2019 Novel Coronavirus Covid-19 Discussion

Forums › Health and fitness › 2019 Novel Coronavirus Covid-19 Discussion

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#2447515 26-Mar-2020 19:32

mattwnz:

Except what do you do with store brought fruit and veges, that has been sent to you, including apples where you eat the skin/outer packaging? Should we wash them in soapy water like our hands? Supermarkets seem like to put plastic packing around some fruit and veges these days, so maybe they are going to be doing that from now on, but guessing they are still touched before it goes into that packing? I do wonder how high the actual risk is of being infected this way, because how infectious is this?

Watch the clip, its quite good. As commented on, its not a big infectious route, but if its on packaging or the apple and now your hand, and you wipe your nose or mouth or eyes, that's one way. Fruit, yes wash like your hands but I read elsewhere running water is ok. Freezing is a no go, the virus can stay active for 2 years. Heat is good, that kills it. Wash hands is the biggie, but maybe its prudent to be thorough with packaging as well.

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#2447521 26-Mar-2020 19:53

The next few weeks in USA are going to be very grim. I hope it's not too late for them to get it together.

https://nypost.com/2020/03/25/worker-at-nyc-hospital-where-nurses-wear-trash-bags-as-protection-dies-from-coronavirus/

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#2447532 26-Mar-2020 20:10

iamaelephant: The next few weeks in USA are going to be very grim. I hope it's not too late for them to get it together.

and ...

NOTE THAT THIS ARTICLE RELATES TO A HOSPITAL IN THE USA, NOT NEW ZEALAND

The Washington Post - Hospitals consider universal do-not-resuscitate orders for coronavirus patients

today

Hospitals on the front lines of the pandemic are engaged in a heated debate over a calculation few have encountered in their lifetimes - how to weigh the “save at all costs” approach to resuscitating a dying patient against the real danger of exposing doctors and nurses to the contagion of coronavirus.

The conversations are driven by the realization that the risk to staff amid dwindling stores of protective equipment - such as masks, gowns and gloves - may be too great to justify the conventional response when a patient “codes,” and their heart or breathing stops.

Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago has been discussing a do-not-resuscitate policy for infected patients, regardless of the wishes of the patient or their family members - a wrenching decision to prioritize the lives of the many over the one.

Richard Wunderink, one of Northwestern’s intensive-care medical directors, said hospital administrators would have to ask Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker for help in clarifying state law and whether it permits the policy shift.

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Fred99

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#2447538 26-Mar-2020 20:26

iamaelephant: The next few weeks in USA are going to be very grim. I hope it's not too late for them to get it together.

The USA is probably totally screwed. At present trajectory by Easter (when the buffoon reckons he'll ease their already half-#rsed response), they'll probably have a million cases, only 3,000 deaths, and Fox news will be telling the public that everything's fine - as the case fatality rate is only 0.3% because of "American Exceptionalism".

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#2447540 26-Mar-2020 20:31

iamaelephant: The next few weeks in USA are going to be very grim. I hope it's not too late for them to get it together.

https://nypost.com/2020/03/25/worker-at-nyc-hospital-where-nurses-wear-trash-bags-as-protection-dies-from-coronavirus/

America - the only country where you can have 1st world, 2nd world & 3rd world health systems and services all in one depending upon your level of wealth. How about a unified Health Care System, instead of dismantling the existing health care systems because they do not make money. Social welfare never makes money.

Mr president Make America Great Again by at least having a slightly bumpy health care field so Americans are not condemned like Sisyphus.

Whilst the difficult we can do immediately, the impossible takes a bit longer. However, miracles you will have to wait for.

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#2447543 26-Mar-2020 20:37

gchiu:

Siouxie Wiles discussed this the other day. She said you could bring the groceries in and leave them for 3 days if you didn't have any bleach to spray the outside.

But then one of the Princess ships had virus detected after 17 days so 3 days doesn't seem long enough.

