This article should be called the human troll . My co worker showed up late today from her second job of cleaning dried vomit out of the mens bathroom.
To quote Han Solo and Princess Leia in the original Star Wars…“I have a bad feeling about this”
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“you are also arguing too similar to the orange goblin”
My posts came before the “orange goblin’s” press conference (compare the dates), not afterwards.
And yes, covid19 is like the flu. Which never keeps me from dining out.
The main difference between the flu and Covid-19 is that the former is well understood and the latter is mostly an unknown.
Among many unknowns, mortality rates are unknown because the number of infections is unknown. It increasingly appears that a very large percentage of infectees are asymptomatic, which would tend to reduce the mortality rate from early guesstimates, but also to increase the number of infectees and eventual deaths.
Just FYI: Here’s what’s happening in SD, flu-wise:
There seems to be very little public concern about the flu here or anywhere else. And more than half of people don’t even bother to get a flu shot.
The flu shouldn’t be underestimated but the current data on the corona virus shows that it is much more deadly and much more infectious. The flu kills about 0.5 million people/year worldwide. It is not clear how bad COVID could become but it could reach Spanish flu levels which killed about 50 million people (when just ~2 billion people lived worldwide)
There’s an orange goblin in the Whitehouse? Has anyone called an exterminator?
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" Who ya gonna call…" 
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It seems likely that estimates of the fatality rate will continue to drop as it becomes clearer that the estimates of how many people have been infected are way too low due to the apparently high percentage who have mild or no symptoms.
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The virus has been named “SARS-CoV-2” and the disease it causes has been named “coronavirus disease 2019” (abbreviated “COVID-19”).
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What if its transferred by the handling of currency ? Im just washing my hands more over this crap .
These are both informative articles, and both are well-written. The first is especially interesting, worth a slow read.
So far there have been no cases of Covid-19 in SD, but it’s all but certain that there will be at least some.
This flu season to date, there have been about 18,000 cases of flu and 74 flu-related deaths in SD county. There were 1230 new cases of the flu in the past week, a third fewer than the previous week.
Hopefully Covid-19 will be seasonal, like the flu, but there’s no guarantee.
There’s a curious pattern in these numbers. Starting with the avian flu in 2008, the viruses you listed broke out every two years. I have no idea what to make of that; it’s just an observation.
[And I’m still waiting for that second bowl of white rice…]
A theory is because of widespread smoking among Chinese men, makes a respiratory illness much more dangerous for various reasons.
Anyway, 80,000 Americans died from the flu in 2017. We should be scared of the flu as well but most aren’t. My collegues: “The flu shot is just gonna give me the flu!"
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There have been 86,000 confirmed cases of this coronavirus worldwide. The mortality rate has been:
"The oldest patients have faced the greatest risk of death, according to the study of Chinese patients by researchers with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
While the overall case fatality rate of the patients in the study was 2.3%, it was 8% for those in their 70s and 14.8% for patients 80 or older."
The above quote was taken from this article with the rather morbid title “How This Coronavirus Kills It’s Victims”
Those mortality rates are exaggerated by a factor of (total infections) ÷ (known infections).
It’s likely that the distribution of mortality by age will be similar to that of the flu, though actual mortality may be higher or lower for each group. And even if the mortality rate is lower, the total number of deaths could be higher if it spreads faster.
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I heard Obama’s Sec. of Health & Human Services, Kathleen Sebelious, on NPR this morning talking about this outbreak. I’ll leave the political commentary out, but while she did warn about over-reacting she also made a comment I found rather interesting because it was the first time I’ve heard it. She said she expected to see a spike right now because of what’s happening around the world and beginning to happen here, after which it would begin to fade away during the late Spring and Summer as the weather got substantially warmer but reappear in the Fall when the weather cools again. I hadn’t thought about this pattern, but it’s actually pretty logical when you think about the typical patterns of the flu and colds.
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If that’s the case, then it should not spread much in the Tropic of Capricorn until their fall.