quote:

Originally posted by r0gue:
Help me out here, please. Am I wrong about this?

The CDC predicts 18,000 - 46,000 deaths in the US from the flu virus this year alone. And people can't be bothered to even get their free flu vaccination shot. It seems to me the media is the amping us all to total hysteria.

Am I right? Or am I missing something that makes this respiratory virus more insidious?

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/...season-estimates.htm

Some perspective. Influenza (H1N1 - Influenza A, about which you may have heard) entered the "herd" (actually, when we noticed it) in the second decade of the 1900s, probably from a bird reservoir. It infected a half-billion people globally, then more than a quarter of the human population. Fifty million of them died. Maybe more. Maybe a lot more - maybe over 100 million. We don't know. China, comparatively, had relatively fewer deaths, most likely because of herd immunity acquired from living in proximity to a source. And leading to speculation that it may have originated there. Which in my opinion is probably true.

The pandemic spread to the US probably originating in Kansas. It spread worldwide within a year, and almost no one had immunity (with the notable exception of the Chinese). Average mortality ultimately was 2-3% of those infected, but it ranged up to almost 25% in a population. in the US, it was about 0.5%. It came in two waves, the second wave deadlier than the first. And China, interestingly, was then not so immune. Maybe ten million died. Or maybe one milion. We don't know.

And then it went away. Or not. You may recall the H1N1 declared pandemic of 2009, this time, probably, from pigs. Worldwide over a half million died. It entered the US from Mexico, and spread from the Southwest. Over 12,000 deaths in the US, occurring during the Obama administration. You will notice a trend - the new pandemic killed less than one percent of the first. The herd now had immunity - first because of acquired immunity, second because of induced immunity (vaccines), and third because most of the un-immune had died.

The "old" viruses are with us still, and part of the general collage of respiratory viruses that pop up and infect the herd in an intriguingly seasonal manner. They appear not to like elevated temperatures, but that's only a guess as to why "seasonal." It could be something else entirely. The seasonal death rate globally for influenza averages around 500,000 now. We think. The herd is immune.

Until now. The current COVID-19 pandemic is what happens when a novel (new) organism invades, to which the herd is not immune (completely). The difference is, that the new player (SARS-CoV-2) is not completely new. It is derived, as far as we can tell, from all of its ancestors (above). So the herd will resist this virus, as it did before, and does every year. A hundred million people will not die. But thousands will, probably somewhere on the order of later outbreaks, and maybe not as many as seasonal related viruses cause, but unfortunately parallel with them. So any panic we feel, in my opinion, should be on the order of the yearly panic we experience when flu season is announced. And in my opinion, we should reserve our maximum panic level for the next novel (new) organism, unrelated to the current pantheon of respiratory viruses that by now are old acquaintances (I wouldn't say "friends," but they are, in fact, part of "us"). The next one may be a complete stranger.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Doc H.,

quote:

Originally posted by r0gue:
Help me out here, please. Am I wrong about this?

The CDC predicts 18,000 - 46,000 deaths in the US from the flu virus this year alone. And people can't be bothered to even get their free flu vaccination shot. It seems to me the media is the amping us all to total hysteria.

Am I right? Or am I missing something that makes this respiratory virus more insidious?

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/...season-estimates.htm

Death rates are about 1 in 50 and that's how it really differs from flu. Now, flu puts kids and elderly most at risk of fatal pneumonia. This also seems to kill some middle aged healthy people. Also, flu lives a very short while on surfaces, almost all transmitted by air, person to person. This appears to also be transmitted by droplets and lives a very long period on surfaces, requiring sterilizing and decontamination, much like Noravirus. Then of course, for flu, we have vaccines and we have anti-virals but have neither for this. Then last, flu is generally contagious no more than one day before you show signs of the disease and one day after all signs are gone. This appears to be contagious up to 14 days before and 14 after or perhaps even more. This is closer to SARS but far more widespread and contagious. To control it's spread, needs to be treated much like Ebola probably.

Bottom line is someone is highly contagious an additional 26 days compared to the flu, and we have no vaccines or medicine directly for it and nobody knows when we'll see the end of it.

I was discussing this with a friend yesterday and we had a question that I had not heard answered before..

In the past, the regular flu shot we’ve received was in fact for a slightly different strain of the flu that actually came here. We were still told that while that may be the case if you were to get the flu your symptoms would be milder and less severe..

