We're besides ourselves right now

[Mr. Jelly]

Note for two years after the noted 1918 influenza it bounced around the world infecting people. Though technically it was considered over. I assume not so much for the people infected in 1919 and 1920.

[Joe Beamish]

Originally Posted by tigobah

I am not making light of the Covid-19 pandemic and like a lot of you I am practicing the staying at home scenario and only going out for needed supplies. However I would recommend watching "Influenza 1918" from PBS. It is part of their American Experience series and was made in 1998, long before this current pandemic. It really does give you some perspective versus what we are experiencing and what happened in 1918. The documentary is on the PBS website. Search for American Experience first and you should see it.

Sounds interesting, though I'm not sure I'll get around to watching it. What is the perspective that you took away from the show?

[KevWind]

There is this comparison https://www.biospace.com/article/com...rsus-covid-19/


excerpt ....

At its worse, the Spanish flu infected 500 million people worldwide, which at the time was about a third of the Earth’s population. More than 50 million people died of the disease, with 675,000 in the U.S. There is some disagreement on that figure, with recent researchers suggesting it was about 17.4 million deaths, while others go as high as 100 million. Generally speaking, the fatality rate for the Spanish flu is calculated at about 2%.

Although it is something of a moving target as more deaths occur and broader diagnostic testing is performed, finding higher levels of infection, sometimes with no symptoms, the global fatality rate for COVID-19 as of April 1 is about 5%, although in the U.S. it is about 2.16%. Some experts believe the 5% figure is significantly lower because of doubts about the accuracy of China’s reporting of the cases, where COVID-19 originated.

Some experts, such as Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who is something of the public point-man for the U.S. response to COVID-19, project the fatality rate will be about 1%, which is still about 10 times the fatality rate of a typical seasonal influenza of 0.1%.

[Pura Vida]

Ugh. We'll never get through this, as long as people are this careless. Be safe, Barry.

Today marks one month that my family has been sheltering at home. Aside from a couple of takeout runs and an occasional walk, my kids and I have been inside the house. Meanwhile, my wife is an ER nurse and facing this on the front lines, where it's expected to get much, much worse in the coming weeks.

[Pitar]

I'm an essential services provider and stick to my daily routine. If I come down with the virus it will end well or not and the world will still orbit the sun. Those who are in my small circle do not maintain any kind of stand-off distance, and we're all of the same resolve I mention here about contracting the virus. Is it the responsible thing to do to run from it or face up to it apathetically as we fulfill the tasks and duties of essential work? I take the latter stance. If I contract it I will then quarantine myself to prevent its spread to others engaged in essential work, and my family, and come out of it or not. I have no opinion of it as a divisive hidden enemy in our midst outside of perhaps some germ warfare awareness held over from my time in uniform. The virus cannot be stopped without a true vaccine. Any counter-measures before that are simply staving off the inevitable.

[gfirob]

I’m in a little town in the mountains of central Vermont. We were hit pretty badly by Hurricane Irene, so there was an Emergency Management team already in place, liaison with the local 25 bed hospital and ambulance service, and continual communication through Facebook, Front Porch Forum and physical mailers to every mailbox in town.

The great majority of people here are staying at home to protect the hospital and their neighbors. We have one grocery store, and we are very careful there. We have a volunteer system to deliver groceries to people who are in self quarantine because of their vulnerability or because they have symptoms to keep them out of the grocery store. We are using all the protocols for everybody’s safety.

We have signs up to tell the out of town refugees and summer home owners to stay home for 14 days and we will bring you groceries to protect the grocery store and the workers. Almost everybody is taking this deadly seriously. When there were kids using the school for soccer or just gathering, the school yard was closed and signs put up. Vermont is doing pretty well on the graphs.

The big point is that the virus spreads exponentially. So if you are careless, you don’t just infect one person, you infect everybody else that gets infected as result, and that is why the numbers jump so fast.

There is no magic to this, it is just individuals sacrificing for the good of the community and staying home. It sucks for a lot of people, stuck at home with kids, or husbands and wives getting to know each other maybe way better than they wanted to. But people are doing if for the sake of the hospital, the grocery store workers and their neighbors. I find it pretty moving.