Drs. Fauci, Redfield, and Lane published a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine on March 26, 2020, about COVID-19. They think the containment strategies, at least on a temporary basis, helped.
“At least on a temporary basis, such restrictions may have helped slow the spread of the virus…,” the doctors write, seemingly uncertain.
They say that the virus may be no worse than a severe influenza season and it may be because of containment — social distancing — tactics.
Cov-19 may “ultimately be more akin to those of severe seasonal influenza.”
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They write:
“On the basis of a case definition requiring a diagnosis of pneumonia, the currently reported case fatality rate is approximately 2%. In another article in the Journal, Guan et al. report mortality of 1.4% among 1099 patients with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19; these patients had a wide spectrum of disease severity. If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of COVID-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.”
It might not be like SARS after all.
Each person infects two people on average, according to the doctors’ findings at this time.
The report concludes: “Community spread in the United States could require a shift from containment to mitigation strategies such as social distancing in order to reduce transmission. Such strategies could include isolating ill persons (including voluntary isolation at home), school closures, and telecommuting where possible.”
The truth is these doctors are just making educated assumptions. They really don’t know what is going to happen and they are unelected officials in a government agency. They can’t be the final word.
CONTAINMENT COULD DESTROY THE NATION
The doctors involved in the virus seem to have one tactic — containment. Containment is putting 30% of America on the breadline. That might make Bernie Sanders happy, but no one else.
Mitigation makes a lot of sense the next time this comes around, but it doesn’t make sense to shut down the entire economy. Americans have some personal responsibility to be careful without the government being held responsible for every death.
Barack Obama refused to shut down the government over H1N1. In fact, no president thas shut down the government over a pandemic. Is this one different? We will have to wait and see. But things that are different are the constant attacks and stressors put on this President.
Everything isn’t answered by the containment. Why is New York so much worse than California? New Jersey has a rising problem as well but the governor has been dealing with incidences of coronavirus parties and other inappropriate gatherings.
Someone has to look beyond this one tactic. It can’t just be about locking up the country every time there is a pandemic. In a global world, we will see more of them.
The country and our countrymen will really have a hard time recovering if this goes on to April 30 or later.
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