[Sirrotica]

At 67 YO, I have type 2 diabetes, controlled high blood pressure, and today I'll find out if a have asthma, or COPD (never smoked in my entire lifetime) after the tests ran about 2 weeks ago. With my chronic ailments the corona virus may as well be AIDS in the 1990s, if I were to get it. Two weeks ago I also thought that people in the US were going nuts over this disease, after doing some research, plus getting info from my wife coming from her employer I'm thinking this virus is not as benign as some people think it is.

My wife is also a 25 year RN, and has worked as many, if not more positions as Dataway's wife has. She now works for United Health Care, and has been getting the information from her employer about Covid 19 for weeks. She is concerned because there is no one with any resistance to this virus, no antivirus, and very little in the way of drugs to counteract it's effects. Hospitalization, with oxygen enrichment, and a ventilator if it knocks you down, bad enough to put you in the hospital, is about as good as your defense is against it is. Not everyone is going to end up in the hospital, but if you do get knocked down that far, your odds aren't that good.

This is similar in some ways to the bubonic plague in the centuries past, where you could survive it, if you were lucky, there was zero medicine to prevent it, or cure it back then. The people of the day knew little about how it was spread. This virus has zero medicine to prevent it, or cure it. If it gets out of control, the death toll could be much higher than it is currently.

China was concerned enough about it to declare mashall law and home quarantine all the residents in, and around ground zero. Until they made it mandatory quarantine to stop the spread, they had little, if any control over it's spread until they used mandatory quarantines.

From Crusty Sarge's thread in the CH, about how things are going down in Italy, about no one taking the disease seriously, has led to 450 deaths a day from yesterdays statistics, that's up 100 people per day over last week. From his posts the people are fleeing Northern Italy, and going South, this is going to be problematic, as it will spread the disease further.

People that get the virus, and survive it, aren't going to be good as new as far as their lungs being scarred from here on out. If you think this is overblown, that's your prerogative, but from my perspective I doubt I have a good chance of surviving it if I contact it. Someone else's indifference, could be my death sentence. I'm glad the officials in the US are taking it seriously. To me it's not just the seasonal flu, I've had that, and survived it quite a few times over the years. I've also had pneumonia once, and survived it. I don't want to roll the dice with corona virus though.

One other thing about it I found out last night listening to the docs on fox news, when they do an ultrasound of your lungs you have blotches spread throughout the lungs, indicating scarring of the internal tissue of the lungs. If you survive it, you will have permanent scarring of your lungs. Seasonal flu doesn't scar the lungs permanently. Equating this disease to seasonal flu is apples and oranges, IMO.

I'm far from an alarmist, but I am staying home until they get a handle on this, and I hate being cooped up as bad as anyone does. Normally I'm out of the house everyday under normal circumstances.