Latest Coronavirus - Yikes

#4,601
#4,601
sutro said:
I think that this would be highly unlikely. If I were were bothering to spend the money to engineer something, it certainly wouldn't have the characteristics of this virus. Not nearly deadly enough to make a difference if you are deploying it against an enemy. Kills the wrong people if you wanted to destabilize via panic - try killing young adults or children for maximal effect here. The biggest reason, though, is that most bioweapons have a really crappy track record. If virulent enough to achieve your goals, most viruses will just keep going right past your intended target to circle back and bite you in the butt. Most bacteria haven't panned out. Anthrax is interesting given the extremely difficult-to-achieve aerosolized spore delivery option, but relatively easily countered with antibiotics. Most US interest dried up years and years ago due to the inherent limitations of biological agents as weapons. Nerve agents were a much more sure thing.

Our knowledge of viruses only extends as far as our modern experience. The degree of human expansion into previously uninhabited areas, abnormal environmental conditions or the search for food or animals for research have periodically put humans into contact with reservoir species, leading to Ebola, Marburg, Machupo, Hantavirus, SARS, MERS. I'd put my money on this being a similar zoonotic exposure.

The long incubation period and extremely variable severity (though apparently with the ability to achieve asymptomatic transmission) does make this virus a lot harder to spot, as many won't even seek care. That, and the initial sweeping under the rug of severe cases by local authorities as far back as late November or early December, is likely what allowed this to spread so widely. I'm not yet convinced by the scattered reports of reinfection. Definitely possible given some chance of incomplete immunity, but as a mainly lower respiratory virus, it may simply be a case of nasal swabs being transiently negative when a BAL would have picked up virus particles.

At the moment, from my perspective as an ED doc, the most difficult thing about controlling the spread of this virus here is that it is clinically indistinguishable from flu or other respiratory viruses and we still don't have short-turnaround molecular testing available to identify it while the patient is still in the ED. As of friday night, I was still shut down by the health department on doing a swab of a university student with an unexplained fever and negative PCR respiratory viral panel (for the standard pediatric respiratory viruses, but doesn't include COVID) but suggestive symptoms, and we have already had (since the end of January) 3 positives as of last friday and one case of community transmission IN MY MEDIUM-SIZED COMMUNITY HOSPITAL. That's not even considering the cases with suggestive symptoms that CDC didn't authorize testing on due to geographic limits of testing or lack of sufficient severity of illness. Being told to self-quarantine because you maybe have something is one thing. Being told to self-quarantine because you definitely have the virus and might kill your grandparents if you don't is another entirely. I'm not sold on the efficacy of the no-test self-quarantine model.

As a result, I think that due to clinically silent or insignificant cases combined with rigorous requirements for testing (probably due to lack of availability of test kits for the last month) we have accidentally recapitulated the Chinese model of failing to achieve local control when we had the chance. I'm not looking forward to the next couple of months in the ED. We've already had about 20 staff quarantined, and that's only going to increase until we get real-time diagnostics in our hospital lab, which is still probably a few weeks in the future, if it happens at all.

By the way, I had a conversation about SARS with colleagues in late January and found this article. Really interesting. One lucky thing about this outbreak is that it doesn't seem that super spreading is as prevalent.

SARS article
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I appreciate your point of view. I don't think that means it wasn't engineered. I never claimed it was intentionally released which I don't think it was. I think it was accidentally released. I think it was a work in progress. I think our government knows it.
 
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#4,602
#4,602
In less than a week the virus has appeared in California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Texas, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Florida and it's now killed 6 people. Never fear though the press conference today said the risk to the public is LOW. GTFO!

LMFAO!
 
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#4,605
#4,605
Coug said:
In less than a week the virus has appeared in California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Texas, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Florida and it's now killed 6 people. Never fear though the press conference today said the risk to the public is LOW. GTFO!

LMFAO!
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How many have died from the flu in the same time period?
 
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#4,606
#4,606
Coug said:
In less than a week the virus has appeared in California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Texas, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Florida and it's now killed 6 people. Never fear though the press conference today said the risk to the public is LOW. GTFO!

LMFAO!
Click to expand...

6 deaths out of 320 million people sounds incredibly low-risk to me.
 
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#4,607
#4,607
Coug said:
In less than a week the virus has appeared in California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Texas, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Florida and it's now killed 6 people. Never fear though the press conference today said the risk to the public is LOW. GTFO!

LMFAO!
Click to expand...
That type of spread would be completely expected with a novel respiratory virus during this season. The risk to the public is very low, but the virus does warrant close monitoring and infection precautions.
 
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#4,608
#4,608
golfballs said:
CNBC had a staff physician from NY Presbyterian hospital. He said he expects thousands of cases here in the US by next week. Really??
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Makes sense with the large scale testing availability that’s supposed to be coming out next week. Hopefully we’ll get confirmation of all the infected folks currently walking around the country.
 
#4,609
#4,609
AM64 said:
You and my wife would have a good time discussing that. She was a diploma nurse - then got her BSN, MSN, and DNP, and still believes that the fundamental thing is actual patient care ... including sitting down and talking with them, learning who they are and where the come from, and then with that suggesting to them how best to manage after they leave the hospital. Her plans to teach never seem to work that well because she sees what nurses should do differently from what educators think ... it just turns into a constant struggle that she hates.
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I just have a ton of health care works in my family so I’ve heard and seen it all my life . NGV is one of those special nurses like that . People love her and her Patient care is top notch because she takes the time to connect with them and balance their health care needs with their needs as a person , like your wife is talking about . So many get busy doing what’s just required of them that they forget why they originally got into nursing to start with . I have zero medical knowledge like your wife or my wife but I get to hear the human side of it . Good floor nurses run your facility , it’s not the admin or the Drs . They are the life blood of your staff , ( IMO ) we should be careful not to educate the compassion they have for their patients out of them . End of rant .. sorry 😊
 
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#4,613
#4,613
0nelilreb said:
I just have a ton of health care works in my family so I’ve heard and seen it all my life . NGV is one of those special nurses like that . People love her and her Patient care is top notch because she takes the time to connect with them and balance their health care needs with their needs as a person , like your wife is talking about . So many get busy doing what’s just required of them that they forget why they originally got into nursing to start with . I have zero medical knowledge like your wife or my wife but I get to hear the human side of it . Good floor nurses run your facility , it’s not the admin or the Drs . They are the life blood of your staff , ( IMO ) we should be careful not to educate the compassion they have for their patients out of them . End of rant .. sorry 😊
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Nope. That was good. It's the compassion and the one on one understanding that make the really good nurses. The technical aspects can be taught - those talents that patients really appreciate come from within. I know I don't have what it takes - as my wife never lets me forget when I'm trying to take care of her. We spend far much time and effort crediting people at the top; in fact, that's not where the good things happen.
 
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