If anyone is wondering why hospitals might want to restrict visitors and even partners for birth, here’s a reason why:
There be [sic] idiots out there ruining it for everyone, not caring a hoot about who they put at risk, because apparently life is all about them and their desires.
I would have to read the actual research study, but it says it was done by an MIT researcher. The Chinese bus study showed that it seems likely that in enclosed spaces, the virus can infect people further than 6 feet. This is supported by things I saw showing whole train cars get contaminated by a sick person vs. an airplane where one’s own air vent brings clean air that isn’t recycled among the whole plane. In that case, people sitting closest to anyone sick, and those in the aisles were most at risk.
I think the fact is that we just don’t know enough. Masks seem to have helped Taiwan, Checz, and other places to reduce spread. If we had enough for doctors and others who most need them such as people in high contact with the public jobs and had extra, I would hope we would be pushing the public here to all wear them when we are out and about. I don’t think it is possibly anywhere close to something like measles in terms of what it can do, but I think it does go beyond that 6 feet and that while this is probably more rare than people in the 6 feet and those who touch things and touch their faces, I think it happens enough (from what I understand from Chinese media and Wechat from doctors there, etc) that it would be a good idea if people wore masks here.
I would have torn my man’s name off baby’s birth certificate with my teeth.
@OHMomof2 -That video is well worth a watch, and has fortuntely made its way around cc and facebook. Lets keep it going.
Back to the nasty smackdown of NY a few posts back: The IHME projection predicts a 60.6K bed shortage (and 10.6K ICU bed shortage). by peak need, which is IN A WEEK! in comparison, NJ predicts a 435/814 bed/icu bed shortage at peak. California, who has done a great job of sheltering, has no predicted bed shortages. https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections
Repeating: Cuomo is doing what he needs to to protect his people. Do not fault him for that one bit. Wish our (#Q&)(%&%( governor would grow a pair.
I had depleted our pantry almost completely before winter and had been meaning to stock up (we always have some times when we can’t get to the store due to weather each year or the power goes out or etc so have always tried to keep some things). In early January I got worried about this virus but not that much since I thought we would handle it and prevent it from spreading here. When I saw we didn’t establish a travel ban until pretty late and that we warned that the ban would happen well before it did so people rushed to leave Wuhan, I got nervous and started reading and watching prepper sites for the first time ever and I started stocking up by buying a little extra each week. I don’t know how much we have not months and months worth of food. I didn’t think I needed months and months, but being unable to order delivery food and not feeling safe going to stores due to being immune deficient, I am a tiny bit concerned. I am thinking to plant a garden for the summer just to have some set source of vegetables.
South Korea, population 52 million, 162 deaths
United States, population 327 million, it will be a great success if we have 200,000 deaths
A physician on MSNBC right now: Among the issues are that patients can’t have any visitors and patients can’t see their health-care providers’ facial expressions. People are dying alone and without knowing that their physicians were trying to comfort them.
He should be arrested.
JYM626 New York has almost 5X more cases than NJ and almost 10X more cases than California.
Repeating: Cuomo is doing what he needs to to protect his people.
Really? How his he protecting his constituents upstate?
NYC/Westchester are testing more than anyone else so Cuomo can prove the cases. Can an area that isn’t testing do the same? In fact, NYS government has left upstate with NO COMMUNITY TESTING so nobody has any idea what the numbers are north. He is sending patients upstate to the very place that he has left high and dry. Once the upstate residents need hospital beds and resources what will happen to them?
NYC people have been fleeing and told to quarantine for 14 days. Does anyone really think they won’t hit the grocery stores first? Will they really quarantine in their hotel rooms or wherever they are going? Does anyone really believe their travel won’t just spread the virus more.
NYC doctors at hospitals made the decision not to allow birthing partners. Governor Cuomo overrode them. Previously, posters here said he was listening to doctors. Um, not so much.
Let’s be clear…Governor Cuomo is doing what he needs to to protect Westchester and NYC who CARRY HIM IN THE ELECTIONS.
