Novel coronavirus (covid-19), Pandemic or Not?

This is By Far the best video interview I have seen of an expert on this virus and what is known at this time. It is entirely Un-scripted (which is awesome)… and about 1.5hrs long.

He said that the amount of infected has been doubling every 4 days or so.

Worth the watch.

About 1:10 infections are from people who are infected by asymptomatic patients.  Because they think they're well, they are acting normally and so potentially spreading this bug more.
The highest viral shedding is in the pre-symptomatic phase.
Once you're symptomatic your immune system is helping shut down viral numbers and so you shed less virus.
It doesn't appear to be passed by the fecal route.

Cough induction for sputum collection is being advised against as it aerolizes the virus into the environment.  This was from a CDC webinar.

It has been 6 Days since my last update. I usually wait until the evening to do it so it will likely be higher by the end of the day.


Here is where we were 6 days ago...

"More than tripled AGAIN in the last 4 days to 537 Confirmed. We now have 21 Dead and 8 Recovered."

Today....

The level of confirmed infected has gone up 5x in the last 6 days to 2,952 Confirmed. We now have 57 Deaths and 12 Recovered.


My wife is FINALLY not yelling at me anymore when I say that I want to stock up on groceries. Too little too late sadly for the sanitizer and such. Still food on the shelves though. So I will do some more shopping today.

I am also getting supplies to build garden beds and such today as well. Then when we get quarantined/the stores close... I will have something to do other than surf the web. lol

Growing veggies will be a pain. Growing calories will be much harder. Too bad my fruit trees will all be in their first year. If they were in their 10th they could be making some serious fruit.

I don't think it will get that bad to the point that the whole system crashes. However, there will be glitches. I don't think fruit will be coming in from all over the world for a while. I don't even think fruit from California will be coming in at some point.

Marty Mitchell wrote:

My wife is FINALLY not yelling at me anymore when I say that I want to stock up on groceries. Too little too late sadly for the sanitizer and such. Still food on the shelves though. So I will do some more shopping today.
 

Marty - here is some good news re. hand sanitizers - you can make your own!

Combine 2 parts of 99% rubbing alcohol/surgical spirit​ B.P (isopropyl alcohol) with 3 parts of aloe vera gel. (Add between eight and 10 drops of your favourite essential oil e.g. lavender, myrrh or mandarin. If you have pets, don't use tea tree oil).  Stir, decant gel into clean recycled hand sanitizer / liquid soap bottle. This is 60 per cent alcohol based - it is the alcohol that kills the bacteria and viruses. You also must cover your hands with the gel and let them dry naturally.

ALSO soap and water is sufficient to kill viruses!  As does vinegar actually!

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/12/science-soap-kills-coronavirus-alcohol-based-disinfectants
https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2018-01-12/does-vinegar-really-kill-household-germs/8806878

3 volumes of 100% alcohol to 2 volumes of aloe vera would be needed to achieve the minimum 60% (3/5ths) alcohol content recommended by CDC for DIY hand sanitizer.

https://www.cdc.gov/handwashing/show-me-the-science-hand-sanitizer.html
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC523567/

Many DIY recipes use 2 volumes of alcohol to one volume of additive; that results in a 67% alcohol content (2/3rds) for an extra margin in case of evaporation during storage.

Thank you all for sharing your ideas and theories. Looks like it is a pandemic. 😞

Huxley Harter wrote:Thank you all for sharing your ideas and theories. Looks like it is a pandemic. 😞

It is sad news.

but it's great motivation to garden.  



Sunlight is the enemy of viruses.  
Food chains will be disrupted and unpredictable in the next year or so.  
being outside and active are great for the immune system.

Huxley Harter wrote:Thank you all for sharing your ideas and theories. Looks like it is a pandemic. 😞

Yup....more than half the officially confirmed cases are now outside of China and the number is growing quickly.  So many folks don't understand why others are concerned.  Makes me very sad.  It's a bit early here, but I'm getting moving on garden activities anyway.

