Help the Fight Against COVID-19

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I’ve got a bad case of cabin fever after self-isolating the past few week, so today, I decided to take a quick ride to see what’s going on around town. Nearly every restaurant is having specials to encourage take-out and delivery. Most small businesses and many non-essential big box stores are closed.

But what surprised me was that the local Cabela’s was open and doing business as usual. What is so essential that Cabela’s, which is a huge destination in our area and caters to customers in and out of state well over a 100 mile radius, needs to stay open? This is the type of shit that is keeping us from flattening the curve!
 
Donnie B. said:
Just heard that the Defense Production Act has finally been invoked.
General Motors is under order to build ventilators.
Click to expand...

As long as the employees are safe and willing to work, I see no issue with this. I just hope we don’t end up seeing martial law being imposed, although it may be necessary. People just aren’t obeying orders being given my the local governments.
 
Just talked with my buddy in France who got Covid..
had to go thru 10 days of it alone. He had it for 20 days including the secondary infection he got. Said he was able to work every day... from home... which he does to begin with.... it was something that gave him purpose. It started with a headache.. and then a dry cough... that he was unable to stop.. he coughed up yellow green phlegm.. and eventually traces of blood.. after developing the phlegm he started to get body cramps, contractions... and woke up crying in the morning. He had difficulty sleeping at night.. and would wake up choking out.. and doctor had him sitting chair and drink a glass of water slowly for an hour and cough. He had to learn little tricks when he went to bed.. breathing patterns... and think about every breath he took. He lived in fear every day as it got worse and worse.. and wondered every minute if he was going to pass the point of hospitalization. The entire time the most terrible dry cough imaginable. When he started to feel better, he tried to take a run... and he couldn't breath... next day caught a different symptom and started to develop some issues went to hospital.. got some new medications and started getting better. He's a climber... and he knows a group of strong healthy climbers that got it and became hospitalized.
And this isnt even someone who had to go into the hospital... this shit is terrible. I got to listen from my buddy on why he's 100% positive it's a man made virus
 
@BaronVonGrim:

BaronVonGrim said:
Just talked with my buddy in France who got Covid..
had to go thru 10 days of it alone. He had it for 20 days including the secondary infection he got....
Click to expand...
Yikes, that's rough. Sorry he had to go through that!

Sounds like your buddy had one of the Moderate-to-Severe cases. (Severe would have required hospitalization even earlier on.)

What's really odd about this virus is the way that the fever and the dry cough, and to some degree the headaches, are all typical...but the severity of it all varies so widely that some people experience less than a day of fever and barely a tickle of cough (and no headaches), others have the fever, a few headaches, and cough terribly, but still don't require hospitalization; and still others wind up in the hospital with a ventilator!

Assuming (albeit without benefit of testing to confirm it) that my family had COVID-19 from late February until about 10 days ago, we saw a lot of variation, even within our household:
  • youngest kid: 101.5 Fahrenheit fever for 2 days, dry cough for 2 days, lingering occasional cough for a week (but total time acting sickly was under 5 days)
  • middle kid: felt tired and headachey one day, and had a tickle in the throat the next day, then back to normal (either never had fever, or it went away before we checked for it)
  • eldest kid and both adults: two days of 101-102 degree fever, dry cough, sleeping all day for 4 days, lot of feeling terrible, cough persists badly for 2 weeks and continues sporadically until the present time, any time you try to resume normal routine you have a relapse and feel tired again

So, we saw 1 case of Mild, 1 case of (nearly) Asymptomatic, and 3 cases of Mild-to-Moderate.

On reflection, that ^^^ spread looks a lot like my family's salsa-spiciness preferences. ;)
 
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Just watched this video modeling epidemics and their sensitivity to factors like social distancing, testing-and-quarantining, and the like:



I know there are other similar videos out there illustrating these concepts; I just found this one to be particularly well-done and enjoyable.
 
A huge flaming meteor could fall from the sky and wipe out half of the USA and there'd be those
in the half that was spared who'd come up with conspiracy theories.
 
BaronVonGrim said:
Just talked with my buddy in France who got Covid..
had to go thru 10 days of it alone. He had it for 20 days including the secondary infection he got. Said he was able to work every day... from home... which he does to begin with.... it was something that gave him purpose. It started with a headache.. and then a dry cough... that he was unable to stop.. he coughed up yellow green phlegm.. and eventually traces of blood.. after developing the phlegm he started to get body cramps, contractions... and woke up crying in the morning. He had difficulty sleeping at night.. and would wake up choking out.. and doctor had him sitting chair and drink a glass of water slowly for an hour and cough. He had to learn little tricks when he went to bed.. breathing patterns... and think about every breath he took. He lived in fear every day as it got worse and worse.. and wondered every minute if he was going to pass the point of hospitalization. The entire time the most terrible dry cough imaginable. When he started to feel better, he tried to take a run... and he couldn't breath... next day caught a different symptom and started to develop some issues went to hospital.. got some new medications and started getting better. He's a climber... and he knows a group of strong healthy climbers that got it and became hospitalized.
And this isnt even someone who had to go into the hospital... this shit is terrible. I got to listen from my buddy on why he's 100% positive it's a man made virus
Click to expand...

That sounds pretty terrible!... hope your buddy recovers fully, asap. This is no common flu bug.

Regarding the virus origins
I would encourage reading the study published by Nature this past week.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

After reading the study above, I'm 95% convinced this virus has natural origins, not man-made.

To play the devil's advocate here, I will note that the Nature published study doesn't seem to reference "S-type" vs "L-type" of possible Covid-19 strains. Right now it seems there is some uncertainty on whether these two supposedly different variations should be categorized together, or if the differences are large enough that they should be studied separately. Viruses regularly mutate over time, especially when passed to new hosts... so variation is expected... it all comes down to what the threshold for the variance is.

So, yeah, I would say, this definitely appears to be a naturally occurring coronavirus based on the current scientific research of experts.... and there is certainly precedence for this type of pandemic naturally happening to humanity every XXX years (Spanish Flu, Black Plague, etc).

We'll continue to get more data in coming weeks and months, but for now I would shy away from spreading conspiracy rumors without factual basis. I think we've been somewhat "conditioned" by the arts and entertainment industry to expect that there's always a conspiracy when there's any sort of gap in information (conspiracies are one of the most common sub genres in action, adventure, mystery, sci-fi, thriller and even many drama stories in books, tv and film.)
 
So happy to live in Canada where every individual has access to equal health care. Our stats in the province of British Columbia show a fatal outcome to the virus of 1.5% which only accounts for those tested positive so should be much lower than 1.5%. Can’t stress how important it is to stay at home and protect everyone.
 
For those still questioning about mortality and fatality rates, an interesting graph I just found.

andamento-decessi-bergamo.png

It represents the monthly number of deaths in Bergamo, one of the city with the highest percentage of infected people in Italy which, at the moment, is only ~0.7% presumably.
And it would still be impressive even if the real percentage was ten times higher due to asymptomatic cases.

And this month is not over yet.

Source: https://www.ilpost.it/flashes/morti-bergamo-coronavirus-covid-19

PS: the official covid-19 caused deaths count for Bergamo residents is less than 150 at the moment (136 on march 24th) while, according to the graph, there are currently more than 300 deaths above the usual average.
This probably means that asymptomatic cases are not the only still untested, and that a lot of people is dying at home without even knowing they're infected.
 
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