Coronavirus - worldwide spread and control

I recall reading about cases of permanent damage to sense of smell from an OTC zinc spray. Are the lozenges (which are a different delivery route) known to be safe?
Further commentary: The gloves won’t help unless you always use the correct technique to remove them without touching the outside, but if they remind you not to unthinkingly touch your face, they work. Elbow vs tissues, well if you can’t wash your hands right away, the tissue method just means you have hands with a coating of whatever.
The advisory about lung tissue was helpful, but food seems to be a vector. There was a case where eating from shared ‘hotpot’ serving dishes passed it to a whole family.

 

The radio this morning said a 61 year old physician died from the coronavirus in just 4 days.

 

Where? 61 is towards the risk zone. Wuhan ncv seems to be highly age-targeting, under 21 they barely feel it. It ain’t an influenza.

 

@Jonathan Edwards: is chalet cooking Brit-speak for smorgasborg (as we say in the USA or however it is spelled here) or all-you-can-eat restaurants where people serve themselves again, over again, rather unsanitarily.

As a pessimistic, misanthropic, introvert with a quasi medical background and a fear of sea sickness, not to mention not liking to be around drunk people, don't worry, I'd never take a commerical cruise line trip. Cooped up with a horde is my idea of hell.

What an incubator.

PS One of my reasons for staying on this website is to learn Brit speak.

 

I think that the virus has been found in faeces too, so especially be careful if you need to use a public toilet. I think this may have been mentioned already, but I reckon it's good to remind people. Also make sure you put the toilet seat down before flushing! OH and I do this all the time, but when family visit they don't. I'm trying to think of a kind way of warning them about this on WhatsApp. They'll probably just say "O-o-o-oh Mu-u-u-um"!

 

Latest from Boris Johnson,

“But Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the government's scientific advisory group for emergencies (Sage) had told him that closing schools and stopping big gatherings "don't work as well perhaps as people think in stopping the spread".

He told ITV's This Morning programme: "One of the theories is perhaps you could take it on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease to move through the population without really taking as many draconian measures. I think we need to strike a balance."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51749352

 

If the epidemic is not slowed as much as possible there will be chains of ambulances outside every hospital carrying people for whom there will be no specialist care beds.

 

Some of their briefings sound like they're now aiming to have infections peak during the summer, when the NHS is under less strain, and would like to have it 'move through the population' before we get to autumn. I'm a bit surprised they seem to already be shifting to that plan rather than taking stronger (albeit socially disruptive) actions to contain it.

Also, we don't know a lot about this virus and its long term affects (if any) yet. Some people seem surprisingly relaxed about the prospect of widespread infection imo.

 

I doubt that Chris Whitty is intelligent enough to know that there is no way that one could predict or manipulate time course in that sort of way.

My understanding is that containment policy has not been watered down. It is just that it has yet to get off the ground in any serious form.

The stupid thing is that being lax now is the best way to ensure a catastrophic economic crash in the long term. I suspect that we are not being told about major shifts in commercial practice because nobody wants to know. The freight traffic on the A12 (to and from Felixstowe) today we estimated to be down to about 25% of normal. There were almost no container lorries with European logos, whereas they are usually 60+%.

 

I've heard this being discussed in an interview with an expert today.

He compared that sort of thinking ("just let it spread and lets get over it") to measle parties and how reckless that would be.

 

I agree Jonathan Edwards. From what I see Chris Whitty is just going along with it all, and advising the government that this is ok.

I spoke to my boyfriend about it. He says at his workplace they’ve already started making plans for employees to work from home and will probably do that in the next few weeks. I hope that is the case - I just hope all employers and event organisers etc take things into their own hands regardless of what Boris Johnson says. In London all I see is everyone being just as busy as usual so far :/

 

Yes, it is unbelievably reckless. Which is why I don’t understand why these experts opinions are not getting through to our current government. Everyone keeps saying - we have to act now.

 

I don't understand it either and I'm scared by the lack of empathy towards the vulnerable in media coverage.

 

Our president yesterday had a televised meeting with heads of big pharma. The president kept insisting that the current flu vaccine could be tweaked into a Covid-19 vaccine. The incredulous looks on the pharma heads.

local report. Our public health department is trying to trace over a 100 people who rode in an airport shuttle bus with an hospitalized man with covid-19.

If they shut down schools, then a lot of health care workers with children can't go to work. However, if the number of cases needing hospitalization is starting to increase versus the number of available isolation rooms and ventilators, well, a decision must be made.

 

I imagine there is a similarity to containing a forest fire - your best chance of containing it is to do so whilst you still think it is not a serious problem. The exponential growth deludes people into thinking they can "catch it in time", not realising that reality rapidly and increasingly outstrips the corrective attempts that people think, in the early days, will suffice, but inevitably lag behind what is needed. Experts of course know the importance of nipping these things in the bud; but politicians' and economists' attempts to avoid panic and minimise disruption actually hampers that crucial early containment, and leave things until it potentially becomes uncontainable.

At the moment most cases in the UK seem to have been contracted from people who have come in from areas abroad where cv is already prevalent. I imagine that now is the time for best-chance containment, whilst the virus is not spreading within the UK population itself. I would guess in practice this will be impossible to achieve, but I imagine that containment also relates to slowing the rate at which the prevalence increases. Presumably a slower increase with a less severe peak is less difficult to deal with than a rapidly increasing higher peak, even if such a lower peak persisted for longer.

 

Sadly, it's probably already out there. Apparently Haslemere has already been affected. Someone I know lives there and the Health Centre had to be closed for a deep clean after a patient tested positive for the virus and ended up in one of the London hospitals. I believe some people in the area have been quarantined.

 

the lady who just died in the UK, has no history of travel outside and so caught it from within the Uk

 

So yes, containment will now be more about holding back its acceleration within the UK population.

 

A few school shutdowns have started in California and Washington state already.