If dying patients cannot see their loved ones in their last moments, certainly expectant fathers who will see their wives and babies in ONE day (the usual release time) can wait!
Bohemian ‘Coronavirus’ Rhapsody parody Madison, WI biochemist sings / sounds like Freddie Mercury in a ‘viral’ hit with 15 million views.
The Medical News Site That Saw the Coronavirus Coming Months Ago
Stat, started in 2015 by the Red Sox owner John Henry, is drawing four to five times its normal audience. “We were built for this,” one of its editors said.
On New Year’s Eve, Helen Branswell, a reporter at the science and medical news website Stat, was finishing an article about the development of an elusive Ebola vaccine when she got an inkling of her next big story.
“Hopefully this is nothing out of the ordinary,” she wrote on Twitter, adding a link to a report of an “unexplained pneumonia” in central China.
Two days later, she tweeted a South China Morning Post article about the outbreak and wrote, “Not liking the look of this.”
Stat published Ms. Branswell’s first article on the “growing cluster of unexplained pneumonia cases” on Jan. 4. There was some indication, she reported, of “a new virus, and perhaps even a new coronavirus.”
Stat, a digital publication in Boston founded in 2015, was early to a story that would dominate the news. In January, a month before the first confirmed case of unknown origin in the United States, the site published articles on the coronavirus’s ability to be spread by asymptomatic carriers; how it could test President Trump’s penchant for undermining established science; and the determination by experts that containing it “may not be feasible.”
“We have realized this was big and have thrown a lot of resources at it.
The site has attracted nearly 30 million unique visitors this year, which is four to five times its usual traffic, said Rick Berke, the executive editor, who oversees the editorial and business departments.
Part of the reason for the surge is that, like many other publications, Stat has placed its pandemic coverage outside its paywall. But with a staff of roughly 30 reporters and editors well versed in health and science, the site was well positioned to cover an epoch-defining story.
“We’re not seeing stories first because we’re smarter, faster or more savvy,” said Jason Ukman, a managing editor. “It’s just because this is the world we’ve been plugged into the whole time. We were built for this.”
Latest Updates: Markets and Business
Stat was started by the financier John W. Henry, the principal owner of the Boston Red Sox and the Liverpool Football Club. Before determining that Boston should have a site to cover the industries of its many hospitals, research labs and biotech start-ups, Mr. Henry bought The Boston Globe from The New York Times Company for $70 million in 2013.
Mr. Berke, formerly a reporter and an editor at The Times, came aboard as a co-founder. Another key member of the leadership team is Linda Henry, Mr. Henry’s wife, the managing director.
“This realization John had was that we need to tell the story of what’s happening in life sciences, and that story needs to come from Boston,” Ms. Henry said.
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Mr. Berke hired a staff that included veterans of the beat — like Sharon Begley, once a science columnist and an editor for Newsweek, and Ed Silverman, who had reported on the pharmaceutical industry for The Wall Street Journal — in the belief that there was a demand for a news outlet dedicated to health and medicine.
“There wasn’t a site that aggressively, in a very ambitious way, covered these stories every day as their main focus,” said Rick Berke, Stat’s top editor.
Stat is operated separately from The Globe, but the two split some back-office functions, occasionally run each other’s articles and share a headquarters on Exchange Place. The site’s main source of revenue is subscriptions, starting at $35 a month with discounts available. Stat also publishes sponsored content in its newsletters and has started soliciting donations.
Before it attracted a wider readership through its pandemic coverage, Stat drew praise for its investigations of the marketing and prescribing of OxyContin; IBM’s efforts to harness artificial intelligence to cure cancer, which, Stat found, fell short of the hype; and how groupthink may have stymied an Alzheimer’s cure.
With articles written in a straightforward style, Stat is meant for a general audience. But it wants to win over specialists, too — readers like William Hanage, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, who praised the site’s coverage as “accessible” yet “still rigorous.”
“There is no single place on the internet that I would go to better update myself on the diversity of views that are out and circulating,” he said.
