11 March, 2020
Today the World Health Organization (WHO) formally declared Covid-19 a pandemic – the worldwide spread of a new disease that most people lack immunity to.
If you’ve been paying attention, you know how serious this is.
There’s a “very high mortality rate — one in six — among people who are over 80 and people with underlying chronic disease,”
Some people with coronavirus have mild or no symptoms. And in some cases, symptoms don’t appear until up to 14 days after infection.
An asymptomatic person spreads the disease through saliva, like sneezing. Also, touching the eyes, nose, face or mouth transfers the virus to your hands, which then spreads when you touch other surfaces.
The new coronavirus can live in the air for several hours and on some surfaces for as long as two to three days, tests by U.S. government and other scientists have found.
Availability of a vaccine is over a year away.
I’ve seen estimates that between 1-in-6 and 1-in-3 people in the United States will contract Covid-19. 80% of those will not have serious symptoms. 5% will have very serious symptoms. 1-2% will die, a 10-20 fold increase over the mortality of common flu. Those age 60 and over, and those with conditions that create a weakened immune response, are the likeliest to have very serious symptoms. Most deaths have occurred in the people over 70.
This is our community – a high concentration of people over the age of 60.
Covid-19 has been silently spreading throughout the country for weeks. The cat is out of the bag. Containment – preventing the spread of Covid-19 into new segments of the population – is no longer possible.
We can, however, act to slow the spread of the disease – by social distancing activities, and by rigorous cleanliness regimens. This is so-called “flattening the curve” – reducing the number of people infected at any one time, and delaying the onset for as many people as possible until, hopefully, a vaccine can be developed in a year or so.
In our home, we will require all visitors to thoroughly wash hands immediately upon arrival. We will disinfect surfaces when they leave. We will carry hand sanitizer in our vehicles, and use it immediately upon re-entering the vehicle after being out in public.
This disease will come to our Storm Mountain community. Now is the time to plan and organize to be able to support our most vulnerable community members as well as those who contract the disease, both to slow the spread of the disease and to supply essentials to those who, for the sake of the community, must remain quarantined until they recover.
Some basic things come to mind:
Online grocery shopping and group pickup from the store, with distribution from a central community location – to limit public exposure.
Volunteer delivery to those homebound.
Preparing meals for those unable to do so for themselves.
I’m sure others will have other useful ideas.
My intent with this message is to simply inform. There is much that is not currently known about Covid-19, especially its prevalence in the United States – due to a deplorable lack of testing, and a continuing lack of sufficient testing labs to handle the volume of testing needed to fully track and retard the spread of the disease.
I’ve included some informational links below.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/summary.html#risk-assessment
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/11/health/coronavirus-q-and-a-wednesday-march-11/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/09/health/coronavirus-q-and-a-monday-march-9/index.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/02/28/what-you-need-know-about-coronavirus/?arc404=true