Hand sanitizers are convenient but soap and water are better.  The water/soap disrupts the virus outer coat.

Too much alcohol and it no longer works as a disinfectant.

Hang on folks, NO vinegar will NOT work as a sanitizer in this instance.  This has been covered multiple times on the news, CDC etc.

Alcohol needs to be at a minimum of 70%, not 60%, make sure if making your own that you very carefully do the math.

You should never put any citrus (mandarin, orange, bergamot, grapefruit etc.) in anything that will be on skin exposed to the sun - there is a photoreactive component that will give you blisters (trust me, I learned this the hard way!) and render your hands red, swollen, blistered messes for at least a week. Also known as "bartender rot" in places there are outdoor bartenders.

Yes, soap and water is still superior to everything else, assuming you wash vigorously for at least 20 seconds (we sing the "Happy Birthday song) - but make sure you do not recontaminate by using your clean hands to turn off the dirty faucet - use a tissue or paper towel to shut off water.

For surfaces, first remove dirt/grime with soap and water. Only then can you sanitize.  

Alcohol, min 70%, Hydrogen peroxide, min 3%, ideally 6%, or dilute bleach can all be used for surface sanitizing - BUT must be left on the surface 5-10 minutes.

I have asthma, my husband is over 80 and has leukemia, so I am a little particular when this sanitizing stuff isn't completely accurate.

I am so sorry if I offend anyone, it's not my intention, but I have researched the snot out of this, and am a little anal about educating folks.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK513254/

Information on sanitizers - updated Feb 2020

Alcohols such as ethanol are well-known antimicrobial agents and were first recommended for the treatment of hands in 1888. The highest antimicrobial efficacy can be achieved with ethanol (60% to 85%), isopropanol (60% to 80%), and n-propanol (60% to 80%). The activity is broad and immediate. Ethanol, the most common alcohol ingredient, appears to be the most effective against viruses; whereas, the propanols have a better bactericidal activity than ethanol.

Oh didn't know about mandarin essential oil causing skin burning...  

To Lorinne Anderson's quote "NO vinegar will NOT work as a sanitizer in this instance"...
Whilst I have read that apple cyder vinegar may not come up to scratch with its anti viral properties, I have not come across anything denouncing this for vinegar per se.

Yes, some say 60%, some say 70%, most WHO folks and other current Covid-19 sites say 70% alcohol.

If you're at risk, the best thing to do is just self isolate until the whole thing blows over.

The UK is considering their next step which is to advise those age > 70 ( and presumably those with chronic illness ) to start self isolating for the next few months.

Yes, some say 60%, some say 70%, most WHO folks and other current Covid-19 sites say 70% alcohol. And remember, we ARE talking virus and not bacteria.

There's a little confusion here about minimum alcohol percentage for disinfecting.

It should be minimum of 70% for surfaces, and 60% for hands.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prepare/cleaning-disinfection.html

Household members should clean hands often, including immediately after removing gloves and after contact with an ill person, by washing hands with soap and water for 20 seconds. If soap and water are not available and hands are not visibly dirty, an alcohol-based hand sanitizer that contains at least 60% alcohol may be used. However, if hands are visibly dirty, always wash hands with soap and water.

For [surface] disinfection, diluted household bleach solutions, alcohol solutions with at least 70% alcohol, and most common EPA-registered household disinfectants should be effective.

My husband health and age are such we have self isolated since last week.

When I go out/work, I wipe down all surfaces, hand sanitize BEFORE entering car, wipe down all items being brought into home (grocery etc.) as well as external surfaces of fast food/delivered food items.

All "touch" surfaces on the car are sanitized before and after each drive, including car door handles, buttons, knobs etc. In the home, light switches, doors, handles, knobs, buttons (toaster oven, coffee maker...) etc. Are sanitized multiple times daily.

Yet, I still feel 80% of the population will have minimal to no symptoms if they contract the virus, most folk have nothing to worry about, and for most folks this has become a PANICdemic, and folks are being hysterical.

