I don’t think there is a more or less convenient day for me to get sick-it would be about the same annoyance any day, and I even remember a Christmas when we were all sick but we managed. No elderly relations to visit, so no concern there. I am reasonably certain my kids will test positive in the normal course of activities this summer, and maybe I will too, though not sure what if any immunity that will provide. Regardless, I wash my hands often and live my life.
I don’t have a strategy when posting. I am posting what I think based on things I read and saw. It isn’t me who has this opinion but pandemic experts. I’m just listening to what they recommend. The national guidelines were supposed to be followed and they included testing, contact tracing, and quarantine. For some reason, after that was published, the goal for those who published it or their boss changed and we as a country are no longer trying to go for containment and instead will likely have to do repeated mitigation with various periods of time staying home again. It seems as though some people somehow didn’t read about these recommendations, hear Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx and other pandemic experts and the WHO and others all talk extensively about them. It isn’t me making something up. This is how you get control of a pandemic. By not doing those things we are messing up big time in my opinion. But it isn’t just my own opinion.
I do not agree with you about what is possible to do. Who would have thought we would have a national stay home order that lasted so long and that such a high % of people took seriously and tried to follow or that a few weeks are people saying they wouldn’t wear masks to see most of the country now owning masks and quite a high % wearing them regularly. With leadership guiding people to do things, the USA could do all sorts of things. We didn’t get testing ready like we should have or contact tracing and that’s why we are not following the published plan. It’s very frustrating to me because that seems like our big chance to have a good fall was flushed down the toilet.
The US didn’t follow the the who recommendations then and they are not a moot point because we are headed into fall when it seems there will be a phase 2 and our actions now will determine with that looks like. But just as in the time leading up to the stay home order, some don’t want to hear what I’m saying and will disagree with me. But I was sadly right then that the WHO was giving the US good advice that we were not taking and I believe we should have followed our own national plan and have not done as well with that as I had hoped. Better than nothing at least.
I think that if you were reading the WHO website daily in Jan, Feb, and March, their twitter feed regularly, etc and you thought they were not ringing warning bells, I’d be very surprised as that’s certainly how all that seemed to me and others who read that stuff at the time.
That’s because there is more testing and people with no or little symptoms are testing positive. Before, only the sickest people were getting tested (since we had no testing for all). South Korea was an early guide on this effect since they did mass testing so we could see the estimated positive rates and fatality rates pretty early with them.
Gotcha. You think your own personal death rate guess is high?
I feel like most people on this site and this thread are pretty informed now and most of us had a good grasp on the fact that this may not be a huge killer in terms of percentages, but because of the exponential spread, it would be a huge killer in terms of numbers of Americans. I was most worried about my parents, in-laws, and one of my kids who has chronic illness. I was worried about spreading it to others unknowingly and I was annoyed that we didn’t know what was going on since this was totally downplayed by our government (and I’m NOT a partisan), even though they had more information than we did. I need truth and facts to make my risk decisions and decide on behavior.
I agree that the ‘daily new case’ number is in some ways meaningless, but ‘daily deaths’ is in pretty much a straight line decline. And, ‘Daily deaths’ are simply confirmed or guessed Wuhan deaths and as such aren’t a derivative of the ‘daily new case’ numbers, correct?
I guess it boils down to whether one believes the fragmented, chaotic response to all this has managed to make a measurable difference worldwide. Personally, I don’t.
(One test - with results coming up in around two weeks - will be whether or not there are measurable consequences from the last several days of big city riots.)
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I figure my risk of death is somewhere around 0.6% should I catch the disease. That seems high to me; it’s worse than 1 in 200. If were looking a positive covid test would scare me very much.
My risk of being hospitalized? Maybe 2%. I don’t like those odds either.
My odds of getting sicker than I’ve ever been? Probably 5-10%.
This is useless speculation. We don’t know the long-term health issues past 6 months after recovering.
I will say, that both my husband and a friend (an RN) who had COVID are having kidney issues. My husband was in such pain he thought he was having a kidney stone. He’s scheduled to see his doctor on Monday. My nurse friend’s kidneys hurt pretty much all the time. She takes hot baths and showers to help the pain.
She says so far, the after effects of COVID range from nothing - to lung damage, heart problems and yes, kidneys. This is all largely anecdotal information passed around my friend’s hospital, which has treated a lot of COVID patients (Manhattan.)
