Have I totally misunderstood Coronavirus?!!

[Soph7777]

I'm really confused on so many levels. I don't understand why such panic about contracting it IF you have no underlying health conditions or are over 70.

The chance of dying is still much lower than many, many other illnesses.

I obviously get why people shouldn't be going out of their way to get it - to protect the NHS in the main.

But my understanding of this disease after watching hours and hours of documentaries and reading up is that 80 percent of us WILL get it.

Lockdown is to stop it spreading so quickly that NHS can't cope to treat everyone leading to many more deaths than necessary - it's not to stop us getting it (which inevitably most of us will).

Have I totally missed the mark here?

I don't get why so many people I speak to are acting like getting it means you'll die instantly once you contract it. It doesn't.

Does anyone else feel the same?

COVID-19 is contagious but its not as bad tas this well known one!

And I quote;

The measles virus is one of the most infectious diseases known to humans. A person with measles can cough in a room and leave, and hours later, if you’re unvaccinated, you could catch the virus from the droplets in the air the infected person left behind.

No other virus can do that.

I’m erring on the side of caution as I have only 50% lung capacity. My OH has low immune system due to meds for his chronic condition. We haven’t seen our grandchildren for 2 weeks, other than Skype. It is very hard but we would prefer to not cuddle them for a couple of months than not see them ever again.

We were thinking we would be back to normal in 3 weeks but as our local news station reported today that two of our local sport centres are being adapted as hospital wards to cater for coronavirus patients I think we are in it for the long haul

Keep calm? Great if you can.
Carry on? Please don't. Especially if it's carrying on shopping

@stupidanduseless, yes the economy will suffer but the economy goes along in cycles of booms and busts because that's how capitalism works. It's a bit closer to the last bust than usual but we'll survive it and just have a bit more national debt. We always have national debt, it's how capitalism works.

Those of us who are worried aren't panicking, we're just aware of the situation. Yes, it's likely that 80% of us will get it but there's not a health service in the world who could deal with that if it all happened in one fell swoop. Hence lockdown. For three weeks or maybe a month with maybe more as the year and the virus goes along. This gives the NHS the room to deal with excess patients whilst also dealing with other emergencies. We need a period or periods of lockdown so we can control the numbers at any given time. We are currently roughly two weeks away from the peak, hence shutdown now to prevent more infection as well as possible because there are already tens of thousands of undetected cases. The numbers of new patients we are given every day is the tip of the iceberg.

We all get that people die every day and that people get seriously ill or injured every day but not thousands more at one time. That's why this is called a pandemic and why everything that's going on is necessary.

Because your "only the vulnerable" is someone else's whole world. It isn't reassuring to vulnerable people to be td its ONLY them that'll die so it's basically fine. That seems to imply no one worthwhile or important will die. They will - vulnerable people are worthwhile and important too

Now there are more and more younger people dying perhaps attitudes will change and hopefully people will take more notice of the seriousness of it. It just concerns me that the virus has changed.

I agree that people have misunderstood - we will all get it. There seems to be a consensus that we can avoid it! But we will all contract this unless a vaccine emerges very very quickly, which it won't. We will likely have to have waves of restriction over the next 18 months to not overload the NHS while everyone is getting it.

Whether you're scared of getting it is a different matter entirely.

Not everyone will get it FFS. They have put many millions in making a vaccin to get it here earlier. If we slow the spread considerably we don't all get it till the vaccin is here. It will save many lives if we slow this down.

Plus that they are trialling different drugs for those who do get it. The more time, the better treatment options that we have. Time saves lives here.

Sorry, maybe we will not all get it, but unless we are all in lockdown for over a year the vast majority will get it.

the lockdown is so that YOU don't spread the disease.
YOU could potential be symptomless or with very mild symptoms and spread it to others via the supermarket trolleys or just by breathing on someone else.

Sorry, maybe we will not all get it, but unless we are all in lockdown for over a year the vast majority will get it.

I'm isolating myself for as long as necessary. I hope that at least the social distancing will be kept up as long as is needed.

www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/25/uk-woman-21-with-no-health-issues-dies-from-covid-19-family-say

Healthy 21 year old no underlying health issues.

That's why

Yet Prince Charles in his 70s has a "mild case"

There is no telling how severe your symptoms will be so why play Russian roulette and the bravado about it being a mild illness.

Yes until at 30 you die because you do not have access to a ventilator.

I get what op is saying. Hopefully if I or anyone I know does actually get it, it's mild and recoverable. Some people have recovered from it whilst being at home and not needed medical intervention at all. It is contagious, and will kill. But we do also lose many elderly people, to flu, each winter.

The NHS is under great strain, and the doctors and nurses are under pressure. Those are the ones our thoughts should be with.

Even this government isn’t stupid enough to think less harm would be done to the economy and stability of this country by letting the virus run its course unchecked than by pursuing the current measures. Even Donald Trump, despite his inane witterings, isn’t quite that stupid.

Per the CNN report : Italian Bartender, sharing his whistle, while people playing beer pong.

"While Lerfeldt and his friends say they have fully recovered,". So at least they've recovered and nit died!

