I don’t need a lecture, I’m a microbiologist, I understand how this works. People with pre-existing conditions are still much more likely to die from the flu. We can’t shut down society for this. There’s a lot of fear mongering and over hyped news out there at the moment.
Did I say anything that wasn’t correct? Most of what I know about this situation I’ve learned from epidemiologists — not journalists, not politicians. I’m a meteorologist, and on my own I’d have no clue what I’m talking about other than being able to observe the trends in publicly available data, given a side interest in statistics. My line of work pretty much requires that separating wheat from chaff is second nature to me, which is why I avoid secondary (or tertiary) sources. That’s why, where I can, in this case I defer to epidemiologists, who are basically the best available source for information on how virus
outbreaks work. Thank goodness the internet makes it easy to find thoughts from credentialed epidemiologists.
While your being a microbiologist instead of an epidemiologist doesn’t mean that you can bring
no valuable input to a conversation, please do understand that your messaging here is pretty dissonant compared to many epidemiologists, who say that this is serious. They are also careful to note that nothing here is worthy of panic and containment can still work; it’s just way harder now that it’s spread as far as it has. There’s a middle ground between “run and buy up all the toilet paper and Purell,” and “this is no worse than the flu,” and as of now that middle ground appears to be the consensus among people way smarter than me to make such judgments. That’s what I’m rolling with.
None of this changes that the virus can spread asymptomatically and that telling high-risk populations to stay away from crowds simply isn’t enough. People who regularly come in close contact with high-risk populations — which is a
lot of people — need to as well, or else they’re putting more than just themselves at risk. That’s all I was saying.
Besides, no one’s proposing “[shutting] down society” and no one (other than China) is doing that. There are difficult but reasonable precautions that can be taken by governments, companies, and institutions — and individuals, of course — to reduce the risk of widespread community transmission while keeping things as normal as possible. That’s what they’re doing. Ideally, these steps work, COVID-19 doesn’t become any worse than it needs to be, and we can mostly forget about it fairly soon, but that’s simply not the reality right now. Rapid and widespread transmission is occurring and accelerating globally right now. This is
especially true considering that the number of publicly reported, confirmed cases is likely significantly lower than the real number, if past outbreaks are prologue here, due to a focus on testing worse cases over mild cases or possible asymptomatic exposures.
Anyway, pardon the nuance, believe what you want, I guess.
