For most of the population — 80 percent, they say — the Kung Flu was a non event. If they got sick it lasted a week or so and was a flu-like annoyance.

For 15 percent of us, however, it became a serious illness. For 5 percent, it became critical, and in this last group were those who died.

I had it, and it took six weeks to fully recover. I didn’t require hospitalization and never became critical, although as I read more about it I did worry at times and asked my doctor for reassurance. What my research tells me is that living or dying for some is a result of a genetic roll of the dice. Some people have immune responses that just don’t work right.

My doctor says I’m not contagious and that I’m immune, at least for the time being. This is the thinking of the CDC. What I know is that I’m going to take this thing seriously, especially in the fall when we start closing wndows and staying inside.

Here’s the headline of a USA Today article:

‘Something we’ve never seen before’: Scientists still trying to understand baffling, unpredictable coronavirus

The article continues:

The new coronavirus has spread like wildfire, killed – and spared – people of all ages and all health conditions, baffled doctors, defied guidance and conventional wisdom, and produced an unprecedented array of symptoms.

There’s never been a virus like it.

“This gets into every major biological process in our cells,” said Nevan J. Krogan, a molecular biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who has studied HIV, Ebola, Zika, dengue and other viruses over the past 13 years.

“At the molecular level, it’s something we’ve never seen before, and then look at what it does to the body – the long list of symptoms – we’ve never seen that before.”

I’m sympathetic to the point of view that our national reaction has been overblown. At the same time, having experienced the virus, I have a deep respect for it.

There are some who beieve that we can’t really stop a virus from spreading, no matter how many masks we buy. I’m sympathetic to that, as well, but I’m not going to needlessly expose myself or family to it.

~ Al Desko

For most people the coronavirus is a news event, something to watch from afar. For others who come down with it, it’s a flu-like illness that goes away. For a small percentage, however, it is a killer.

Some 15% of COVID-19 cases are severe, and 5% are critical.

Why does an otherwise healthy middle aged man go into the hospital and die from the coronavirus? Here are some answers:

How does coronavirus kill? Clinicians trace a ferocious rampage through the body, from brain to toes

As the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 surges past 2.2 million globally and deaths surpass 150,000, clinicians and pathologists are struggling to understand the damage wrought by the coronavirus as it tears through the body. They are realizing that although the lungs are ground zero, its reach can extend to many organs including the heart and blood vessels, kidneys, gut, and brain.

“[The disease] can attack almost anything in the body with devastating consequences,” says cardiologist Harlan Krumholz of Yale University and Yale-New Haven Hospital, who is leading multiple efforts to gather clinical data on COVID-19. “Its ferocity is breathtaking and humbling.”

Unusual Presentations of COVID-19: ‘Our Ignorance Is Profound’

Although a cause-and-effect relationship is unknown, people with the virus have presented with or developed heart disease, acute liver injury, ongoing GI issues, skin manifestations, neurologic damage, and other problems, especially among sicker people.

For example, French physicians described an association with encephalopathy, agitation, confusion, and corticospinal tract signs among 58 people hospitalized with acute respiratory distress.

Strange new coronavirus symptoms have been uncovered

The novel coronavirus has a few common symptoms that can be very misleading. Fever, cough, fatigue, and muscle pain are also typical of the common cold or flu, as are chills, shaking, headache, and sore throat. Shortness of breath can also appear, and breathing issues are common for other ailments. But doctors who have observed COVID-19 patients have been able to identify a slew of other symptoms that might be indicative of a SARS-CoV-2 infection.

The sudden loss of smell and taste is one of the most popular signs of COVID-19. It’s been studied and explained, and it’s now associated with the new disease. Other neurological or cardiac manifestations have been observed in patients who may have not experienced other symptoms. And if you encounter skin lesions similar to frostbite, or you have bluish lips or face, then you might have COVID-19.

~ Feuilleton

Research supports these remedies.

Appes. Apples contain quercetin, a plant pigment (flavonoid). It is found in many plants and foods, such as red wine, onions, green tea and berries.

The broad spectrum anti-viral medicine known as quercetin has already proven successful at treating Ebola and Zika viruses, says Dr. Michel Chrétien, a researcher at the Clinical Research Institute of Montreal.

Numerous experiments have shown that quercetin exerts antiproliferative, antioxidative, antibacterial, anticancer and antiviral effects. It was found that quercetin could protect patients from dying from severe complications associated with the pandemic influenza A (H1N1) virus infection.

You can buy quercetin supplements. Quercetin has been safely used in amounts up to 500 mg twice daily for 12 weeks. It is not known if long-term use or higher doses are safe.