I had a rough glance at how many people have asthma, diabetes, are over 70 etc

It's probably up to 1/3 of the population who are at quite high risk, so you will see a lot of very scared people

And the predicted low death rate (but nevertheless high numbers of deaths) is where proper healthcare is available. I would like more information on what would happen to the 20% of people with symptoms who get severe or critical disease where ventilators are unavailable. What’s the modelling on the death rate and numbers of deaths then? Clearly highly alarming, given world reaction to the virus.

It's track and trace that is really effective, not lockdown itself. Unless we are happy to lockdown indefinitely (that vaccine is a year/two years off). This lockdown is temporary until people's thinking catches up with reality.

And 1.5 million people are in the shielded group.

This is the message I got from my daughter in Madrid two weeks ago.
Talking to my friend who's boyfriend has been rushed to hospital here in Madrid with suspected Covid-19. They've run out of oxygen masks, nurses are working 20 hour shifts. There's not enough beds so he was left on a chair despite having a raging fever and difficulty breathing.There's one toilet for everyone to use. One guy said he'd been in the same clothes for 4 days. And they still don't know if he's tested positive but is now surrounded by people who have. The health system here is on the brink of collapse.
That was two weeks ago, things are much, much worse now. The health system simply cannot cope with the amount of dangerously ill people needing care all at once. This is why we're being asked to stay at home, to reduce the spread.

I entirely agree with the principle of the lockdown and flattening the curve to let the NHS cope better. At the same time, I worry that people exaggerate how effective treatment can be in severe cases. There are no clearly effective antiviral drugs yet for this virus. There are repurposed drugs for other conditions (like chloroquine, which has already poisoned someone in the US) which may be of some benefit, but we are still waiting on the results of trials. The 21 year old who died yesterday, for example. It's an extremely upsetting story, but she wouldn't have been denied a ventilator or anything the NHS can throw at it if she died in hospital, before the curb reaches its peak, and in an age group where she was going to get triaged to the front of the queue. (Thankfully, relative to the total number of cases in the population, the fraction of people who develop these very severe problems is tiny. If half of us already have had it, the death rate so far is 0.001%, maybe a little more if assuming some undiagnosed deaths. But the fraction of people who survived because of treatment is also then minuscule.)

It would be a terrible pity if conditions where we already HAVE very effective treatments (early-stage breast cancer, for example) went untreated. I think it's right to say that no one on a cancer ward would have recovered without treatment, but some patients in the Chinese and Italian statistics (perhaps less so here where the barrier to hospitalising may be higher) would presumably have recovered without hospitalisation, ie had bad mild or mild moderate cases. Maybe someone with more knowledge can speak to this: but, compared to other major illnesses, how effectively does hospital treatment improve mortality rate for covid-19? It seems in a way important psychologically not to place too much hope on what medical treatment can do here, and to recognise how far vaccination has wiped our collective memory of how awful viral infections can be. The more I read about measles, the more grateful I am we live in a time when childhood viruses have been almost completely eradicated.

I wonder if covid-19 will end up being more like chickenpox, something that we don't vaccinate against in this country precisely because it's a much more dangerous illness for adults than children?

@hopsalong

We need to treat this like Measles not Chickenpox. When there are Measles cases now the person is put in isolation, they trace and track, they deep clean schools etc. And we know that vaccination is key, so as soon as we have a vaccine we will follow that model. It's just what we do until then.

Ventilation just gives the body's immune system a better chance of fighting the virus. (By taking over breathing so the body can concentrate on fighting the virus) It's not a cure, it's just a pause button. It can't be done indefinitely and it doesn't always work, because the immune system is still overwhelmed by the virus. For many ventilation works, for many it won't, and for some it isn't even worth trying and only palliative care can be given. Ventilation has its own risk and can result in permanent lung injury, organ failure and brain damage. If we had an effective antiviral this would be much better than ventilation and would improve the time spent on a ventilator as the anti viral would reduce the amount of virus making it easier to fight off and any time on a ventilator would be less and have better outcomes. But we don't have an effective anti viral. But vaccination will always take priority where it is possible because anti virals are usually not a cure they just reduce the symptoms and severity (with the possible exception of hepatitis c). It's better to not catch a virus at all and be immunised against exposure.

There are many countries that do now immunise against chicken pox. In the UK the few numbers of serious cases and/or deaths means that the government have deemed a national immunisation program unnecessary but other countries are routinely vaccinating because they have made a different cost vs risk analysis. With chicken pox we know that people usually cannot catch it again, we don't know that with covid 19. The evidence suggests that it might not result in long term immunity so this would be a big gamble. And even if it does result in immunity, the virus could still linger and we may see a shingles like illness. Only with covid 19 it could vary massively in severity we don't know what a "covid 19 shingles" could do.

Even a mild illness like chicken pox is not risk free, and covid 19 is less mild. Adults who get chicken pox usually get more poorly, but they do not frequently die from it. Also the more the virus spreads the more likely it is to mutate. All viruses can mutate, but ideally it would as little as possible in order that immunity (long term or temporary) and vaccines can be effective. If we let this spread and mutate by the time a vaccine is ready it might not work.

AnotherMurkyDay - I think you mean, ventilation is necessary in severe and critical cases to get enough oxygen into the body to prevent death by suffocation...

And even then doesn’t always work, if the lungs are too damaged.

Hoping someone’s going to correct me on this one!