Everyone needs to wear face coverings for the next few years, until a vaccine is widely distributed. People shouldn't go out unless they must, such as for work or grocery shopping. If restaurants in your area open for dine in, don't go. Don't go the beach, movies, sporting events, concerts or anywhere else you don't really need to go. I'm not talking about for a few weeks, I'm talking about for the next few years. This is life now. However long it takes to get a vaccine. Or, if enough people get infected, herd immunity might mean we get to that point sooner. But that would be a terrible thing, because if we got to the point where there is a chance the virus might lessen naturally, there would be millions dead in this country.
No more shaking hands obviously. Wash your hands good for at least 20 seconds. 6 feet is really not enough social distancing. If someone sneezed or coughed, it could be several times that at least. You shouldn't even face people when talking to them. You need to be careful passing people. You really should avoid that. We don't know enough about how long the virus can be in the air after someone walks by or how long as they walk in front of you. That's why everyone needs to wear a mask. It should be required, but I'm talking about what you need to do to try to protect yourself. You can't rely on the federal, state or local governments on this. Even if yours is doing things right now, it might not matter in the end. The mask can be cloth. Some even recommend adding a coffee filter into it if you can. You need to be careful taking it off of course. It would be good to have a few if you need to go out more than once per week. Need to work daily? Have one for each day of the week. You can't wash it every day.
You need to wash some things when you get them home. Non-perishable stuff you can leave out for awhile. I do it a week. Things that go in the refrigerator should be washed. For the freezer, the virus might be able to live for years. We just don't know. Anything outside and inside the packaging could be contaminated. There are more and more meat processing plants where there are a high number of cases. We just don't know how easily it would be for the virus to be frozen in the food. Once it's cooked thoroughly, it's fine. But while handling it, and the packaging, before that point, you should be careful.
Most of the elected officials in the federal government are lying to you at every turn. I'm not here to debate that point. They are and there is little recourse until November. And if that goes right, noon on January 20th, 2021 is when we can talk about what really needs to be done. Sadly, there's the potential for millions to be dead by then.
A video: "Dr. Gupta shows spread of virus with a restaurant seating chart":
https://www.cnn.com/videos/health/2020/04/21/coronavirus-spread-restaurant-seating-sanjay-gupta-newday-vpx.cnn
It shows how some people got infected at a restaurant. Think about that if you ever think about eating out before vaccine. A fan might have helped blow it around in that case.
CDC director warns second wave of coronavirus is likely to be even more devastating:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/04/21/coronavirus-secondwave-cdcdirector/
"There's a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through," CDC Director Robert Redfield said in an interview with The Washington Post. "And when I've said this to others, they kind of put their head back, they don't understand what I mean."
A remarkably candid assessment given this administration.
I hate constantly being negative about things, but honesty is important right now and we're not getting it from the federal government.
I don't want to get into what happens if they can't come up with an effective vaccine. On that point, I am going to assume that in 18 months to 2 years we might have something that is rather effective. It's not a guarantee obviously, but I do want to be optimistic on that point. (But reality is, it might be years after that and it's possible we may not get something that is very effective.) The other thing is if any somewhat effective treatments come out, like remdesivir ( https://www.gilead.com/purpose/advancing-global-health/covid-19/remdesivir-clinical-trials ) for example. That could be a wildcard, but we count on that.
While the elected leaders in the federal government talk about opening things back up, how good testing is and how much we are making of various things, like ventilators, swabs, masks and other personal protective equipment, the reality is, we are failing across the board.
We could have hardly mishandled this worse. We delayed what will now likely be inevitable, because I don't think at this point, even once we get to hundreds of thousands of deaths in the U.S., that we will see a national stay at home order. It would need to be for several months and at this point, a third of this country wouldn't listen. We had one chance at likely doing this the way it needed to be done. We failed.
The president is talking about how we may have a lot less than 100,000 killed, maybe 50,000 to 60,000. We could be at 50,000 by the end of Thursday or early Friday. We could be at 60,000 by the middle of next week. The models everything was based on were completely unrealistic. It was dangerous how everyone obsessed over these numbers without properly explaining them all the time. We were never going to socially distance like we needed to.
We were never going to get to zero deaths by the end of June.
http://covid19.healthdata.org/
They needed to have, with equal presentation, the models on that site that show what happens if we didn't do what we needed to do. And, show how off their model has been. Have the error. How does an earlier forecast compare to now? They revised their death estimate up today. We keep being above where we should be for the death toll, so they had to. But the model itself is useless at this point. There wasn't enough talk about subsequent waves.
I hope we can keep the death toll out of the millions in the U.S. by the time this is over, but that might be hard.
Much of the federal strategy is to pretend things are getting better and some people are going along with it.
Dr. Birx is a lunatic. You can social distance getting a tattoo? A haircut? She's ridiculous. She's just going along with the idiots at this point.
Trump wanted things to open back up. (He wants some of the states to be liberated. Not quite as bad as Brazil's president wanting a military coup.) Fox News wanted things to open back up. People in Trump's administration wanted things to open back up. Which of those came first, who knows. But they all reinforce each other and the end result is, people protesting in the streets. Most are not social distancing. Some of them will die, some will end up killing their families and some will end up killing medical personnel when some of them need to go to the hospital.
