Coronavirus (COVID-19) Discussion Thread

[vivster]

last92 said:

vivster said:

I'm not against containment measures. It's perfectly fine to try to stop the spread. What's not fine is wasting energy and resources on light cases and then complain about an overwhelmed healthcare system. With the panic that is going around I can't even be sure that only the most severe cases are hospitalized, because considering the still low number of cases world wide it seems that many people are way overtreated. I wonder how many people are hospitalized that only display symptoms of a regular flu.

You clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Of course only the most severe cases are hospitalized. Most sick people here in Italy are instructed to stay at home and call the doctors only if they feel very sick.

The difference with a normal flu is massive. The population has no antibodies for this virus and we don't have effective drugs yet. These two differences make the Covid-19 several times more dangerous than the average flu. Please stop spreading misinformation and listen to experts. And no, reading some decontextualized data is not a good way to obtain information.

Do you have any information of what "severe" actually means? I've seen that word and "serious" thrown around a lot, but nobody actually says what it means.

Not sure where you come from with antibodies. Of course we have none, just like we have none for the new strains of flu every year. We do have other antibodies, though and those seem to be doing a pretty great job at it considering how little people with a normal immune system are affected by it. We're not talking about the T-virus here. We also don't have really effective medication against the flu either. All we do is treat the symptoms and in more severe cases use antivirals which may or may not work a bit. We still have tens of thousands of deaths because we certainly do not have the flu under control.

I get that the diseases and viruses are different, which is why I'm not comparing them directly but rather the results and implications caused by them. All I can see for now are wrong numbers that are acted upon as if they were factual. It's cool that we are able to build such strong defenses and measures against this but I'm wondering where this will all eventually lead. If people dying from coronavirus are so preventable by using these measures, does that mean we'll have to use them for every other disease as well?

What do you personally recommend in our fight against preventable diseases?