Would the same be true in this case? That is are those of us who have received our normal flu shot slightly less susceptible?
I understand that we may not have enough data points to say one way or another....

quote:

Originally posted by smlsig:
In the past, the regular flu shot we’ve received was in fact for a slightly different strain of the flu that actually came here. We were still told that while that may be the case if you were to get the flu your symptoms would be milder and less severe..

Would the same be true in this case? That is are those of us who have received our normal flu shot slightly less susceptible?

This virus is not specifically related to the influenza viruses, so your flu vaccine will not affect it. It is from a different family of viruses.

The comparisons to the flu are due to the similar symptoms and transmission methods, not due to any close relation between the viruses themselves.

quote:

Originally posted by jimmy123x:
Death rates are about 1 in 50 and that's how it really differs from flu. Now, flu puts kids and elderly most at risk of fatal pneumonia.

We still don't have great data, but more recent data seems to indicate that initial estimates of mortality rate were significantly overstated.

The Guan paper mentioned in the article below found a 1.4% mortality rate among hospitalized patients in China with a confirmed diagnosis. It doesn't account for people who get the disease and don't get sick enough to end up in the hospital.

This article is from the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the most respected medical publications there is.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387

>On the basis of a case definition requiring a diagnosis of pneumonia, the currently reported case fatality rate is approximately 2%.4 In another article in the Journal, Guan et al.5 report mortality of 1.4% among 1099 patients with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19; these patients had a wide spectrum of disease severity. If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.2

quote:

Originally posted by Doc H.:
Some perspective.

Excellent "Cliff's Notes" version. Thanks, Doc!

Going out of our way to comment about the concerns of others is a common way of validating our own lack of action. Very often the ones who are most vocal in ridiculing people who take protective measures know in their heart of hearts that they should be doing something themselves, but they don’t want the trouble and inconvenience. An extremely common example are the people who want private gun ownership banned because they don’t like the idea of having to defend themselves.

Is there anything the average American should be doing now? There’s no way of knowing at this time how the epidemic will progress. Will stocking up on toilet paper or bottled water be a wise move? Well, it certainly can’t hurt at any time, and the people who question why it might be a good idea don’t understand the possible consequences of a serious pandemic. Anyone who has been paying the slightest attention should know by now that this disease has already affected the supply chain of various goods and materials. What happens if things get bad enough that our local plant stops treating our water because of lack of personnel to operate it or because it can’t get the necessary chemicals to do the job?

Plus, as I’ve pointed out before, the effects of a disease on society are not limited to how they affect the individual sufferer. Whether we like it or not, how it affects the behavior of those who don’t have it is just as important, if not more so.

Then there’s the mortality rate of the disease. A two percent rate, or one in 50 doesn’t sound too dangerous, but consider what that means to us and the people we know.

My small agency has 25 employees. A 2% death rate means there is a 98% chance that any specific infected individual will survive. If only 12 of those people contract the disease, however, the chance that all will survive drops to 78%, i.e., there is a 22% chance—one in five—that one will die. And then what about their families? Assuming an average family size of three, and that 36 develop the disease, the probability that at least one of those people who are relatively close to me will die increases to over 50 percent. Another way to look at a two percent mortality rate is if half of the people in my small county (~3500) develop the disease, 70 would die.
(I agree, however, that the mortality rate of COVID-19 is probably much less than two percent because there are many undiagnosed cases. But regardless of what the true rate is, we owe it to ourselves to understand what such figures mean.)

As for whether people are “panicking,” I’m reminded of that movie line, “You keep saying that word, but I don’t believe it means what you think it means.” We have seen nothing close to a panicked reaction to the disease in this country thus far. If the BS news media is hyping the situation in an effort to keep their viewers enthralled (and tuned in), people who are equating concern and precautions with panic aren’t helping either.

“I am prudent, you are fearful, he is panicking.”

Edited: mortality, not morality.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: sigfreund,

I'm coming back to the South Koreans, who are testing like crazy. And the more they test, and the more cases they find, the lower the fatality rate gets. On 25 February they had about 10:1,000 = 1.0 percent. On the 27th, they had 13:1,766 = 0.74. Yesterday it was 17:3,150 = 0.54. Today it's 17:3,526 = 0.48.

Of course some among the newer cases might eventually die, too; but I suspect when it's all sorted, there will be no more than the 0.4 percent fatalities of all known cases reported some time ago already for China outside Wubei province. And there are probably some, but I still have to see confirmed reports of significant numbers of healthy middle-aged people dying of this.

quote:

Originally posted by sigfreund:
Going out of our way to comment about the concerns of others is a common way of validating our own lack of action. Very often the ones who are most vocal in ridiculing people who take protective measures know in their heart of hearts that they should be doing something themselves, but they don’t want the trouble and inconvenience. An extremely common example are the people who want private gun ownership banned because they don’t like the idea of having to defend themselves.