But really if there's virus on the outside packaging, all you need to do is wash your hands after handling, and before eating. That has been shown to be really effective in clinical settings to stop getting the infection, and the viral load is way higher there.

i presume (could be wrong) they detected virus RNA after 17 days. did they check if the virus was viable or even better, if it could infect anyone.

re groceries - all comes down to dose. if you have an infected person sneeze all over it - yeah you probably could get it. again, whether the virus is viable - did anyone test if it infects anyone. i believe these are still unknowns, but i wouldn't worry about it too much.

do what you can, and what you can't, well that's how it goes. put the groceries away and wash your hands and eat older food or wash the new food you want to eat.

YMMV!

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neb

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#2447545 26-Mar-2020 20:43

FineWine:
America - the only country where you can have 1st world, 2nd world & 3rd world health systems and services all in one depending upon your level of wealth.

You can say that again. When I worked there I had to go for a yearly medical OK as part of the visa requirements, so I thought I'd drop in to the local family health clinic, i.e. the local GP. It was literally a third-world clinic, junk piled up along the corridors and offices, lots of people waiting, only a handful of overworked staff on duty, after waiting all morning a nurse saw me during her lunch break. I couldn't believe that this was in the US, if you changed the skin colour of the staff and showed people a photo they'd have said "Zimbabwe".

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#2447546 26-Mar-2020 20:49

Fred99:

iamaelephant: The next few weeks in USA are going to be very grim. I hope it's not too late for them to get it together.

The USA is probably totally screwed. At present trajectory by Easter (when the buffoon reckons he'll ease their already half-#rsed response), they'll probably have a million cases, only 3,000 deaths, and Fox news will be telling the public that everything's fine - as the case fatality rate is only 0.3% because of "American Exceptionalism".

depends on what your endpoint is.

if America's endpoint is to keep the companies alive (note: Trump and his entire family are heavily invested in business), then the companies might be "fine". if the rich gets sick they will be treated, and 5% of them would not make it but the other 95% would. if the middle & lower class gets wiped out then the more money for the rich to claim. they can always import foreign workers.

but it might not turn out that way, but I'm too depressed to think too much.

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#2447552 26-Mar-2020 21:00

Beaurepaires is another self-proclaimed "essential".

For the sake of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The government should hit this greedy sick bastard like the fist of an angry god.

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#2447553 26-Mar-2020 21:02

meanwhile ...

TikTok influencer tests positive for coronavirus after licking toilet seat

https://play.stuff.co.nz/details/_6144786040001

Fred99

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#2447555 26-Mar-2020 21:03

Batman:

depends on what your endpoint is.

The endpoint there (barring a miracle cure that's most unlikely to come) is literally many millions of dead.

The combined testing (CDC and private labs) is less than 10,000 per day. I think we tested 2,000 yesterday in NZ, we've (hopefully) got things under some kind of control with reporting and contact tracing, our lockdown is nationwide.

At present trajectory - they are doomed. They're also dreaming if they think it's going to stay "just killing mainly the old folks". Some 40-50% of patients needing hospital care are under 50 - if they can't get it, they'll be dying like flies too.

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#2447556 26-Mar-2020 21:06

With all this doom and gloom I wanted to pose a few thoughts here for people to think about - with one question being key.

What if NZ has just made a fundamental mistake with its approach? And how can we recover if that is the case?

Right now you're probably thinking "oh but the experts are saying this it must be true". But what if it's not? The one thing about this virus is experts all don't agree on many things.

NZ took the nuclear approach by going into a full lock down based primarily on the Imperial College report that was released last week and modelling from Te Punaha Matatini (that is in the news tonight) saying 80,000 will die. This predicted the doom and gloom that was going to follow if countries continued down the path of the so called herd immunity approach. We're not the only country to take this approach of a lock down, but we have taken the steps of a full lock down at a point well before many other countries.

In a best case scenario if NZ was to continue our look down for the next month we could see a few thousand infected people and hopefully no deaths. But what do we do then?

