Anyone concerned about the Coronavirus in WDW ?

[gwynne]

Because of our inability to adequately test, we most likely already have multiple outbreaks throughout the US, but no one knows yet. I'm sure we'll get a sudden spike some time over the next two months.

Your post spells out the situation well.
I really hope they are able to adequately test soon.

 

[DeniseJH]

A question for the nurses here: According to HHS Secretary Alex Azar today, 15% - 20% of people that get the Coronavirus have required hospitalization. Is that anywhere on par with the stats. for the "regular" flu?

Another question for nurses: How are your hospitals/Drs. offices handling this? Have there been any meetings about Coronavirus response? Are YOU concerned?

 

[DeniseJH]

Because of our inability to adequately test, we most likely already have multiple outbreaks throughout the US, but no one knows yet. I'm sure we'll get a sudden spike some time over the next two months.

Seems likely with what we know.

 

[SamFaniam]

A question for the nurses here: According to HHS Secretary Alex Azar today, 15% - 20% of people that get the Coronavirus have required hospitalization. Is that anywhere on par with the stats. for the "regular" flu?

Less than 1% of Americans that are infected with the flu each year require hospitalization.

 

[mnrose]

A question for the nurses here: According to HHS Secretary Alex Azar today, 15% - 20% of people that get the Coronavirus have required hospitalization. Is that anywhere on par with the stats. for the "regular" flu?

Another question for nurses: How are your hospitals/Drs. offices handling this? Have there been any meetings about Coronavirus response? Are YOU concerned?

No. Not anywhere close to 15-20% of people get hospitalized with the flu. Roughly 38 million people (somewhere around 10% of the US) have had the flu this year. 280,000 hospitalizations. 16,000 deaths. So that means .7% of people. 15-20% is unimaginable and would absolutely overwhelm our health care system. Plus, they require highly specialized treatment and equipment that not even every hospital has. And, certainly not in the quantities required. This has been the major challenge in other countries who've had more cases.

 

[Haley R]

Have there been any reports on this affecting pregnant women/newborns? I feel like I haven’t seen much

 

[DeniseJH]

Less than 1% of Americans that are infected with the flu each year require hospitalization.

Thank you.

No. Not anywhere close to 15-20% of people get hospitalized with the flu. Roughly 38 million people (somewhere around 10% of the US) have had the flu this year. 280,000 hospitalizations. 16,000 deaths. So that means .7% of people. 15-20% is unimaginable and would absolutely overwhelm our health care system. Plus, they require highly specialized treatment and equipment that not even every hospital has. And, certainly not in the quantities required. This has been the major challenge in other countries who've had more cases.

Yes, thank you. (Might have to say this louder for those in the back.)

 

[Southernmiss]

Oh thank you! I'm not.

My only worry is being a carrier without knowing and giving to my parents or sister with lupus. All 3 that I'm seeing tomorrow!

You may find this interesting. It goes by the namebrand Plaquenil and is also commonly used by patients with lupus.

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202002/13/WS5e45222ca310128217277606.html

 

[Farro]

You may find this interesting. It goes by the namebrand Plaquenil and is also commonly used by patients with lupus.

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202002/13/WS5e45222ca310128217277606.html

She's on Plaquenil.

 

[TLSnell1981]

Thank you.

Yes, thank you. (Might have to say this louder for those in the back.)

But remember, we likely have very skewed numbers at this time. Some who are infected show mild to no symptoms, so aren't included in these stats.

 

[sky13]

Time will tell. But will all the other things that was going to kill us all. Ebola, swine. SARS. Etc. I think we will be ok.... just the hype is so, to me. Odd and I don’t buy it.

Ebola, SARS, MERS - all of these have fairly high case fatality rates (Ebola about 50%, SARS around 10%, MERS around 33%), which are higher than the current estimate for COVID-19 (around 2% but could be way off).

The large difference between Ebola/SARS/MERS and COVID-19 is that COVID-19 appears far more transmissible between humans than Ebola/SARS/MERS. So it has the potential to infect far larger numbers of people, resulting in much higher total numbers of fatalities.

Swine flu - I refer to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21342903 (authors are from the CDC) which says that in 2009-2010 in the USA, the estimates for 2009 pandemic H1N1 are approximately 60.8 million cases with 12,469 deaths, which is a 0.02% case fatality rate if my maths is correct. So basically 100x lower than the current estimated case fatality rate for COVID-19.

