Ronstar
Moderator Emeritus
Went to Walmart. Lots of bare shelves. Even the toothpaste shelf.
This might have some cross-over with the other threads, but I think it fits here?
Daily deaths from COVID-19 in China have dropped to single digits. Eight.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/china/
Single digits in S Korea as well (I know many don't trust China numbers).
Even Italy, which has been hit hard, may be flattening out (a little early to say, but the last three days are about flat).
In the US, there has been in the range of 1 to 8 deaths per day this month. Can you imagine any other cause getting national attention from 8 deaths a day? I'm gonna guess that more people die each day from heart attacks while trying to open pickle jars.
Sure, we need to be alert to this and take reasonable precautions as it is contagious and likely more serious to the elderly/compromised, but we also need some perspective. I fear that some of the reactions are going to cause more deaths than the virus. Let's see, there are 221 M drivers in the US, and about 1.25 fatalities per 100 million miles. So if each driver made an extra 5 mile trip stocking up over the course of this, that's 14 deaths right there. How many more because some people stock up on sanitizer due to the histeria, leaving other susceptible people without?
DW and I went out for drinks and dinner at the local micro-brewery (had a food truck there , as they do most w/e). Place was pretty full.
We stopped at Trader Joes on the way home to pick up a few things for the w/e, and many shelves were bare. Surreal. A few people we chatted with had comments like "I feel I'm in a 3rd world country". It's crazy. Sure, some prep makes sense, but this has been blown all out of proportion.
Apparently, hoarders don't care much for asparagus, those shelves were full (but we already had some).
-ERD50
Went to Walmart. Lots of bare shelves. Even the toothpaste shelf.
Even if every infected person recovered, the fact that there are 15,000 hospitalized patients right now in Italy on top of all other illnesses means that there are NO hospital beds.
If you send people home without treatments, or put them on cots in tents out in the parking lots, the death rate will go a lot higher.
Italian doctors are already having to make the tough decision of letting old and weak patients "go", so that they can use the resource on younger and more viable patients.
There is no toilet paper left in town or paper products including paper plates. I don't understand what paper plates would be used for in a pandemic but I'll know to stock up next time.[emoji23]
A few things. China’s numbers ( if you trust them )have gotten better because they shut just about absolutely everything down in a way that only a totalitarian society can. It’s hard to spread a virus when no one is allowed out of their house.
South Korea’s numbers appear under control because they have done an amazing job of identifying people with this virus. They’re testing 15000 people per day so that they can get those people to isolate themselves. They’ve shut down offices and schools. They have taken this seriously from day one and they appear to be benefiting from that.
Italy’s numbers are a warning about what will happen if we don’t take this seriously and reduce the activities that spread this virus. Italy had daily deaths in the single digits like us 3 weeks ago. In the last 24 hours, 250 people died there. I don’t know where that ramp up ends. Hopefully now that they’ve shut things down it slows back down.
Here in the US, we have absolutely no idea who has it right now. The minimal testing we have done has identified over 2200 cases. I’d be surprised if there aren’t 20,000 out in the wild at this point. We are going to see our number of deaths ramp up dramatically in the next few weeks. Hopefully, the shutdown of activities with large crowds and the social distancing companies and people have started to do will help keep the scale of this from growing to the point that it melts down our health care system like it has Italy’s.
It isn’t that 8 people a day are dying right now. It’s that in 3 weeks it will probably be 250/day, and that in 3 months it could be 2500/day if we don’t slow it’s spread, and our hospitals will be completely overwhelmed.
I’ve been remarkably impressed by how serious businesses have taken it, even at great expense to their bottom line, given that it like you said doesn’t really look like a crisis yet from the immediate numbers. That gives me a lot of hope that we won’t collapse our health care system.
This is a thread about our personal news and family news. I'd like to hear about you personally and not another rehash of numbers and speculation..how are you and your family today..
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76 YO parents Called and said they can’t find toilet paper in the store so they bought paper napkins. ..
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I think you should phone them and tell them to NOT flush them down the toilet, they may not know.
If they do, it's likely it will clog the pipes and turn into a major issue.
I heard that many colleges were either sending their students away or telling them not to come back from Spring Break, and I thought about how that would have affected me those 40 odd years ago. Just like Richard Gere in "An Officer and a Gentleman", I had nowhere else to go. That's why I stayed at school for every spring break and almost every holiday. It will be devastating for those young people who have no family to back them up.
UW Virology
@UWVirology
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7h
@UWVirology
performed #SARSCoV2 #CoronavirusUSA #HCoV19 tests for 1680 people on 3/12. About 7% positive. Let’s all work together #WeGotThisSeattle to #FlattenTheCurve!