These daily whatever the heck you want to call them's are about spin and lies. Whatever supplies the federal government gets is because they outbid all the states and territories just do they can be the ones to say we helped the states out. Then the states get criticized. For those states that buy from China or South Korea directly, you get criticized for helping the citizens of your states.
Some of the experts said we needed to get down to 1 new case per day per million people. That might be about 330 cases per day in the U.S. and we are still averaging 25,000 new cases each day or more. We're on a plateau right now. We're not going down. We can't test enough daily so naturally the daily new case number is, to some extent at least, low because of it.
We needed to get the cases low so we could track cases.
We still don't have enough tests.
We don't have enough masks and swabs. By the time this gets to a higher peak, we may not have enough ventilators. As bad as things are right now, I think they are going to get considerably worse.
We didn't have a nationwide stay at home order. Some places are not going to before others start to open some things back up.
We aren't ready to contact trace like we would need to. Don't have people, tests or the cases low enough. We needed all of this to have had a chance to open back up and keep infections as low as we could.
I know some states are doing what they need to do, but ultimately, it's likely to fail. Unless every state starts to have a hard border, where you can no longer travel without being forced to quarantine for two weeks under supervision, and we ground air traffic, the states where things are opening back up will ultimately have an impact on other states that did do the right thing at first. The states with Democratic governors can't lockdown for a few years completely, while other states get to open things back up rather significantly. Obviously at some point, when the death tolls in these states where things are opening back up rise precipitously, some of the governors may change their thinking. They'll act like the doctors are wrong, talk about the models being wrong, blame people for not social distancing, blame China and blame anyone else other than themselves. But at that point, a lot of people will be infected and a lot more people will have died. We don't know how deadly this really is, but if it were 2 percent, and half the nation gets infected, that's millions dead. That is a very realistic scenario. It took some time for exponential spread to have hundreds of thousands infected and tens of thousands dead in the U.S. But now that there are hundreds of thousands confirmed to be infected, it will be very easy to see a sharp rise quite quickly. Not months. Weeks. When things open, it could get very bad very quickly.
Having followed hurricane models for the past 15 years, I understand not to put a lot of faith in a single model. We don't have experience with pandemics much. Think about how many times a hurricane model is probably tested, including past storms. You don't take a new model and bet your life on it. We thankfully don't have many pandemics, but it also means not a lot of experience with them that the models can be based on. We can't base this on other countries' curves. America is a very different country. It was ridiculous that there was talk about possibly getting to a point where we saw no deaths later this summer. That can't happen. No one was ever going to social distance for that long. We keep showing models that rely on some areas having stay at home orders for months. They assumed that everyone would be under it at some point. If you have hurricane models saying a storm is going one place, and you get enough people believing that so much that another place doesn't prepare, the hurricane isn't going to hit that place that didn't prepare simply because they didn't prepare. That's not how it works. But that is how it works with these coronavirus models. Everywhere is seeing impacts from this. It's not like one area gets hit and another doesn't, but if people don't do what they need to do, it can be considerably worse. Unimaginably so. And that can have an impact on areas that did do some of what they needed because there are no hard borders between states, or even counties. I think hurricanes are much easier to model than a pandemic like this. Weather is weather. You need powerful supercomputers and a lot of data to input into it from actual observations. With the coronavirus, a handful of people doing what they shouldn't be doing could result in tens of thousands of infections later on due to exponential spread. You can't model this with enough accuracy. The models succeeded in getting enough influential people to feel confident that this is getting better, or that the stay at home orders may not have been needed to begin with. Now it could successfully get millions killed in this country.
You can't expect a model that has hardly ever been tested, because pandemics don't happen like this often, to be too accurate. We're talking about modeling human behavior. People seeing the model, and making decisions based on the model, actually effect the results that the model is trying to forecast. I can't possibly stress how difficult that is to forecast. How about next to impossible.
I wanted to also just mention about antibody testing. I don't know how reliable the tests are out there. There have been some things, which were not peer reviewed, that said that the number of infected might be considerably more than what we think. One said 85 times in one spot. I don't think those are accurate. If they were, that would make the fatality rate very low. This is deadlier than the flu. We don't see the amount of deaths like this from the flu. There have been issues with some antibody tests that picked up on some other coronaviruses. Some of the viruses that go around which are what we refer to as the common cold involves other coronaviruses. Some antibody tests were picking up on that and were wrong. Not sure what antibody tests the people that came out with that used. You don't want to think that you may have some kind of temporary immunity to COVID-19 when in reality you have some antibodies from a cold. Also, it's unknown if you do have any immunity from COVID-19 after you get it. You might for a bit, but that remains unproven. Some people have gotten it again, but the virus may have never gone away in the first place. Additionally, there was some people that tested positive again much later. The tests were sensitive and may not have been picking up on the live virus but remnants. More research is needed.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Attorney General about the stay at home orders:
"We're looking carefully at a number of these rules that are being put into place. And if we think one goes too far, we initially try to jawbone the governors into rolling them back or adjusting them," Barr said during a radio interview on the Howard Hewitt show on Tuesday.
"And if they're not and people bring lawsuits, we file statements of interest and side with the plaintiffs ... As lawsuits develop, as specific cases emerge in the states, we'll take a look at them."
From: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-barr/u-s-attorney-general-wont-rule-out-legal-action-over-state-coronavirus-measures-idUSKCN2232ZO |