Time for a coronavirus check-in.
I don’t talk about work much, but my job is in health care. I build software that serves particularly frail elderly folks – in other words, the most vulnerable population in the coming pandemic. I am NOT an expert, but I do work with a variety of people whose job it is to stay informed. As this thing spreads, so will misinformation and confusion, and the best defense against panic is preparation. So I want to share the information I’ve seen so far.
This is happening. Over the course of this pandemic, somewhere between 40 and 70% of us will be infected. Many of us will not show symptoms, and many more will not experience any serious harm. It’s the ~10% who do experience major complications that we must be concerned for. That’s the elderly (or even middle-aged), folks with respiratory problems, immune-compromised, or anyone that’s already sick with another disease (see this).
What matters is the rate of infection. Yes, we’re all going to get it – but if those infections are spread out across months and years rather than days and weeks, far fewer people will die. Good personal hygiene (washing your hands, not touching your face, coughing into your elbow) isn’t just to protect yourself: it’s to protect others and slow the spread (see this).
Quarantine is the best protective measure. Current estimates suggest that the infectible area is within 6 feet: basically, if you’re sharing air (mask or otherwise), you’re at risk. Duration of exposure increases risk. Think about the cruise ships: most of those people never touched each other, but they all got infected together (see this).
Don’t buy masks. Sorry, but health care workers need them far, far more than you do. Production capacity is far below demand, and it’ll remain there for many weeks or months. Their main virtue for the general public is to stop you from touching your face anyways and there’s other ways to accomplish that.
Our health care system is going to be overloaded. It’s a treatable disease, but up to 10% of cases require a lengthy hospital stay. We’re going to run out of hospital beds and ventilators – optimistic estimates place this around late May. We’re going to run out of masks and other protective gear to keep health care workers from getting sick. When this happens, far more than just the infected will begin to suffer. (see this and this).
Nobody knows how bad this will get, but the prognosis is grim. The solution is not to panic, but it’s not to continue business as usual, either. We need to enthusiastically support strong, decisive responses: canceling events, closing schools, mandatory remote work, and self-quarantines. This means we need to be thinking about the members of our community that will suffer when people stay indoors. Anyone working paycheck-to-paycheck, whose jobs are in the service industry, whose businesses depend on putting lots of people in small rooms. They’re going to be hurting.
China got through the first wave by instituting some of the strictest quarantines modern society has ever seen (see this piece for a great perspective from Wuhan). But they – like Japan and South Korea – also already have a strong culture supporting this response.
We don’t have this on any level. Our health care system intentionally leaves many people without access to care. Our government doesn’t have the power to institute serious or swift reform. Our culture and habits around hygiene are under-developed. Half of our media is committed to framing this as a hoax because the president decided this, too, should be a political battleground, goddamn his miserable soul.
But it’s also an opportunity to grow as a society. It’s kind of inspiring, in a weird way, to see that we’re still capable of reacting to bad news, to see people take this problem seriously in a time of numbness amidst bad news. Our individualistic ways are going to cost us, in the coming months. Maybe we’ll learn some of the behaviors and values we need to tackle other societal challenges, like climate change. Who knows.