I understand much of the precautions taken around the world. I see the US is most in trouble on how they are handling compared to countries like Korea, China , Germany, where many have gone back to work.
One Big reason is Test…
With the disease now spreading within the community, the critical task is separating the infected from the healthy, but there is only one way to do that: Test people to see if they are carrying the virus, which is different from an immunity test.
South Korea has been a leader in this, and is now manufacturing 100,000 test kits a day. In the US, hospitals around the country have more people reporting symptoms than they can test—and the even bigger problem is detecting people who are carrying the virus without symptoms.
By figuring out who is healthy and who is not, smart decisions can be made about who can go to work and who should be isolated. In South Korea, testing takes place at drive-through sites and special hospital booths. There’s also widespread temperature checks, with thermal cameras and thermometers, at public buildings and restaurants. Same with Germany, Germany has 1/10 the cases as the US and 20times better recovery rate.
The US has tested between 80,000 and 350,000 people so far—the lack of a concrete number is indicative of the disorganized response—but epidemiologists say we need to be testing more than 100,000 people a day to effectively track the disease.
The US doesn’t have the tests to do that right now. So far, the Trump administration has not relieved test shortages at hospitals and has yet to use the Defense Production Act to compel private companies to help. On Tuesday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it would use the law to produce 60,000 test kits, but abruptly reversed its decision, saying it was able to obtain them without coercion. Yet there is still a massive shortage of this key tool that would give pandemic fighters the information they desperately need about their foe.
At least some private companies are working on solutions, with Amazon piloting a home-delivered test system in Seattle.
…and Trace
If the US can get a handle on who is infected and where, we can start using tried-and-true epidemic fighting techniques to figure out who they may have infected, and isolate them. In some places where the virus is widespread, it may be too late for tracing efforts to prevent the need for extreme social isolation.
But other cities, earlier in the curve, could benefit from a comprehensive tracing effort, allowing them to avoid full-scale sheltering in place by cutting off clusters of infected people from the general populace. “South Korea is a democratic republic; we feel a lockdown is not a reasonable choice,” Kim Woo-Joo, an infectious disease specialist at Korea University, told Nature.
That’s likely to mean legwork, and may require hiring more public health workers. There are also increasingly high-tech—and perhaps ethically dubious—means to do so. Eleven countries, ranging from South Korea to Israel, are using mobile phone location data to figure out where infected people have been, and then using that data to identify others who may have been exposed to the virus. The civil liberties implications are worrying, but the rapid roll-out of this technology is a reminder that private business already has access to much of this data, and may be an opportunity to think hard about how it should be used.
A hospital surge
The logic of social distancing is simply that most countries don’t have the medical equipment necessary to handle so many ill patients at once, so the best way to avoid rationing care is to keep the number of cases manageable. Another response is to increase the capacity at hospitals so that high infection rates don’t lead to unbearable stress on the health care system. In New York City, now the global hot spot for the disease, a convention center is being converted into a 1,000-bed hospital for non-Covid-19 patients. New York University is allowing final-year medical students to graduate early and the state is calling for retired health care workers to come back to work.
Still, key supplies are missing, particularly mechanical ventilators and personal protective equipment like masks, face shields and gowns. So far, the government has relied on voluntary efforts in the private sector to increase access to those supplies, but it will take months to get the more complex products flowing out of factories.
Find the antibodies
This is perhaps the most important step toward normalcy: Figuring out who is immune to Covid-19 after recovering from an infection.
That requires a different kind of test from the ones used to see if the virus is present in your body. With these tests, your blood is examined for the antibodies your immune system has created to fight off the virus. Some physicians are already using laboratory versions of these tests in an effort to treat sick patients with blood transfusions from recovered patients, in the hope that the antibodies will help the suffering patient recover. But in the long-term, a more reliable version of the test that can be administered on a large scale will allow public health authorities to determine who can safely go back to work.
Patience
The world won’t be done fighting coronavirus this year, or likely next. Researchers say that a safe vaccine won’t be available until 2021. And therapeutic treatments that make it easier for victims to survive the virus will also take time to be developed and proven in clinical trials. In the meantime, it’s going to take repeated applications of a combination of the above tools to keep dealing with flare-ups of the disease. The sooner that we recognize the breadth of the challenge, the more manageable those flare-ups will become.
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The US isn’t using data that could save people from getting coronavirus. For most part, stay AWAY FROM THE HERD.
The top ten ways to die is mostly healthy food and exercise related. Cutting my PD superfoods of healthy food products from the farmer markets and public is not helping. The work is the excerise part and keeping people at home will cause greater killers of other health condition and inside buildings creates a greater spread of virus. plus, poverty kills more than anything.
I known people will look at me as the crazy one. Mark my words, this handle of the virus will go down in human history as the worst planning since world war 2. Muster gas is what came out of the war, for a cure for Cancer. Lol, how well is that working out. Stupidity, poverty and the medical profession are the leading cause of death. Be your own best doctor in the world, I am planning to live to an age of a 100.
I am still looking for more bio organisms intelligent life down here.