Chicken soup. The mild anti-inflammatory effect conferred by chicken soup could be one of the reasons it mitigates symptomatic upper respiratory tract infections like the common cold. When an individual comes down with a cold, the inflammatory response  signals white blood cells (WBCs) to migrate to the region. This may contribute to the commonly encountered cold symptoms, such as stuffy noses. When the researchers measured the ability of the WBCs to migrate through a filter from one side of a chamber to the other side, they found that fewer cells migrated to the other side of the chamber in the presence of chicken soup.

The warm salty nature of chicken broth is likely to help. A sore, itchy throat and respiratory congestion are some of the more common symptoms of a cold, and gargling with salt water seems to help. A saline solution can draw excess fluid from inflamed tissues in the throat, making them hurt less. Gargling also loosens thick mucus, which can remove irritants like allergens, bacteria and fungi from the throat.

Green tea. Green tea catechins (GTCs) are polyphenolic compounds from the leaves of Camellia sinensis. GTCs have been reported to provide various health benefits against numerous diseases. Studies have shown that GTCs, especially epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG), have antiviral effects against diverse viruses. EGCG binds strongly to many molecules in cells, especially proteins, and then affects their original activities and functions. By interacting with the virion surface or cell surface receptors, EGCG can interfere with the interaction between the virions and the host cells.

Sit out in the sun and fresh air with an apple and cup of green tea.

~ Hippocrene

A New York doctor at the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak says his hospital is like a “petri dish.”

Do you know why? And do you know why hospitals are notorious for respiratory infections?

Windows. They can’t open windows to let in fresh air. And fresh air kills viruses.

In the years before antibiotics became available, open-air therapy was the standard treatment for tuberculosis (TB) and other infectious diseases. Patients were nursed next to open windows in cross-ventilated wards or put outside, in their beds, to breathe fresh outdoor air. This was believed to aid their recovery and reduce the risk of cross- and re-infection. The open-air regimen was also widely used on casualties during the First World War; and during the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic.

We learned this in the 1918 flu epidemic, but we forgot it.

Put simply, medics found that severely ill flu patients nursed outdoors recovered better than those treated indoors. A combination of fresh air and sunlight seems to have prevented deaths among patients; and infections among medical staff.[1] There is scientific support for this. Research shows that outdoor air is a natural disinfectant. Fresh air can kill the flu virus and other harmful germs. Equally, sunlight is germicidal and there is now evidence it can kill the flu vi

Florence Nightingale understood this: “A nurse is to maintain the air within the room as fresh as the air without, without lowering the temperature.” What hospitals looked like in her day:

[Editor’s Note: We are not permitted to call the Wuhan Virus the Wuhan Virus because that would be cismisogynistic or something. So this blog is referring to it as the Chinese Flu.]

For those so inclined, we can reduce the virus to numbers.

How canceled events and self-quarantines save lives, in one chart

A disastrous inundation of hospitals can likely be averted with protective measures we’re now seeing more of — closing schools, canceling mass gatherings, working from home, self-quarantine, self-isolation, avoiding crowds — to keep the virus from spreading fast.

Epidemiologists call this strategy of preventing a huge spike in cases “flattening the curve,” and it looks like this:

The Elegant Mathematics of Social Distancing.

From a mathematical perspective, determining how big a crowd is safe depends on a couple of key questions: How many people in a given area are infected with the disease? And how big is the event? If you know those things, you can estimate the probability of someone getting infected at the event. An elegant “Covid-19 Event Risk Assessment Planner” by the Georgia Tech quantitative biologist Joshua Weitz makes the following calculation: If, say, 20,000 cases of infection are actively circulating the US (far more than are known so far), and you host a dinner party for 10 folks, there’s a 0.061 percent chance that an attendee will be infected. But if you attend a 10,000-person hockey match, there’s a 45 percent chance.

COVID-19 Event Risk Assessment Planner

The mathematics for calculating the probability of exposure given the number of carriers in a population and group size aren’t difficult but they can be surprising. Even a low number of carriers can generate a relatively high probability for reasonably sized groups. For example, assume you run a firm of 1000 people in the San Francisco Bay Area (population 8 million.) Let’s suppose that there are just 500 carriers in the area. In this case, assuming random draws, the probability that at least one of your employees is a carrier is 6%. You can run your own calculations at Wolfram Alpha following this format:

p=8000000, c=500, g=1000, 1-1(1-c/p)^g //N

where p is the population size, c is the number of carriers, g is the group size and the //N at the end isn’t a division but a command to Wolfram Alpha to give you a numerical answer.

