Thread: I have heard a number of people dismissing concerns about coronavirus as less dangerous than the flu, and today would like to talk about why that is probably wrong and people do it at their peril.
2/ first and most importantly, we know a *tremendous* amount about influenza - how it spreads, disease progression, how to prevent and treat it - and we have fairly effective vaccines. (A successful influenza vaccine is about 60% effective.)
3/ We don’t know any of this about the SARS-CoV-2 virus. We don’t know if it lives on surfaces, if it’s seasonal, if it’s mutating and becoming more / less dangerous. We don’t know the case fatality rate, any preventive treatments besides hand washing, and we don’t have a vaccine
4/ —and that’s just for starters. We don’t know long-term survival, secondary complications, life expectancy, or if some people are naturally immune. In short - we don’t really know anything.
5/ so that alone makes it very dangerous. In addition to that, let’s talk about hospitals. We think so far that only a small percentage of people who contract SARS-CoV-2 get COVID-19, the acute viral pneumonia that lands people in the hospital and kills some of them.
6/ But we don’t know the percentage. We don’t know what if any treatments, mitigating factors, or even genetics make a person more or less likely to recover. And that is genuinely a problem.
7/ A sort of branch of civil engineering is tasked with recommending things like airport and hospital size - how big a waiting room should be, how much parking somewhere needs. And once you introduce a totally new and as-yet unpredictable variable into that mix,
8/ you throw off alll your other numbers. Suddenly a hospital ICU with 15 beds might not be enough. There might not be enough ventilators for all the new patients. There might not be enough staff.
9/ Remember - this is just one more thing of many we don’t know. Could five cases overwhelm a rural hospital? What would that look like or do? Hospitals plan for a regular amount of ICU patients including flu victims. But this is eight weeks old...nobody has planned for it.
10/ so while you are busy telling your friends you don’t know what the big deal is...it’s a big deal to medical staff who have to try to plan for these things. Not knowing so much is a genuine disadvantage. Please don’t pretend to know it all...you don’t.
11/ this was sort of a nerdy And roundabout way of reminding everyone that some things that sound smart aren’t useful or actually smart. Be careful what information you repeat. And now I have to go back to making books!