Lucky you! Unfortunately your recollection is faulty as a few posters here have said just this very thing – in some cases many times over.
I’ve said that it looks to be similar to a ‘rough’ flu year, several times.
Consider it said again.
The kind of “rough” flu that causes kidney injury, I guess.
It’s a flawed question because it’s not really about whether @Creekland odds of death but how many people he/she will infect along the way.
Someone posted awhile back that if you have the virus and don’t quarantine, you will kill a person within 14 days (because the virus spreads exponentially).
People forget that we are a community and our actions can and do effect others. We don’t live in a bubble.
Eh, that’s sort of true. It’s true on average that if you have the virus and you don’t do any social distancing or mask-wearing, and the people around you don’t do anything either, on average you’d kill somebody in the next, probably not 14 days because it takes a while for a person to get infected and die, but in the next 3-4 weeks.
But the variance is extreme. You’d probably infect nobody. You might infect one person and then they might infect nobody. If you were the right kind of person in the right place, you’d infect 6 people, or 8, or 75, or some other large number.
It’s just a simple question. It’s not a trap to then say the odds are low so why are we not social distancing, etc. It was just to get an idea what people here are thinking.
On another forum I frequent a doctor there had brought it up. He was querying patients that were concerned about the virus and a majority of otherwise healthy people said their odds of dying if they caught it were 50%.
This forum as a whole is probably more educated than the general public so I was interested if the same or similar thoughts were happening here.
It’s just a simple question.
Cases has always been a poor measure of how the pandemic is progressing. You can not estimate number of infections strictly from number of cases. Our most likely situation right now is new cases our rising while new infections are declining. Tracking percent of positive tests is a more useful statistic than cases.
As I’m very careful and able to isolate pretty well, I think I have a fairly low chance of catching covid-19 and plan to continue to be cautious until more is known and hopefully a safe and effective vaccine is available.
Neither is a good measure at this point, unfortunately. As we test more and more asymptomatic people, the test positivity rate will drop, as the infection rate is always lower among the general asymptomatic population.
Pay attention to hospitalizations and deaths (as a lagging indicator). Tracking numbers of cases has little if any value. Serology test results have value for inferring viral penetration, but we need to be cautious because of potential sample bias as well as the accuracy of the tests themselves. (See also the second video linked below for a good discussion on other mechanisms of immunity that do not show up in antibody testing.)
Also, it’s a technical point, but COVID does not spread “exponentially.” This is easily observable if you plot any the relevant statistics on a log normalised chart. The rates of increase slow from the first observations. (Technically, the first derivative of the log transformed function is strictly decreasing.) This short video may or may not help with the intuition, depending on your mathematical sophistication: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aHrx68IT7o
Of course, many will dismiss a Stanford Nobel Laureate’s analysis without even understanding it. If you are in that camp, I would suggest reading a book that I found very valuable (despite my having a very different worldview from the author): The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt. I won’t try to summarize it, just read it.
Here is another video I found extremely valuable, on the pandemic of fear and group hysteria that we are experiencing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk2YZfnsOPg . Really, watch it, particularly those posters who are so emotional that they put others on “ignore,” lol.
So, here we are on May 31. This thread was an experiment. How did we do, @CCadmin_Jon ? Please share your thoughts on how you think it went and what you plan to do or allow now. This thread (as of right now) has almost 5300 posts. The other large covid thread (School in the Fall) has even more – over 5500.
Please include us in a discussion instead of just announcing some drastic change with no warning (unfortunately, CC has a record of doing the latter).
Is there much action in any other part of CC? I looked at the trackalytics on CC just a few days ago, and the numbers are declining steadily.
Well, how we are doing is the biggest elephant in any room I’ve ever seen is being ignored by this thread. We can clutch our pearls over Lake of the Ozarks, and wail over peaceful protesters in Michigan carrying firearms (which was obnoxious, but hurt no one), but not much said over riots in the street all over the country in the very communities that are most at risk if they do get infected.
Forget the shut-downs, stay-at-home orders, and social distancing. These crowds are going to spread whatever disease is out there. We didn’t ever have shelter in place orders for Covid, but may need them for this.
The early peaceful protesters often wore masks. What is going on now is going to be deadly.