Thread by @NorthernSprw

By request here is the email I sent to my extended family 36 hours ago. (slightly edited)

Subject: “Please take extreme isolation measures right now”

(I am a PhD biologist who teaches human physiology to university health-sci students)

Hi all. I wanted to share this link to a very worrying analysis about the degree to which # of diagnoses cases lags behind # of true cases. Essentially we are only about two weeks behind Italy (1 week behind in raw # of cases, 2 weeks in cases per capita):

medium.com/@tomaspueyo/co…

I am a biologist and we study exponential population growth as part of basic population ecology. Most nations, including Italy and the US, are reporting caseloads that perfectly track an exponential population growth of the virus. The doubling time is 6 days.

Additionally, caseloads lag the real number of infected people due to the delay of incubation time, and the additional delay between first symptoms and when it gets so bad that the worst-affected people finally go to the hospital.

All this means that, even if extreme measures are taken and spread is halted completely, caseloads will continue rising exponentially for another two weeks (again, with a doubling time of 6 days) simply due to people who were already infected.

Long story short, I urge you all to take extreme isolation measures right now, if you haven't already. I am not usually this paranoid. This pandemic has me really, really worried. If you wait until things look bad you will be too late.

Also - washing hands, though it is important & wonderful & yes you should do it, is not enough. Put bluntly, you need to not be touching anything that anybody else has touched within the last 5 days, and not breathing air that anybody else has breathed within the last half hour.

Again, I am a biologist; I have been running labs and working with potentially infectious agents & biotoxins for 25 years. We don't muck around with washing our hands - we wear lab gloves! And we never eat or drink in the lab, and we never touch people in the lab.

I suggest we should all be applying "lab rules" to the entire outside world right now.

Things I have done:
- I have 2 months' of food and supplies at home (nonperishable) and am thinking of upping that to 3-4

- I've cancelled all trips

- Last week I stopped going to the gym and to any bars, restaurants, cafes or music events

- I basically am not in contact with a single other living person right now

- I have a box of medical supplies in case I need to get through a mild case of pneumonia on my own if the hospitals become swamped

- I bought a few boxes of nitrile lab gloves in my size and carry a ziploc bag of lab gloves now

- If I need something, I order it from Amazon and spray everything down before opening (outside of package should sit 4 min wet w bleach, hydrogen peroxide or 70% ethanol).

Yes, I'm that paranoid. Yes, this has gotten to the silly state of spraying down a new bleach bottle with another bleach bottle!

It's not that I think I'll die (though COVID-19 is often no fun even for survivors - moderate cases are those that "only" have mild pneumonia and, according to one recent account, can have such a bad sore throat that it feels "like coughing up razor blades").

The real goal here is to slow the rate of spread so that the maximum number of critically ill people at any one time does not exceed the ICU capacity of all the hospitals in the USA. I'll be frank, what I am fearing is that we are already well past that

and that in 2-3 weeks’ time we will be reading articles of pneumonia patients dying untreated in hastily erected tents in the parking lots of hospitals that are completely overrun. I really, really don't want any of you to be in that situation.

Mom, Dad, beloved friends in their 70s/80s - as I'm sure you know you're in a high risk group, so please be very careful!!

Those of you who are "only" in your 60s, be aware you're also getting into a high risk group too (especially if male - sorry, guys!).

Anyone with hypertension, heart conditions, diabetes, immune disorders or pre-existing lung conditions is also at risk. For some reason hypertension seems particularly hazardous

(possibly relevant for the hypertension risk factor: the lung cell-surface-protein that the coronavirus binds to, called “ACE2”, is actually an enzyme that helps regulate blood pressure.)

Even if you are at little risk yourself, you can spread it those at higher risk. Think of yourself as being part of a great campaign to save everybody’s grandparents.

Please consider no outside shopping whatsoever, & switching to have groceries delivered to home when needed.

Also, being overly cautious in this unprecedented event does not have much downside - if it turns out to have been unnecessary, well, so you don't have to go grocery shopping for a while, you've saved some money by not going out, and you've watched a lot of Netflix.

If I am wrong, you can all laugh at me later! But, again, we are running only two weeks behind Italy.

Much love

Sparrow