COVID-19 (coronavirus disease)/SARS-CoV-2 virus

Sitting at home it doesn't seem like testing capacity has changed much at all in Houston since this crisis began. Maybe a slight improvement but really, not much. It doesn't seem like it's happening on a large scale and doesn't seem particularly easy to get done. I wouldn't mind getting tested but it seems like a big-to-do when by this time, I was hoping it wouldn't be.

 

My father in law is a pilot for United out of Chicago. He has other business ventures, thankfully. Haven't talked to him recently enough to hear anymore on this, but that's sad.

 

The "I know my rights!!!" guys are all over these checkpoints in Florida. Florida getting nailed first by spring breakers and then by new yorkers. Now these guys

 

If it was just a bottleneck in testing, deaths would still be rising - but deaths have stabilized too. We're right at the timeframe when we should start seeing some impacts from all the measures taken 1-2 weeks ago, so the cases could actually be stabilizing to some degree. We're said to be around 11 days behind Italy, and Italy's peak new-cases day was 9 days ago.

 

Yes, there will still be some. And some people are still out and about (although mostly, they are just going for walks, keeping a distance from others - just some younger idiots are ignoring everything). But I would say 95 %+ people are actually being quite disciplined about it here in Berlin. I spend time above one of the most central squares of Berlin, usually quite a busy area. The past 12 days, it has been empty almost all day, every day. Actually, we went for a walk near a lake in the outskirts and that was far busier than this central square (I guess a lot of people had the same idea when the weather was nice).

 

It's important to note that "social distancing" doesn't mean you stay in your home all the time.

There's nothing wrong with going for a walk or being outside if you are staying away from people.

 

Nice try covid. Not getting near any fomites.

 

Mortality rate is continuing to rise. We will be over 2% by tomorrow. Overall world mortality is over 4.8% currently.

 

Sure - but mortality rates don't seem too correlated with testing right now, at least in the short term. They are going up in places we know are doing pretty good at testing. Just within the US, NY has some of the highest mortality rates but we know they are testing much better than places like Texas. Mortality rates in the US will probably continue to rise, especially as cases flatten out - because the masses of people that were diagnosed 7-10 days ago will start hitting the point where patients die, unfortunately.

There's no doubt we still have testing problems here, but I don't think we've hit any kind of bottleneck of 20,000 cases per day. Testing should be improving and expanding daily, which means our capacity for positive tests should be increasing daily.

 

I haven't read up on Florida, but what exactly is the purpose of cops asking where you are coming from? What is the protocol if they say, well I came from a hospital infested with Corona? Then what?

Let's say this guy was coming from such a facility, but since he refused to talk they had to let him go, now what?

 

It's a shame the cops didn't get tipped off and put the entire congregation under house arrest.

 

The number of deaths from COVID-19 will continue to go up just because it takes a while for patients who contract the virus to die after they test positive and are admitted into the hospitals. The death rate of this disease is likely at least 20 times higher than that of the seasonal flu which will be boosted by the exhaustion of medical resources in the hot spots within the country. With a population size so big we are going to have a huge death toll in the U.S. even if our infection rate is controlled to only 3% with the stay home measures. That's the sad reality of this disease.

330 million x 3% infection rate x 2% death rate = 198,000 deaths

 

If he was coming from NY or Louisiana, for example, they could ask him to self-quarantine for X days or whatever. The person may not listen and I don't know how enforceable those things are, but for people who aren't aware they should do that or people who might need a scare from "authority", it might make a difference. It's similar to Rhode Island going door to door telling NYers they have to quarantine themselves, I guess?

 

Realistically, I think a 3% infection rate seems like a pipedream for something that's going to keep cropping up whenever we open up society again. I think the hope is with anti-virals and other treatments, hopefully we can get that 2% death rate down substantially.

 

Cop not wearing any PPE wants the dude to roll down his window to talk to him up close like that? Hell nah

that checkpoint seemed useless...just refuse to answer and u can go on your way

If they do answer, then what?

 

The mortality rate of confirmed cases within all major countries except Germany is over 1% (see https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries). Do you mean the actual mortality rate number is 0.5 - 1%? If so, how is that estimated?

 

Wet markets by themselves are not the problem. I've seen wet markets all over the world, from Asia to Europe to Latin America. Heck, there's wet markets in NYC Chinatown. The problem is if they're selling high disease risk animals like pangolins. Keep in mind, this issue is not limited to China as pangolins are sold in other countries as well but China is a huge country so that's a low hanging fruit to fix.

I hope they start regulating the wet markets in China much closer in the future but the reality is that China is HUGE (about 30% larger than the contiguous US) and 4.5X the population of the US. Our federal government is struggling to manage a population that is a fraction of that size so imagine how tough it must be over there. Another factor that people forget is that China is not rich like the US. In the 1980s, China was significantly poorer per capita than Afghanistan and India and have done well to improve economically since then, but there's still hundreds of millions of people still living in poverty. So once you mix in a HUGE population + poverty, there's bound to be instances that slip through the cracks like selling pangolins. That being said, I hope they crack down hard on violators so that selling exotic animal meat is minimized as much as possible.

And we also shouldn't limit ourselves to focusing only on regulating exotic animal meat either. Industrial farming also needs to clean up their act. If you've ever seen how pigs, chickens, and cows are industrially farmed, you know unsanitary the conditions are and how those farms are ripe for a disease outbreak as well. The 2009 H1N1 pandemic came from a pig farm in Mexico, but the origins of that viral strain are from a US pig farm in 1998.

 

Ah come on those guys are playing on cheat mode right now.

 

They completely shut down Wuhan in a day or two. They act very authoritatively throughout their country, if they wanted to do it, they could.

There was a video a few pages back I think that explained the history of the wet market in China, how it began almost as a necessity to feed a starving nation, how it grew and the government got involved form a $$ standpoint, etc.

yes, definitely