Coronavirus

[Swerd]

These guys?
View attachment 34583

As soon as I saw your response, I searched for a photo of Pete Townsend wearing a surgical mask. No luck. Imagine a combination of these two photos.

 

[gene]

Gene,

All the best and I hope you feel better. I know the COVID-19 is a tough bug to shake. I have a few friends in China dealing with family members that are sick. The good news is you are strong and young. Flush you body with fluids and be careful coughing too hard or often. Keep us posted if you need anything. We can a;ways deliver Panera Bread chicken soup to your house.

man that sounds good. now you got me craving....

 

[Ponzio]

man that sounds good. now you got me craving....

that's a good sign, healthy appetite and all

 

[John Parks]

As soon as I saw your response, I searched for a photo of Pete Townsend wearing a surgical mask. No luck. Imagine a combination of these two photos.
View attachment 34588
View attachment 34590

The answer is obvious!

 

[Darenwh]

Take care of yourself Gene. If it helps, at least you got it early enough that if (I pray it does not come to this) you end up in the ICU there will still be beds and supplies. I suspect as this ramps up they may be hard to come by for some and that will add to the toll this virus extracts from the population.

Also, for everybody, don't forget to keep the humidifier going in the house to keep the humidity above 50% (I try to keep it up around 60%) as this helps to keep lungs healthy. It's just something to help keep people a little safer. Good luck to all, I suspect this ones going to be bad...

 

[lovinthehd]

Best wishes, Gene, hope you are well soon!

 

[panteragstk]

The number recovered is higher than 8. There’s at least 18 recovered from Kirkland nursing home alone.

Not my numbers.

https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

 

[Ponzio]

Not my numbers.

https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

They maybe playing catch-up. We have multiple cases here in my county in PA that are not shown. Obviously it's not in real time. Possibly it's updated every 12/24 hours? Don't know.

 

[panteragstk]

They maybe playing catch-up. We have multiple cases here in my county in PA that are not shown. Obviously it's not in real time. Possibly it's updated every 12/24 hours? Don't know.

Could be. I would imagine the tested cases are going to be updated more than the recoveries would be. Hopefully we'll see @gene in that recovered pool soon.

 

[Doubleroll]

@gene sorry to hear! Praying for a full and speedy recover...

 

[Mr._Clark]

Wow, I have to give this woman in Italy credit:

>>>Over the weekend, a nurse named Doris Bia posted on Facebook that after taking a leave for several years to be a full-time mother, she was going back to work at the Oglio Po hospital in hard-hit Cremona.

“Starting tomorrow I’ll be beside those who are untiringly fighting this god-forsaken virus,” she wrote. “I’m doing it because I can’t ignore their sacrifice.”<<<

Patient No. 1 is out of ICU as virus pushes Italy to brink

Italian doctors are celebrating one small victory in their battle against the coronavirus after Patient No. 1 — a 38-year-old Unilever worker named Mattia — was moved out of intensive care

abcnews.go.com

 

[Matthew J Poes]

So, it's official now - the WHO is now calling this a pandemic.

When I wrote my Article on COVID-19 i debated calling it a pandemic. I had been hearing that this decision had been made for a while and was to be announced. I just didn't know if it would be announced before the article went public. I decided to play it safe and just call it an epidemic.

 

[Matthew J Poes]

Because of my work I've been talking to lots of colleagues who work on the actual health side of public health (what I do is considered PH prevention, but its more about family and parenting), I was getting live updates before some numbers went public and so I am positive that there are no websites that are particularly current. It's too hard and it will only get worse. For the most part cases are only made public once they go through a confirmation process with the CDC meaning everyone is tested twice. That takes a while. Same is true for recovery.

And as many have heard, there seems to be some cases out of China (and now possibly Italy and South Korea) of patients who tested negative, seemed healthy, and then displayed symptoms later on. It's unclear if they caught it again, caught a different strain, etc.

I just want everyone who thinks this is like a cold or flu to know this is a lot more serious. For young people, you probably will be ok, but probably doesn't mean definitely. But, and far more importantly, this appears to be seriously contagious. Insanely so. Far more than many of the past Coronaviruses or Flu.

I've also heard folks make a certain epidemiological mis-statement, that as we screen more widely the virus mortality rate will go down because the denominator is lower than reality. That is true, but that same screening problem impacts the numerator too. Both go up. The direction of bias is currently unknown. While the 10% number that was floated is most certainly wrong, to suggest that the 3.5% number will drop to 1% is itself probably wrong too.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.04.20031104v1.full.pdf

This is one of the better current papers on the mortality rate. It's using SOTA analytic methods and while it makes a lot of assumptions, so do more standard epidemiological methods (which are extremely biased by the under-reporting and underscreening). This model uses a Bayesian modeling approach called STAN which allows them to account for the bias introduced by under-screening (among other factors).

This group is currently projecting that as much as 50% of the world will be infected within a year. It's pretty insane.

I've been in touch with Gene every day and I wish him the best possible recovery. This has been really hard on Gene and Audioholics as a whole.

 

[shadyJ]

When I wrote my Article on COVID-19 i debated calling it a pandemic. I had been hearing that this decision had been made for a while and was to be announced. I just didn't know if it would be announced before the article went public. I decided to play it safe and just call it an epidemic.

Your article hasn't been linked to yet in this thread. For those who haven't seen the front page yet, Audioholics posted this article about the impact of COVID-19 on the consumer electronics business. It's a great article, and I recommend that everyone give it a read.

