I live in a small county in KY with a population of 40K. I can tell you from being here in the middle of a covid hotspot how dangerous this stuff is. We had a church that went against the recommendations on mass gatherings and went ahead with a revival they had planned. One person with covid came from out of state to attend the revival. Over twenty church members got the virus and six are dead. These were the first covid patients the local hospital had seen and before they realized it was covid they were dealing with, several nurses got it. An elderly patient got the virus from the hospital and took it back to a local nursing home where over thirty residents and five employees got it. So far twelve of the residents have died including a husband and his wife. As of now we have 169 with the virus and 19 dead. I know three of the ones that have it and three that have died. The stories of what the families are going through is very heart breaking. Their mothers, fathers and grandparents are dying and they can't be with them.
I have tried to keep my distance from people for the last six weeks, but because of being over 65 I had a covid test done yesterday, just in case. While the test isn't anything you can't endure, you're damn glad when it's over. Results: negative!!
Here's a newspaper story on how one of of my friends died.
https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/2020/04/09/coronavirus-kentucky-woman-not-allowed-to-return-nursing-home-dies/2970848001/
Really sorry to hear how bad it hit your little county. We are in the suburb north of DC and while our rate has flattened, it's still 150-200 new cases a day! My neighborhood has a lot of police (we are the furthest from the big city) and of the 462 county employees alone who've gotten it, nearly half are police/fire so at least one family has it right here on my own street.
What surprised me is that nearly half HALF of the people getting COVID19 are in the 18-49 age group. My micro-biologist daughter who is in this up to her ears and in that age group says that people in her age range are not dying like us old farts but something not really reported is that a lot of people in her age range will have breathing issues for life. So for more than half of our little YST forum group, unless the case is minor the issue is about getting scar tissue in the lungs. We played around with the numbers and she said that if you take the total number of cases, multiply roughly times 20% (one out of every five people) because 80% are minor, then subtract the fatals, the answer will be how many will probably be an additional burden on the hospital system for the rest of their lives and probably lose years of life in the end. For the US that resulted in:
1,184,248 Total known cases
68,286 Known fatal
168,564 The 20% survivors who likely will be affected for life.
On related notes to share:
#1 is that she is really bothered by how many of the testing safeguards are being skipped and especially outside of the US. For you Brits she did mention the UK, because companies already pushing into Phase 2 testing on people are using the 3rd world as guinea pig subjects. Sounds cold but it isn't the first time and the idea is that any improvement is more than the number of people who would be lost anyway.
#2 is that companies and Governments anticipate going into production before they have significant data beyond immediate efficacy. In other words they may have data to show the vaccine can prevent COVID19 but will not have had the time to really watch for and understand potential side effects.
#3 bottom line was she thinks that while vaccines should be OK when they do become available in the West, her advice to me was to
not be one of the first to get a vaccine when they come out.
