Confirmed Coronavirus Patient at the University of Michigan Health System
Per Michigan Medicine: https://twitter.com/umichmedicine/status/1237759433020710920
https://www.uofmhealth.org/coronavirus-covid-19-update
UofM, what are you waiting for? Cancel in-person classes already.
The amount of Ls UofM has taken from online classes to sexual assault scandals has been pretty crazy in 2020
March 11th, 2020 at 12:03 PM ^
There is nobody at the ACC tournament.
March 11th, 2020 at 12:29 PM ^
It just means less.
March 11th, 2020 at 12:34 PM ^
Did the players turn up?
March 11th, 2020 at 12:05 PM ^
Guarantee that by no fault of their own this thing is getting spread by health care workers faster than any other means.
March 11th, 2020 at 12:09 PM ^
Well, I would say the fastest is what we have here in Silicon Valley. We just had 3 TSA workers at San Jose Airport test positive. That's like holding your thumb over the garden hose spout to increase the velocity and spray it everywhere.
March 11th, 2020 at 12:08 PM ^
this is different. a person with the virus is now a patient there. there is nothing that says the person had been in contact with the general population in the university.
March 11th, 2020 at 12:08 PM ^
We’ll all be fine.
March 11th, 2020 at 12:11 PM ^
Tell that to the individuals with comorbidities and at high risk for poor outcomes if they contract the disease.
March 11th, 2020 at 12:14 PM ^
*Most of us will all be fine.
March 11th, 2020 at 12:22 PM ^
Never mind.
March 11th, 2020 at 12:56 PM ^
I’ll let my autoimmune deficient 19 month old who depends on healthy people to care about this disease know that WD says not to worry because most people will be fine. He will be comforted with this news
Fortunately all data to date seems to show young (>10 years) people are not getting especially sick. That said, those little ones have grandparents, teachers and relatives with comorbid health issues and the like. Your little one would *hopefully* and by current data be able to deal with this virus. But the fewer cases circulating the less likely it is to infect an older, sicker, vulnerable person
*your overall point is absolutely correct though. Healthy 20-30 year olds thinking that they themselves will be fine are often correct (although the first case in NJ was a 32 y.o who required hospitalization). But this is like playing russian roulette with our population
I’m not worried about me if I get it because I’ll be fine. I’m not sure if you missed it in my post, but my son isn’t just young, he’s got an autoimmune deficiency, so normal “young people” numbers don’t apply to him. He’s the 1% of people that die from this
March 11th, 2020 at 12:34 PM ^
And just how many is that? Are we talking millions or tens of millions of people?
March 11th, 2020 at 12:56 PM ^
It's very difficult to know that. Worst case projections are in the millions. Mortality rate is almost certainly skewed by limited testing of asymptomatic or not seriously effected people, and also by death toll in concentrated areas where the disease has overwhelmed the medical infrastructure (e.g. Wuhan).
That said, even if you account for that and say the mortality rate is closer to 1% than the 3.4% WHO is reporting, given this thing spreads basically like the flu (likely worse since we have vaccines for flu), you're still looking at hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Once we know the real denominator in the US, the fatality rate will be much lower than it is now. This thing is way over-hyped. People need to calm the fuck down unless they have underlying medical issues that put them at risk. This is not the black plague.
No not at all people need to take this very serious...look at italy what makes anyone in the U.S think that could not happen there or anywhere else?
Also, wtf is an 'underlying medical issue'? Most people have some issues...every time I hear that it feels like an attempt to marginalise those that die of get seriously ill. I mean how many people have asthma...is that enough of an 'underlying' issue for a virus that attacks the lungs?
March 11th, 2020 at 12:10 PM ^
As a HS teacher I can't help but wonder if we ever get to the point where we're cancelling K-12 public schools.
March 11th, 2020 at 12:22 PM ^
If somebody doesn't address the public soon and tell everybody straight up to calm the fuck down I think K-12 schools will be cancelled by the end of the week. And then we are truly on a very uncertain and frightening path. When will school be resumed? Is this the only virus that school will be closed for? What about next year during flu season? And what else should we cancel, anything where anybody congregates? Is school even a good idea with all of these germs everywhere? Then we are essentially imposing martial law on ourselves. With all due respect to everybody who wants to discuss how urgent and serious this thing, this is getting really carried away now and it is going to have serious societal consequences.
March 11th, 2020 at 12:27 PM ^
I'm calm. The people trying to flatten the curve are calm. You calm down.
BTW, K-12 schools have been closed in some places and probably will in other places as this continues to grow.