 

[Matthew J Poes]

Your article hasn't been linked to yet in this thread. For those who haven't seen the front page yet, Audioholics posted this article about the impact of COVID-19 on the consumer electronics business. It's a great article and I recommend that that everyone give it a read.

Thanks I just realized that it hadn't be linked over. Glad you caught that.

Yeah for those who want to know where this all came from, I am a methods expert/evaluator for government funded prevention and support programs. I help prove that our tax dollars are spent on support services that really work, basically. They seek to improve outcomes that range from public health to school readiness. It gives me access to a lot of the PH first responders. Reviewing is all a side job (as is the acoustics stuff) and I was hearing a lot of what was going on with COVID-19 from both industries. One focused on health effects and the other on the economy. I was really stunned by what I was learning and how quickly everything was changing. I work with the Washington State Department of Health (among many others) and was hearing about what was going on in near real time.

Audioholics is not a health website so I tried to write an article that, while providing some context for how different this virus is, really focused on that economic impact. I've been hearing projected estimates of half a trillion dollars or more in economic impact from COVID-19 over the next few years. If even a fraction of that turns out to be true, it would be unprecedented. I would have included those numbers in the article but I just couldn't verify the numbers. It seemed like people were just guessing.

 

[Matthew J Poes]

Could be. I would imagine the tested cases are going to be updated more than the recoveries would be. Hopefully we'll see @gene in that recovered pool soon.

There still aren't enough test kits and won't be for some time. Highly doubtful that official "recovered" cases is going to be accurate. This may have changed, but at one point they were releasing folks once they appeared symptom free for a sufficient amount of time, but were not verifying that they were in fact virus free.

 

[Old Onkyo]

Besides playing “how low can the stock markets go,) we were scheduled to fly to DC, NYC, and Baltimore in three weeks, with train travel in between.
we are over 60, wife has compromised immune system due to chemotherapy.
we are cancelling the trip. Currently doctors will not provide a note restricting travel....

 

[Matthew J Poes]

Take care of yourself Gene. If it helps, at least you got it early enough that if (I pray it does not come to this) you end up in the ICU there will still be beds and supplies. I suspect as this ramps up they may be hard to come by for some and that will add to the toll this virus extracts from the population.

Also, for everybody, don't forget to keep the humidifier going in the house to keep the humidity above 50% (I try to keep it up around 60%) as this helps to keep lungs healthy. It's just something to help keep people a little safer. Good luck to all, I suspect this ones going to be bad...

Not to suggest that keeping the house humidity level higher isn't always a good idea, it certainly is, but they have been trying to push back against this advice as a prevention method for the Flu or COVID-19. The problem is that there is one limited and debated study that suggested this slowed the spread of Influenza and zero studies showing it is beneficial for Coronaviruses or COVID-19 specifically. My impression from the meetings I attended were that they didn't want people to get a false sense of protection. We know that low humidity and cold increases the spread of influenza, but that isn't quite the same as increasing the humidity inside a home. Many other factors in the home lead to the spread, with humidity being a fairly unimportant one.

What I've been told in my meetings with folks from the CDC and HHS is this, the following things should be assumed to not provide any meaningful protection against COVID-19:

1. Wearing Masks
2. Wearing Gloves
3. Raising Humidity
4. Buying a lot of toilet paper
5. Using HEPA air filtration (The virus isn't airborne)

and the following things should be considered our best prevention:

1. Washing our hands with soap and water for at least 20 seconds
2. Avoiding large social gatherings
3. Keeping high distance between ourselves and others
4. disinfecting the surfaces around us more frequently, especially for business owners

One of the misinformation pieces going around with this is that because it appears to have a very low mortality rate for younger people (under 60), there is a belief that they don't need to worry or react. The problem with this view is that its a very selfish way of looking at the problem. In order to "flatten the curve" meaning reduce the spike in cases that the health care system is facing, and to avoid overwhelming it, we need to take measures that reduce the spread. When the healthcare system becomes overwhelmed like it did in 1918 and again in Wuhan, more people suffer than need to. Not just from COVID-19, but other readily treatable disorders. When doctors and nurses get sick and are taken out of commission, when we get a shortage of not just supplies but doctors, everyone suffers. We all have a role to play.

 

[Matthew J Poes]

Besides playing “how low can the stock markets go,) we were scheduled to fly to DC, NYC, and Baltimore in three weeks, with train travel in between.
we are over 60, wife has compromised immune system due to chemotherapy.
we are cancelling the trip. Currently doctors will not provide a note restricting travel....

I think thats a smart decision, but I'm sorry to hear that you can't get a note restricting travel. The CDC did officially provide guidance that older adults should minimize travel, but I have heard from our local health department that they were not getting a lot of direct communication. I had to pass on some messages for them. I wonder if your doctors are simply not aware of the current recommendations?

 

[shadyJ]

I feel bad for all the people who were involved in the organization of major events or gatherings scheduled for the near future. They pretty much all have to be canceled. I have to wonder how much insurance softens the blow for them. Likewise, think about how hard this is going to be on commercial movie theaters. Imagine being an producer or director or actor who has a movie set to release in the next couple months. I am betting this year will be the worst for box office receipts in a long time. On the other hand, it may be a boon for streaming services since not as many people will be going out. I also feel bad for the restaurant industry; this isn't going to be easy for them. Remember that if you don't want to eat out with the crowds, most places offer take out, so you can still support your favorite restaurants by ordering to go instead of mingling with other people.