Originally Posted by
2StgTurbine
And again, you are missing the real point. The survival rate of COVID-19 is dependent on a high level of medical attention. There is not enough capacity in the medical system to treat everyone to the degree required for COVID-19. Once the medical system gets overloaded, massive amounts of deaths can occur.
Actually, no. The survival rate is QUITE HIGH, higher than for SARS or Ebola. 80+% of people who have it don’t require ANY medical personnel to be involved with their care or anything much else besides Tylenol.. This is not the plague or even as bad as a cholera epidemic.
But I will agree that once the medical system gets overloaded, deaths will go up - which is what the social distancing thing is about. But the difficulty isn’t respirators, or at least they aren’t the MOST limiting thing, it’s qualified medical personnel. Less than 15% of doctors at most hospitals are credentialed to provide ventilator care and doctors of any kind are in relatively short supply since we as a society forgot to lead-turn the retirement of the medical baby boomers.
Medical personnel are a ‘long lead time item’ as we used to say at the Air Logistics Center. If you want a new doctor you had to start four years ago - even for just an intern, and eight or more years ago for a pulmonologist. It’s a little late to worry about that now.
And basically, any 24/7 position requires (under normal circumstances) five personnel. What happened in Wuhan (and is happening in Italy) is that the relatively few ICU personnel that hospitals have were pushed too hard, got too fatigued, let their own precautions down, and caught the virus themselves. Worse yet, they got a relatively HUGE inoculum which made their cases far more deadly than would have otherwise happened if they had acquired their disease from a small inoculum in the community rather than massive exposure to the virus being shed by the very sickest patients.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/corona...-happens-next/
https://khn.org/news/surging-health-...virus-spreads/
https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/25/...k-front-lines/
I will ask you this again, do you really think the medical experts, government officials, and major businesses haven't seen the same data you have?
And I will ask you again, WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES THAT MAKE?
I’ve done nothing but provide facts - facts which you have never refuted. What does that have to do with what I do or do not think that medical experts, government officials, and major businesses have or have not seen? Quit with the straw men arguments about issues I haven’t made. If you believe I’m factually in error, refute the facts.
The sky is NOT falling. This is NOT an extinction level event.