In the last couple of days we've seen reports such as the one out of Oxford that argue 50% of the UK population are already exposed, and a figure already established was that herd immunity required 60% of the population. It's very clear that a significant number of people who are infected do show are asymptomatic and do not show any symptoms of illness, but do carry and spread it.

If this is true the UK could well peak within the next 7 days or so, and from that numbers could decline. Despite some reports claiming people have caught the virus twice, other coronavirus variants do not work in this way (you typically can't catch the common flu twice in a season unless you have underlying health issues). They have had deaths, and will have more, but if some of these newer studies are correct it could mean that the UK could return to some form of normality. They would have herd immunity and the virus would die out.

These reports however don't explain countries like Italy - but Italy has very high death rates from influenza yearly, often well above other countries, that has never really been explained.

So this poses the big question. What if (and if is the question) the approach taken by countries such the US, UK and Australia where they moved towards lock downs at a later point turns out to be the best approach? If herd immunity develops in those countries life could possibly return to normal fairly quickly. We could know the answers to that within 7-14 days.

It's clear community spread has occurred in NZ, but it would seem that based on the number of sick people that our rates of spread would have to be significantly lower than other countries, and we'd certainly be nowhere near a point where herd immunity could even be close.

So where does that leave NZ? What if we do such a great job of wiping out the virus with our lock down that we don't have any deaths, have no herd immunity, but are now stuck on an Island where we have no choice but to keep our borders shut until a vaccine becomes available? What if that vaccine was still 12 months away?

Whether it's by luck, by incompetence or simply by trusting advisors, people like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump could be empowered in a way we could never have imagined. We can all laugh about Trump wanting the country back to normal by Easter - but what if that does happen? Does that mean it was the best approach?

We're not all going to die from the virus, that's pretty clear. But if we wipe it out and later find herd immunity is infact the key to this I'm not sure how we can reverse the path we've now gone down.

In a week if US and UK numbers start declining rapidly will NZ need to look at a back down from level 4 and encourage further social contact to move towards herd immunity while still protecting vulnerable people? With the problem being if community spread didn't occur people won't be contagious and therefore spread can't occur.

Some of you will read this and laugh. Some will immediately try and pick holes in this. I'm not saying I even necessarily believe what I'm saying - but I'm saying this because people need to look outside the square sometimes. I've read in full a lot of research papers in recent days and it's pretty clear experts don't agree on everything, but ultimately they can't all be right.

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#2447557 26-Mar-2020 21:09

sbiddle:

In a best case scenario if NZ was to continue our look down for the next month we could see a few thousand infected people and hopefully no deaths. But what do we do then?

i agree with you. in my view this has gone so far that the fix is gone, there is no fix. if we keep this lockdown we will be locked forever.

i think the way forward is find a quick point of care test. every passenger gets a test, get result in 30 mins and then move on.

mattwnz

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#2447560 26-Mar-2020 21:13

Fred99:

At present trajectory - they are doomed. They're also dreaming if they think it's going to stay "just killing mainly the old folks". Some 40-50% of patients needing hospital care are under 50 - if they can't get it, they'll be dying like flies too.

My cousin is living in New York, just moved there from the UK. So what is occurring over there is a huge worry. Looks like they are going to end up going down the herd immunity route, even though a lot of people are just staying at home, which will hopefully help to slow it down.. I think a big problem is how late the WHO officially declared this a pandemic, because it didn't seem up until them did governments including the US really start to do things. Trump is apparently aiming for it to be controlled by easter...

NZ seems to have some CT clusters around a school, a resthome, a wedding, and a farming event, but hopefully we can get that all under control. I still can't believe that it was only last weekend when some neighbours had a big birthday party in a marquee down the road, it has moved so fast. At least we are now locked down at last.

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#2447561 26-Mar-2020 21:13

Sideface:

The Washington Post - Hospitals consider universal do-not-resuscitate orders for coronavirus patients

today

This is where we will get to if the brain dead fools who continue to breach the lockdown don't stop. It's beyond me why the cops aren't arresting all the greedy shop owners who keep opening.

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