kwlf wrote:
One reason Germany may be doing well is that it has a very high number of ICU beds compared to other countries.
Christian Drosten, chief virologist from the Charité hospital in Berlin today gave a different explanation in the national media conference. According to him, Germany is “ahead of the curve” as regards getting people tested, as there is an unusually high number of well equipped, regional laboratories that can do these tests, and compared with other countries a higher percentage of suspect cases have already been tested. He said that the deaths will inevitably follow, but two weeks later.
According to some highly publicized media reports of people (journalists) who couldn’t get tested even though they think they may be at risk, this may be debatable, but it is all relative I guess.
Well, you learn something new every day. I was completely unaware of high altitude flight as a treatment for whooping cough and cannot immediately see how it might work.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1669876/pdf/bmj00126-0060c.pdf
The few papers I found were in obscure journals and amounted to little more than collections of anecdotes and regurgitations of long held convictions dressed up in authentic sounding medical jargon. Hard data were lacking.
It sounds a bad idea for this virus. When it gets bad, you need supplementary oxygen. A lot of people are on O2 therapy, which is obviously the opposite of high altitude therapy. When it gets really bad you need intubation and oxygen. I’m afraid a trip in a light aircraft is really not going to help. Sorry.
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Silvaire, out of curiosity why are you not concerned about the pandemic? Are you in a demographic unlikely to be affected? Or do you feel the risks are exaggerated? Or that resistance is futile? Or something else entirely?
Trillions wiped off the stock markets today just because some bloke in China ate a bat.
Tom Clancy could have come up with that.
Well, those trillions only existed in some peoples’ wet dreams anyway. We’re now roughly back to where the stock market was a year ago.
To be fair on China, people throughout the world eat bats. In Indonesia they’re considered a treatment for asthma so can be eaten even in Islamic countries (permitted as medicine). It’s Europe that’s the outlier in this regard, probably as our bats are just too tiny to eat, even smaller than dormice.
It doesn’t stop our cat from catching them, however.
Peter wrote:
Tom Clancy could have come up with that
It was somehow expected (article from March 2019), scale of impact on stock market is a different story…
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6466186/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30791586
Still it is just flu (but fresh new one) and humans will get used to it 
Silvaire, out of curiosity why are you not concerned about the pandemic? Are you in a demographic unlikely to be affected? Or do you feel the risks are exaggerated? Or that resistance is futile? Or something else entirely?
Well, first of all where I am right now (Las Vegas) there is almost zero chance of it affecting me, one person here had it last time I checked, a traveler from Asia now in quarantine, and my judgement is that (other than loosing $100K from my retirement account over the last few days) it probably won’t affect my health much at any time in the future.
Beyond that, I think that what’s going to happen is that the vulnerable population is going to have stay out of circulation for a while, others like me and my wife might get it someday (although likely not) and then recover and life will go on. In due course an American for-profit drug company will develop a vaccine, many people worldwide people will get it, and it will eventually end… like everything else. Quarantine of healthy people, shutting down schools etc is not a viable solution except for a short period that isn’t going to make difference. It is what it is, common sense in daily life is good but excessive fuss won’t make any difference except to disrupt the economy and make it worse.
I think Europe seems to have developed a tendency to commit economic suicide in immediate response to any crisis, real (like this one) or imagined.
PS having spent time in a hospital in Latina, Italy where broken front windows and reception were boarded up for lack of money, and where four patient beds were stuffed in a tiny room with wind and dust blowing through open windows, I can assure you that I don’t think of it as first world medical care. A friend was a radiologist there at the time, about 12 years ago. Tough working conditions. Maybe Lombardia is better.
kwlf wrote:
[…]
6/ My friends call me in tears because they see people dying in front of them and they can only offer some oxygen. Ortho and pathologists are being given a leaflet and sent to see patients on NIV. PLEASE STOP, READ THIS AGAIN AND THINK.[…]
This sounds really terrible. If orthopaedic surgeons and pathologists are sent to attend people with respiratory failure, the shit has really hit the fan.
As an anaesthesist/intensivist myself it is only a matter of time until I will have to deal with similar cases, I’m afraid. I can already picture us converting Operating Rooms into intensive care beds. If we count all the anaesthesia machines we probably have a hundred respirators as reserve, but routine care will suffer massively and people will still come in with trauma, cardiac arrest or strokes, so you cannot just shift all the capacity to Coronavirus patients.
Silvaire wrote:
for-profit drug company
Is there another kind?