Is there anything the average American should be doing now? There’s no way of knowing at this time how the epidemic will progress. Will stocking up on toilet paper or bottled water be a wise move? Well, it certainly can’t hurt at any time, and the people who question why it might be a good idea don’t understand the possible consequences of a serious pandemic. Anyone who has been paying the slightest attention should know by now that this disease has already affected the supply chain of various goods and materials. What happens if things get bad enough that our local plant stops treating our water because of lack of personnel to operate it or because it can’t get the necessary chemicals to do the job?

Plus, what I’ve pointed out before, the effects of a disease on society are not limited to how they affect the individual sufferer. Whether we like it or not, how it affects the behavior of those who don’t have it is just as important, if not more so.

Then there’s the morality rate of the disease. A two percent rate, or one in 50 doesn’t sound too dangerous, but consider what that means to us and the people we know.

My small agency has 25 employees. A 2% death rate means there is a 98% chance that any specific infected individual will survive. If only 12 of those people contract the disease, however, the chance that all will survive drops to 78%, i.e., there is a 22% chance—one in five—that one will die. And then what about their families? Assuming an average family size of three, and that 36 develop the disease, the probability that at least one of those people who are relatively close to me will die increases to over 50 percent. Another way to look at a two percent mortality rate is if half of the people in my small county (~3500) develop the disease, 70 would die.
(I agree, however, that the mortality rate of COVID-19 is probably much less than two percent because there are many undiagnosed cases. But regardless of what the true rate is, we owe it to ourselves to understand what such figures mean.)

As for whether people are “panicking,” I’m reminded of that movie line, “You keep saying that word, but I don’t believe it means what you think it means.” We have seen nothing close to a panicked reaction to the disease in this country thus far. If the BS news media is hyping the situation in an effort to keep their viewers enthralled (and tuned in), people who are equating concern and precautions with panic aren’t helping either.

“I am prudent, you are fearful, he is panicking.”

So.....How much toilet paper and water did you buy?

quote:

Originally posted by PowerSurge:
So.....How much toilet paper and water did you buy?

None—because I already had an adequate reserve stock of both on hand for reasons having nothing to do with this disease.
But despite how difficult it is for some people to understand that not everyone’s circumstances and ability to be prepared in advance are the same, many others must wait until there’s some prodding.

And as for me, I also have about 3 feet of crystalized water piled up all around my house if I need it, and filters to help ensure I don’t get any more common diseases from using it.

have a domestic air travel trip upcoming

will be watching the developments closely this week

--------------------------------------

quote:

Originally posted by sigfreund:
And as for me, I also have about 3 feet of crystalized water piled up all around my house ...

Don't eat the yellow crystalized water

quote:

Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:

quote:

Originally posted by slosig:
I use a corny trick a PT friend gave me when I fly commercial - Take antibiotic ointment like bacitracin or neosporin (if you don’t have common allergy to neomycin), squirt some on a Q-tip and wipe it around the inside of your nostril. Turn it around goop up the other end and hit your other nostril. You now have a sticky physical barrier to stop people’s funk from getting to you through your sinuses and an antibiotic effect too.

I dunno if it works, but I’ve not gotten sick on a flight since I started doing it. Nope, I don’t fly commercial enough for that to mean much statistically, but it doesn’t appear to hurt anything either.

I'm not sure antibiotics will be very helpful against a virus like the flu or the coronavirus. But i suppose it will act as a barrier of some sort. One still has to breath though.

My grandmother taught us that trick way back when I was a child in the fifties/sixties. She suggested Vaseline, but the idea was similar. Not so much antibiotic, but a barrier, and perhaps the notion "germs don't do well in grease", or some such. Don't know if that's true or not, but the idea of a barrier covering your mucus membranes does make sense to me, as does the idea that it can help heal dry, cracked membranes so they function better. Any docs want to comment?

The (understanding) anatomy of the respiratory system reveals that a little ointment in the nostrils, is like lining the bank of a river with a towel, in an effort to dam the water.

The towel will get wet, but nearly all the water in the river is going to laugh at the towels.

Nostril hair, adenoids and the mucous membranes capture most pollen, dust, a lot of viral and bacterial matter, and the immune system deals with things that it can. It's why we only have a light response to most things.

