Vanderbilt shutting down due to coronavirus.

[OldDude]

Wow, Whit trying to be rational on a sports message forum. Talk about tilting at windmills !

As usual, good post Whit.

[commadore]

I’m trying to see the relevance of your decision not to cancel a flight two months away to Vanderbilt’s decision to cancel in person classes right now to try to contain the spread of this virus and protect its students and the public at large. BTW, St. Louis University and another college in St. Louis announced the same shutdown decision today. I expect other schools will adopt this corse you characterize as an “insane over reaction.”

Every physician I have heard says this virus is no worse than the flu. No one under the age of 15 worldwide has died from it. The vast majority of deaths have been over 75 and those with pre-existing conditions. We lose 25-50,000 people in the United States each year to the flu and there is nowhere near the widespread panic as the press (yes, I said the press) has generated for this. I went to buy toilet paper today because we were running low and had to go to three places before I could find any. Really? Toilet paper? Costco and Target were bare. Finally found some at Walmart. And forget alcohol, hand sanatizer, or wipes. Pure panic. It is laughable.
Is this virus serius? Yes. Especially if you are old and infirm. Otherwisee, it doesn't seem to be that bad...just highly contageous. And so is the flu and they haven't shut it down for that.
Also, if my cruise was this weekend, I would be on the plane to Seattle.

For starters, the mortality rate is 10 times greater than the flu. But the big reason for concern is that the rate of serious complications requiring hospitalization is close to 20% and everybody is susceptible -- that's the big problem with a brand new virus. Nobody is immune from previous exposures or vaccination, and left unchecked, the spread of the disease is exponential.

Even though the large majority of cases are mild to moderate, a big outbreak would overwhelm the ability of hospitals and ICUs to care for the serious cases. If the hospitals and ICUs are strained past capacity, then there won't be sufficient capacity to handle ordinary health issues that require hospital care.

So the concern isn't whether a particular person will get the disease, it's over the entire hospital system. I agree that it may seem alarmist now, but given that the spread of the contagion is exponential, if action isn't untaken until it seems alarming to us lay people, it'll be too late.


If these measures can help slow the spread of the disease sufficiently, hopefully we can avoid swamping hospitals and ICUs past their capacity.

No, the mortality rate worldwide is slightly greater than the flu. In countries like South Korea and Japan it has been slightly over 1%. When testing ramps up here that is what will be found here. Right now in the US it is 2.35% (40/1,700). Mortality under 60 worldwide has been 1%. 60-70 is 2% and each decade doubles. Those are facts from the CDC.

[VandyWhit]

Every physician I have heard says this virus is no worse than the flu. No one under the age of 15 worldwide has died from it. The vast majority of deaths have been over 75 and those with pre-existing conditions. We lose 25-50,000 people in the United States each year to the flu and there is nowhere near the widespread panic as the press (yes, I said the press) has generated for this. I went to buy toilet paper today because we were running low and had to go to three places before I could find any. Really? Toilet paper? Costco and Target were bare. Finally found some at Walmart. And forget alcohol, hand sanatizer, or wipes. Pure panic. It is laughable.
Is this virus serius? Yes. Especially if you are old and infirm. Otherwisee, it doesn't seem to be that bad...just highly contageous. And so is the flu and they haven't shut it down for that.
Also, if my cruise was this weekend, I would be on the plane to Seattle.

For starters, the mortality rate is 10 times greater than the flu. But the big reason for concern is that the rate of serious complications requiring hospitalization is close to 20% and everybody is susceptible -- that's the big problem with a brand new virus. Nobody is immune from previous exposures or vaccination, and left unchecked, the spread of the disease is exponential.

Even though the large majority of cases are mild to moderate, a big outbreak would overwhelm the ability of hospitals and ICUs to care for the serious cases. If the hospitals and ICUs are strained past capacity, then there won't be sufficient capacity to handle ordinary health issues that require hospital care.

So the concern isn't whether a particular person will get the disease, it's over the entire hospital system. I agree that it may seem alarmist now, but given that the spread of the contagion is exponential, if action isn't untaken until it seems alarming to us lay people, it'll be too late.


If these measures can help slow the spread of the disease sufficiently, hopefully we can avoid swamping hospitals and ICUs past their capacity.

No, the mortality rate worldwide is slightly greater than the flu. In countries like South Korea and Japan it has been slightly over 1%. When testing ramps up here that is what will be found here. Right now in the US it is 2.35% (40/1,700). Mortality under 60 worldwide has been 1%. 60-70 is 2% and each decade doubles. Those are facts from the CDC.

According to the CDC's most recent influence surveillance report, so far this season there have been at least 36,000,000 cases with 22,000 deaths. If my math is right (feel free to check), that works out to a case-mortality rate of about .06%. If we use the mortality rate for COVID-19 as 1%, that means that it's 17 times more lethal than flu. (Again, check my math.)

But like I said, the big concern is the possibility of swamping our health care facilities because the rate of severe complications that require hospitalizing is so much higher, 15-20%. For comparison, hospitalizations for flu this year are 370,000 for a rate of about 1%. That's why it's so important to try to keep the number of cases of COVID-19 as low as possible, even if the chances of one of us dying from it are still very small. If we want to be able to care for people with the serious cases, we've got to make sure that we will have the capacity to do so.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm