Divemedic

Exponential growth

Every health care provider that I know is receiving the same instructions:

Since test kits are in short supply, no one will be tested for coronavirus unless they have traveled out of the country in the past 14 days, or have been exposed to someone who has tested positive in the past 14 days.

What this means is that there are likely many people who have the virus that are not being tested because they have not traveled out of the country in the past two weeks. The big hole here is exposure.

Let’s say that you just tested positive for COVID 19. Quick, name every person that has been within 6 feet of you in the past two weeks. How many people do you think you forgot, or don’t know their identity?

I think there are far more cases than are being reported, simply because no one knows who they are.

Even so, the known cases are doubling every 2 to 3 days, and have been for the past 3 weeks. As I type this, there are 1,300 cases in the US. So, there were 328 more cases today, and 294 yesterday. That means the number of cases has doubled in the past 48 hours. At this rate, there will be 1800 cases by Thursday (tomorrow night) and 2500 by Friday. Another week, and there will be 12,000 cases by the following Friday. How long the cases can keep doubling is anyone’s guess.

I am not an epidemiologist, but I do teach biology. When an organism is not being limited by availability of resources, we see exponential growth. Look at this chart, and it is a textbook case of an organism unlimited by access to resources:

Until COVID is cut off from the resources it needs, the growth pattern will continue.  Shutting down mass gatherings isn’t going to do much. Most transmission is happening in small groups, not at sporting events. The way to curb this level of growth is to quarantine everyone. In a country like ours, I don’t think that is possible.

Instead, this virus will continue, and with an R0 of more than two, it will continue to grow.

Trump cutting off trade with Europe won’t accomplish much. The virus is already here.

Instead, we will ride this out as a nation, and we will see where it takes us. A vaccine is likely a year away.

By Divemedic, ago

Someone is lying

They tell us that COVID is less dangerous than the flu, but then the military makes announcements like this:

Beginning 13 March, Navy Recruit Training Command (RTC), the Navy’s boot camp, will suspend guest attendance at graduation ceremonies to prevent any potential spread of COVID-19 to either Sailors or Navy families.
Graduations themselves will continue, and will be live-streamed on Navy online platforms, including our Facebook page.
Commander, Naval Service training command, which oversees RTC, will continue to monitor the situation and consult with medical experts to decide when it is appropriate to resume guest attendance at graduation ceremonies. There are currently no confirmed cases of COVID-19 among recruits, and RTC has robust screening processes in place for those who arrive each week.
This action is being taken out of an abundance of caution, to both ensure the welfare of Sailors and that RTC can continue its essential mission of producing basically trained Sailors. RTC Recruits impacted by this change are being authorized to call home to directly inform their loved ones.
Liberty will be cancelled for graduates of RTC. They will report directly to their follow-on assignments. Liberty or guest access at those locations will be at the discretion of those commands. Families are encouraged to contact their recruits following graduation for details. We cannot speak on behalf of the commands they will be reporting to regarding their liberty policy.

Corona is either not a threat, or is really bad. Who do you believe? Someone is lying.

By Divemedic, ago

If you are worried about COVID, you are racist.

While I agree that much of the hype around corona virus is over the top, a couple of the ‘facts’ here are incorrect. Yes, the flu kills more each year, but not on a percentage basis. Just like Ebola kills fewer people, that doesn’t mean that I would rather have Ebola than the flu.

Similarly, I don’t care what race you are, I am not going to get COVID just so I can virtue signal others.

By Divemedic, ago

Supply shortage

My ARNP son has told me that the facility where he works is running out of N95 masks. So they are issuing one mask and a paper bag to each employee. They are to keep and reuse their mask as necessary.

He is convinced that this outbreak will be the same as all of the other scares: SARS, Swine Flu, Avian Flu, Ebola, etc. He is blaming the media for whipping the country into a frenzy.

I am not so sure. At this point, the freezer is full, and I am pretty sure that we have all of the supplies we need to last more than a month in quarantine without having to dig into the freeze dried foods. I have a large box of N95 masks in storage that I bought a couple of years ago during one of the previous virus scares.

It isn’t just food, Make sure you have toilet paper, feminine hygiene products, and needed medications. The best news here is that all of it is stuff that you would buy anyway, so it won’t cost you more than normal, you are just buying all of it in advance.

Just in case things get much worse, don’t overlook security for when the redistribution warriors decide to go midnight shopping. 

By Divemedic, ago

Something isn’t right

According to the CDC, there are 153 confirmed cases of COVID 19 in the US, with 11 fatalities: 10 deaths in Washington state, and 1 in California. That works out to a 7% fatality rate, which represents a very large increase over the 2% rate we have been give up to this point. This means one of a few things:

1 The other nations are not reporting correct figures with respect to their cases versus fatalities.
2 This illness is far more deadly than we are being led to believe.
3 There are far more than 153 cases in the US, but we aren’t catching most of them.
4 The US strain is somehow more deadly than the one in the rest of the world.

By Divemedic, ago