But the nostrils are pretty much useless in preventing virus and bacteria from getting into the deeper part of the respiratory system.

They are only about 1% of the tracts that are actually where a virus is going to come in contact.

quote:

Originally posted by sigmonkey:
The (understanding) anatomy of the respiratory system reveals that a little ointment in the nostrils, is like lining the bank of a river with a towel, in an effort to dam the water.

That would be my thinking.

First, know that I'm not even remotely Anti-Vax.

But it just occurred to me that I can't even remember the last time I've had a Flu shot. I've no idea, off hand. It's been years. Many years.

Is that dumb? Am I wrong or being foolish? I'm a healthy dude, about 50 now, pretty fit for a non-professional athlete, etc. But I don't get sick much. Thr ocasional cold or brief seasonal allergies maybe.

I'm not "making some stand", really I just never think of it or worry about it.

Should I, anyway? I guess I don't know the correct answer to that (,musing, thinking aloud).

Hmmm.

quote:

Is that dumb? Am I wrong or being foolish?

Nope. Never had one, likely never will until it is verified to cover every possible strain which seems impossible. I'm in contact with people frequently and have been so for (including college) the last 36 years. I've MAYBE had the flu about 3 or 4 times. I know people that got the shot that got the flu anyway (not the symptom reaction).

Perhaps when I reach an age or physical condition where I become a candidate for complications, but until then, I don't feel the need.

quote:

Originally posted by 46and2:
First, know that I'm not even remotely Anti-Vax.

But it just occurred to me that I can't even remember the last time I've had a Flu shot. I've no idea, off hand. It's been years. Many years.

Is that dumb? Am I wrong or being foolish? I'm a healthy dude, about 50 now, pretty fit for a non-professional athlete, etc. But I don't get sick much. Thr ocasional cold or brief seasonal allergies maybe.

I'm not "making some stand", really I just never think of it or worry about it.

Should I, anyway? I guess I don't know the correct answer to that (,musing, thinking aloud).

Hmmm.

The very short answer is, yes. And a little longer explanation - the vaccine (whatever is current) may not protect you from getting the flu (whatever is current), or at least some symptoms from same. What it will do is provoke an immune response you wouldn't otherwise have - most likely against the flu strain going around at the time. Which will not then make you as ill as you might have been otherwise, because your body will be alerted that something bad may attack it, and have antibodies prepared. And it will "remember" for future, similar baddies, at least for awhile. There are risks associated with introducing immune-provoking agents into your system, including an allergic response. But overall, risks are significantly lower than not having your soldiers ready and waiting at the wall, when the barbarian hordes invade. Because the barbarian hordes may sack your city if they get through, leaving nothing behind. And the more of the horde you kill, the less likely they are to invade neighboring kingdoms.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Doc H.,

We may be on our way to this being endemic in the population due to the community of spread by healthy individuals. Co-morbidity seems to be a bigger factor than covid-19 alone for severity. It will take time for the population to tamp down this bug. We may learn a few things about staying healthy and avoiding diabetes, heart failure, copd and dementia in our elder years. Take care all.

quote:

Originally posted by amals:

quote:

Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:

quote:

Originally posted by slosig:
I use a corny trick a PT friend gave me when I fly commercial - Take antibiotic ointment like bacitracin or neosporin (if you don’t have common allergy to neomycin), squirt some on a Q-tip and wipe it around the inside of your nostril. Turn it around goop up the other end and hit your other nostril. You now have a sticky physical barrier to stop people’s funk from getting to you through your sinuses and an antibiotic effect too.

I dunno if it works, but I’ve not gotten sick on a flight since I started doing it. Nope, I don’t fly commercial enough for that to mean much statistically, but it doesn’t appear to hurt anything either.

I'm not sure antibiotics will be very helpful against a virus like the flu or the coronavirus. But i suppose it will act as a barrier of some sort. One still has to breath though.

My grandmother taught us that trick way back when I was a child in the fifties/sixties. She suggested Vaseline, but the idea was similar. Not so much antibiotic, but a barrier, and perhaps the notion "germs don't do well in grease", or some such. Don't know if that's true or not, but the idea of a barrier covering your mucus membranes does make sense to me, as does the idea that it can help heal dry, cracked membranes so they function better. Any docs want to comment?

Yes. The antibiotic part of the ointment might help with bacterial contamination, but all you have is the physical barrier against viral stuff. Still, it is unlikely to cause any problems and may help with some. YMMV.