Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!
How I wonder what you’re at!
Up above the world you fly,
Like a teatray in the sky
— Lewis Carroll, as sung by the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland
Are we having fun yet?
I bet the bat alleged to be at the root of the global coronavirus crisis is getting the last laugh now — wherever its spirit flies.
It certainly seems that much of the human population of Planet Earth has rushed down a rabbit hole in the past week or so, doesn’t it?
Could Lewis Carroll have imagined that people would be fighting over toilet paper in blind fear of a virus that, for most, seems to be more bark than bite.
The collective madness sweeping parts of the globe brings to mind another fairy tale character, Chicken Little.
“The sky is falling!”
I am not downplaying the severity of COVID-19. People, mostly elderly, are dying from the disease. They make up a small percentage of those contracting the virus.
But the flu kills a lot of elderly people every year, too — with no ensuing tugs of war over toilet paper.
Trevor Noah put it in perspective on the Daily Show last night: Some 5,000 people have died around the world from COVID-19 (since that poor bat met his end in a meat market in Wuhan). Every day, some 3,000 people die in traffic accidents around the world.
Why aren’t people panicking over that? How is it we shrug that off?
The coronavirus situation is all about fear of worst-case scenarios — and “an abundance of caution,” as so many political leaders have been putting it in the past few days.
But, encouragingly, already it appears that the majority of people who come down with COVID-19 make speedy recoveries.
Still, the sky is falling for society in many parts of the world.
School’s out for students and staff. Markets have crashed, the economy is reeling. New terms are trending: self-isolation, social distancing. And most everybody is doing what mom always told them to do: wash your hands.
You know there will be books written and movies made. Storyline: One person slays a bat . . . and all hell breaks loose.
So what, dear reader, will be the moral of the story?
Leave bats alone?
CLARIFICATION: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated 3,000 people die in traffic accidents every day in the United States. In fact, as the corrected version now says, the “3,000” is a global figure.
— Jillian
It’s not that most of us will contract COVID-19 (Corona Virus 2019), because we will.
Look at the numbers.
First, your count of auto deaths is way off. 3,000 per day would be over a million in a year, but the NHTSA puts that number at 37,461 per year, or 102 per day. Still way too many, but significantly better than ten and 20 years ago.
But that is a death rate of 0.011%.
Guns is also called an epidemic, but with 15,292 gun related deaths in 2019, that is a death rate of 0.0046%.
I hesitate to say “only” because I don’t want to trivialize that any death by gun is preventable.
How about the flu? Influenza killed 34,200 people in the US in 2018. That works out to be a death rate of 0.0104%
With the statistics available, mostly from China where most of the Covid-19 deaths are occuring, COVID-19 has an overall death rate around 3%. That is 261 times greater than death by automobile. Most epidemiologists are estimating that up to 2/3 of US residents will contract the virus- meaning that we can expect 3.27 million deaths over the run of the virus.
If we don’t slow the virus, then the hospitals will be overwhelmed. We only have about 100,000 hospital beds in the US- many more will die simply because there’s no place to care for them. If they need a respirator to help them breathe, the numbers are even more dire. So, if we can keep the number of people in hospital for COVID-19 to under 100,000 at any one time, then our death rate will be lower.
For most young people, the COVID-19 virus is no worse than a bad case of the flu, but they are contagious before ever exhibiting the symptoms of infection.
The numbers are much worse for people over 70 with diabetes. (Me, for example). The death rate in china for that population is 7.3% of the infected. In the US that means that of the 49,200,000 people in the US over 70, 3,591,600 will die. (Well, maybe not so many because many of those seniors won’t also have diabetes.)
The good news, if you want some, no child has died from COVID-19. The youngest death so far was 54 in Switzerland.
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You’re right! I must have misheard Trevor Noah (it was after midnight, she says sleepily). The death toll from vehicle accidents is about 3,200 per day GLOBALLY, not the United States. Good catch, Steve. Thank you. Am changing the post accordingly.
Perhaps I am downplaying the severity of all of this. In my home province of Quebec, there have only been 17 confirmed cases of the virus, all people who picked it up in foreign countries. There have been no cases of community transmission, yet.
We shall see how this unfolds.
