Have you heard of plasma treatment? Sounds like China has been experimenting with this and has had some good initial results. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30141-9/fulltext
Probably overkill considering even frontline staff are relying on surgical masks. Washing hands (or better yet limit touching things outside your home) is much more important than wearing a mask, also consider the cost - this is likely going to linger for months at least, how many n95 masks are you and your family willing to buy/go through during this period?
The problem here is you need to get people who've recently recovered to donate blood plasma. You are basically doing a blood transfusion to transfer the antibodies from a recovered patient to a sick one. And that's only going to confer protection for a limited time, as you are transferring antibodies, but not the B cells that actually produced the antibodies. Maybe it would be easier to find willing donors with all the people with mild cases, but this seems like it would be a treatment that would be limited to people who are in really bad shape and in intensive care or something. Obviously if you are at that point it would be great, but I don't think you can really pop down to your GP when you feel a little feverish and get a pint of plasma. Seems like more of a severe measure.
The situation looks to be significantly better outside of China and Iran. This virus is still a problem, but looks like much less of a threat than we feared from these numbers. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries Outside of China and Iran the numbers are this Coronavirus Cases: 8070 Deaths: 84 (1%) of total cases Recovered: 439 (5.4%) of total cases Active Cases: 7547 Currently Infected Patients: 7257 (96.2%) in Mild Condition 290 (3.8%) in Serious or Critical
https://www.realclearscience.com/bl..._to_panic_about_the_covid-19_coronavirus.html Five Reasons You Don't Need to Panic About the COVID-19 Coronavirus The COVID-19 coronavirus that emerged in Wuhan, China back in December 2019 is now spreading globally and will undoubtedly be declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) very soon. Its ascendance has already rattled stock markets, disrupted the daily lives of millions, and resulted in the heartbreaking deaths of nearly 3,000 people, including the first in the United States on February 29th. With COVID-19's spread now picking up steam outside of China – it has now arrived in at least 60 countries and new cases are rising almost every day – we can expect its outbreak to get worse before it gets better. Make no mistake, COVID-19 is a grave pathogenic threat which must be taken seriously. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC): More cases are likely to be identified in the coming days, including more cases in the United States. It’s also likely that person-to-person spread will continue to occur, including in the United States. Widespread transmission of COVID-19 in the United States would translate into large numbers of people needing medical care at the same time. Schools, childcare centers, workplaces, and other places for mass gatherings may experience more absenteeism. Public health and healthcare systems may become overloaded, with elevated rates of hospitalizations and deaths. Other critical infrastructure, such as law enforcement, emergency medical services, and transportation industry may also be affected. Health care providers and hospitals may be overwhelmed. The CDC's warning is frank and unnerving. It is an impetus for sober and reasoned action. Stock up on a week's worth of frozen/canned food. Restock your medicine cabinet. Practice proper hygiene. Stay home if you're feeling sick. There is no need, however, to panic. If you're feeling in any way anxious about the coronavirus outbreak, here are five facts to help assuage your worries. 1. The number of cases in China is already falling significantly. Where once the graph of coronavirus cases in China showed an exponential climb, it has now leveled off substantially. Just three weeks ago, China was recording more than 3,000 new cases per day. Officials are now consistently reporting fewer than five hundred, with the number still dropping. Seeing much-improved conditions on the ground, big companies like Starbucks and Apple in China are resuming business activities. The latest (Feb. 29th) World Health Organization (WHO) situation report revealed 435 new cases in China in the previous 24 hours. 2. The vast majority of cases are mild, and the death rate is likely lower than reported. A large study of 72,000 confirmed COVID-19 patients in China found that 81% of cases were mild, another 14% were severe (characterized by difficulty breathing), and 5% were critical. Overall, the death rate was 2.3 percent. More recently, the WHO reported a death rate of 3.8% in China, but noted that it is rapidly falling as standards of care quickly improve. Early on, the city of Wuhan (where the disease originated) was inundated with patients and hospitals could not provide proper care due to overwhelming demand. For Chinese patients whose symptoms started after February 1st, the death rate is just 0.7 percent. (For comparison, the U.S. death rate from 2019-20's annual flu oubtreak is between .06 percent to 0.1 percent. SARS a similar virus to COVID-19, had a death rate of 9.6 percent.) The death rate could be even lower, as very mild cases of COVID-19 that resemble a common cold likely go unreported. 