Around 100 people die per day in US from automobile accidents. So far, total deaths in US from caronavirus is in low 20s last I heard. Total. Just perspective. Just odd we don't get more excited about sear belt use and DUI which cause many many more deaths. I guess if it bleeds it leads, and we are a society that loves the media.
I don't think that's fair, either as a comparison or to the media. Automobile accidents are in the news all the time, a bus
driver has a heart attack and the bus hit a tree, and a child died, a car lost control and skidded off the highway in the mountains and was lost in the snow, and wasn't found for weeks,
etc,
etc,
etc. There are examples of tragic accidents and road-rage,
vehicle pileups and senseless acts of violence everyday.
But, those things are an
accepted risk of getting into your car everyday. Kids today are taught to drive more defensively in drivers Ed, cars have gotten much safer, with anti-collision sensors, and automated braking, and a host of thousands of incremental improvements every year. Better crumple zones, stronger and lighter materials, better airbags, more airbags, active sensors on seatbelt pre-tensioners, sensors that detect if you start falling asleep at the wheel. Lane-drift correction, the list goes on and on. We, as a society, are getting really good at being able to mitigate as much risk as possible, while still allowing the freedoms we all enjoy today.
Coronavirus is much scarier than a car accident, you can't see it, you can't sense it, and you have no
immediate way to know if you contracted it. It traveled so fast through parts of China that production of
goods basically came to a standstill, and the Chinese government responded by putting more than 45 MILLION people into involuntary quarantine, which would basically be the same as the US shutting down all of California and Oregon combined. That is a very scary prospect. The scope, and speed of transmission is what sets coronavirus apart. It's not part of society's collective known risk factors.
We all accept that influenza raises it's ugly head every winter, in fact, myself and my whole family, all 7 of us, had influenza over a two week period in February. It nailed our
house, we were in a self-imposed quarantine for nearly 2 weeks, only venturing out to the doc's and to the pharmacy. We had groceries delivered, and thankfully, I work remotely from home. What could have been a major financial blow for us was not, and I know that I am extremely lucky in that regard. I have a great job, and the flexibility to take time off, or work in my PJs at odd hours while sipping soup and trying to breathe normally. The whole family getting the flu sucked, like a lot, and it truly underscores the fact that we need true healthcare reform in this country, we were able to weather the flu because we all had insurance, either provided by my job, or through the state. Too many people do not have that. But, I digress.
The flu is a known risk factor. Coronavirus is not part of our collective risk factors. It's an outlier, a non-discriminating virus, transmitted invisibly and undetectably. Our only saving grace is that while it's amazingly easy to transmit, it's not sd amazingly deadly. Please don't get me wrong, it's still deadly and has killed thousands, but its death vs transmission rate could be much worse. That said, the statistics of coronavirus survival on non-immunocompromised people is really good. Especially for kids. That's the good news, the bad news is that it's
really bad for people who have respiratory issues and for older generations. Older people, and people with pre-existing medical conditions (such as asthma, diabetes, heart disease) appear to be more vulnerable to becoming severely ill with the virus.
Much remains unknown about the novel coronavirus ripping through China, but one thing is certain. The disease can cast a storm over the whole human body. Such has been the nature of past zoonotic coronaviruses, ones that hopped from animals to humans like SARS and MERS. Unlike their common-cold-causing cousins, these emergent coronaviruses can spark a viral-induced fire throughout many of a person’s organs, and the new disease—dubbed "COVID-19" by the World Health Organization—is no exception when it is severe.
That helps explain why the COVID-19 epidemic has killed more than 3,800 people, surpassing the SARS death toll in a matter of weeks. While the death rate for COVID-19 appears to be a fifth of SARS, COVID-19 has spread faster.
On February 14th, the confirmed cases rose to more than 50,000, nearly a 50 percent jump relative to the prior day, and the tally has since increased by another 13,000. Today, it stands at over 111,000 globally. The leap in cases reflects a change in the way Chinese authorities are diagnosing infections instead of a massive
shift in the scope of the outbreak. Rather than wait for patients to test positive for the virus, diagnoses now include anyone whose chest scan reveals COVID-19’s
distinctive pattern of pneumonia. This is what kills people, the way it attacks our respiratory
system, causing the cilia, which helps keep our lungs
clear, to die and we basically drown with fluid in our lungs. The virus
ups the ante by attacking the cytokine response, which is our bodies attack beacon for our immune
system, and our body starts attacking healthy cells as well.
All of this is to say that the danger is not over-hyped. It is deadly, maybe not to you, but to a large segment of the global population, it has the potential to be fatal. We have seen pandemics before, but this one is scarier because of how fast it travels. I don't think the media is overplaying this.
We, as a society, need a wake-up
call. A
call for taking better care of ourselves, a
call to recognize that the herd has to protect the weak and that we all share the responsibility to act responsibly and try not to spread our illnesses around.
Perhaps, for those of us in the US, this is what we need to finally get people to agree that healthcare for all benefits society as a whole. I really don't care where people stand politically on most subjects, but there is no good argument that our
current system isn't terribly broken and that healthcare should be a basic human right.
So, let's stop comparing coronavirus to other risk factors of life, like auto deaths, influenza, and obesity. These are all known risk factors, that we have the ability to fight. When we have a vaccine for coronavirus, it will
fade from our consciousness, but until it does, it's gonna be part of the conversation for the next year or two, and it will have a lasting impact on our society.