Chicken little/fake news/the boy who cried Wolf

I really don’t want this thread to become a thing and I sincerely hope that it doesn’t but I am struggling to figure out for myself how this coronavirus pandemic is really playing out. I hear on the news the world health organization has decided that this disease has a 3.4% mortality rate. I also see, as JNF So accurately pointed out that the mortality rate in South Korea is less than 1%. I have never in my life seen video of mosquito fogging trucks spraying disinfectant through the streets. I have never seen people with hand sprayers walking down the sidewalks spraying off the sidewalks with disinfectant. The truth is I don’t know what to believe anymore. Our president says everything is fake news. The media tends to hyper sensationalize every topic that comes down the road just to get the ratings. I remember my nursery rhymes even though they were read to me a long time ago. Chicken little ran around saying the sky was falling.
The little boy who cried Wolf thought it was cool that everybody came running when he cried it until the wolf actually came and all of his sheep got eaten. I’m not freaking out. The world has a way of culling the herd.. I just wish we lived in a Walter Cronkite day and age where we knew if Walter said it it was true. I’m tired of the 24 hour news cycle. I think it sucks that we live in a day and age where everyone’s voices Are heard including the inherently stupid. This morning apparently there wasn’t enough things to talk about on the morning news so there was a segment on how to keep children occupied while they’re not at school. You can make paper airplanes, you can play with balloons, I am believing we are doomed as a society. I realize this post has absolutely nothing to do with prostate cancer. If somebody Wants to lock it up or delete it I will be perfectly fine with that I just needed a place to vent and apparently my sweetheart has grown even weirder than I am when discussing the coronavirus as she will not even let me bring it up.

Another point: we don't know the true case fatality rate (CFR), as we have no idea how many have the virus.

From Harvard infectious disease epidemiologist and microbiologist Marc Lipsitch: "Repeating my plea to media: PLEASE stop saying 'there are now X number of cases in the US' and start saying 'as of today X cases have been reported in the US. Because of limited testing, experts agree the real number is far higher.' We don't know how much higher but many times"

https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1239173318638534657

and

"Same applies for some other countries, but US is among rich countries perhaps the champion of undertesting. Kudos to many colleagues for racing to fix that, but for now the numbers are wildly underestimated."

https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1239173640656166912

In the end we will be ok.

We as Americans EXPECT that this problem will resolve. That's what I love about being American. We have an extremely low tolerance for inconvenience/worry/BS etc.... and Covid19 is far up our tree on all of those points.

It was not that long ago the world was way riskier than it is today. There were no antibiotics. Polio and other viruses could strike out of the blue. Earth is a dangerous place, and we spend alot of time trying to make it safe, but in the end, if PCa has taught me anything, there are no guarantees. Things can pop our little bubbles.

There will be treatments to lessen the severity. There will ultimately be a vaccine. In the mean time wash your hands, disinfect your doorknobs, and stay at home for a couple of weeks. This is not ebola or something with a 50% fatality rate. This is a virus that spreads easily and just by shear numbers has the potential to send a ton of people to the hospital where there is not enough capacity.

For us in the northern hemisphere the sun is getting higher in the sky every day. Many people will catch it and be done with it in a few days, granting immunity.

This too shall pass.

My Dad and his brothers were asked to fight in WW II, my brother served in Vietnam. I’m being asked to sit at home...I think I’ll make it.

This all depends on which end of the telescope you decide to look into. You have one chance in X of catching the virus. Nobody knows what X is; it sort of depends on how many people wash their hands, especially you. Estimates range from 3 to 10. Three is the worst case so we'll go with one chance in three of catching the virus. If you catch the virus you have one chance in Y of dying from it. Nobody knows Y either; it depends on the effectiveness of some treatments being rushed through testing and whether the critical cases outstrip the number of ventilators available. For China the value of y is somewhere around 30 (one in thirty infected died) but china was the first country to have the virus and they had to play catch-up. South Korea's result is a better guess. That'd be roughly Y=100 (one in one hundred infected die.) So, doing the math: 1 in 3 chance of catching the disease times 1 in 100 of dying if you catch it is 1 in 300 of dying from the coronavirus assuming the worst case infection rate and assuming you don't have it already. So, you probably won't succumb. If you have lots of friends and they have lots of friends you might know somebody who dies but it's very unlikely it'll be you. Remember that 1 in 300 is something of a worst case and it's waaay better odds than most of the things we talk about here on the forum. That's the little end of the telescope.
The big end is when you apply those odds to the roughly 330 million people in the country.

Todd1963 said...
I really don’t want this thread to become a thing and I sincerely hope that it doesn’t but I am struggling to figure out for myself how this coronavirus pandemic is really playing out. I hear on the news the world health organization has decided that this disease has a 3.4% mortality rate. I also see, as JNF So accurately pointed out that the mortality rate in South Korea is less than 1%.

Personally, I think the lower rate in S. Korea is because they tested more, were more successful in social distancing, and hospitals coped. Any country that doesn't do this this will probably follow Italy's mortality rate.

Post Edited (jasperx10) : 3/17/2020 3:17:24 AM (GMT-6)

My thought is that when this thing is over, we may not truly know if we overdid it. But, I guarantee that we will know if we didn't do enough. Wash your hands even when you think you've washed them enough, stay home, and follow what the experts such as Dr. Fauci at the CDC say. Social distancing and testing are significant to our success at flattening the curve. Check out the Spanish Flu of 1918 - Boston and Philadelphia didn't follow recommendations and had the highest death rates in the US - 700 deaths in one day in Philly. Approx 675,000 died in the US and an estimated 50 million world-wide. The cause? H1N1 bird flu. Different agent this time - one unknown with no treatment, no vaccine, and man with no immunity. We know how to slow it down - we just need to cooperate. Rant over.

GREAT advice Nytngale!