Staying Safe During the Coronavirus Pandemic
Saving Your Health, One Mask at a Time by Peter Tippett MD PhDCEO careMESH; Chairman DataMotion; ex Presidential Advisor; Norton Antivirus creator
How does the average person decide what measures to follow unless they truly understand how these things work or have a clear set of “rules” they can abide by?
I am an Internal Medicine-certified, Emergency Room MD with a PhD in Biochemistry. I have also spent much of my professional life in the high-tech world helping people understand how risk, infection, and the growth of infection behaves. So I thought it might be helpful to folks in my network to explain how personal protection from a virus like SARS-CoV-2 (the formal name of the virus that causes COVID-19) actually works, how any given measure individually lowers risk, how various countermeasures work together, and most importantly, to give you some simple guidelines for day-to-day living in this new COVID world.
The financial and social consequences of the current Covid-19 outbreak are astronomical. I believe if the current knowledge about non-toxic anti-viral strategies is used together with common sense preventive measures we will get through this in a few months. Most viruses adapt and mutate to live with us - instead of dying with us - and the illness becomes milder and less aggressive – in time. I am wishing you well and hope for all of us that this blows over without any further loss of life.
Why You Should Ignore All That Coronavirus-Inspired Productivity Pressure Global catastrophes change the world, and this pandemic is very much akin to a major war. Even if we contain the Covid-19 crisis within a few months, the legacy of this pandemic will live with us for years, perhaps decades to come. It will change the way we move, build, learn, and connect. There is simply no way that our lives will resume as if this had never happened. And so, while it may feel good in the moment, it is foolish to dive into a frenzy of activity or obsess about your scholarly productivity right now. That is denial and delusion. The emotionally and spiritually sane response is to prepare to be forever changed.
The U.S. may end up with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the industrialized world. This is how it’s going to play out.
This guide, developed by experts in Medicine and Infectious Diseases, offers step-by-step instructions for some of the most common situations you might encounter, focusing on how you can protect yourself & your community.
Epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, who warned of pandemic in 2006, says we can beat the novel coronavirus—but first, we need lots more testing.
Alarmist is not a word anyone has ever used to describe me before. But this is different.
The facts, the ethics, and the protective measures you should take
Wash your hands or say a prayer? Social distancing or Sunday mass? Cancel public events or give out coronavirus communion wafers to the credulous? Many believers face these choices as the coronavirus spreads. There is no religious response to the pandemic, unless we count abandoning religious rules in favor of science and medicine. Faced with these choices, most people accept that religion is pointless, at best, and harmful, at worst. Most are making decisions that appear to be motivated by science and medicine, not scripture and sacred doctrine.
Fresh air, sunlight and improvised face masks seemed to work a century ago; and they might help us now. by Richard Hobday
Meaning comes from the pursuit of more complex things than happiness. The wisdom that Dr. Viktor Frankl derived from his experiences there (the holocaust), in the middle of unimaginable human suffering, is just as relevant now as it was then
Let me be crystal clear: if you’ve faced a tragedy and someone tells you in any way, shape or form that your tragedy was meant to be, that it happened for a reason, that it will make you a better person, or that taking responsibility for it will fix it, you have every right to remove them from your life. - Tim Lawrence
Why the World’s Two Most Capitalist Societies Had Such Uniquely Grotesque and Inadequate Responses to a Global Pandemic
Donald Trump put his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and xenophobic adviser Stephen Miller in charge of his coronavirus response—no wonder things are such a disaster.
The most important lesson of the 1918 influenza pandemic: Tell the damn truth “The government lied. They lied about everything”: A historian on what went wrong in 1918.
Exponential growth and epidemics - How is COVID-19 Currently Growing
Sound Coronavirus Advice:
Let me introduce myself: I am a practicing ER doctor with a Bachelors degree in cell and molecular biology/genetics and a Masters degree in public health in addition to my doctorate.
