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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

AIBU to ask if you are worried about the new coronavirus? - continued

999 replies

IvyBush123 · 10/02/2020 19:29

Here is the old thread:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/3813759-AIBU-to-ask-you-if-you-are-worried-about-the-new-Coronavirus?pg=40

Here is a twitter video from Wuhan I want to share because it so heartbreaking. People happily celebrating shortly before it became known that there was a virus outbreak. There already were some rumors but people didn’t believe them:
twitter.com/WLaowai8/status/1225637845508837377

@Yourtunbridgewells: The info you are sharing (472000 deaths in the UK) is very scary. Is this a worst case scenario.

@justdeckingthehalls: Epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding writes that it is airborne on twitter: twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1226236552059260928
N95 masks help against airborne transmission don’t they?

OP posts:
Thread gallery
6
RedToothBrush · 14/02/2020 21:12

red this sounds a bit as if you doubt the need to self-isolate? I know from other threads that you are very very data-based, sound research etc, but I think that comment might possibly be unfair?

I don't doubt the need to self isolate. The problem is people self isolating because they've stood within 20 foot of someone who has been never a plane in the last six weeks and has got a bit of a sore throat.

At this point it's just crazy. People's inability to calculate risk is mad.

The prison story being the prime example, of when you look at the dates, time etc it just don't make sense. It just undermines support for people like the Uber driver who has been left stuffed.

The number of cases friend said the business was currently dealing with was absurd. It does make you wonder what the 111 script is (if you call 111 you don't speak to someone medically tried, you talk to someone who reads of a card). The inability to distinguish between the ridiculous and the genuinely concerning cases just makes it more likely that real cases will be missed due to volume.

RedToothBrush · 14/02/2020 21:16

Watch out for pneumonia just above your kidney... COVID-19 isnt just any flu. Its so bad it moves your lungs to your lower abdomen.

AIBU to ask if you are worried about the new coronavirus? - continued
Jenasaurus · 14/02/2020 21:17
  1. Stay at home
  2. Separate yourself from other people in your home*
  3. Call ahead before visiting your doctor
  4. Wear a facemask if advised to
  5. Cover your coughs and sneezes
  6. Wash your hands
  7. Avoid sharing household items
  8. Monitor your symptoms (or the person you are caring for, as appropriate)
9.Do not have visitors in your home 10.Waste

Separate yourself from other people in your home
You should stay in a well-ventilated room with a window to outside that can be opened, separate from other people in your home. Keep the door closed. Use a separate bathroom from the rest of the household, if available. If you have to share these facilities, regular cleaning will be required.
If a separate bathroom is not available, consideration should be given to drawing up a bathroom rota for washing or bathing, with the isolated person using the facilities last, before thoroughly cleaning the bathroom themselves (if able or appropriate*). Ensure the isolated person uses separate towels from other household members, both for drying themselves after bathing or showering and for hand hygiene purposes.
If you live in shared accommodation (university halls of residence or similar) with a communal kitchen, bathroom(s) and living area, you should stay in your room with the door closed, only coming out when necessary, wearing a facemask if one has been issued to you.
If you share a kitchen with others (such as university halls of residence or similar), if possible avoid using it whilst others are present. If this is not possible then wear a facemask if you have been issued with one. Take your meals back to your room to eat. Use a dishwasher (if available) to clean and dry your used crockery and cutlery. If this is not possible, wash them by hand using detergent and warm water and dry them thoroughly, using a separate tea towel.
If these recommendations cannot be implemented, then home isolation should be avoided.

Ontopofthesunset · 14/02/2020 21:23

I agree about the inability to calculate risk. Right now anyone who has not been in close contact to anyone with the virus is more at risk from a car accident. Someone on the preppers thread is saying that they don't want to take their child to a soft play party in Lewisham. I don't suppose the Chinese woman who was recently diagnosed went to soft play.

Either the virus is everywhere so you might catch it at softplay, in which case it can't be very dangerous at all, as most people don't know they've got it and are not being tested, or it's still only in a few isolated cases whose contacts are being tracked as much as possible, in which case it's not widespread, so you won't catch it at soft play. So either way the soft play in Lewisham is a negligible risk.

yolofish · 14/02/2020 21:49

Hmm.

The risk issue: if you, or one of your loved ones, is immuno-compromised or in another at risk group then 'risk' suddenly becomes a lot more prominent in your life.

So you weigh it up - is commuting on the train or tube potentially an issue? Well, yes, it could be for us.

If my adult child doing the commuting is likely to be infected, does she come back home where I can look after her, and potentially isolate her quite effectively - but where her father is immunosuppressed by chemo?

I'd just have to keep them in separate rooms I think and shuttle around the place with the Dettol...