If everyone stays home if they have a fever/dry cough, and simply follows basic hygiene, social distancing, and don't touch their faces, we should all be fine.

Lorinne Anderson wrote:My husband health and age are such we have self isolated since last week.

That's a very good idea.

Lorinne Anderson wrote:
Yet, I still feel 80% of the population will have minimal to no symptoms if they contract the virus, most folk have nothing to worry about, and for most folks this has become a PANICdemic, and folks are being hysterical.

If everyone stays home if they have a fever/dry cough, and simply follows basic hygiene, social distancing, and don't touch their faces, we should all be fine.

That's very harsh.  This virus has no known antidote, kills in high numbers in the elderly ( over 14% ), has a high rate of asymptomatic transmission, and no vaccine.  The various govts are giving very mixed messaging .. see the USA for example.  In this case of conflicting information, very poor leadership, people are responding as rationally as they can which is to hunker down with enough provisions to last.

The head WHO doc stated the 80% on W5 last night - he went to Wuhan, and was there for 3wks. He is their top infectious disease dude.

If this is true, then it means 1:5 people will get a symptomatic illness of which in certain populations 1:5 will die.

Math is not my strong suit...if 20% get ill, and only 1:5 of those get ill enough to die, that is still a very small number. I prefer to have my glass "half full" and focus on the majority (over 80%) who will suffer little to no ill effects.

The panic shopping here is completely over the top. Folks buying dozens of large bottles of hand sanitizers, clearing shelves of disinfecting products, toilet paper (seriously, carts with hundreds of rolls!), and bottled water (?). Grocery store lineups of 45 mins to get INSIDE the store, it's insane!  This is what I call the PANICdemic.  

Unfortunately, my husband is very high risk, I am moderate risk, so we are going to have to rely on keeping our environment safe and others practicing their basic hygiene, social distancing, and staying home if they have a fever.

Lorinne Anderson wrote:Math is not my strong suit...if 20% get ill, and only 1:5 of those get ill enough to die, that is still a very small number. I prefer to have my glass "half full" and focus on the majority (over 80%) who will suffer little to no ill effects.

And that's why we have vaccinations, to protect the vulnerable.  And when we don't have any vaccination, we then isolate the vulnerable.

For perspective...

I don't think you really grasp what the issue here is.

79 children died recently in Samoa from measles, a 100% preventable illness.

We are talking about preventing the death of your fellow citizens, friends and family from a preventable illness.  Those other things you listed are often not preventable.

People tend to forget that this disease has had exponential growth because of the socialising nature of humans – proven by the 1800 dead so far, with close to 400 deaths in the last 24 hours in Italy alone.

As WHO declared, under-reacting is proving to be a fatal mistake.

For the benefit of our American cousins, a New York Times article paints a bleak picture. Hence the NEED to be vigilant:

NEW YORK TIMES


Some important statistics extracted from that article:

• USA has only 2.8 hospital beds per 1,000 people Fewer than Italy, China and South Korea
• USA estimated to have 45,000 ICU beds. During a moderate outbreak, about 200,000 people would need one
• There’s simply not enough ventilators

In Italy, Doctors are making war-time triage decisions e.g. a 60 year old placed in a corner left to die because a 40 year old needed urgent treatment, etc.

According to one of our most vocal Doctors, many issues have been ignored or purposely removed from debate e.g. there are a lot of 30 and 40 year olds dying from this disease. Our government is more preoccupied with releasing financial stimulus packages to aid businesses affected by the disease than policy and actions to physically deter its spread, like those taken now by China, Spain, Italy, etc.

A friend is a hospital Nursing Sister in Sydney – all thoracic/cardio surgery has been cancelled unless life-threatening. Staff and hospital space will likely be redirected to treat Coronavirus patients.

So, unless you personally know the movements of each individual you choose to socialise with (almost impossible), then I would not be socialising with anyone – use the phone, skype, snap chat, etc as a temporary replacement for the next few months – do realise, it is temporary and may save you or a loved-one’s life.

