up a huge deathcount doesn’t mean that it’s not a major public health emergency. The precautions are justified.

869

I’m starting to think that very many of us are going to get this virus, regardless of what we do. It is spreading fast.

870

Well they finally pulled the plug. The F1 GP of Australia is off. The results are (so far):

1/ March 15th GP of Australia: cancelled
2/ March 22nd GP of Bahrein: TV only
3/ April 5th GP of Vietnam: uncertain
4/ April 19th GP of China: postponed
5/ May 3rd GP of Netherland: uncertain
The track in Zandvoort (NL) is owned by Bernhard Lucas Emmanuel Prins van Oranje-Nassau Van Vollenhoven, a nephew of our king. Almost every rule in the book was bent to “assist” with environmental, building and zoning issues. Approvals and procedures were sped up almost to the level that they were granted even before the request was applied.
Third parties were forced to invest in upgrading the rail- and road infrastructure. Et cetera.
Well, maybe the prince is eligible for financial support due to the impact of the Corona virus.

871

hopefully someone with flu doesnt catch corona virus and then it mutates into a super virus

872

Let’s try none of the above. Only three teams were willing to race in Melbourne. Mercedes, and more importantly, Ferrari were “vehemently” against racing.

McLaren has 14 team members in quarantine. They wouldn’t make it to Bahrain even if the race is held.

Talk is that Baku in June will be the start of the season.

Even with the drastic measures China took once things broke, it has taken months to get the situation stabilized. Italy is in the thick of it, but the rest of the world is still climbing the curve. The U.S. can’t even manage to get adequate testing established.

Nature will not say no, and will take its course. It’s all about mitigation at this point. Any sort of normalcy will take time.

873

874

The biggest danger is the burden it places on the healthcare system. 10-20% of infected require hospitalization. Intensive care beds, ventilators etc.

Most countries do not have a lot of ‘spare’ capacity in their healthcare system. In China doctors were collapsing due to exhaustion. In Italy doctors are saying the same - everybody is working overtime, people who could be treated are dying because they do not have spare ventilators. Scheduled surgeries and operations (for other issues) are being cancelled.

A lot of people do not seem to grasp how serious this is. It is not merely a case of “the numbers”, but the effect of those numbers

875

Precisely this! The need to be hospitalized is bigger than with flu and other “cold season” illnesses/diseases.

Most of the countries (including mine) don’t have enough ventilators in case they are needed (and we can see that they are needed), so it is imperative to avoid more contamination and a peak where there would not exist the possibility to respond to severe or mild cases at all.

Yesterday a chief from an hospital was saying that in most of the cases this will not be severe. HOWEVER, if not treated well, it will be severe and will extend the treatment periods.

The definition of “case” was enlarged here in Portugal to be possible to do more tests even if there were no initial signs of symptoms or even if epidemiology didn’t point to a Covid-19 possibility. So now we are doing more tests even on people with less aggravate symptoms, and therefore more cases can be detected and treated timely.

BTW, here is a report of what is thought to be the first case of Covid 19 back in November 2019:

876

Nobody is predicting the end of the world. You keep claiming that people are exaggerating, but the person on this board doing the most exaggerating is you. You come across as someone who is quite young, or has not experienced a hospital emergency room, or a foreign country where people and the government have limited means to take action in a health crisis. You also seem to be denying the reality of the mortality rate for coronavirus being several times higher than that for the typical seasonal flu. Denying reality is not an effective way to evaluate the risk from a given public health problem.

Pointing to the low number of deaths in the USA so far, without considering the context and what is going on at the same time, and claiming that is proof of the low danger posed by the virus is just irrational. It ignores all of the time, energy and money being spent on diagnosis of the virus, containment of the spread of the infection, and mitigation of the disease symptoms in infected people. It also ignores that we are now prohibiting many foreigners from entering our country. All of that taken together is unprecedented in our lifetimes, and has to be taken into consideration in evaluating the effects of the virus.

To claim that the “few deaths we have seen aren’t earth shattering” is to deny the reality that those deaths might appear to be more consequential if one of them is you or someone you love. Many people today often seem to believe that an event or problem doesn’t matter if it does not affect them personally. I would argue to those people that taking that view in the case of a disease outbreak is not a good idea, even from a selfish point of view.

877

True indeed. I remember a few people around where I live that where very persistent in raising money and awareness for cancer. The thing is, they all had someone close to them die from it. They very well new about cancer before but only after it had affected them did it become the most important thing in the world that everybody needs to care about.

878

People are freaking out too much. I believe the only reason why its more contagious than the flu is because no one has had it before. We have more resistance to the flu

879

What you say about the covid19 being more contagious is true. And the fact that it is new and we people have no immunity to it is a good reason to be concerned and more careful regarding washing hands etc.

880

I say nip it in the bud. All the cliches apply here. Plan for the worst and hope for the best. Two wrongs don’t make a right. ( for those who point to other killers being worse) For those who say it’s only the media playing it up , turn off the cable news once in a while. Just because it is on 24 hours a day now doesn’t mean you have to watch it 24 hours a day.

People with pre existing conditions including old age are very concerned and rightfully so. One report from Italy even said children are dying too. Lets all hope it is only “the sky is falling ” syndrome and the media is ” crying wolf “. Any others I’ve forgotten?