3. Only one out of every 1,000 people in Hubei Province has contracted the coronavirus. There have been 66,337 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in China's Hubei Province, where the outbreak began in December. That sounds like a lot, but keep in mind that the population of Hubei is 59,170,000. The province is slightly smaller than Nebraska, but with thirty times as many inhabitants. With this sort of population density, it's a positive sign that just .11% (roughly 1 in 1000) of the population has caught COVID-19. Even if there were 53,000 unreported cases, that would mean only one out of every 500 people in Hubei caught the virus. Given the population density in most other countries is significantly lower than in China, we can expect that the coronavirus will have a much harder time spreading in much of the world. 4. There have been no reported deaths in young children. Though the outbreak has endured for more than nine weeks, there still have been no fatalities in children under the age of nine, with almost all infected simply experiencing cold-like symptoms. Moreover, only 2.4% of cases are in individuals under the age of 18. Kids and teenagers have been surprisingly resistant to the virus. The death rate for people aged 10 to 39 currently stands at just 0.2 percent. Those genuinely at risk from COVID-19 are the elderly. People aged 80 and up have a 14.8% to 21.9% chance of dying if infected. 5. The world already survived another pandemic just ten years ago. Remember H1N1, more commonly known as Swine Flu? This was the most recent pandemic (besides HIV/AIDS, which is still considered a pandemic). It began in early 2009 and lasted through late 2010. Between April 2009 and April 2010, there were approximately 60.8 million cases, 274,304 hospitalizations, and 12,469 deaths in the United States alone! Globally, it likely infected between 700 million and 1.4 billion people, resulting in 150,000 to 575,000 fatalities. While this loss of life was tragic, more than a decade later, many scarcely remember Swine Flu. The same will hopefully happen with COVID-19.
As already clearly mentioned in the CDC report, the biggest threat of this disease compared with H1N1 or other kinds of flu is that it can easily overload the healthcare system. For H1N1, only 0.45% of cases require hospitalization while that number for COVID-19 could be over 19% (in China), assuming all severe and critical cases require hospitalization. Even if the number in China is a big overrated, the actual number should still be at least 9% -- which is 20 times of that of flu. Meanwhile, this disease is more infectious than H1N1 so if there are more infected cases, hospitals will definitely be overwhelmed. In the city Daegu, Korea, there were 1300 patients that needed hospitalization but could not be admitted, according to local media in Feb. 29. As for the significant falling of cases in China, do not overlook that it was due to strict nationwide measures with a significant financial cost and therefore might not be easily adopted elsewhere.
The European pathogen got a pair of different strains from the Wuhan one....mutation so it seems. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...-for-weeks-before-it-was-detected#maincontent
I fully understand the worst case scenario risks but we need to also keep in mind the not so bad scenarios in order to not completely panic over this virus. South Korea is the gold standard for mass scale testing so far and they are having the craziest outlier scenario to deal with in the case of that religious cult. Anyhow, they are currently at death rate of 0.6% with 99.4% of active cases classified as mild and 0.6% as serious/critical. If you look at the example of the Diamond Princess cruise where we have about 3700 people in a confined space. About 705 were infected which is a little under 20%. Out of that 7 have died which is a death rate of just under 1%. 36 out of the 705 cases have been severe/critical which is around a 5.1% rate. This means nearly 95% of the cases were mild. I am going to guess the average age of a cruise ship skews to being older than the general population as well. All of that said the major negative with the Diamond Princess is the low total recovered rate around 14.2% or only 100 of the 705 total cases. This could be due to extreme caution and I can't really find any updates.
reduced death and critical care rate is good news Isn't it easier to isolate in a confined fixed environment (Diamond Princess)? How do you isolate what you don't know? SK has done massive (free) testing. I think they tracked down and tested all 200k+ member of that church. Is US going to expand to massive free testing?
From my understanding there were a lot of mistakes made during the quarantine on the Diamond Princess and it spread more than it should have. That said I was looking for more updates on it and I really can't find anything. I would guess once we get decently reliable kits then testing will skyrocket here like what was mentioned with No Worries link. Hopefully we can follow in South Korea's footsteps.
Singapore has confirmed 108 cases. 78 have fully recovered/ discharged. 24 in hospital (stable), 6 in ICU, 0 deaths so far. 3,140 who came into close contact with patients were quarantined, 2,805 have completed quarrantine, 335 still under quarantined. https://www.moh.gov.sg/news-highlig...ew-cases-of-covid-19-infection-confirmed-2Mar
Looking ahead to spring break - March 13. Any idea where this goes in the next two weeks? Would be nice to actually take a break from the world with the family on a road trip, but weighing whether we should cancel our plans. San Antonio and New Orleans. I'm a little nervous, but then I don't think a road trip would be any less concerning that staying in HTown . . . thoughts?
