Coronavirus Outbreak

[AnthonyMartin]

My personal request. Share all the politics you like, just wash your hands and be careful. Our school hasn't closed yet, but since we are just outside of Montgomery County I expect it to close soon. Our ERs are really being challenged with sick and with worried well. Either way, this thing is gonna consume my life for a while...

[Ken]

My personal request. Share all the politics you like, just wash your hands and be careful. Our school hasn't closed yet, but since we are just outside of Montgomery County I expect it to close soon. Our ERs are really being challenged with sick and with worried well. Either way, this thing is gonna consume my life for a while...

I think the school closures are going to be a mistake. How many nurses and other medical professionals, for example, have small children and are going to be forced to stay home and care for them during the day now that schools and preschools everywhere are closing? A LOT of them.

Schools could actually be run as mini-quarantine sites with no mixing of students or teachers across classes or different parts of the school. That would greatly restrict exposure spread if a student did show up infected. You would maybe have 24 students possibly exposed rather than 500. But maybe that's no longer good enough. Closing schools isn't going to put all children into isolation. It will just free them from supervision in many cases.

[Judas Maccabeus]

My personal request. Share all the politics you like, just wash your hands and be careful. Our school hasn't closed yet, but since we are just outside of Montgomery County I expect it to close soon. Our ERs are really being challenged with sick and with worried well. Either way, this thing is gonna consume my life for a while...

I think the school closures are going to be a mistake. How many nurses and other medical professionals, for example, have small children and are going to be forced to stay home and care for them during the day now that schools and preschools everywhere are closing? A LOT of them.

Schools could actually be run as mini-quarantine sites with no mixing of students or teachers across classes or different parts of the school. That would greatly restrict exposure spread if a student did show up infected. You would maybe have 24 students possibly exposed rather than 500. But maybe that's no longer good enough. Closing schools isn't going to put all children into isolation. It will just free them from supervision in many cases.

Maryland just announced friday will be the last day for school for awhile. Governor said that childcare provision will be made for those who are "essential." This means fire police and healthcare, let's see how this goes. In spite of this, I am expecting many of the gals at our clinics to play the "mommy" card, and the rest of us will be working doubles.

Had a patient come in today with a mask. I had to tell her it was quite useless, as she was wearing it upside down.

Seriously, the hospitals are pitching the isolation tents behind their ERs. Someone expects this to be really bad. No one actually knows how much of this is out there, largely due to the total incompetence and denial of the current administration.

J.M.

[Robert]

While we are still waiting for clear death rates, please remember that 98% or so of the people who test positive for covid-19 will live a long healthy life.

An average of 136 people a day die from influenza.

[Josh]

Dude,

How do you propose we make reliable testing happen faster?

Okay so you are living in the real world. So are we. We aren’t insulated to the point we are backward and ignorant though, which is how it came across to me.

OK sorry. But the lack of testing capability may be the single biggest heath care crisis this country has faced since the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. And it is entirely by choice, not lack of capabilities. This country has the most advanced microbiology facilities and expertise on the planet. We have state-of-the-art labs and technicians all across the country. And we have the largest biotech and pharma industry and manufacturing capacity on the planet. There are tens of thousands of medical professionals and experts across the country who want to do their job and are flying blind due to the bureaucratic fiasco in Washington DC.

You can blame the Trump Administration, you can blame bureaucracy and career bureaucrats. You can blame overly burdensome regulations. I'm sure there is plenty of blame to go around and when there is finally time to do a retrospective analysis we can get to the bottom of what went wrong and is still going wrong. But one thing is certain. There will be thousands of lives that will be unnecessarily lost due to the lack of national leadership during this crisis. Maybe firing the entire pandemic response team at the National Security Council that was set up to coordinate decision-making during this sort of crisis was a bad idea? That one is on John Bolton actually. But he no doubt had approval from above.

[Josh]

While we are still waiting for clear death rates, please remember that 98% or so of the people who test positive for covid-19 will live a long healthy life.

An average of 136 people a day die from influenza.

