(03-13-2020 09:23 AM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote: It doesn't change the overall scope: it only kills those at the margins particularly those at the margins with respiratory or cardiac issues. These are people who should live like there's a pandemic every day because they have a thin margin of error in their health. I feel like what we're seeing is more over-reaction than substance. The Y2K of 2020.
In the US, it's the opposite of Y2K, which was well understood, had a lot of people with advance warning working on the problem, and which would have been quite a problem if people hadn't worked long and hard on preventing it.
"It only kills at the margins" is
thanks to the ability to put people in severe respiratory distress on ventilators. If we elect to allow the spread of the disease to progress far enough to overwhelm our ability to put people on respirators, the percentage death rate will spike.
(03-13-2020 09:32 AM)mpurdy22 Wrote: This is where I get confused. Why do they say this is brand new?? My over 1 year old (think its actually two years old) can of disinfectant spray can says it kills SARS Corona virus and Human Corona virus among the 100 germs it kills. So corona virus doesn't appear to be all that new.
covid19 is a coronavirus that is new to humans. "Coronavirus" is the name for a family of viruses that are round and covered in a fatty lipid and have spikes sticking out that struck somebody as looking like the spikes on old fashioned medieval crowns ... but the exact make-up of the spikes are different for each specific virus in the family.
There are like four "human" coronaviruses that cause colds, because they attack nasal passages. MERS and SARS and COVID19 are caused by coronaviruses that are newly introduced to human populations, so we don't have immunity to them from prior exposure. They also attack lung tissues rather than nasal passages, which is why their symptoms are more like influenza than a cold.
They think that the one causing covid19 may be from a coronavirus endemic among bats, though it might be from a coronavirus that is endemic among pangolins. But in any event, it's new to humans so it's spreading like a novel virus rather than spreading like an endemic one. As Mark Lipsitch at Harvard notes,
Quote: Even seasonal infections can happen “out of season” when they are new.
New viruses have a temporary but important advantage – few or no individuals in the population are immune to them. Old viruses, which have been in the population for longer, operate on a thinner margin — most individuals are immune, and they have to make do with transmitting among the few who aren’t. In simple terms, viruses that have been around for a long time can make a living — spread through the population — only when the conditions are the most favorable, in this case in winter.
The consequence is that new viruses — like pandemic influenza — can spread outside the normal season for their longer-established cousins. For example in 2009, the pandemic started in April-May (well outside of flu season), quieted in the summer (perhaps because of the importance of children in transmission of flu), and then rebounded in September-October, before the start of normal flu season. Seasonality does not constrain pandemic viruses the way it does old ones. This pattern is common for flu pandemics.
Seasonality of SARS-CoV-2: Will COVID-19 go away on its own in warmer weather?
Soap is really good against coronaviruses because of that lipid layer. So is alcohol, but not as much. Peroxide bleach and chlorine bleach disinfect it well (though obviously pick one and stick to it, because the gas from mixing the two can kill you as dead as the coronavirus).