Dr. Hanage added that Ms. Branswell’s reporting on the coronavirus had made her “a godlike figure to people who are infectious-disease epidemiologists.”
Ms. Branswell, who has published about 50 articles on the pandemic, was a health reporter at The Canadian Press before taking on the infectious-disease beat at Stat in 2015. In October, she profiled the World Health Organization’s head of health emergencies, Mike Ryan.
“We’re not ready,” Dr. Ryan told her. “If we can’t stop Ebola, what hope do we have of stopping … Disease X?”
These days, in her time away from work, Ms. Branswell reads mysteries and checks in on friends and family (remotely, of course). She also spends time on Twitter, where she serves up reliable information from experts in the field.
“Helen used Twitter the exact same way with Ebola, with Zika, with SARS,” Mr. Ukman said. “She’s really, really good at communicating information about an infectious disease.”
Ms. Branswell said the next frontier of testing would be serological — to test not if subjects are carrying the virus but if they have already had it.
A nervous reporter asked: Are we going to get through this?
“It’s not going to be over soon,” she said. “And it’s going to be very painful. But yes. We’ll get through this.”
We all agree that front line HCWs have the most urgent need for masks (especially N95 masks), and many of us have donated our masks for that cause. We can’t find masks on store shelves these days. However, the supply situation is changing for the better. China, which used to make more than 50% of the masks worldwide, increased its production 12-fold since the beginning of the outbreak there. Masks are no longer in short supply over there and I’ve been told they’re even available to be shipped internationally on Alibaba websites. Our government, as well as major retailers like Walmart, should be able to source these masks more quickly than before (perhaps they’ve already done that). I’ve also been told Walmart periodically have masks (their own Equate brand) in store for less than $3 for a box of 20.
Fauci: Mask-wearing recommendation under ‘very serious consideration’
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, revealed on Tuesday that the White House coronavirus task force is seriously considering guidance that all Americans wear masks to help thwart the rapid spread of COVID-19.
But the nation’s top infectious disease expert also acknowledged that such a directive has been complicated by the nationwide dearth of personal protective equipment.
“The idea of getting a much more broad, community-wide use of masks outside of the health care setting is under very active discussion at the task force. The CDC group is looking at that very carefully,” Fauci told CNN.
“The thing that has inhibited that a bit is to make sure that we don’t take away the supply of masks from the health care workers who need them,” he continued. “But once we get in a situation where we have enough masks, I believe there will be some very serious consideration about more broadening this recommendation of using masks.”
Fauci cautioned that while “we’re not there yet,” he said he believed the task force was “close to coming to some determination” soon on whether to expand the administration’s recommended mitigation measures to include masks.
“Because if, in fact, a person who may or may not be infected wants to prevent infecting someone else, one of the best ways to do that is with a mask. So perhaps that’s the way to go,” he said, adding that the subject was “under very active consideration” and would be raised at the task force’s meeting on Tuesday afternoon.
Some public health experts, including former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, have suggested that encouraging the wearing of masks in public could help curb the rate of COVID-19 transmission in the United States, which now has more confirmed cases than anywhere else in the world.
More than 174,000 Americans have become infected, and at least 3,416 have perished as a result of the disease. Because of limited testing capacity, experts agree the actual number of positive cases is much greater.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/31/fauci-mask-recommendation-coronavirus-157476
https://www.nbcboston.com/news/national-international/ships-with-people-from-ill-fated-cruise-beg-florida-to-dock/2099986/
Gov. DeSantis doesn’t want the ships to dock in Florida.
Passengers from an ill-fated South American cruise are anxious to disembark once they reach Florida, but Gov. Ron DeSantis said the state’s health care resources are already stretched too thin to take on another ship’s coronavirus caseload. The U.S. Coast Guard said Tuesday that the decision would be punted to Washington if authorities can’t agree.
This makes me very upset. Not him in particular, but all that have rejected this ship. SHAME. Those people are going to die.