And there is no “flu test” that can tell you if you’re positive to not before you have symptoms.

Mankind simply doesn’t have this kind of capability to do this kind of stuff yet.

[temporal1]

While we are still waiting for clear death rates, please remember that 98% or so of the people who test positive for covid-19 will live a long healthy life.

An average of 136 people a day die from influenza.

Talking with my daughter this week, i told her, i’ve lived through numerous disease-cycles, including mumps+measles before vaccines. schools did not close. some days, attendance was VERY LOW. But, rarely a school closure, or various closings going on.

i reminded her, when she was at the university, classes were in session, -20F and blizzards.
sick or not. unforgiving. 1990’s.

At times, i would have been for more restrictions! Like, in the 1980’s, regarding HIV-AIDS.
Ebola, i thought, deserved more restrictions.

So, this seems peculiar.
Trying to figure out “why?” .. in our chats, i told her i have been impressed with DJT’s policies to PREEMPTIVELY promise aid to areas in direct paths of oncoming hurricanes.
He’s done this. i think it makes sense and works well. After Katrina, a welcome approach.

Is he (and Congress) trying to get ahead of Coronavirus? i suspect so.

Of course, criticizers are abundant and firing off shots as-if this is not good enough.
Hindsight is 20/20. Monday morning quarterbacks, etc.

Time will tell.

It might tell that effective hurricane response is not exactly like effective communicable disease-cycle response.

[Ken]

Dude,

How do you propose we make reliable testing happen faster?

Okay so you are living in the real world. So are we. We aren’t insulated to the point we are backward and ignorant though, which is how it came across to me.

OK sorry. But the lack of testing capability may be the single biggest heath care crisis this country has faced since the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. And it is entirely by choice, not lack of capabilities. This country has the most advanced microbiology facilities and expertise on the planet. We have state-of-the-art labs and technicians all across the country. And we have the largest biotech and pharma industry and manufacturing capacity on the planet. There are tens of thousands of medical professionals and experts across the country who want to do their job and are flying blind due to the bureaucratic fiasco in Washington DC.

You can blame the Trump Administration, you can blame bureaucracy and career bureaucrats. You can blame overly burdensome regulations. I'm sure there is plenty of blame to go around and when there is finally time to do a retrospective analysis we can get to the bottom of what went wrong and is still going wrong. But one thing is certain. There will be thousands of lives that will be unnecessarily lost due to the lack of national leadership during this crisis. Maybe firing the entire pandemic response team at the National Security Council that was set up to coordinate decision-making during this sort of crisis was a bad idea? That one is on John Bolton actually. But he no doubt had approval from above.

I’m sure there are ten thousand experts who could answer that question better. Maybe use the off-the-shelf WHO testing protocols deployed in China and Korea and have US pharma companies pump out test kits by the hundreds of thousands on an interim basis until whatever FDA-approved test protocols can be developed to replace them?

Trump managed to shake the pockets of the Federal government to come up with $30 billion in spare change to build his wall without going to Congress and he waived every single procedural and environmental law to just deploy contractors and bulldozers with zero review. They just snatched the money from other Pentagon funds, and send in the bulldozers, skipping every single required legal step normally required for large Federal projects.

He found another $22 billion to pay for his farm bailout of farmers suffering from his trade war with China, also without going to Congress.

With a stroke of a pen he could have done the same thing a month ago for Coronavirus and had a million test kits deployed across the country by now.

[Szdfan]

While we are still waiting for clear death rates, please remember that 98% or so of the people who test positive for covid-19 will live a long healthy life.

You don’t know that. Some of them might get in a car with you. Or cross the street while you’re driving.

An average of 136 people a day die from influenza.

While I don’t think panicking is a helpful response coronavirus, neither is minimizing it. I think that comparing it to influenza is an apple and oranges comparison that’s not helpful.

[RZehr]

While we are still waiting for clear death rates, please remember that 98% or so of the people who test positive for covid-19 will live a long healthy life.

You don’t know that. Some of them might get in a car with you. Or cross the street while you’re driving.