RedToothBrush · 14/02/2020 22:07

Ontopofthesunset Exactly. This week I've had people say they won't go to Manchester yet they work in a school and have been to the GP twice and this hasn't crossed their minds as much more likely as a somewhere to be infected.

There's been loads of comments about banning all flights to China but no thought about the developing situation elsewhere in the world or indirect flights. Also coupled with lots of racism.

Then you have the taxi driver who is apparently not high risk, apart from the fact two taxi drivers in Japan have caught it.

And now we have cases like this popping up
mainichi.jp/english/articles/20200214/p2g/00m/0na/044000c
New coronavirus cases further spread in Japan, some infection routes unknown

While health minister Katsunobu Kato said there is "no reason for changing the government position that it has yet to reach a state of epidemic in Japan," infection of a Hokkaido resident in his 50s with no recent history of traveling abroad has been confirmed, the Hokkaido government said. The man is being treated at a hospital where he remains in serious condition.

In Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, a man in his 60s who recently returned from a trip to Hawaii has tested positive for the coronavirus, the city government said. He has not visited China recently.

In cases reported Thursday in the western prefecture of Wakayama, a route of contraction is not known, either.

A man in his 70s who was treated at a hospital in Wakayama where a doctor was confirmed to have been infected with the virus has also tested positive for it, local officials said Friday, adding that the two apparently never had any contact.

Wakayama Gov. Yoshinobu Nisaka said, however, he does not think infections are spreading inside the Saiseikai Arida Hospital in Yuasa, where the man, a farmer, was briefly hospitalized from last week.

A local government official warned that infections could be spreading outside of the medical facility as the man developed symptoms before he visited the hospital on Feb. 6.

At what point does it become necessary or advised for anyone with a cold or sore throat to self isolate in the uk? Is that even reasonable and possible? In the absence of a more concrete plan and consistent strategy led by government its all just a nonsense. And one that supports businesses, self employed, schools, parents etc.

I'm particularly fed up as I've had a cold or cough more or less since November. Having a 5 year old germ factory is proving bad for my health. I've been laid up in bed for the majority of the last two days apart from to take him to school. I can't not take him because of his attendance record. I know he hasn't got coronavirus but the point is what happens as this does spread then that does start to be an issue for people. A coherent plan from government is now needed. We don't have one. That's starting to be troubling.

Basically the situation is becoming a farce because the government is taking up to 72 hours to test the highest risk cases, because they don't have enough testing capacity. We already have an overload of the healthcare system. As a result contact tracing is taking far too long to really be effective as a result. You have a mix of genuinely concerning contacts as well chancers and the anxious now self isolating because of it. The window of opportunity to slow it down is closing fast because people haven't applied a good enough triage of risk assessment.

The case of the nurse who has been in direct contact with someone is also showing the problem up very strongly.

No one knows what the fuck they are doing.

WhoWants2Know · 14/02/2020 22:19

I've had a nasty virus this week and I must say that I was much more conscious of containing it than I have been previously.

Normally I'm one to soldier on wherever possible because I don't want to let anyone down. This time I wasn't leaving the house unless it absolutely couldn't be avoided, then keeping a hell of a distance from everyone and dousing myself with alcohol gel. Talking about it does have an impact.

Jenasaurus · 14/02/2020 22:27

whowants2know same here. I have a cough, headache, and feverish and feel a bit wheezy but I also sat next to a colleague with a cold last week so I know its that, but if I had been in an environment where I could have been in contact with someone from one of the areas its prevalent abroad I would be self isolating right now. I work in a healthcare environment and know the number of patients who are scared they have the virus without having any of the risk factors but I do understand their fear. Its in the news, every few minutes my PC pings a notification of another suspected case and I live in between London and Brighton, very near a London airport where all these cases keep cropping up, makes it feel very real.

LoveNote · 14/02/2020 22:33

so as a manager i'd like to know.....if they are home self isolating, is it paid or unpaid?

chipperdipper · 14/02/2020 22:40

When people say "it's not just the flu!", do they just not know what the flu feels like? People seem to call common colds "the flu" quite a lot!

GorkyMcPorky · 14/02/2020 22:51

When people say "it's not just the flu!", do they just not know what the flu feels like? People seem to call common colds "the flu" quite a lot!

I was wondering this before. I've had proper flu once as a 17 year old. I literally couldn't go further than the bathroom for 10 days and missed my A Level mocks. If a new form of 'just the flu', predicted to affect 60-70% of the population is heading our way, the economy is fucked whether it's particularly deadly or not.

Jenasaurus · 14/02/2020 22:52

love note surely that would be down to individual employers, to be honest if you had an employee with suspected coronavirus and they were advised to self isolate for 14 days would you pay them or prefer them to come in to work?

GorkyMcPorky · 14/02/2020 23:20

Reassuring data on infants.