Today they’re talking about ‘social distancing’, tomorrow it’s likely ‘social isolation’. ‘Social distancing’ seems to be about as useful as the Cold War ‘Duck & Cover’ bullshit.

Personally, I try to be ‘ahead of the curve’, so have isolated myself since the beginning of last week, not including seven chooks and a cat! Living in suburbia means shopping excursions will be short and quick outside of peak times. Family have been given the hint to stay away, since they are pretty much doing what everyone else is doing – to me, that’s like going over the trenches in World War 1 and hoping not to get shot … statistically, bad, very bad.

Over-reacting? Well, it is officially a pandemic. To each their own, good luck.

P.s. in regards to 'curves', current thinking is to isolate in the short term knowing people will likely catch the bug in the future anyway. This means less of a spike in numbers and therefore less stress on the hospital system = more lives saved, and, that when/if you do catch it, you will more than likely survive because hospitals aren't as crowded and have learnt better ways to manage the illness - flatter curve versus a spiked curve over time.

Lorinne- the issue is the exponential growth of this, and your meme is out of date.  Italy alone logged 113 deaths yesterday from this, 404 globally. I invite you to check out the current stats - https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-toll/


We currently have about 80 000 cases worldwide, outside of China. It takes about 1 month to kill.  

Number of cases has been consistently doubling every 4 days. If that keeps up the entire country of Canada will be infected in about 68 days. Health Canada is predicting 50-70% of the population will become infected. Aproximately 20% will require hospitalization.  Canada's population is 37 million. If that happens within 2 months, and hits 50% of the population, 20% require hospitalization, 3.7 million people in Canada alone will need hospitalization (and likely die without it). That's 10% of the population.

Potential exponential growth of cases in Canada:

Day 1 - 304
Day 4-  608
8- 1 216
12- 2 432
16- 4 864
20- 9 728
24-1 9456
28- 38 912
32- 77 824 - one month from now!
36- 155 648
40- 311 296
44- 622 592
48- 1 245 184
52- 2 490 368
56- 4 980 736
60- 9 961 472
64- 19 922 944
68- 39 845 888 - greater than the population in Canada!

Catie George wrote:
We currently have about 80 000 cases worldwide, outside of China. It takes about 1 month to kill.  

That's likely to be the case with full medical support.
But people in Wuhan were dying at home because there were no hospital beds to treat them.
I'd imagine the same could happen everywhere a govt has failed to enact public health measures early enough to flatten the curve of infection.

And yet new cases in China have plummeted. Why? Because of proper hygiene and self isolation, most likely.

Yes, we should not be hanging out in bars/large groups; yes we should stay home as much as is realistic; yes, we should be cautious and endeavor to slow the spread; yes, we need to be careful with personal hygiene; yes, we should ensure our elderly and co-morbid folk are able to self isolate by helping supply them with food drops.

Yes, this will continue to spread, despite everything. At the end of the day, three, six, twelve months from now, we will look back, regret those that did suffer and die, but the vast majority of folks should be just fine.

Fear spreads far faster, and is potentially far more dangerous than any virus.

Lorinne Anderson wrote:And yet new cases in China have plummeted. Why? Because of proper hygiene and self isolation, most likely.

Yes, we should not be hanging out in bars/large groups; yes we should stay home as much as is realistic; yes, we should be cautious and endeavor to slow the spread; yes, we need to be careful with personal hygiene; yes, we should ensure our elderly and co-morbid folk are able to self isolate by helping supply them with food drops.

Yes, this will continue to spread, despite everything. At the end of the day, three, six, twelve months from now, we will look back, regret those that did suffer and die, but the vast majority of folks should be just fine.

Fear spreads far faster, and is potentially far more dangerous than any virus.

Fear saves lives. Dying after a month of struggling to breath is a really terrible way to die.

China managed this with lots of masks (which we don't have), and confining people to their apartments which we in the west don't have the political will to do, not by "staying home as much as realistic". I invite you to watch this video - which shows the scale of the quarantine efforts still underway in Wuhan.    This is what was required to turn the outbreak in Wuhan around.