Group of Austin spring breakers test positive for coronavirus after trip to Mexico
Officials are reinforcing the message that people of all ages should stay home after a group of young adults tested positive for coronavirus after visiting Cabo.
Author: Rebecca Flores
Published: 11:26 AM CDT March 31, 2020
Updated: 2:18 PM CDT March 31, 2020
AUSTIN, Texas — A large group of Austin spring breakers have tested positive for coronavirus after returning from a trip to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, the Austin Public Health (APH) said Tuesday, March 31.
Austin health officials said about 70 people in their 20s went to Mexico on a chartered plane for their spring break trip about a week-and-a-half ago. Part of the group returned on separate commercial flights.
There are 28 young adults on the trip that have tested positive for COVID-19 so far, and dozens more are under public health investigation, Austin Public Health said. Four of the confirmed cases did not present any symptoms. All 28 people diagnosed with the virus are self-isolating and being monitored at this time.
The University of Texas confirmed to KVUE that “many” of the young adults who went on this trip are students at UT, and those who tested positive were confirmed. The university released the following statement:
"Many of those involved were UT Austin students. The university is working closely with Austin Public Health to assist in contact tracing. The incident is a reminder of the vital importance of taking seriously the warnings of public health authorities on the risks of becoming infected with COVID-19 and spreading it to others. UT Health Austin is a group practice designed and managed by the faculty and staff of the Dell Medical School. It serves an array of clients. University Health Services provides medical care and patient education to students at The University of Texas at Austin, and it is part of the university’s Division of Student Affairs. Both organizations are working closely with Austin Public Health.”
According to an official with Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, the spring breakers took a charter flight from the airport on March 14. The majority of them reportedly returned on a charter flight on March 19. Although they were chartered flights, the travelers did go through the terminals at the Austin airport when they departed and returned to Austin.
“While Mexico at the time of their travel was not under a federal travel advisory, Austin-Travis County residents should follow CDC’s travel recommendations indicating travelers avoid all non-essential international travel,” APH said. “A leisure vacation of any kind is not considered essential.”
Figures show nearly half of those who have tested positive for COVID-19 in the Austin area are between the ages of 20 and 40.
RELATED: Nearly half of Austin-area coronavirus cases are under the age of 40. An infectious disease doctor explains why
“The virus often hides in the healthy and is given to those who are at grave risk of being hospitalized or dying," said Austin-Travis County Interim Health Authority Dr. Mark Escott. “While younger people have less risk for complications, they are not immune from severe illness and death from COVID-19.”
The Department of State Health Services has been notified about this case.
How deadly is the coronavirus? It’s still far from clear
There is room for different interpretations of the data
From magazine issue: 28 March 2020
How deadly is the coronavirus? It’s still far from clearHow deadly is the coronavirus? It’s still far from clear
… [edit] this article very long
But I’d like to raise some perspectives that have hardly been aired in the past weeks, and which point to an interpretation of the figures rather different from that which the government is acting on. I’m a recently-retired Professor of Pathology and NHS consultant pathologist, and have spent most of my adult life in healthcare and science – fields which, all too often, are characterised by doubt rather than certainty. There is room for different interpretations of the current data. If some of these other interpretations are correct, or at least nearer to the truth, then conclusions about the actions required will change correspondingly.
The simplest way to judge whether we have an exceptionally lethal disease is to look at the death rates. Are more people dying than we would expect to die anyway in a given week or month? Statistically, we would expect about 51,000 to die in Britain this month. At the time of writing, 422 deaths are linked to Covid-19 — so 0.8 per cent of that expected total. On a global basis, we’d expect 14 million to die over the first three months of the year. The world’s 18,944 coronavirus deaths represent 0.14 per cent of that total. These figures might shoot up but they are, right now, lower than other infectious diseases that we live with (such as flu). Not figures that would, in and of themselves, cause drastic global reactions.
