Joel Pollack would like us all to take a breath, surgical mask not required:
Coronavirus is an ‘info-demic’, a panic caused by the spread of partial and often misleading information about a health risk, sometimes deliberately.
The virus is real, and a small number of people have been infected. But it is going to pass.
It is an unpleasant respiratory illness, but it is not an organ-destroying horror like Ebola. Precautions are being taken, a vaccine will emerge, and life will continue as usual.
Here are five specific reasons to chill out.
(Read it all, but feel free to ignore his political potshots. All sides would best be more tempered for the moment.)
I wouldn't, just yet, take a vacation to east Asia, Italy, Brazil, Iran (!), or certain counties in California but, for now, panic is unjustified.
By the way, to clear up part of the ‘infodemic’, the CDC did not say that the ‘unknown’ case in northern California is a case of ‘community spread’ infection, i.e. that the monkey is out of the box. They actually said (do read that) that in this one case the source is currently unknown so it could be ‘community spread’. They also say that the patient may unknowingly have crossed paths with a traveler returned from an infected location. Several such travelers have been treated at the UC Davis Medical Center, where this patient is currently being treated, and at Travis Air Force Base, both near this patient's Solano County home. It would be nice of reporters to be more careful on that point. (Print reporting has been pretty good here, but TV reporting has been appalling.) Anyway, doctors in Solano County did an excellent job of quickly catching this case and getting the patient to a better facility, so there's hope that she will be fine and was isolated before spreading the virus any further.
For the morbidly curious (raising my hand), here's a list of current U.S. coronavirus patients. Not all are showing symptoms of COVID-19, but apparently all have tested positive.
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Nobody really knows for sure how the epidemic got started, only how it very probably didn't. Food markets and fried-bat-on-a-stick have been ruled out. Weaponization also seems unlikely, as does theft from a secure biofacility in Winnipeg. (!) The most likely explanation is that this bug started in the usual way, as a spontaneous mutation of another coronavirus strain – some, e.g. SARS and MERS, have been far deadlier – and that the Chinese government's response has been inadequate (!) and sometimes counterproductive. (Japan's, too, damn it!) Note to officials in affected countries: Don't stand on pride, man! Take it seriously and get the best help. And whatever you do, don't ‘quarantine’ people on a floating petri dish aka a cruise ship.
Another aside: The primary benefit of ordinary surgical-type masks in this case is to prevent wearers from spreading the disease to others. Such masks much less effectively protect the wearers themselves. In other words, for now at least, don't bother. Most people aren't wearing them correctly anyway.
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