LinvilleGorge

Alright, let's get it back on track. No more political sniping. We have the TB for that. Intelligent talk about this issue or take it to the TB.

Go for it. We need a purge of stupidity. I have plenty of guns and ammo and I'll be here at the house isolating like a responsible human.

Start freaking out then. It's probably going to happen. It needs to happen. Anyone shocked by such a development hasn't been paying attention to global news.

Like I said earlier, fug the half steppin'. Rio the band-aid off. We're going to get to that point. Let's be proactive instead of reactive. We know what's coming.

This. It can be mitigated. We can do this. But this attitude of "This is 'murica and I can do what the hell I want!" is not helping.

I call this the LEEEROOOOOY JEEEEEEEENKIIINS!!!! approach.

What's to be gained? Now you have a segment of the population who has been infected who will likely have natural resistance to the disease. Okay, but that's going to happen naturally without intentionally infecting healthy people and having to provide care and quarantine for them. Inevitably a small portion of them will still develop serious illness and a very small portion may even die. The optics on that are gonna be fuging AWFUL.

Oh, it's definitely a terrible idea, but I think the risk of reinfection is near the bottom of the long list of reasons why.

Most of the medical experts think reinfection isn't a major issue. Yeah, there might be a few people who get reinfected. Yeah, there will be some healthy younger people with no known pre-existing health conditions develop severe illness. But focusing on anecdotal uncommon situations only breeds unnecessary panic.

Honestly, we should just go ahead and suck it up and do a full mandatory quarantine like Italy has done. Critical jobs can still work while maintaining social distancing. But then again, I'm a rip the band-aid off type of guy. I'd rather something hurt bad for a brief period than linger on.

I wouldn't be surprised if that IS the reality.

Healthcare workers everywhere are about to be the 9/11 firefighters of 2020.

A vaccine is likely a ways off. Like over a year ways off. The best bet sooner is an effective anti-viral, basically a COVID-19 version of Tamiflu. There are some promising ones out there,

Honestly, it might be ill advised, but I'm a lot more hopeful than that due to watching the tides turn in China and South Korea and the hope of the warmer weather around the corner hopefully naturally slowing the spread.

To put this into perspective, roughly 15% of COVID-19 patients require hospitalization. There are less than one million hospital beds in the entire U.S. Even on the low end of that prediction, that's over 10 million people who will require hospitalization. That's basically the populations of Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Charlotte. Combined. Charlotte is by far the smallest of those cities and there's barely enough hospital beds nationwide to accommodate Charlotte.

Here in Colorado we've only tested 711 people. We have 101 confirmed cases. The number jumped by 30% today. There are still a lot of infected people out there who are either experiencing minor symptoms and think they have a cold or they're still in the incubation period and are currently asymptomatic. The really scary thing for us here is that our first fatality occurred today. She was a lady in her 80s with pre-existing health conditions (to be fair I think being in your 89s by itself probably qualifies as a pre-existing health condition). What makes it scary is that she played bridge with over 100 other elderly people over the course of five consecutive nights prior to her diagnosis. There were a lot of people potentially exposed and they're all part of the most vulnerable demographic. We could have an even worse version of the Seattle nursing home situation here soon because these elderly people weren't confined to a nursing home. They were out and about after their exposure.

Here's a sad chart. Based on what we had already seen in China and South Korea before the Italy situation even blew up, the measure we're seeing taken today should've been taken about two weeks ago. We likely would've had a chance to replicate the Singapore situation where this was practically stopped in it's tracks from the get go. Now we're in the exponential curve. And that's with absolutely piss poor access to testing. The actual number of cases is almost certainly a lot higher.

What is the ulterior (that's the word you were looking for) motive that would explain many of the world's countries, allies and foes alike, basically grinding to a halt to stop this thing? Lots of major private businesses coming to a decision independent of government intervention to practically grind their own businesses to a halt in an effort to stop this thing? Maybe, just maybe it's because they're run by people who aren't complete morons who understand the potential danger we face and that major interruption to their countries and businesses are absolutely inevitable at this point and taking drastic actions in the short term is going to look a lot better in the long-term than doing nothing and letting this thing spread like absolutely unchecked wildfire by continuing business as usual. Here's a hint at why current gross numbers don't really matter. What matters is how much bigger they were vs. months, weeks, and days ago.

Just left the grocery store. It was apocalyptic. Like if a blizzard and a hurricane we're gonna hit the NC coast at the same time.

There's a reason why novel coronaviruses for the past two decades or more continue to be largely traced back to Chinese wet markets. It's not a condemnation of China or the Chinese people as a whole, but the way those wet markets work with a smorgasbord of everything that walks, crawls, or flies being housed in very close proximity and slaughtered in the open gives these viruses the ideal environment they need to cross the species barrier and ultimately infect humanity. There's more than enough evidence at this point to show that these things are a global health hazard and that evidence existed before COVID-19. Once we get over this one there needs to be SERIOUS international pressure on China to shut down these wet markets.

The test came back negative.

Well, cancer isn't contagious either. I agree with you though. I'm not all doom and gloom about this, but people do have to take this seriously and get serious about taking aggressive mitigation efforts. I do think we're going to go through a period of ugliness though. Hopefully not as bad as Italy due to our younger and less concentrated population. The nightmare scenario for America would be a major outbreak somewhere like NYC. It'll be interesting to watch Seattle. I do think there's hope that the virus will be less contagious during the summer. Early studies show that it's most contagious around 8.7 degrees Celsius (roughly 48 degrees Fahrenheit) with fairly significant drop-off as temperatures climb from there.

oops, the zero shouldn't have been there. Not sure if it was auto fill or a brainfart on my part.

I hope we don't see it. With proper mitigation efforts we very well might.

Why can so many people fail to understand that pandemics experience exponential growth? We're only at the very beginning of this thing. If people would stop sticking their fuging heads in the sand then maybe we can actually take the necessary steps to significantly mitigate the spread and avoid a complete fuging disaster. It's gonna suck ass in the short term, but we'll be a helluva lot better off in the long-term to suck it up and mitigate the fug out of this thing rather than take half ass measures and hope for the best because that poo ain't gonna work and if our healthcare system gets overrun then that's also gonna mean that a helluva lot more people are gonna die from those other conditions he mentioned because there's not gonna be any medical assistance available for them with everyone dealing with COVID-19 patients. /rant off