But the number of deaths it's not so much the problem here. The problem are the amount of people requiring hospitalization, the leangth of stay and most importantly the admissions in intensive care. That number alone is 8.6%in Italy atm.

I completely agree with this.

There is a limited number of healthcare personnel and hospital beds. There are an even more limited of healthcare personnel who are trained in intensive care, and intensive care beds. At the best of times, hospitals and intensive care units are already fairly full - an additional influx of patients needing hospitalisation and intensive care can easily overwhelm the healthcare system. This appears to have been what happened in Wuhan leading to an increased case fatality rate there.

According to this (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/), Italy currently has 105 patients who are serious/critical, out of 1128 known cases. This paper from 2012 (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00134-012-2627-8/tables/2?shared-article-renderer) says that Italy had 7550 critical care beds then. 105/7550 may not sound like a huge proportion, but there is a risk that with increased spread the numbers needing critical care beds will go up and there may not be enough critical care beds to go around. Not to forget that other patients are still going to need these beds - patients with heart attacks, strokes, major surgery, transplants, other types of pneumonia...

Not exactly. With other diseases, heat/UV/humidity only slows transmission, doesn’t stop it. In the warmer areas in the Southern Hemisphere most cases have been travelers coming back from an infected area with few human to humans transmissions and those have been between people in the same household. Some are hoping this is the case because really, Singapore (hot, not many cases) should look more like South Korea (cold, hundreds of cases). It’s possible Singapore is better at containing so who knows for sure yet.

I live in Singapore. We have perpetual summer. We also have fairly widespread air conditioning so that could be a confounding factor.

We got our first cases over a month ago (started with travellers to Wuhan), and started picking up cases of community spread about a month ago. I think about a quarter of our cases are imported from Wuhan, another quarter didn't actually fulfil any pre-determined at risk criteria (like travel to China) but were tested because they had symptoms or had other concerning factors, and the remainder were contacts of known cases, or picked up from contact screening, quarantine, etc. I know there's a programme going on where all public hospital patients who have pneumonia get tested for COVID-19.

They are trying incredibly hard with containment with lots of contact tracing, quarantine, stay home notices, leave of absences, random temperature screening at various places, etc going on. Some of my friends work in companies where they have been told to split into work from home and work from office teams (so that if one team goes down, the other team can still keep the company going).

The contact tracing they are doing is honestly very impressive. They actually managed to link together a cluster of 17 patients (who didn't have any known risk factors or links) back to another cluster of 9 people at a family gathering (I think no risk factors?) back to another cluster of 6 people and finally back to 2 travellers from Wuhan... (https://www.moh.gov.sg/news-highlig...-between-church-clusters-and-wuhan-travellers)

Even though our rates of new cases have slowed down a bit, we're all still a bit on tenterhooks though. We went through the panic buying stage about 3 weeks ago when we first knew there was community spread here...

Edited to add: Singapore was quite affected by SARS in 2003 and so we do get rather worried when it comes to infectious diseases in general especially when there are definitely a number of cases here...

A question for the nurses here: According to HHS Secretary Alex Azar today, 15% - 20% of people that get the Coronavirus have required hospitalization. Is that anywhere on par with the stats. for the "regular" flu?

Another question for nurses: How are your hospitals/Drs. offices handling this? Have there been any meetings about Coronavirus response? Are YOU concerned?

I'm not a nurse, but these are some CDC figures for the regular flu from https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html - in 2018-2019 they estimate 35 million people had symptomatic illnesses, with about 500,000 being hospitalised and about 35,000 deaths. 500,000/35 million is about 1.4%...

 

[JulieBeeRN]

A question for the nurses here: According to HHS Secretary Alex Azar today, 15% - 20% of people that get the Coronavirus have required hospitalization. Is that anywhere on par with the stats. for the "regular" flu?

Another question for nurses: How are your hospitals/Drs. offices handling this? Have there been any meetings about Coronavirus response? Are YOU concerned?

So far, the only real change is that we had to hide our masks because people were walking off with entire boxes of them.

But seriously, we have a new screening process that is similar to influenza/other respiratory illnesses. You get a mask if you present with fever and/or respiratory symptoms. If you are identified as at high risk for COVID-19 (ie via travel or close contact with a lab-confirmed COVID-19 patient); then we have specific guidelines that include moving to a private room/air infection control room, what type of protective devices to be used, how to assess the patients, etc.