It still boggles my mind that it all may have begun with the folly of one person selling in a meat market in Wuhan — be it a bat, anteater or whatever creature.
(Bat worked well for this post and the Twinkle Twinkle song. Yes, I am trying to add some humour to this, black though it may be. We copy editors have a strange sense of humour, given the amount of bad news we edit every working day. It seems like all I have been editing these past couple of weeks are stories about the damn coronavirus and how it is affecting people.)
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The actual death rate appears to be less than 1%. The relative death rate in any country depends on the rate at which people are tested.
Maybe 3/4 of the people who get COVID-19 do not show symptoms. That is why it is so difficult to slow the spread.
In the US you don’t get tested unless you show serious symptoms. The mortality rate then appears to be around 5% where only the most significantly ill get tested. OTOH, the mortality rate in South Korea where very many people are tested is around .6%. Now, .6% is nothing to be sneered at. That is 6 times a normal flu season. It is not the same as millions of US dead.
China has a horrid medical system. They sat on this epidemic for two months, denying it existed, even though people were dying and the doctors didn’t have a clue what was going on. And the first stages of a modern epidemic are always the deadliest. The symptoms get dismissed as a cold or the flu or something else. Medical attention is not sought until it becomes life-threatening.
Now we do have a clue of what is going on. If anything we run the risk that people will swamp the medical system out of fear and not the actual disease. It does seem that “cytokine storm syndrome” is the primary cause of death, where the body takes itself out in the process of fighting the disease. We have drugs to treat this but it is too early in the game to know how effective they are against CORVID-19. The IL-6 blockade drug Tocilizumab seems to be working in China and Italy. Roche has gotten permission to produce it in mass quantities.
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.6% of the US population is still 12,957,120.
Tocilizumab is an immunosuppressive drug, mainly for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. It is in no way an anti-viral drug. The last thing you would want to do with a viral infection is to suppress the body’s ability to fight the infection.
Cytokine (Latin for Cell Death) drugs are very specific to the cells they target. It is way too early to even begin thinking of human trials for COVID-19.
The “mab” at the end of Tocilizumab means “monoclonal antibodies”. Monoclonal therapeutics are very expensive to manufacture and since they are cell-specific, even when one is found effective against COVID-19 it will take month to begin production in any useable quantity.
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.6% of the US population is NOT 12,957,120. You skipped a decimal.
That is the mortality rate among people **who had reason to be tested.** Even S.Korea doesn’t test people with no symptoms and no obvious exposure. Total tested is about 1% of its total population. We cannot know the actual infection rate nor the mortality rate because nobody is doing universal testing.
You are also assuming everyone gets infected. That isn’t going to happen. The worst case is about 50%. That’s how epidemics work. Once the number of recovered infected plus the number of people who are resistant to infection – either through biological makeup or taking precautions – hits a certain level, the epidemic recedes. Also since we know the virus is only highly lethal to the elderly and immunocompromised, it reduces the number of people we absolutely have to protect.
And you are assuming we don’t learn how to care for or better treat cases. China’s caseload very quickly blew past any possible medical response. Since we’ve got to social distancing at a much earlier stage of the pandemic, we’ll be able to flatten the curve in a way China did not.
Wuhan province has a population of 115 million. It is a hundred percent certain that China did not catch more than a small fraction of the infected so most of the infectious people remained in the population. Yet a basic lockdown and curfew kept the death toll at around 3400.
That does not translate into millions of Americans dead. There are many reasons why that won’t happen.
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So, the world has gone bats. What else is News. Hopefully though, this will not provoke an eradication of the critters so important to life on Earth. Otherwise, the Mosquitos will indeed add to the darkness in this End of Days; if the DEET doesn’t kill us first bzzzzzzzzzzzzz 🦇🦟%O
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I believe the “panic” buying and hoarding is happening because people THINK they will/might come under a FORCED quarantine or supermarkets might be forced to close.
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Whatever the exact number, I frequently use the auto deaths statistic to put things in perspective for people: the chance of being killed by terrorism, airplane crash, side effect of a drug.
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WRT White Rabbit… the song defined the drug hedonism of the 60s/70s . One of the routes I was considering taking in my show was to have the character sing this as he went over all the medications he needed just to function.
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