re: Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) ***W.H.O. DECLARES A GLOBAL PANDEMIC***

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Fly into HK or SG anytime of the year, not just bc of this, and they are temperature testing as you walk to customs. The fact that the US wasn’t doing so over a week after the blowup of this in Asia was incompetence. Wouldn’t have stopped, but slowed so things could be mitigated. Maybe even the CDC could have had time to get the tests right the first time

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I don't think airport testing accomplishes much of anything. Too many, probably a large majority, slip through surveillance. And, until last week the CDC couldn't produce enough tests to test people who were suspected. You can slow it down some by stopping all flights, but it would literally have to be all flights into the country from everywhere, and even then it would seep across the borders and continue spreading via cases already inside the country.

The main tool was and is widespread testing. That will help identify people who potentially need care and who need to self-isolate. Testing can also identify a regional hotspot but, Chinese data aside, I'm not sure how much that will help. If people refuse to self-isolate or obey a quarantine, then it becomes a political quagmire.

But, the main advantage of testing IMO, is that seeing local numbers helps people at high risk to understand that they need to self isolate before they get the infection. That alone could go a long way toward reducing the sudden build-up in hospital case load.

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You just need people to not be shitbags and stay the frick home if they have a cough or a fever.

PROTIP: People are shitbags.

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Yeah, I already figured that in. Pisses me off when people do that.

Sorry but “don’t test, don’t know” isn’t satisfactory

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I had something similar in early Jan.. basically coughing up sputum for a few weeks, chills to the point I couldn’t warm up even in a burning shower, literally told my wife I thought I was going to die for a couple of days. I went to urgent care and my HR/pulse was so high, they ran an EKG on me at 29 years old. Basically, doc was stunned and gave me some steroids and told me to rest because he couldn’t pin point anything.

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I also had something similar in mid-Jan as well and live in a major metropolitan US city. About 12-15 hours of terrible chills/fever, thinking I was going to die. Then spent the next three weeks hacking up mucus and having dry coughing bouts. It sounds a lot like the symptoms people have described of COVID-19, but who knows

My hypothesis - If the first case in Wuhan was Dec 1, and they didn't implement all the quarantine measures until mid-Jan, there's no doubt many people in the US have already had this and some potentially died from it. It was just never diagnosed as such. We're just hearing about a spread now due to actual testing being done.

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Most workers in the US would lose their jobs if they did this. Employers do not care if you are hacking coughing etc as long as they still make money. I hear Louisiana is maybe worse about this than other states.

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They need to get the frick over it. Plenty of companies can implement work from home policies for the next few months for many workers. This would certainly help.

Or South Korea is being very conservative in what they are calling a recovery.

By the statistics they seem to have a much higher percentage of people still sick but holding on than any other country.

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They need to get the frick over it. Plenty of companies can implement work from home policies for the next few months for many workers. This would certainly help.

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Working from home is an impossibility for more than half of the US work force.

From a public relations perspective, it is ALWAYS better to get in front of a crisis rather than try to cover it up.

Granted, this is a medical issue, but I think the same principles apply.

South Korea is taking the proactive approach. Acknowledging the problem and taking major measures to test everyone. As a result, they may be overloading their HC system.

However, in the long run, I think they are doing the best thing for their country.

Conversely, we continue to downplay the issue. Seem more worried about calming people than being frank about the danger and at worst are covering up the issue via a lack of testing.

I am positive that when it's all said and done, case studies on how NOT to manage an epidemic will be written about the US response. On the flip side, S. Korea and Singapore will be models for how to do it right.

We fricked this up. It's pathetic that our response is more inline with Iran than S. Korea. Down play down play while the numbers silently explode.