Am I concerned to the point of cancelling our WDW vacation in 10 days?? No
Will I be washing my hands more?? Yes

 

[DeniseJH]

But remember, we likely have very skewed numbers at this time. Some who are infected show mild to no symptoms, so aren't included in these stats.

We can only go by the numbers given, that's what they know. We don't know that they are skewed.

 

[DeniseJH]

So far, the only real change is that we had to hide our masks because people were walking off with entire boxes of them.

But seriously, we have a new screening process that is similar to influenza/other respiratory illnesses. You get a mask if you present with fever and/or respiratory symptoms. If you are identified as at high risk for COVID-19 (ie via travel or close contact with a lab-confirmed COVID-19 patient); then we have specific guidelines that include moving to a private room/air infection control room, what type of protective devices to be used, how to assess the patients, etc.

Am I concerned to the point of cancelling our WDW vacation in 10 days?? No
Will I be washing my hands more?? Yes

Good to know, thank you! (Sorry about your masks!) We've got a trip coming up in May, and we are still excited and planning!

 

[Dreams&wishes]

So far, the only real change is that we had to hide our masks because people were walking off with entire boxes of them.

But seriously, we have a new screening process that is similar to influenza/other respiratory illnesses. You get a mask if you present with fever and/or respiratory symptoms. If you are identified as at high risk for COVID-19 (ie via travel or close contact with a lab-confirmed COVID-19 patient); then we have specific guidelines that include moving to a private room/air infection control room, what type of protective devices to be used, how to assess the patients, etc.

Am I concerned to the point of cancelling our WDW vacation in 10 days?? No
Will I be washing my hands more?? Yes

I think this is the issue if you only test/act on patients with travel/close contact you will miss a whole lot of cases. Cases in Europe and Singapore have jumped up when they started testing patients in hospital with coronavirus symptoms unrelated to travel/contact. Failing to take these cases into consideration could further acerbate the spread of the virus

 

[Disneylover99]

Have there been any reports on this affecting pregnant women/newborns? I feel like I haven’t seen much

I remember reading about a pregnant woman in China with the virus who had a c-section. The baby was healthy and virus free. This was in early February.

 

[Dreams&wishes]

I just want to add that the Lombardy Region (Italy) it's really starting to face a hard situation in regards to intensive care/hospital overcrowding. The number of doctors /specialists are constantly decreasing as patients are increasing and doctors are getting infected and having to go to quarantine. The army is starting to come in to open army hospitals and more intensive care beds and they are also planning to call in doctors /nurses on retirement. This is not a easy/flu situation.
This will also affect all the other patients that come in for other conditions and may not be able to be assessed creating a higher mortality rate even for those patients.

 

[kiddo76]

Comparing flu statistics and COVID-19 statistics is very deceiving. Flu statistics come from years of data and large sample sizes of patients. Right now, COVID-19 stats are based on a very small sample size, over a very short amount of time, and only on confirmed cases.

To break down the comparison between the two to a defined mortality rate is not accurate. There is just simply not enough data on COVID-19 yet. That, to me, is the fear mongering part of it.

The concern should lie with the unknown about COVID-19. To say Covid is 10xs, or 100xs, or 1000xs deadlier than the flu is fairly disingenuous.

 

[Dreams&wishes]

Comparing flu statistics and COVID-19 statistics is very deceiving. Flu statistics come from years of data and large sample sizes of patients. Right now, COVID-19 stats are based on a very small sample size, over a very short amount of time, and only on confirmed cases.

To break down the comparison between the two to a defined mortality rate is not accurate. There is just simply not enough data on COVID-19 yet. That, to me, is the fear mongering part of it.

The concern should lie with the unknown about COVID-19. To say Covid is 10xs, or 100xs, or 1000xs deadlier than the flu is fairly disingenuous.

Yes mortality rate is one thing, but the number of patients needing intensive care it's a very well known number/fact. A number that it's not comparable to that of the flu.
I attach again the official data of Italy as of yesterday, so you can see the issue here.
I have a friend who works as pneumologist at the S. Paolo hospital in Milan, one of the majors, the situation is Real and it's not good! No scaremongering, just facts.

 

[Haley R]

I remember reading about a pregnant woman in China with the virus who had a c-section. The baby was healthy and virus free. This was in early February.

I’m more worried about when he’s out and breathing on his own honestly. I’m due April 23. We’re at wdw right now and plan to come back next week. We only live an hour away. I’ve been washing my hands a lot.