So is this the official GS Coronavirus thread? Asking because I really don't trust any of the news outlets and the CDC hasn't updated anything for a bit.
Split this off from the Death Flu thread, so this now *is* the official GS Coronavirus thread.
The Federal response on this has been awful because Trump's administration is far more worried about political fallout than a functional government. There's a great Twitter thread I read which listed all the things his administration has done to neuter an effective response to this. (Defunding HHS and CDC, firing the guys who keeps SARS, MERS, and Ebola from doing much damage, putting his political interests above public safety, etc, etc, etc.)
The state response in WV is basically, "Go about your lives." There's very much an "out of sight, out of mind" mentality. Our governor isn't too bright himself.
Here's what I'm seeing on the ground in small town West Virginia which as of this writing has zero (0) reported cases. However, that's only because the only testing facility in the state is in Charleston. (And it didn't even exist until about 48 hours ago.).
Life in my small town is "business as usual," though on the street level there's a lot of conversation and some low-level panic. I had lunch Monday with the guy who runs the Augusta Heritage Festival, a pretty big, month long celebration of Appalachian arts with workshops, concerts, and other events. It's been around for years. People come form all over the country (and internationally) to attend. Add of last Friday, they were set to break attendance records. He was pulling in dozens of reservations per day. Over the weekend, reservations dwindled down to virtually zero. This was after the SXSW cancellation. Hand sanitizer and hand soap are both sold out all over town.
The small college I work at sent an email Sunday telling anybody sick not to come on campus or back from spring break . There's rumors of shutting down for two weeks. We have a faculty assembly meeting tomorrow and I'm sure it will be discussed. WVU & Marshall set the tone for what all these small WV liberal arts colleges do, so I'm sure my institution will just follow suit. A lot of students are sick, but the flu has already been pretty bad.
You can feel the undertone of fear though. It's palpable. I told my students to not come to class if they're really sick, and to go see the nurse. We'll figure out getting their class work covered.
Much of my research into Coronavirus is along the lines of what Sirharles is saying; that the fatality rate in the U.S. is likely much lower due to the amount of people who have yet to be tested. And that under the age of 60, the fatality rate isn't much worse than the regular flu. That 3.4 percent is almost exclusively older folks. Which we'll all be in a decade or so, right?) The area for concern is that Seattle nursing home in which 50% of the patients died once it got in there. It's quick. These old people go from no symptoms to dead in the space of 24 hours.
I shared this on FB recently. It give a really great overview of the science of how the virus works and why it's so deadly to folks with lung and cardio vascular issues.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTYfke545vITo be fatalist (because what's more OG GS than that?), the reasons for possible concern are three-fold:
1.) Pandemic to Endemic... That this basically becomes like the common cold and never goes away, but becomes a thing that we just have... which if I assume enough people survive, our bodies will build antibodies for?
2.) Autumn of Terror ... We've all become experts on the 1918 Spanish Flu over the past few days, right? Infection rates went down over the summer only for it to come back hard when weather got cold in the fall. Most of the 675,000 deaths were in this second wave. There's a fear that Coronavirus will lay dormant during the summer then come back hard.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-pandemic-h1n1.html3.) Mutation... The mutation fear on this one is huge because it's such a tenacious little fucker anyway. Again, Middle aged bogeys like us are probably just going get a pretty bad flu and recover. But if it mutates and gets stronger, it could be problematic. Thankfully it's a virus, so antibiotic resistance is a moot point. Still, if it mutates heavily before somebody comes up with a vaccine, it could do some serious damage and become endemic.
I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with any of this information since I live in a country with such a large vacuum of leadership. On one level, the idea of a quarantine seems silly with nobody in my area all that sick, but isn't the point of a quarantine to keep the disease from spreading?
I'll try to dig up some links for some of the shit I mentioned above. It's all come through on Twitter.
In other news, I drank 3 bottles of hand sanitizer last night, so I should be good for a day or two.
I just got back from Louisville where i bought a few bottles of *very* expensive and high proof bourbon so I'm hoping that keeps me clean. My liver will never get Coronavirus. Jury is still out on the rest of me.