AIBU to ask if you are worried about the new coronavirus? - continued
BigChocFrenzy · 14/02/2020 23:20

North Korea taking quarantine seriously - which for them means shooting those who disobey ...

These were a couple of NK civil servants, normally privileged in their society, so I wonder how many ordinary people have been executed without publicity

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/north-korea-official-suspected-having-21488373

A trade official has reportedly been killed by a firing squad after defying coronavirus quarantine* orders*
in the authoritarian Asian country,

while a National Security Agency official was sent to work on a farm for similar offences

Words · 14/02/2020 23:27

Hi BCFSmile
I'm An old timer under another name on Westminstenders.

eeeyoresmiles · 14/02/2020 23:34

At what point does it become necessary or advised for anyone with a cold or sore throat to self isolate in the uk? Is that even reasonable and possible?

To slow the spread, people self-isolating with any sore throat is clearly desirable (for this virus, and others we want less of too right now). I don't know how that gets triggered though. It's clearly going to be bad for the economy, but then so is any war, and I honestly feel like that's a bit how we need to start thinking about it.

Thinking of it that way gets past the whole normalcy bias. It helps us accept that extreme measures (everything from cancelling massive international conferences, to not just going to work and 'powering through' colds), are necessary and important and not just stupid people 'panicking'. It might also help people to feel a sense of shared purpose and hope in taking the necessary measures over a long time, rather than expecting it all to be over quickly.

With colds, some people can stay home more easily than others, but even they won't stay home if there isn't a really strong message coming from the government that we all have a duty to do our very best to stay home with any respiratory infection, that it is OK to do that and not over-reacting.

If that message is out there, then quite a few people who might otherwise go out will feel justified in staying home with respiratory illnesses, and that will help. Even if most of those illnesses won't be Covid-19, some of them will, and if those people stay home, it will slow the spread.

It seems clear that if we don't get ahead of this, i.e. do things (all of us together, via government instructions) that currently feel a bit OTT but which could make the biggest difference later, then we'll always be reacting to any spread and not preventing it, and it will get much much worse very quickly.

What we really need to know is which things we're thinking we don't really need to do yet that we'll desperately wish we'd done, in a month's time. But we do know that to some extent from Wuhan - and it's not waiting and seeing how things go until after there are so many infections that it's too late.

PineappleCocktail · 14/02/2020 23:42

A self test facility would be ideal for this.

According to the preppers thread, bleach kills the virus so at least it'll be cheap and easy to keep on top of the cleaning if there is an outbreak here. Zoflora also kills it so all the Mrs Hinch fans will be laughing Grin

LoveNote · 14/02/2020 23:47

The one I’m thinking of who is going to self isiolaye I would pay but it’s the less scrupulous staff.... large branch , 160 employees who seem to hate their Jobs

We are Manchester too so airport will be used as a reason

GorkyMcPorky · 14/02/2020 23:48

What we really need to know is which things we're thinking we don't really need to do yet that we'll desperately wish we'd done, in a month's time. But we do know that to some extent from Wuhan - and it's not waiting and seeing how things go until after there are so many infections that it's too late.

If only this had happened in Hubei as a result of Li Wenliang's 'scaremongering'.

BigChocFrenzy · 14/02/2020 23:56

< Peers under false moustache, waves to words >

BigChocFrenzy · 14/02/2020 23:58

Best to follow NHS advice, which afaik is only advising self-quarantine when there are reasonable grounds to fear infection

Russellbrandshair · 15/02/2020 00:02

Best to follow NHS advice, which afaik is only advising self-quarantine when there are reasonable grounds to fear infection

This. It’s completely unrealistic to expect everyone with a hint of a cold to immediately take 2 weeks off work. The risk of that many people being off work from essential or vital services would actually pose more risk to the vulnerable than corona virus

BigChocFrenzy · 15/02/2020 00:09

If we start to get a lot more cases - and deaths - then official advice for the UK would have to change

However, if it remains with comparatively few Uk cases, the NHS / govt is unlikely to recommend people stay at home if they have colds or sore throats, without any official suspected Covid-19 contacts
Otherwise, anyone who fancies several days off could claim symptoms

Losing many millions of work would hammer the economy, bankrupt some small businesses
If govt finances are too hard hit, they'd cut public spending
The poorest would be hardest hit, as usual

BigChocFrenzy · 15/02/2020 00:10

Losing many millions of work days

HeIenaDove · 15/02/2020 00:21

@LoveNote what about the less scrupulous employers employing ppl on zero hours, people on UC. If someone is under threat of a sanction if they dont attend a JC appointment they will attempt to try and drag themselves there however shit they feel.

You only had to look at the threads about Boxing Day working for retail workers to see that they faced disciplinaries if they phoned in sick.