China is a mass surveillance state that can do what it wants and the populace has to abide by that.  

At one stage every resident in Wuhan was reporting their daily temperatures by app.
Other regions were sending you alerts if you had been in near proximity to an infected person, and grading your risk.
Even if you took a taxi through an area an infected person lived, your status changed.

South Korea were doing drive by testing, and isolating whole cities.

Taiwan started controlling the border as soon as the disease was announced.  They didn't believe the reports and went to Wuhan themselves where they made their own assessments, and escalated their response which is why they had so few deaths.

Iran is a basket case because religious authorities blocked infection control measures like closing off the city of Qom, reassuring the populace to participate in elections,  and just ignore the virus.  They have mass grave pits dug and they're covering the bodies in lime.

A shorter, 15 minute, segment of the Joe Rogan interview with Michael Osterholm (posted full length by Marty Mitchell above 5 days ago.  

Roberto pokachinni wrote:  ....segment of the Joe Rogan interview with Michael Osterholm.....

FWIW: Local follow-up interview that appeared today in the Fargo Forum and open-access for the sake of public dissemination:  https://www.inforum.com/lifestyle/health/4998840-This-is-not-going-to-be-like-a-Minnesota-blizzard.-.-.-were-talking-about-something-that-I-call-a-coronavirus-winter

Thankyou everyone for all of the very informative and thoughtful posts!

I gave a lot of thumbs up to folks just now as I caught up on reading them.


My main concern for this virus at this point is... as mentioned... keeping the # Infected rate to a minimum in an effort to keep the hospital system from being overrun more than it already will be (It is always at max capacity during the FLU season/this time of year).

Since a week or two ago when the WHO re-did their calculations for death rate and bumped it up from a 2% to a 3.4% I became concerned since that is almost double of what they originally calculated. For instance there are 330 million people in the United States. If this disease... that has a Doubling Rate of every 4 DAYS... is not stopped or slowed... all 330 million will be infected eventually. 3.4% of 330,000,000 is 11,220,000 deaths. If the spread is not Slowed and the system is overrun... expect it to triple.

For instance... down below you will see an article a week ago from Italy. Their system is already being overrun with just 24,747 confirmed at this time. In the article from a week ago they were already experiencing a 5% death rate. Saw a report yesterday stating that is approaching 7% now. 15% of the folks who catch this disease require around 10 days of forced air to keep them alive. Which means they will perish once the system is overrun.

If say 10% of the worlds 7.5 Billion population perishes by the end of this (Which is possible given the current state of the world medically)… then that would be around 750 million deaths.

There are currently around 170k confirmed cases right now. It will double every 4 days without huge measures.

https://nypost.com/2020/03/12/heres-why-the-coronavirus-death-rate-is-so-high-in-italy/

The other side of this is that there are currently existing drugs showing real promise against the virus, including the treatment of people that are already critically ill.  Kaletra and Hydroxychloroquine are two of them.  Chloroquine is a very common anti-malarial drug, and so should be in large supply.  A number of countries are already treating people and having good results with these.  I expect the number of helpful drugs is going to go up dramatically as others are used as possible treatments.  It only takes one drug breakthrough to slow or even stop this virus, and that could happen long before we lose millions of people.  Vaccines are also currently being tested.  I'm cautiously optimistic.

Jérôme Salomon, a top official at the French health ministry, said the situation was “deteriorating very quickly.” He told France Inter radio on Monday that many people did not seem to be taking calls for social distancing seriously, and he tried to dispel the notion that the virus seriously threatens only the elderly. There are 300 to 400 people in intensive care in France, he said, and roughly half of them are under age 65.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/world/coronavirus-news.html

In case you wondered...

Trace Oswald wrote:The other side of this is that there are currently existing drugs showing real promise against the virus, including the treatment of people that are already critically ill.  Kaletra and Hydroxychloroquine are two of them.  

Until someone publishes a controlled series of their outcomes then this is just hearsay.  
There's a group in Australia saying this combination effectively treated their patients but until they publish somewhere ...