CoronAgeddon

Are you starting to feel like the world is ending?

If you are you're not alone.  The Covid-19 Corona virus information feels like a classic Hollywood movie, a common virus mutates in a different continent and rapidly spreads around the world shutting down the economy as it quickly spreads destroying lives. In fact, some of you might recall a few years ago I started to write a story with a similar idea based on the Influenza outbreak from 1918. I still need to finish the story. I actually think Covid-19 and the handling will give me some great material to work with.

Ironically, as I started to write this post I was beginning to suspect there was some underlying nefarious plan to take down the world economy but as I researched more and more information I have come to understand why the government is reacting so aggressively. I still wonder if we may be over reacting but I can understand how the progress of the virus in Italy has scared everybody. Seems every day the Italians have worse news.

Here in Santa Cruz we have a shelter in place order. Our schools are closed, most businesses are closed, ironically the recreational marijuana distributors are open. In my office we have cut volume by over 50% I'm walking around with a mask on and send each patient home with the wise words "stay healthy". I still wonder if there is an antihero like Dr. No hiding behind this but then I look at Italy, Iran, South Korea and I nod in agreement with the grand plan.

Of course, everything you read says if you get the virus your risk is low to moderate but no one really has any idea what that might mean. Realistically when we have 200,000 people infected in a population of billions and 8,000 deaths it seems hard to understand why everyone is so frightened. But, then I look at predictions of 100 million American infections and 1-2 million deaths predicted and that does look super frightening.

I wish there was more and better information from experts aside from stay indoors for 15 days and reassess. I saw a great article on how that made a huge difference in the Spanish flu in 1918 but one would hope we had made progress in the past 100 years. I also wonder why there hasn't been an accelerated review of the drug Ritonavir which the Chinese have tried but without any info on if it works. We all know it will take ages for a vaccine but if we might have a drug that works early maybe it could be used like Tamiflu to slow the spread.

And with the still relatively small numbers it is very hard to keep focused on maintaining distance. I understand how China essentially locked down Wuhan and now they have very few new cases. This has given rise to optimism that controlling contact can control spread of the disease and we are seeing dozens of countries essentially asking people to stay in their homes. The question we all have is how easy is it to get? I am unable to find any data on what percent of close contacts of positive individuals get the virus and I cannot figure out what percent of people tested are positive. These are the numbers necessary to help us decide how scary this really is.

Yet, news reports suggest this is one of the most contagious viruses ever, which makes sense since the Corona virus is also the typical cold virus. Current analysis indicates each infected person should infect two to three others, but is this accurate? We may not know until the end when someone goes back and analyses the data but I suspect it is overestimated. I recently read that in China most of the healthcare workers who contracted the disease were traced back to family contact transmission and not from patients in the hospital. If this is true then the contact time with an infected person needs to be longer.

The information we do have is that people are most contagious early before they know they have a serious problem, this is similar to how the flu virus behaves. The CDC estimates 2019 influenza has infected 36 million people with 22,000 deaths over 25 weeks. The infection rate peaked around week 18. If Covid-19 is more contagious then we are going to see some seriously large numbers in the next few weeks unless everyone isolates. I suspect we already have more cases out there and either the mortality rate is lower than advertised or we a due for a big shocker real soon. In the US Washington State is going to be our canary and if Washington starts to go down the drain we know we are in big trouble. But if they start to turn around then that will probably also tell us what to anticipate.

Either way, we are right now stuck in the unknown so uncork a bottle of wine, sit back, binge watch some end of the world movies and relax.