Coronavirus: Advice from ME organisations

I touch my face all the time thanks to fine hair that tickles my face. I put my hair up but there is always a few strands that get free! The last few days I have been trying to remember to use my shoulder and upper arm area. My reading glasses needed adjusting yesterday, it was a bit of a feat but I managed to adjust them without using my hands.

The last two days I have had to go the supermarket and both times I stopped to talk with a Chinese person and after walking away thought that I may have increased my risk if they had been in contact with relatives that have recently been in China.

I also share a laundry with 3 other tenants! For me I feel it would be very hard to avoid this infection if it gets to NZ. I hope the containments and self isolating slows things down. In the meantime I am trying to prepare the best I can with gloves, masks, powdered milk, etc.

 

hm. Watching others may be step one in breaking the habit. Next is becoming aware of a reflexive habit in oneself.

 

It's surprisingly difficult to keep your hands off your face! I've been trying - and failing - to develop the habit for years now, ever since I came across an interview with an aid worker who was talking of a time before hand sanitiser became ubiquitous and of places where clean water for handwashing was a rarity. They were taught the principle of not touching their faces - and it worked so well they never got sick in conditions you'd expect to get sick (they probably also practised other things I can't remember anymore but they key was the hands off your face bit).
Definitely requires practice though.

 

Yes, and from looking at flights websites yesterday - lots of flights are coming into the UK from China every day, via Russia or Malaysia or Sri Lanka or even direct! and anyone coming from China has a much higher potential to be carrying Coronavirus since it is the start of the epidemic. I have no idea why this doesn’t seem to have occurred to our ministers and even all other countries to stop flights to and from this country temporarily. I think it’s appalling that people’s health in this country is being put at risk in this way.

People who are healthy and walking around - like this recent case in London, she did not self isolate (despite the fact if they come from affected areas they have to self isolate for 14 days), instead she attended a huge conference in Central London, then just “self reported” and walked into a busy London A&E and took a London taxi! What about people like me? Who already have a tendency to pneumonia and am very ill and awaiting an operation - what happens if I catch it because of people’s selfishness?

The latest case in London has me terrified. I came home from London only this week, after this lady seems to have gone to that conference; and got food delivered from central London and stayed in a hotel room where there were I presume at least a few Chinese nationals staying on holiday/business. I took a taxi to and from London. My boyfriend travels in busy rush hour to and from Central London every day and is not as careful as me when it comes to hand sanitizers, not touching his face etc. I see him a few times a week and in close contact.

I don’t know why this seems to be totally ok with people making decisions in the UK. I’m always the first person to advocate for freedom of movement but saving peoples lives comes before any freedom of movement. I’m also not sure why every single country didn’t immediately close their flights to and from China, as soon as cases became known. Isn’t isolation so important?

Official advise is that people shouldn’t travel unless it’s “essential”. Surely a bus conference wasn’t “essential?”. People cannot be relied upon to self isolate, or to only come in “essential” cases, as this case shows. I believe in London and in the UK it is going to become very serious, sick people who cannot fight it off will be in serious danger and no one seems to be taking the risk seriously. I’m so terrified and don’t understand why the actual ministers and those who can make decisions aren’t doing so? Sorry if I’m not making sense but I woke up today and am terrified

 

I share your worries.

What often upsets me is that they keep on repeating that "only" the elderly or people with underlying condotions are being the ones with the severere outcomes.

Well, not everybody is young and healthy.

My biggest worry as of now though is not getting needed care for my other condotions due to overcrowded hospitals etc.

And shortage of meds.

 

I actually think that at the moment the chances of any of us in the UK having picked up the virus so far is less than one in a million - even if we travelled around London on the tube. But I think people need to start thinking about being more careful from now on.

It does seem crazy that people are still flying in from China but there is a big difference between Wuhan and China. Something like one person in a thousand in Wuhan has been infected. For the rest of China it is still more like one in a million - but it sounds as if that may be changing.

One thing that intrigues me is that so far there is little evidence that the virus spreads rapidly in big modern cities. Even in Hong Kong numbers are not so big. SARS never went out of control in big cities even in China.

 

I find that so strange. Why could that be? I hope that’s the case in London and other big cities. It really worries me as when you think about how many people come into contact with each other in for example London. Taxi drivers, doctors, Deliveroo drivers, restaurants, Tube/Public transport and all the surfaces, workplaces etc. And people travel in and out of London to other cities in the UK continuously.

The case in Brighton where (I think) two doctors surgeries had to be closed, a nursing home, a young child is waiting to find out whether they have it or not as they were treated by a doctor confirmed to have it etc.. just one person was capable of passing it onto so many others. Especially as non symptomatic people can pass it on. This is what worries me. For now, if it’s just one or two individuals they can try to trace all the people they’ve come into contact with. Example this lady they had to trace 250 people at least.