COVID is not a flu. Not even a little. Here are reasons why:
1. It is a separate species. It is no more like influenza than you are like a hippo. DIFFERENT SPECIES.
2. It is an airborne virus. This means the tiny droplets can stay in the air for a full 2 hours. So if a person coughed in aisle 4 of Target 1.5 hours ago, they may be home now but their covid cloud is still hanging there just waiting for you to walk by and take a breath. Influenza is not an airborne virus. It is droplet spread- meaning someone has to directly crop dust you with their sneeze to get you sick. Covid is much more contagious.
3. Covid is more virulent. Virulence factor is a measure of how catchy something is. For example, the flu is like beer. It takes a bunch to get you drunk. Covid is more like tequila - A little goes a long way. You need to suck up a lot of flu particles to actually catch the flu; with covid, even a few particles is enough to infect you.
4. Covid has a longer incubation than the flu. When you catch the flu, you typically get sick in the next 1-2 days. This is awesome because it means you stay at home while contagious because you feel like a heap of fried garbage. Covid has a blissful 5-9 days of symptom free time during which you are well enough to head to the movies, gym or mar-a-lago while also being contagious enough to infect everyone you encounter.
5. Covid has a longer duration of illness than flu. With covid, you have a 5-9 days of blissful asymptomatic contagiousness. This then turns into about 1 week of cough and overall feeling like hell but still surviving. Week 2 is when things hit the fan and people end up unable to breathe and on a ventilator. Many stay on the vent for up to 15 days. 5 days incubating+7 kinda sick days + 15 days on a ventilator makes for 27 days of virus spreading illness, (assuming your don’t just die of massive asphyxiation and body-wide collapse from overwhelming infection somewhere in that last week).The flu has an average incubation of 1-2 days and sick time of 7 days for a total of 9 infectious days. In the world of deadly viruses, that 18 extra days might as well be a millennia.
6. Covid is more deadly. A LOT more deadly. The flu has about a 0.2% mortality rate, meaning 2 of every thousand people who get sick with flu will die. On the contrary, the death rate from covid is reportedly 2%, so 10 times more deadly than flu. Ten times more death seems like a lot more death to me. Whats more worrisome is that 2% is actually incorrect because it doesn’t kill kids so that skews the average. With covid, age is a major factor in survival. If we don’t include people under 30, the death rate for adults is on average 4.5%. 9 out of every 200 adults that get this will die from it. Do you know 200 adults? Do you think losing 9 of them is no big deal? Since mortality increases with age in covid, the risk gets worse as you get older so if we put 100 grannies in a room with covid, only 85 would make it out alive to make pies and tell great stories of the old days... and that just sucks.
I hope that helps to clarify why covid is in no way a flu, why you are in no way a hippo, and why staying home is the only way for non-essential people to do their part while I spend my days at work covered in a plastic poncho, sucking air through a stuffy respirator mask, leaving my scrubs in my driveway, showering the covid off at 4am when I get in, and thinking to myself “now do u still think it was just a flu?” as I risk my own life with my face 2 inches from their highly contagious, gasping mouth while I slide the plastic tube down their throat and start up the ventilator."
Quit caring about your 401K. In a year or two it will be back. The airlines and cruise lines will get bailed out. The economy is going to tank no matter what, so quit worrying about it. Right now the decision is do we want a tanked economy with a low body count or a high body count. We are all in this together. Wash your hands. Cover your mouth. Practice social distancing. Stay away from large crowds. Be smart. Stay home if sick. Don't hoard or steal medical supplies. We need them desperately at the hospital.In Italy they have an excellent national healthcare system with about 5000 ICU beds, and per capita have more doctors and hospital beds than we do here in the US. Of course, the US is bigger and has more total beds, and ventilators... but again.. less per capita. In Italy, in Lombardy (the state/province) and in Milan... they have simply run out of ventilators. Doctors are faced with having too many people who cant breathe anymore, and not enough breathing machines to put them on. They are literally deciding on the spot who might live and who will die. They aren't doing CPR or anything else futile for the COVID patients. They don't have the staff or capacity to do so.
Pluto shares good advice for survival