Top health official to older Americans: ‘Don’t get on a cruise ship’
Dr. Anthony Fauci offered stark advice.
A top U.S. health official on Sunday warned Americans who are elderly or have who underlying health conditions not to get on a cruise ship as the number of documented coronavirus cases continues to rise within the United States and globally.
“Something that’s important, that I hope the American people appreciate is that the risk of getting into trouble with this infection, namely if you are infected, is overwhelmingly weighted toward people with underlying conditions and the elderly,” said Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“If you’re a person with an underlying condition and you are particularly an elderly person with an underlying condition, you need to think twice about getting on a plane, on a long trip,” he said. “And not only think twice, just don’t get on a cruise ship.”
Fauci said health officials should be able to “get a better handle” on the number of the people who have contracted the coronavirus now that testing is more widely available. But he said people “need to seriously look at anything that’s a large gathering.”
“You have to realistically be concerned about community spread,” he said, referring to people who get sick from contact with other sick people in their community.
Testing will either cool down the frenzy, or possibly fundamentally change society. If asymptomatic people are found to be transmitting, a ton of things will change.
Italy has told 25% of the population to stay home. Our sister cancer institute Fred Hutch in Seattle has mandated work-at-home, we’re preparing to do the same, as much as possible. (Hutch doesn’t have a clinical wing, focused on research and doing clinical trials through Harbor View hospitals.)
There’s a silver lining in all this - just about everyone will clean up their diet, get serious about exercise and take care of themselves. Nothing will go out of style quicker than 20 and 30-somethings who vape, eat lousy food, and stay up all night.
Once the vaccine comes out, anti-vaxxers may become curiosities from the past.
Wonder what CorVid19 does to March Madness, not that we aren’t going through a bit of that now. Had not thought about the impact of the spread of this virus on college basketball until today.
Good friend of mine had a kidney transplant a year ago. All the anti-rejection drugs she’s on severely compromises her immune system, so she has to wear a mask in public…and now she can’t get one.
Being in one of the most at-risk groups, she’s quite terrified of this whole thing, and I don’t blame her a bit. Seeing her situation makes the behavior at both ends of the spectrum (“its just the flu” to “HORDE ALL THE THINGS”) all the more frustrating.
I don’t worry about me being affected by this thing. I worry a lot about her.
I read that some news agency contacted hospitals in Iran to ask about fatalities. This was last week sometime, early. The numbers summed from the hospitals was significantly higher than official numbers. Don’t know what to think about the other countries, even our own. I wonder if the reason for higher deaths in the US is because it hit a number of cruise line victims, who were older. I’m completely guessing, but I wonder if for US numbers the infected are disproportionately older.
I read somewhere that So. Korea was early and broad in testing. In the US, we have been hampered in that regard. But you have a good point about treatment protocol.
Yeah, there are 800k Taiwanese in China and even with the Lunar New Year managed to limit the spread
“COVID-19 occurred just before the Lunar New Year during which time millions of Chinese and Taiwanese were expected to travel for the holidays. Taiwan quickly mobilized and instituted specific approaches for case identification, containment, and resource allocation to protect the public health. Taiwan leveraged its national health insurance database and integrated it with its immigration and customs database to begin the creation of big data for analytics; it generated real-time alerts during a clinical visit based on travel history and clinical symptoms to aid case identification. It also used new technology, including QR code scanning and online reporting of travel history and health symptoms to classify travelers’ infectious risks based on flight origin and travel history in the past 14 days. Persons with low risk (no travel to level 3 alert areas) were sent a health declaration border pass via SMS (short message service) messaging to their phones for faster immigration clearance; those with higher risk (recent travel to level 3 alert areas) were quarantined at home and tracked through their mobile phone to ensure that they remained at home during the incubation period.
Moreover, Taiwan enhanced COVID-19 case finding by proactively seeking out patients with severe respiratory symptoms (based on information from the National Health Insurance [NHI] database) who had tested negative for influenza and retested them for COVID-19; 1 was found of 113 cases. The toll-free number 1922 served as a hotline for citizens to report suspicious symptoms or cases in themselves or others; as the disease progressed, this hotline has reached full capacity, so each major city was asked to create its own hotline as an alternative. It is not known how often this hotline has been used. The government addressed the issue of disease stigma and compassion for those affected by providing food, frequent health checks, and encouragement for those under quarantine. This rapid response included hundreds of action items (eTable in the Supplement).”
I wouldn’t expect you to understand, especially in light of your counter intuitive comment. This is all about models and their predictive value, which has nothing to do with medical credentials, especially of your stepson at the VA. This is precisely why your bloviating comments add no value here.
For the rest, we’re seeing real economic impact resulting from the response to Covid-19, thus the Fed lowering rates. The reaction thus far to Covid-19 is far greater than the impact of the virus itself. 7 billion people in the world, 100+K cases and 3K deaths, virtually all elderly with existing health issues, but let’s shut down everything.
Meh. The economy will be fine, especially if the virus ends up being much ado about nothing. “Better safe than sorry” is a fine guideline for something like this. Shut some things down. Cancel some meetings, conferences, and sporting events. At a minimum, it’s a nice reminder to people that these things aren’t really that important and that they’ll be back again next year.
Except to those of us whose entire paychecks depend on such things. For us, those cancellations do become a rather significant problem.
I had 50% of my business for this quarter cancel in a 48-hour span last week due to coronavirus. As a commissioned salesperson, that’s 50% of my paycheck over the next 60 days that simply…vanished.