March 11th, 2020 at 12:38 PM ^
Discussion of closing entire school systems because of two or three confirmed cases of an overwhelmingly non-fatal virus is not calm behavior. It is hysteria.
Saying that anybody with symptoms matching those of Covid 19 should stay home for 7-10 days and that the elderly should significantly limit their social exposure is reasonable.
March 11th, 2020 at 12:49 PM ^
Well, I have to say, if your view were the actual consensus among health experts then I would agree with you. But it's not, so I don't.
I'm sympathetic to the impetus behind some of this... but what about people who just don't stay home for 7-10 days? A couple of kids whose parents both work, and they figure "it's just a cold, no coronavirus in town yet" and then you have a dozen kids in two classes in the elementary school and another three from the high school that got it from one of them on the school bus. But none of them found out until days later and five of them were in school exposing other kids.
March 11th, 2020 at 12:32 PM ^
If somebody doesn't address the public soon and tell everybody straight up to calm the fuck down I think K-12 schools will be cancelled by the end of the week.
I don't know if your DVed me, but as this is my career how am I not supposed to be interested? I did not suggest that we should close. I'm perfectly calm and just a curious party with a vested interest. FWIW I have no interest in being stuck at home all day.
March 11th, 2020 at 12:32 PM ^
Great post! Opening up pandora's box. When will it stop? Not to mention ruining the U.S. economy and over what?
The potential death of loved ones? I don't know as I'm not a doctor, but that seems to be a pretty big driver of all this. I was under the assumption that all that really mattered was the economy and keeping it strong, but I guess there are these annoying people out there that care for the safety of others first. I personally try not to fraternize with them, as they seem to be lower income lesser thans.
Amen to that. The poors and their incessant whining about the health and well-being of family members is SOOOO damn tiring.
Cant they see what they're doing to the stock market?
March 11th, 2020 at 12:38 PM ^
Making spring break a 3-week break, and extending the school year 2 weeks into summer isn't the end of the world if it effectively delays the spread of this virus.
Your slippery slope argument isn't all that convincing.
Good questions except for the flu season one. That's patently absurd and schools would be closed for flu unless the mortality rate /infection rate is much, much higher.
. #1 There's a vaccine that reduces flu transmissions and thus infections by powers of 10.
#2 The mortality for nearly all cases of flu is 10-20x less than that of Covis-19.
#3There are also proven, inexpensive anti-virals which further reduce mortality from those who do get flu.
#4 Flu incubation in rarely, if ever, as long as 14 days. So even if there were a very deadly strain of flu, schools wouldn't need to be closed for as long as they ought to with Covid-19.
Read this....isolation is key to keeping the worst outcomes at bay. That means cancelling school and other large crowd activities: sports, church, parades, concerts, etc. Sucks but it sucks worse to have 10's of 1,000's die for no reason other than "i don't want to sacrifice anything in my life"....
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca
Society will survive if the K-12 schools shut down for a few months.
Maybe it’ll have the unintended effect of making some parents actually raise their fucking kids instead of having the schools do it.
My 14 year old is wondering the same thing. She desperately wants school to be cancelled. Then again, she wants that irrespective of coronavirus...
Schools will start canceling within a week. It's inevitable.
March 11th, 2020 at 12:14 PM ^
I'm on two sides of this:
1. I'm not opposed to proactive cancellations to flatten the curve, as that chart getting passed around demonstrates. I think Y2K might be a good equivalence to shoot for--something that wound up being no big deal, BECAUSE it was taken so seriously. An environment where 40,000 people who can all be healthy carriers, that are from all over the country, compacted together in close quarters? Canceling classes sounds like a reasonable way to keep things contained.
2. The fact that the patient is at U of M hospital doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the university. What, you mean a patient with a dangerous medical condition is at one of the best hospitals in the country? You don't say!
In my opinion, the presence of a patient at the U of M hospital should have nothing at all to do with the decision to cancel classes. If that patient comes from the local population, different story. If the university decides it's wise to proactively cancel because it's just a good idea, no big deal. But using a patient at the hospital as justification undermines the credibility of the decision-makers. Nobody at the University will catch this from a patient in isolation at the hospital. They'll catch it from somewhere else, and that's the threat that should determine whether or not classes are cancelled.
March 11th, 2020 at 12:44 PM ^
I've seen how quickly these things can spread in a "closed" environment.
