Quote:
Originally Posted by MissMoppet
Might I suggest that consulting Twitter and Facebook is the short road to insanity. Leave them alone!
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The twitter link is from the account of the NI Department of Health. It features a short video from a respiratory consultant providing some cogent information. Maybe watch it before dismissing it.
@ clf - I completely agree with your comments about the the stupidity of panic buyers etc, and I find their behaviour intensely frustrating and contemptible. I wish people were capable of responding rationally - not going into a frenzy of panic-buying, but not dismissing the whole thing as "fake news" or "much ado about nothing" either. The latter is not the opposite of the former! As you say, the issue with the insouciant "it's just a bad flu" brigade is that most of them will catch this disease and live through it with no long-term effects, but are highly likely to pass it on to others who will not be as lucky.
I've seen a lot of comments dismissing the risks on the basis that the virus has only claimed the lives of people with pre-existing comditions, as though these people's lives were somehow less important or less valuable. I doubt anyone would refer to the death of such a person in a hit-and-run or whatever with comments along the lines of "Ah well, he was old and unwell, he didn't have much time left anyway". But in any case, it isn't just the old and infirm who are at serious risk - I just watched an Italian doctor talk on the news about how it is most certainly not only a threat to the elderly, pointing out that she has colleagues in their 40s and 50s who are now in intensive care.
An elderly friend of mine who lives in Spain has just spent the past two weeks in hospital there, not because of the virus but due to acute pain and other issues caused by osteoporosis. It's far from the first time she has had to do so, sadly. I talked to her most days over that period and did my best to reassure her as I listened to her describe how she spent the entire time feeling increasingly fearful because of the changes she observed around her and enduring a growing anxiety about whether she is going to get it herself, knowing she is completely helpless. She was released today ahead of schedule because it was agreed that the longer she stayed in, the greater the risk to her life.
This is not normal flu - being a new virus we have no antibodies for it at all, plus it has a higher infection rate. One person can infect 400 others within a month. Proper social distancing can reduces that to just 3. I know which number of additional patients I'd rather see the NHS treating in that space of time.
One last statistic is that 793 people have died from Covid-19 in Italy. That's not in total, that's in the last 24 hours. In other words, more than one death every two minutes. I don't know how much starker it needs to get before everybody takes it seriously.