Coronavirus: either very low risk or deadly, urgent health emergency ... but not both

The following is something I posted on a bulletin-board service in my neighborhood that I belong to. Someone posted a viral email from James Robb, MD, a virus doctor. It provoked a lively debate about the U.S. Government's actions on coronavirus. The link above has the email as well as background info on Robb. I also checked him out on the Internet, and the top anti-bullshit site Snopes.com has even more background info. Dr. Robb may be mistaken, but he is totally legit.

What, me worry? Boomers should realize that
this is not about "the" future but about our future.

On the facemasks debate: what the government is trying to convince us of --facemasks provide NO benefit-- is patently false, as the viral letter from the virus doctor explains. By preventing you from touching your face, and especially your nose and mouth, you avoid contamination from viruses on the surfaces you touched.

However, when you think about it, it is obvious this can only be minimal protection, and there is a very strong argument to be made that, given the shortage, every last mask should be reserved for use by actually infectious patients (so they don't spread the disease) and especially for our health care providers.

And that should be done by the government simply taking control of the entire supply. Eminent domain. And, of course, pay compensation to the owners and suppliers.

But Trump won't do that so we get the cock-and-bull about the face masks being so absolutely useless and worthless that people shouldn't buy them so that they can be available for medical use where they are most needed. One or the other. Confiscate all the face masks and punish the sellers because they're a fraud or requisition them as a desperate necessity.

I wish the government would stop treating us like children.

I watched Mike Pence's press conference Wednesday. The risk is low, just ignore it, go about your normal life, nothing to see here. If THAT were true there wouldn't be a White House task force meeting around-the-clock and holding daily press briefings. The White House hadn't had a press briefing for most of a year before this. Now every single day. Really?

And then I saw that in Seattle, people with "underlying" medical issues like high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, pregnancy or cancer, as well as those over 60 should stay home and especially avoid places where there are people, and the more people the more you should avoid them.

You know how that makes a cancer survivor with high blood pressure and heart disease who is about to turn 69 feel? Grateful not to be pregnant or have diabetes, but I've changed my twitter handle to "Likely coronavirus fatality."

For whom the bell tolls, or why my name on Twitter is now "Likely Coronavirus Fatality"

And so it begins ...

In Kirkland, a Seattle suburb, a 59-year-old man with no travel or other known contact with the epidemic died Friday. He tested positive for the virus, and was the first American to die of the disease.

Also in that same suburb, although no link to the dead man has been reported, a long-term-care nursing home is off-limits after a resident and a caregiver both tested positive for coronavirus. Fifty more patients and caregivers have come down with symptoms, but their tests aren't done yet.

A nearby fire department station has also been declared off-limits because of exposure to ill seniors at that nursing home. Two dozen firefighters and  have been quarantined, along with two police.

Three days earlier, on Wednesday, we were told a woman from Vacaville, California, an hour northeast of San Francisco, had tested positive for the virus.

She had been hospitalized for ten days, first at a smaller hospital, before being taken to the U.C. Davis medical center in Sacramento. She'd had no travel outside the U.S. or contact with anyone who might have been exposed to Coronavirus so she wasn't tested until U.C. Davis doctors insisted the Federal Government's Centers for Disease Control bend its rules and test her because, although she had no known link to the epidemic, her doctors had ruled out all other causes for her illness.

After that first case, the CDC made more exceptions. So on Friday, another California woman with no know source of contagion became a confirmed COVID-19 patient, this one being treated at the Mountain View El Camino hospital. If you saw the news stories, notice how none of them mention Silicon Valley, though the hospital is a 10-minute drive from Apple headquarters.

Friday night, another unknown source case was confirmed out of Oregon, in Lake Oswego. The person had fallen ill February 19. After seeing it in the news, I had to Google it to find out it was just 8 miles south of the center of Portland. The patient is an elementary school employee. The school is now closed until Wednesday.

It was only on Saturday, after the emergency cover-your-ass press conference Trump called on hearing of the first dead American, that we learned of the CDC's hyper-restrictive tests policy.

The announcement was that the CDC had relaxed its rule of only testing people with travel to international virus hot spots or had other direct links to the epidemic. Now people hospitalized with a respiratory syndrome that aren't positive for a flu virus or bacteria can be tested, too. And local labs,  not just the CDC in Atlanta, will be able to test for the disease.

From this information we must assume there are now active outbreaks in the Seattle, Portland, Silicon Valley and Vacaville areas, and early in the week we will hear of dozens more cases there, as the work of tracing contacts and placing them under quarantine really gets underway.

But almost certainly there are other outbreaks --perhaps many more-- that will come to light now that the CDC has abandoned its head-in-the-sand no tests for 99.9% of Americans policy.

Especially in major transportation hubs, like Atlanta, where I live. If the virus is already widespread in the wild, how could it not be in the city with the world's busiest airport?

A number of cases wouldn't already have drawn attention because we're in the middle of a very active flu season: in the big majority of cases there is no difference a patient or doctor can see between influenza and COVID-19 without laboratory tests.

The WHO international expert mission to China report published on Friday, Feb. 28, emphasizes that most transmission in China has been within families. Many Chinese live in multi-generation traditional families that are rare in the United States.

The report notes that in the relatively few infections detected among minors (2.4% of the total) the children were tested because others in the household were sick. A Chinese CDC study of 44,000 confirmed cases said there were no deaths among children under the age of 10.

That's the good news. The bad news is that COVID-19 has it out for seniors. The majority of the deaths in the Chinese epidemic have been of people 60 or over.

The death rate among those over 80 that have been infected is 15%. For those reported as "retirees," it is 9%. Your chances of dying also are higher if you are male, have had cancer, have high blood pressure or have heart disease.

What they don't say is what are your chances if you are close to 70, retired, and a cancer survivor that's been diagnosed both with high blood pressure and heart disease, all put together.

And on top of that if you have the bad luck to live in a country run by a narcissistic jackass who insists on saying Coronavirus is a hoax to make him look bad and gives happy-talk press conferences highlighting how very few cases we've had but forgets to tell you we have so few because his CDC had been refusing to look for them.

So, yeah, they way things have been going, call me Likely Coronavirus Fatality.