After a short time, this is going to become impossible to trace people like this. What happens then? Genuinely I’m just really baffled because it really does seem to be the case that our ministers are not taking this seriously.

 

Exactly - are those of us with underlying conditions or young and elderly people, not important?

 

@Jonathan Edwards I wonder if you have any sense of how long it might take, (if it is not contained & turns into serious pandemic) for it to turn into a situation of self isolating or enforced isolation? I ask because I have booked a stay in a log cabin at the beginning of June (it's a site with about 80 cabins in the forest - Forest holidays). It's the first 'holiday' I have had in 15yrs & is only possible because I found a place just 20mins drive away from my home. I'm pretty excited about going despite it being simply a different place for me to lie in bed/on sofa for most of the day - the change of scene & nature proximity will hopefully be a joy.
BUT.... I have to pay the balance for it in 3 wks - after which I will lose a lot of money if I cancel it. About 4 different people will be staying with me during the wk (carers - one at a time) so it's not like I could self isolate there in the way I could at home, & obviously there will have been people in the cabin the wk previous & the cleaners that will come in, in the morning before I arrive.

I'm just trying to get a sense of whether, if it gets really bad it will be 'all over' by then, or is likely to be right at peak danger time, or....???

Not asking you to make the decision of course, but if it were you, would you be seriously considering cancelling/postponing?

 

I really don't know, I am afraid. We have a deposit down on a holiday in July abroad. I am tending to take the view that we assume we are going unless there is advice not to - in which case there is a reasonably good chance of getting money back because the operator will have to cancel.

 

That sounds pretty bad Trish! Would it be worth contacting the manager of your care agency about this? After reading your post I decided to email the manager of my own care company. I told her about my concerns about the possibility of a coronavirus epidemic in the UK and said that I hoped she would consider encouraging the care staff to start practicing a more vigilant approach to hand washing and glove-wearing in preparation for this. I expect that the manager of any care agency will take this pretty seriously because it would be a disaster for them if their clients and/or staff started getting sick with coronavirus.

 

Yes none of this actually makes sense. Perhaps these viruses dont thrive in close contact and need people to live further away from each other to replicate. How bizarre.

Anyway I'm glad we have taken to having the authorities assaulting unmasked people coming of trains here for a virus that isn't spreading in places that have close contact.

I wonder what the census records birth/death certificate keeping records are like outside of the big city areas in China?

 

TWiV (This Week in Virology), the same blog David Tuller writes for about ME, run by Vincent Racaniello, has been very informative about this corona virus.

I have been working my way through podcast #586. Recommends washing hands over gels and points out that surfaces may retain other corona viruses in an infective state upto 5 days, also that enteric transmission is possible.

http://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-586/

 

More of these?
https://twitter.com/user/status/1233512322699792384

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1233570079431745536

There are reports that SARS-CoV-2 has been circulating in Washington state (USA) for 6 weeks and no one noticed until now. That suggests the virus isn't quite as virulent as the hype on the internet suggests.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1233970271318503426


The smaller outbreak in South Korea occurred after a large religious gathering, likewise the cruise ship outbreak. It seems to me there is a clear pattern emerging - large crowds gathering in close proximity is causing spikes in infection rates and many people are mistakenly assuming these infection rates reflect normal day to day patterns.

 

Article in the New England Journal of Medicine by Tony Fauci.


On the basis of a case definition requiring a diagnosis of pneumonia, the currently reported case fatality rate is approximately 2%.4 In another article in the Journal, Guan et al.5 report mortality of 1.4% among 1099 patients with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19; these patients had a wide spectrum of disease severity. If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.2

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387

 

That looks like a political piece from a bureaucrat to me. The wording of the account of the reproduction number actually suggests alack of intelligence too.

I find it very hard to see how this argument that Covif19 is 'as safe as flu' and 'safer than SARS and MERS' works. There are already four times as many deaths as from SARS or MERS. So this is more of a threat to you and I than they were. The final death rate is likely to be 100 times greater than those two in fact. It may still be less than seasonal flu but other than Asian Flu and Bird Flu it is very rare to see fit healthy people in their 30s die from flu. There have already been deaths in medical staff in their 30s from Covid19.

The best time to limit the pandemic is now. I honestly do not understand why government spokespeople like Fauci are not telling it like it is and pointing out to people that isolating themselves as much as they can must be the only sensible approach. If they are worried about economic implications the case is even stronger. As soon as numbers are high enough to justify lockdown the economic situation will nosedive.

 

The pandemic is being limited now, given all the hype and resources being provided. Those who travel internationally are being advised to isolate themselves.

The best thing for the average person to do is simply avoid large gatherings in confined spaces - since that is what has led to all of the spikes in numbers we have seen so far. Simply avoiding that will prevent epidemics in the USA, Australia, UK etc.
Of course this also puts the Olympics in doubt...