Thank you for the sane reply!
But what I don't understand is why college campuses don't just ask their faculty over age 60 to stay home to protect themselves? Why does the entire campus have to shut down if the mortality rate for those under 40 is practically nothing? I get you don't want to spread a virus, but these schools stay open every year during flu season and then the kids go home at spring break to infect grandma with a bad flu and potentially kill her.
These are the same college campuses and same administrators that keep their schools running during Meningitis outbreaks, remember. And that's a virus that really does target the young and can kill them within 48 hours. 100+ healthy young Americans die each year due to Meningitis, most of it spread on college campuses.
I'm going to use this post to reply to because it gets at the heart of the matter.
So, I'm 29. I'm in fairly good health outside of seasonal allergies, so should I personally contract coronavirus, I will more than likely be fine. But my parents are also turning 60 this year, and they have become more susceptible to the flu knocking them out for a week in recent years. My grandfather is in his 80s. He definitely is at risk. And my brother is on an immunosuppresor due a separate health complication -
I'm going to
link here an article aimed specifically at explaining why social distancing is a good way to fight a pandemic, and why even young people who are statistically less at risk of death should practice it. It gets to two main points, which if you don't want to click on the link I'll put here.
First: coronavirus is much more infectious than the seasonal flu, and with a longer incubation period than the flu, ends up having double the RO rate (essentially, a rate that states how many people will be infected by a disease carrier) than the flu. Combined with an estimation that about 20% of the US population belongs to an at-risk group (aka the elderly or people with other illnesses) and you get a situation where people within that age range where they don't have to worry about the disease end up with decent odds of passing the disease on to someone who does.
Then we get into the second thing: as of right now, the amount of coronavirus cases in the United States is manageable. Emphasis on "right now" - as China and now Italy have demonstrated, the disease is contagious enough that it can very quickly overwhelm a country's health care system. Evidence suggests that the mortality rate for the disease could be less than 1% as long as adequate medical services are available. But Italy has a health care system that is comparable to the US, and they're currently seeing a 6.7% death rate on confirmed COVID-19 cases. And the stories coming out of Italy are horrifying, that of ICU units being set up in hallways of hospitals, and doctors forced to consider how their resources are being spent. This is not a media overreaction: this is the government of the country shutting down all businesses except grocery stores and pharmacies.
The point of social distancing and limiting the amount of large gatherings is to attempt to flatten the infection rate so that our health care system can manage it. I'm going to post an image released by the CDC that helps illustrate this point:
(Oh, and specifically for
@TP2000 that article also has
a link to research on the 1918 influenza that proved that social distancing measures undertaken by the city of St. Louis saved lives, especially compared to Philadelphia which didn't and saw a host more deaths).
Now, of course, these strategies aren't guaranteed to work. And of course there's decent odds that most college-age students are going to convene in groups anyway because that's what they do. This is where I show my expertise and reveal that I'm a high school teacher (Orange County hasn't closed the schools...yet), and people in the younger age brackets happen to be at the age where they generally believe they are invincible and won't die to something as silly as a disease. And the big flaw in social distancing is it's asking people to put aside their own personal happiness in favor of the greater public good, which as history has shown time and again is not a thing most humans are capable of. But it is something that makes a ton of sense and is recommended by public health officials, so why not do it?
(I have a whole separate rant about how government reaction, especially on the federal level, has been woefully inaccurate and is really setting us up for an Italy/China situation rather than a South Korean one, but that's for another subforum).
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