I don't understand how I'm supposed to look after my wellbeing when I'm employed and need to go to work and need to be in close contact with hundreds of people. CDC should advise businesses and should advise everyone to WFH if they can. My boss didn't even hear about this at all, think about that for a second.
1. Wash your hands frequently
2. Especially wash your hands before eating
3. Practice not touching your face. In particular eyes, mouth, nose
4. Keep distance from people. Aim for 1.5 feet. Double that if person coughing or sneezing
5. Don’t shake hands
6. Avoid large gatherings
7. If sick, take sick days
8. Watch out for objects many touch but which are infrequently cleaned. Doorknobs, pens, elevator buttons, etc. Using your elbow or sleeve is better than your hand. Once community spread starts, wear gloves.
More here. If everyone did the above the R0 would drop.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/25/wuhan-coronavirus-safet...
I can wash my hands and certain food, but other food that I eat (like a sandwich, bread, all sorts of prepared food) can't be washed by me before I eat it.
If someone sick coughed on their hands and then made that food for me, I'm screwed.
Eg pack sandwiches in a lunchbox rather than buy one.
You perhaps can’t eliminate it all. But this is a risk reduction game, rather than a perfection game. Taking low impact precautions goes a long way.
There are a lot of hourly workers in the service economy that don't get sick time, and they still need to pay their bills. I'm not personally worried about the people in my office since I can avoid close contact. I'm worried about the people stocking shelves at grocery stores and pharmacies, working checkout counters and the like.
Maintaining a decent (though not extreme) amount of supplies at home will also help you avoid shopping at time of greatest spread.
I say “not extreme” as hoarding can cause problems on its own. Basically just forward your own purchases a couple weeks.
I'd edit the 1.5 feet to 1.5 meters
I'm also going to start refusing to handle objects handled by multiple people, such as the signature stylus in credit card checkout terminals.
door handles are also a problem
mandatory retrofit of every public door with automatic opener or at least push bar (use elbow or hip) would also help. There's a thousand things society could do (have done) to systemically reduce R0 of most everything contagious...
Personally I’d staying about a meter away from people at least. Can anyone comment of 1.5 feet is fine though? I’m assuming the author knows more than me.
Non-disposable gloves aren’t great. They’ll soon become an infection vector.
I wouldn’t worry about gloves until outbreaks happen.
If someone is coughing or sneezing I'm going to shoot for much farther that three feet.
Nah.
Poor people, who get poor health care, have poor sanitation, and are malnurished have poor immune systems as a result, and because of that become disease reservoirs.
They need to be lifted out of poverty if we are ever going to have a more healthy society as a whole and decrease the likelihood of future epidemics.
The phenomenon I describe happens on a good day in the US, with no epidemics. Sick people go to work because their bosses don't tolerate otherwise. Sick kids go to school because their parents can't miss work to take care of them. A lot of people (not me, I am much more fortunate) cannot take any such breaks to take care of ordinary life situations because a lesser paycheck or lost job for completely legal bullshit reasons drowns them, gets them behind on tight living expenses.
These issues exist independent of coronavirus, when things are going "well".
I haven't even gotten into how these conditions feed back into stress, mental illness, other health conditions like obesity that are not aided by stress, all self re-enforcing.
If all parties wanted to fix this, we could, even without lifting those people out of poverty.
Working to eliminate poverty world-wide will go a long way to making us all healthier.
That said, I agree that people should get more sick-leave and be allowed to work from home more, if they can do their job from home, and be allowed to go home to take care of their family if they need to.
These things and lifting people out of poverty are not mutually exclusive, and improving the one will help improve the other.
And by the way, there are plenty of middle class people who are accurately described by my statements, you don't need to be in poverty to get there.
If you're in a high risk category (old, history of chronic cough, cardiovascular issues, etc) then you should consider self isolating even at the cost of your job if WFH is not an option.
As China and Korea have demonstrated, this quickly becomes a problem much larger than the authorities are resourced to handle. At that point your health is in your hands and your hands only.
For instance, self isolation is still 14 days. This isn't enough. They are also restricting isolation and travel only to "affected areas of Italy" instead of all of Italy.
It boggles my mind that people say "the risk is low" and "we don't know how to contain it or where these cases are coming from" in the same presser.
People say the risk is low because it's probably good on net if the cases are coming from everywhere; it would indicate that the visible clusters where people die a lot are anomalies, and most cases aren't that bad. The worst case scenario is that containment is impossible but it really hasn't spread widely yet.
Do you have a source for that? I know that there is a nationwide flu surveillance system run by CDC, and it has indicated that most states are at or near peak - is that what you’re referring to?
Korea has so far tested 66,652 cases. All under government supervision. Local governments are barging into churches of those damned Sincheonji cultists responsible for the outbreak, in order to obtain the list of church members. Police force is tracking down cultists who failed to respond.
Of course, not all is well, and some critics are arguing we should have blocked people coming from China, which is something only the government can do, by the way.
Seriously, Korea is a living demonstration how the government is absolutely critical in controlling an epidemic. I'm tired of this fetishization of "individual responsibility" with no basis in reality.
It's already becoming well known that that particular church sect is linked to the start of the disease in South Korea: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/02/24/8089147...
An alternative framing, which I believe to be more productive, is for the entire community to take ownership. "we messed up, we need to do better"
At a time like this, we need to partisanship aside and and focus on solutions, not blame. There will be plenty of time for a post-mortem after the crisis has passed.
I'm sure they didn't intentionally contract coronavirus, but once they did, their behavior went so far into gross stupidity territory that it's hard to distinguish from malice. Even after all national news blared for several days that hundreds were infected by their mass gathering, many of these cultists are still hiding their identity, not responding to authorities, and most infuriatingly, they are still going on about with their business, spreading disease everywhere.
A few hours ago it was revealed that a worker at Daegu Airport was Sincheonji cultist, he went to the Sincheonji meeting on 2/16 and kept working between 2/17-2/21, well after the news broke out on 2/18, and now he was diagnosed positive. Some 25k people were estimated to pass through Daegu airport during these days. WTF.
I don't claim to have all the details, but worry that some group is being scapegoated while a larger problem is being ignored.
The NPR article in particular was pretty bad [1].
>Critics say the disease may have spread within the church quickly because of the way that it worships. "Shincheonji followers hold services sitting on the floor, without any chairs," packed together "like bean sprouts,"
> "A bigger problem is that they shout out 'amen' after every sentence the pastor utters, pretty much every few seconds. And they do that at the top of their lungs,"
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/02/24/8089147...
I guess NPR shouldn't have used the expression literally.
The religious aspect also obstructs the more interesting questions of privacy
The government can not wash your hands for you, or preemptively tell if you becoming sick.
I don't see how reminding people of their individual responsibility is detrimental to a government response.
Every individual is ultimately responsible for their own safety, security, and wellbeing. The government isn't a protective loving parent that will go out of its way to care for you as an individual when infra and institutions become overloaded.
This sucks, no doubt, and you have my sincere sympathies. This is a problem that many, many people will be facing. It's a lot like any other natural disaster--there's really not much to be done but carry on as best we can.
CDC messaging is tough. It needs to be enough to get people to do what can be done (which is not a lot), but not enough to spark irrational silliness (some of which we're seeing right here).