@aligncareSo, do we have to hear about every new case of the flu from now on? Geez.
Hey, I’m just getting over a doozy of a 2-week long cold. I had rivers of snot. Kleenex made a fortune on me, their stock went up. Why didn’t that make national news?
My message to the democrat party media is simple: You’re milking it, you bozos!
Your cold didn’t make national news because we know what a common cold is, how it spreads, what symptoms is causes and common colds, while miserable, rarely results in fatal complications or puts people in the ICU.
We also know what influenza is, what strains are circulating and where and who is most at risk. And we have vaccines for influenza and medications that can lessen the effects and shorten the duration. And we know how influenza is transmitted and when the flu season starts and typically ends and have reliable tests for it and a good surveillance system for tracking its spread and severity and also if a new or “novel†strain of influenza appears, like the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, when to raise alarms.
And influenza deaths, especially when it results in the deaths of young and healthy people typically does make at least the local news, often more as a cautionary tale as to the importance of getting a flu shot and not ignoring or failing to seek treatment when signs of pneumonia or sepsis appear.
A record-breaking 105 US children have died from flu so far this seasonhttps://www.cnn.com/2020/02/21/health/child-flu-deaths-105/index.htmlhttps://news.google.com/search?for=child%20dies%20from%20flu&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen
“CDC estimates that the burden of illness during the 2018–2019 season included an estimated 35.5 million people getting sick with influenza, 16.5 million people going to a health care provider for their illness, 490,600 hospitalizations, and 34,200 deaths from influenzaâ€.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html
That is a lot of illness and a lot of deaths and most of those deaths occur in most of the same populations suspetible to SARS-CoV-2 – the elderly and people with underlying health conditions although this year’s A strain of H1N1 does seem to be causing serious illness and deaths in children more than usual.
But understand that with this novel coronavirus, there are still a lot of unknowns. And “novel†is the key word. It means a new contagion that never infected humans previously and something for which no one has had prior exposure to and therefore no immunity.
What we think we know so far is that it is less deadly than SARS or MERS but is perhaps more contagious which is not good. A Case Fatality Rate (CRF) of around 2% puts it into the same CFR as the 1918-19 “Spanish Flu†but we do not yet know if it will spread as rapidly or as extensively or if this is just the first wave similar to the “Spanish Flu†that in its first wave that first appeared in the spring of 1918 was deadly for some and disappeared by summer, only to return in the fall of 1918 in a much more lethal form.
And we do not yet know the exact CFR of SARS-CoV-2 because, and much like influenza, not all people infected seek medical care and therefore are not tested and some can be somewhat asymptomatic, plus the fact that testing in the US has been woefully low because of shortages in test kits and initial misguidance from the CDC on who should be tested which thankfully is now being addressed. The upside of people with mild symptoms or asymptomatic is that this could lower the overall CFR - the downside is that this could mean wide scale spread and what we are beginning to see – community spread.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-commemoration/three-waves.htmThen there is the R0. Currently, the R0 for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease COVID-19, is estimated at about 2.2, meaning a single infected person will infect about 2.2 others, on average. By comparison, the flu has an R0 of 1.3.
All this doesn’t mean I’m headed down to the bunker (yet).
But to claim this is nothing more than a “cold†or that it is an invention of the liberal media to take down Trump, is both stupid and dangerous.
Read up on the 1918-19 Influenza pandemic, why it got the name “Spanish Flu†and how media censorship among nations engaged in WWI played down the pandemic, including in the US under the Sedition Act and how that likely contributed to many deaths.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/journal-plague-year-180965222/Lastly if this is no big deal, then why has the Trump administration put even more travel bans in place, is meeting with manufacturers of PPE and may evoked war time powers under the Defense Production Act to force them to ramp up production of coronavirus protective gear, is meeting with pharmaceutical companies on vaccine production and why is FEMA mobilizing a response?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fema-prepping-possible-coronavirus-emergency-declaration-n1147016
