Quote:
Originally Posted by BillyMac
While 100,000 deaths is pretty bad, the worse part of COVID-19 is that one can walk around with the virus for days, maybe a week, while being completely asymptomatic and unaware that your'e sick and can infect others. That's not the case with many other infectious diseases, including influenza, (you get the virus, don't know that your'e sick and spread the disease for only a few days, get sick, stay home from work or school, and stay in bed). Not so with COVID-19, with this disease one can infect dozens, maybe hundreds, before one even begins to feel sick.
|
Actually that's been the case with viral pneumonias, which have been among the leading killers of old people (especially in nursing homes) since forever. How could it possibly be getting into nursing homes, other than by being spread from the general population?
Pneumonia isn't caused by a single agent, but we don't know how many it is caused by. It can be caused by a bacterial infection, by influenza, or by other viral diseases. In most cases of pneumonia, even the fatal ones, the causative agent isn't even explored. Other than influenza and tuberculosis, nobody tries to control the spread of pneumonia agents in the general population, and usually the infection isn't even traced. We just know pneumonia agents circulate in the general population, and sometimes cause pneumonias there, but manifest as life-threatening ones in the debilitated. Influenza at least makes most people sick, and we do try to control the spread of tuberculosis -- which tends to infect some people for a long time, and has a lot of carriers who are asymptomatic or have only occasional symptoms -- but for the most part we try only to protect debilitated persons and health care personnel from these agents.
Covid-19 to me is just another viral pneumonia agent, no different from what we presume to be many others that are always circulating and cause most people little harm. It seems the only reasons efforts are being made to control its spread in the general population are: that it was discovered close to its apparent origin of human transmission, and there was a brief chance to prevent its breakout; and that it was associated with a far more severe version of SARS. But the time its breakout could've been stopped has long passed, and it's now known to be much less of a threat than SARS was. I think efforts to control it in the general population are futile, and that control efforts should have been aimed at isolating nursing homes, not the general population.
Of course nursing homes have always been bad on average at keeping pneumonia from going around; some have viewed such pneumonias as a merciful end where euthanasia was not practiced. But as we know, in various places around the world perverse policies were followed that seemed to deliberately increase the chance Covid-19 would go around such facilities, snipping off lives faster than the usual run of pneumonias would have.
We could all have been trying to live like this for the past century for all the medical justification there was, given what we know about pneumonia, trying to keep these respiratory agents from going around because in a few cases they will kill old, debilitated people. But we would thereby have crippled all of society to try to save those few.