Coronavirus expert says he knows when the virus ‘will burn itself out,’ according to leaked analysis

“Sunlight will cut the virus’ ability to grow in half so the half-life will be 2.5 minutes and in the dark it’s about 13 to 20 [minutes],” Nicholls said. “Sunlight is really good at killing viruses.” For that reason, he also added that he doesn’t expect areas such as Australia, Africa and the Southern hemisphere to see high rates of infection because they are in the middle of summer.

Regarding temperatures, Nicholls said the warmer the better for stopping the spread of the virus, according to the transcript of the conference call. “The virus can remain intact at 4 degrees (39 degrees Fahrenheit) or 10 degrees (50 F) for a longer period of time,” Nicholls said, referring to Celsius measurements, according to the transcript. “But at 30 degrees (86 degrees F) then you get inactivation. And high humidity — the virus doesn’t like it either,” he added, the transcript of the call showed.

How long can the new coronavirus last on surfaces?

How long can the new coronavirus linger on surfaces, anyway? The short answer is, we don’t know. A new analysis found that the virus can remain viable in the air for up to 3 hours, on copper for up to 4 hours, on cardboard up to 24 hours and on plastic and stainless steel up to 2 to 3 days. However, this studyhas not yet yet been peer-reviewed.

Another study concluded that if this new coronavirus resembles other human coronaviruses, such as its “cousins” that cause SARS and MERS, it can stay on surfaces — such as metal, glass or plastic — for as long as nine days (In comparison, flu viruses can last on surfaces for only about 48 hours.)

Ohio Official Who Claimed 100,000 Covid-19 Cases in the State Says She Was ‘Guesstimating’

The director of Ohio’s Department of Health, Amy Acton, shocked a lot of people on Thursday when she said in a press conference that she believed 100,000 Ohioans had already contracted Covid-19. The Columbus Dispatch offered effusive praise of Acton for being a “voice of knowledge.” What an incredible human being, to let her humanity “shine through” like that. Brings a tear to my eye, it does. But Director Acton forgot to mention a small detail about her Apocalypse Now statement; it wasn’t true.

~ Calash

President Trump urges all of us to be calm about the coronavirus.

“We’re prepared and we’re doing a great job with it and it will go away, just stay calm,” Trump said, “Everybody has to be vigilant and has to be careful but be calm, it’s really working out, and a lot of good things are going to happen.”

I tend to agree. The reason is that we, along with millions of individuals, families, businesses, churches, nursing homes, hospitals and government agencies, are doing everything we know to do.

Personally, we have suspended attending our church dinners, we wash our hands a lot, we don’t plan to travel, and we started using a grocery service that doesn’t require us to enter the store.

We could label each activity an Infection Intercept Point — IIP, if I were a government bureaucrat. Right now millions of IIPs are being put in place.

Remember: Not too long ago we were worried that we Americans are too clean, that our obsession with killing germs was actually making us sicker.

Megan McArdle, a fine reporter, writes in The Washington Post:

Despite early exposure, Singapore and Hong Kong have kept their caseloads low, not by completely shutting down large swaths of their economies as China did but through aggressive personal hygiene and “social distancing.” South Korea seems to be getting its initial outbreak under control using similar measures. If we do the same, we can not only keep our hospitals from overloading but also buy researchers time to develop vaccines and therapies.

She encourages you to create your own IIPs.

We are all in this together. It is your responsibility to keep America safe by following the CDC guidelines, just as much as it is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s or President Trump’s responsibility to lead us to safety. And until this virus is beaten, we all need to act like it.

Wash your hands!

~ Faute d’Mieux

It isn’t all that complicated. Here are some calm voices.

Coronavirus – How to. prepare and protect yourself as US gears up to fight it.

1. Avoid those people who are sick with the virus
2. Avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth
3. Practice good hand hygiene — wash your hands with soap and warm water for at least 2 minutes
4. Disinfect surfaces

Why hand washing really could slow down an epidemic

“We consider that, at most, 1 in 5 people in an airport have cleaned [their] hands at any given moment in time (i.e., 20% of airport population),” the researchers write in their study paper. However, the researchers argue that if more people were to wash their hands frequently and correctly, it would significantly slow down the rate at which diseases are likely to spread.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) say that best practices for hand washing include not only rinsing the hands with water, but also applying soap and scrubbing the palms, the back of the hands, between the fingers, and under the fingernails. A person should scrub for at least 20 seconds before rinsing the soap and drying the hands with a clean towel.

And from our President.

These days the President of the United States has to tell people to wash their hands. We’ve become a helpless society.

~ Dramaturge