Initial reported figures from China and Italy suggested a death rate of 5 per cent to 15 per cent, similar to Spanish flu. Given that cases were increasing exponentially, this raised the prospect of death rates that no healthcare system in the world would be able to cope with. The need to avoid this scenario is the justification for measures being implemented: the Spanish flu is believed to have infected about one in four of the world’s population between 1918 and 1920, or roughly 500 million people with 50 million deaths. We developed pandemic emergency plans, ready to snap into action in case this happened again.
At the time of writing, the UK’s 422 deaths and 8,077 known cases give an apparent death rate of 5 per cent. This is often cited as a cause for concern, contrasted with the mortality rate of seasonal flu, which is estimated at about 0.1 per cent. But we ought to look very carefully at the data. Are these figures really comparable?
Most of the UK testing has been in hospitals, where there is a high concentration of patients susceptible to the effects of any infection. As anyone who has worked with sick people will know, any testing regime that is based only in hospitals will over-estimate the virulence of an infection. Also, we’re only dealing with those Covid-19 cases that have made people sick enough or worried enough to get tested. There will be many more unaware that they have the virus, with either no symptoms, or mild ones.
That’s why, when Britain had 590 diagnosed cases, Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, suggested that the real figure was probably between 5,000 and 10,000 cases, ten to 20 times higher. If he’s right, the headline death rate due to this virus is likely to be ten to 20 times lower, say 0.25 per cent to 0.5 per cent. That puts the Covid-19 mortality rate in the range associated with infections like flu.
… That means every positive test for Covid-19 must be notified, in a way that it just would not be for flu or most other infections.
In the current climate, anyone with a positive test for Covid-19 will certainly be known to clinical staff looking after them: if any of these patients dies, staff will have to record the Covid-19 designation on the death certificate — contrary to usual practice for most infections of this kind. There is a big difference between Covid-19 causing death, and Covid-19 being found in someone who died of other causes. Making Covid-19 notifiable might give the appearance of it causing increasing numbers of deaths, whether this is true or not. It might appear far more of a killer than flu, simply because of the way deaths are recorded.
If we take drastic measures to reduce the incidence of Covid-19, it follows that the deaths will also go down. We risk being convinced that we have averted something that was never really going to be as severe as we feared. This unusual way of reporting Covid-19 deaths explains the clear finding that most of its victims have underlying conditions — and would normally be susceptible to other seasonal viruses, which are virtually never recorded as a specific cause of death.
Let us also consider the Covid-19 graphs, showing an exponential rise in cases — and deaths. They can look alarming. But if we tracked flu or other seasonal viruses in the same way, we would also see an exponential increase. We would also see some countries behind others, and striking fatality rates. The United States Centers for Disease Control, for example, publishes weekly estimates of flu cases. The latest figures show that since September, flu has infected 38 million Americans, hospitalised 390,000 and killed 23,000. This does not cause public alarm because flu is familiar.
The data on Covid-19 differs wildly from country to country. Look at the figures for Italy and Germany. At the time of writing, Italy has 69,176 recorded cases and 6,820 deaths, a rate of 9.9 per cent. Germany has 32,986 cases and 157 deaths, a rate of 0.5 per cent. Do we think that the strain of virus is so different in these nearby countries as to virtually represent different diseases? Or that the populations are so different in their susceptibility to the virus that the death rate can vary more than twentyfold? If not, we ought to suspect systematic error, that the Covid-19 data we are seeing from different countries is not directly comparable.
Look at other rates: Spain 7.1 per cent, US 1.3 per cent, Switzerland 1.3 per cent, France 4.3 per cent, South Korea 1.3 per cent, Iran 7.8 per cent. We may very well be comparing apples with oranges. Recording cases where there was a positive test for the virus is a very different thing to recording the virus as the main cause of death.
…
John Lee is a recently retired professor of pathology and a former NHS consultant pathologist.
WRITTEN BY
Dr John Lee
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19-is-not-as-clear-as-we-think
link for above
@suteiki77 You have a legitimate concern about your health based on your medical history. No judging here from me. Reframe your mask wearing as an effort to keep a hospital bed free for another person. If you don’t get sick, another person can get care.
Take care! We would hate for anything to happen to you!