Popped in to see what the Piggs were saying about the virus.
Glad to see Hobie is offering up the “closing schools seems like overkill” opinion. I tend to lean that way as well. I feel like the media has learned all too well that their livelihood ebbs and flows with panic and I feel they do their very best to feed it at every chance they get – most obviously with Trump, and now with the COVID-19.
Also glad to see that there is some reasonable discussion going on here. Hoping we can keep the politics out of it. I am not sure how anyone can say that the government is late in dealing with this since 60 people have died in two weeks while 100 die every day in automobile accidents. Not 1 person in San Diego has died and all the schools are closed.
With that said, some of the numbers appear significant. The growth in the US is pretty clearly exponential so nipping that early makes sense.
I wonder about the actual death rate vs. the measured death rate. I know a friend who took his daughter to ER last night because she showed 3 symptoms of the virus: very tired, fever, soreness in her chest when breathing. No cough. The hospital basically told her she had the flu, but did not test for the flu or for COVID-19. They were basically told that if your fever is really high and you are having real difficulty breathing and really worried about not getting enough air, then they would pay attention and maybe test you. Or if you recently traveled to infected areas. They also said they have been very busy with flu patients. I’m not sure how they know it isn’t a mild case of COVID-19.
I also read an article today that said there are 1200 COVID-19 test kits for all of San Diego.
Put that number together with the story from the ER and it sounds like the only people they test are the ones that are dying, which makes the measured death rate among “confirmed” cases massive. Also, the number of cases may be astronomically higher than those reported since they only test people who are very sick or coming from infected areas. I mean – how could San Diego possibly report more than 1200 cases if that is all the test kits they have.
The measured death rate is 3% or so. CDC or WHO estimated the actual rate under 1%. Could be much, much lower, in reality.
I put those together and it sounds like just another flu to me.
Lastly, I wonder if the overall effect of just letting the thing run its course would, in the end, be less disruptive than trying to stop it and having it not really work and everyone gets it anyway.
The article below suggested that 160,000 ventilators would not be enough. Well, if 1% die and double that amount need ventilators, then we could support over 8,000,000 simultaneous cases. Seems like not a problem, even if unchecked.
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I also wanted to say that it is really annoying when you all change names. It degrades the site alot, makes it impossible to follow and I just skip all the posts because I don’t know who the hell is saying what. And you are just bitching at each other mindlessly anyway so I don’t feel like I am missing much by skipping through it.
