Here’s what I wish everyone knew about #covid-19, especially young people who believe they are “low risk”.
1) “I’m not at risk” – everyone is at risk from the #coronavirus, and even young and healthy people can end up on a ventilator in an intensive care unit with this disease
2) “There’s no chance I have it” – you can’t know this without taking a test. The symptoms can be very mild, such as a runny nose or sore throat, and many people may not even get symptoms at all
3) “It isn’t time to worry yet” – this is untrue. In the UK, we aren’t testing enough to know the true extent of the epidemic, but it’s reasonable to assume there are more than 10,000 cases. We are not far behind Italy’s situation
4) “I won’t spread it to anyone vulnerable” – the only way you can be confident you aren’t spreading it is to stay home and limit all external contact. Socialising with anyone, even just young healthy people, can ultimately mean someone’s relative with diabetes or cancer gets it
5) “I feel fine, so there’s no problem” – not so. Some evidence suggests you’re most infectious the day BEFORE you first experience symptoms
6) “Only the elderly or people with underlying conditions die of it” – this is completely untrue. At the start of a #Covid_19 outbreak, these are the people who die first. But younger, healthier people die too – it just takes longer
7) “We should all just take our chances and get it over with” – this will lead to many thousands of avoidable deaths. The more we slow this down, the more time we have to develop better treatments, and the less overwhelmed our NHS will be
8) “If vulnerable people just stay home, they’ll be fine” – I wish this were true. But this is a huge number of people, many of whom have essential medical appointments, and all of whom need food. They cannot fully seal themselves off, so all of us have to do social distancing
So please - stay home if you can, and cancel your social plans. Covid-19 may not go as easy on you as you think, and it's too easy to spread this deadly infection without even knowing
Why the UK government hasn't made all this simply, explicitly, abundantly clear to the public is beyond me.
And that 10,000 UK cases number could be a large understimate btw - Chris Whitty said there may be this many cases NINE days ago. Assuming each of those spreads it to two other people and so on.....we could be looking at a very large number indeed
Some of this covered and explained further here (free to read): newscientist.com/article/223847…
