Have we officially determined that there is a severe strain and a mild strain of Coronavirus? Can anyone speak with confidence on that?
There's countless strains, and lots of speculation (some of it peer reviewed) about there being a couple large groups, but as for specific "strong strain" / "weak strain", no, we don't have that. More to the point, if we actually had an isolated,
consistently very mild strain, that could be used as a vaccine. That is after all how vaccines started, with the observation that people who got (mild) cowpox tended to be immune to (severe) smallpox.
He's way too cocky & the optics wouldn't look good (& we all know it's about the Trump brand to his base) if he did get tested while thousands can't get tested.
I strongly suspect that they have him preemptively on any of the off-label antiviral treatments that have shown promise against COVID-19 and whose side effects are not particularly concerning.
Same thing here in my very international corner of not-so-reflected-and-rational Switzerland this afternoon [I purposefully went later to avoid the crowds]. No sugar. No flour. No fresh veggies!! I asked - all been bought today. Don't even mention toilet paper, that's been rare for a while now.
No problems in Iceland. Was just at the grocery store today; more people than usual, but not a swarm of them. Every shelf was fully stocked. Nobody was hoarding. Actually, it probably looked like
I was a hoarding prepper, because I'd been putting off shopping for quite a while, so had to buy proportionally a lot to restock - I didn't see a single other person with nearly as much food in their cart as I had. Also, I was in a mask
There was an article I read earlier on DV that stated that in general, shortages are not expected in Iceland due to existing stockpiles.
Sadly, mortality has shot up in Lombardy
Let's say it all together: "confirmed positive cases" != "total cases". Dividing the number of "confirmed or suspected cases" by "number of confirmed or suspected fatalities" yields an utterly meaningless figure, and people should stop doing it.
That doesn't mean that the death rate
isn't unusually high in Lombardy; I also wouldn't be surprised if it is. It just means that you can't calculate it that way. It yields zero informative value.
To be clear, the article notes only one such death.
Although most patients who retest positive do not display clinical symptoms, some have developed fevers and other signs of the virus. One such patient, a 36-year-old man, died in Wuhan on March 2, five days after being declared recovered.
This. People need to stop taking anecdotes and treating them as if they're the general case.
There will
always be both false positives and false negatives in a pandemic. There will also always be cases of remissions, regardless of the nature of the disease. The existence of such things has no impact on what's normal. "What's normal" is that most people get "the flu", get better, and go on with their lives. An unfortunate minority - far higher than with a typical seasonal influenza, most commonly the old and/or sick - get pneumonia, and of them, it's sometimes severe enough to be fatal or cause permanent damage. The general characteristics of the disease are perfectly familiar to us all. What's
not usual is the fact that we have zero herd immunity, zero vaccines, zero approved antivirals, and it's a more severe strain than a typical flu, at least for the elderly and sick (and to a lesser extent the middle-aged).