My wife runs the Int'l program for a parochial high school in SW MI with most of the kids living in a dorm. We have some domestic students from around the country as well as students from Nigeria, Thailand, Vietnam, Korea and two from Wuhan, China. One of the Chinese students went home for Christmas and came back just after the first of the year, moving right back into the dorm. Thank the Lord that he didn't bring coronavirus back with him. But what did happen was Influenza A went through the dorm (this was verified by testing,by the way) right when 2nd semester started. I didn't hear the final numbers, but close to 100% of the students ended up with the flu as well as a few of the dorm staff. This all happened in a 3-week period. It also spread among the general student population but not at the same rate.
Where I work, I'm in a cube farm with 20 other people. Near the end of January a few people "toughed it out" and brought in Influenza B (again, verified with testing). It spread quickly and everyone but me and 2 other people ended up with it. My strategy was to wash my hands anytime I touched anything in common areas (getting coffee, etc.) and using hand sanitizer anytime I was done working on any paperwork that someone else touched. I also didn't touch my face.
I was amazed at how quickly these viruses jumped to new hosts.
March 11th, 2020 at 12:15 PM ^
Does anybody actually know a real live person who has the Corona virus?
March 11th, 2020 at 12:22 PM ^
No, but I do know a few people that were on that cruise ship that docked in Oakland a few days ago. They have been sent to Georgia to be quarantined for a few weeks.
March 11th, 2020 at 12:22 PM ^
Yes. He's in his 50s and recovering, as most will. I'm not a freakout artist, and agree that most people fall in that category. Self quarantining over a 2-3 week period to prevent spread from those infected seems prudent, and the virus will weaken, as other viruses/pandemics have. Makes for a quiet March, but just wait for the Spring fever to get unleashed in April/May. We'll be ok
March 11th, 2020 at 12:56 PM ^
Wait... you mean not everybody who gets the virus dies????
I had NO idea!
/sarcasm
March 11th, 2020 at 12:34 PM ^
Depending where you are in the world you may know someone who has encountered the disease. I have plenty of friends in the Seattle area whose neighbors, etc. are likely infected. As long as you're relatively healthy, it's basically a common cold and the advice is just to stay home and quarantine yourself.
Not anymore. All the real live people I knew that had it are now dead.
But before they passed they said this whole thing was completely overblown and a creation of the media.
March 11th, 2020 at 12:24 PM ^
I mean, at this point, aren't we all going to get it no matter what we do? I am down with taking measures such as not shaking hands for awhile, washing hands a lot and avoiding large crowds if you can. I absolutely support having greater measures in place to protect the elderly and immuno-compromised folks, but that is more about them quarantining themselves and getting good support networks in place to take care of them. At what point do all of these Mickey Mouse cancellations, which appear designed more as a PR move to limit an organizations liability, just prolong the spread of the disease?
March 11th, 2020 at 12:33 PM ^
it is about mitigation. to not overwhelm the medical institutions with all the sudden infected people. most elderly and immuno-compromised folks are already doing their best to prevent ANY sort of infections. asking them to do 'more' is missing the point.
the community as a whole has to do it together, that is why it is called 'public health'.
Seeing as how those groups have been doing "More" such as cancelling In-homes at senior living facilities, etc. it feels like there may actually be room to do a little more to protect the groups that it has been shown the virus is most dangerous to(aka the ones who will need the ICU beds,etc.) My specific thought is around targeted ways to address a public health threat to the most vulnerable populations without shutting down the entire country and ensure that resources are being put to productive use rather than putting in a general panic and doing things like shutting down schools which means that kids are suddenly left to their own devices to get the virus from god knows where.
My point is that I don't know that these broad hammer solutions like cancelling classes are going to do much good and may in fact do a lot of harm to the broader society mostly in the name of trying to manage bad PR.
March 11th, 2020 at 12:43 PM ^
Yeah, but the idea is to slow down the spread to allow hospitals and all health care providers enough time to prepare and enough capacity to deal with patients.
March 11th, 2020 at 12:45 PM ^
I'm having a vigorous discussion about this amongst people in my line of work, but prolonging the spread of the disease is actually important IF it spreads the same number of cases over a longer period of time. Because such a delay would allow the medical capacity to keep up with the demand.
The real danger is that there could be so many cases at once that hospitals are overwhelmed (A poster said that U of M has 30 beds available; if hundreds of cases are contracted a day, and 10% of those need ICU as has been suggested, those beds will be gone fast). Then people start having to make decisions about who gets the best care based upon who is likely to have the best chance to get better and/or who will live the longest if treated.
There are only like 28,000 ventilators in the entire country, if 200,000 people get this in the first month that is almost every ventilator even at a 5% severity rate. Of course spreading it out matters.