🏏 👌🏽 🚴🏼 Coronavirus: Possible Implications for Society, Economics, and Medicine 🕗 🍇 🧘🏽

“What is accepted without evidence can be rejected without evidence.”

- Euclid.

The post “Coronavirus: why you need to act right now” , like the original translation, attracted a lot of audience attention for obvious reasons. Since everything in the world should be in balance, within the framework of this post an attempt will be made to present another view of the already universal problem. The task of explicitly refuting or exposing the above post is not worth it. Everyone can independently match conflicting statements.

Indeed, given everything that happens to coronavirus, it can be very difficult to decide what to do right now. Should I wait for more information ? Should I do something today? If yes, then what?

Unfortunately, the judgments of so many now take on the character of faith. Nevertheless, for all those who really have a desire to understand the nature of the phenomenon, this material can provide food for thought or set a direction for their own research, to help more thoroughly understand a difficult situation and have more chances for informed decisions .

In this video with many graphs, data and models, the author will try to answer many questions:

What is the nature of viral diseases? 3:30
What is the current scale of damage from viral diseases when it was not customary to talk about it everywhere?
? 17:30
? 23:00
, ? 30:00
? 35:00
. 50:00
. 53:00

COVID-19 — , SARS-CoV-2 (2019-nCoV). — , /, .

We urge you to be critical of any published information.

Official sources
C
C
()

, .

Wash your hands, take care of your loved ones, stay at home whenever possible and work remotely.

Read publications about: coronavirus | remote work

Transcript

Epigraph

Well, this is the situation, roughly, in which we are now. That is, we have an epidemic, “help who can” is. Where we are - it is not clear, except that it is populated by all malosoznatelnymi life forms that fall into ... WHO said, we at the same time there is an epidemic coronavirus infodemiya , info epidemic. Damage from which is comparable, at least, with damage from the virus itself.

I will try to describe what I will talk about. We are in a situation where the picture changes rather quickly, and no information can be 100% correct. The only thing I promise you, I will not give any fake information. And that everything that I will talk about went through a filter screen in the form of me and my experience as an information broker for the past 30 years, as an IBS strategy director, and as ... a healthcare practitioner, I’ll carefully say over the past 18 years old.
Accordingly, what I'm not sure about - I will say “I think” or “I believe”.

In what is not my thoughts, not my thoughts, but that information that is official, from official medical sources that have a fairly high degree of competence in this matter, you have to take my word for it that I checked this information for today the moment it is trustworthy information. Which does not mean that tomorrow she cannot turn over. But I think that we won’t have to wait for significant miracles, in the sense that today I will tell you one thing, but in reality it will turn out to be something completely different - no. But changes, of course, will be as information accumulates and the situation changes.

About viruses and viral diseases in general

A few words about how a person is known to be not just mortal, worst of all, that he is suddenly mortal, as the classic told us. The fact is that people are constantly sick. They constantly suffer from infectious diseases. From time to time, infectious diseases new to humanity as a whole appear. What is the difference between new and old? By the fact that people in them, the population as a whole does not have immunity. That has never happened before, and for the first time the entire population is faced with some kind of new pathogen. This is different from the situation with long-circulating diseases, when everyone who lived there for 5, 10, 20, 30 years on planet Earth, they somehow already faced this, some immunity already exists, and only those who do not have immunity re-born during this time, in children, and therefore they fall ill again. Why do children often get sick in their early years,relatively often? They download an anti-virus database. Which adults already have. For the first time they encounter new pathogens, viruses, bacteria, protozoa, as you wish, and form immunity to them.

Among all diseases, the so-called acute respiratory viral infections are notable diseases. This is when the doctor on the newsletter does not want to write the flu or to find out what you got sick with this winter, he writes SARS. Here is ARI (acute respiratory disease) - when, maybe, it’s bacteria, maybe the virus is not clear, and SARS is an acute respiratory viral disease. In fact, there are a lot of viruses that cause them, and the flu that is most famous, it occupies from 7 to 20% in the structure of ARVI in different years, but it is the most famous - it has such a powerful PR and a really high mortality rate disease . Influenza has a mortality rate of about 0.1-0.2% of cases per year. Accordingly, this is a common seasonal flu that you know every year. This year, predominantly one strain of influenza, in this another.And every year the whole world gets the flu.

In addition, from time to time a new flu appears. Than it is new, it is a flu that no one has previously had, so no one has immunity to it. This is a lottery, it may have a higher mortality rate than normal flu, such was the Asian flu, the Hong Kong flu. There was Russian flu in the 70s, the name is usually based on where it was allocated first, not even from where it popped up.

But it happens, for example, that there was swine flu, the older ones remember how they scared everyone, there was terrible swine flu, but it turned out that it is mild compared to the usual seasonal flu. It so happened. This is one story.

The second story is that people die from pneumonia, people die from pneumonia, and this is one of the most common causes of death in the world. For the whole population, this is in 4th place as the cause of death, and for the elderly, people over 70-75 years, this is number one as the cause of death.

The elderly, people who have concomitant chronic diseases, who have weakened immunity, weakened lung function, they poorly tolerate pneumonia. They get sick and cannot recover from it. This has been going on for many centuries, apparently.
This is the most common cause of death in older people.

In total, every year, every year, 2.5-3 million patients die from pneumonia every year , more in the winter, I will explain why later. I.ewe can assume that on a winter day (!) about 10 thousand people (!) die from pneumonia (in the northern hemisphere, a greater number of humanity live in the northern hemisphere).

Now we are a little closer to the coronavirus. Among these viruses, which people get sick in winter, fewer in summer, which causes SARS - there are several coronaviruses.
I will not show you this photo, it is already tired of everyone - this balloon with horns, with a crown.

This is a fairly large family.- these coronaviruses. Five of them once passed from animals to humans and circulate in the usual way. From 7 to 15 (13)% of the annual incidence of winter SARS is coronavirus. Generally speaking, they are quite innocent, these are the 5 “old” circulating coronaviruses, they are less dangerous. They rarely lead to pneumonia, most often it all ends in recovery.

But these are not all coronaviruses that we know. There are several coronaviruses that are dangerous pathogens. They all (judging by what we know at the moment) happened, spread to the person from bats. There is a reason why bats and bats have a high body temperature, and they have a high temperature because they have to fly, and this is a very energy-consuming story and they heat up quite a lot, bats. And viruses do not like high body temperature. Therefore, viruses start in them, but the bats themselves do not die from them. They act as a reservoir of these viruses. In particular, for the whole family of coronaviruses, they are natural carriers.
Twice already in our memory, before this case, coronaviruses from bats passed to humans.

One of these transitions is a disease that was incorrectly called “SARS,” you can call it “SARS alone,” or it was called SARS. South Asian Respiratory Syndrome. And this happened when in the same way somewhere in China, the virus from the bat first got to civet. Civetta is such a small animal, similar to a mongoose. In China, it is bred and, in particular, eaten. And then from these same civet came to man. And there was an outbreak of this SARS, the disease was not very contagious, but with a rather high mortality rate, 10% of the reported cases ended in death according to statistics. And after a few months, here he appeared, just like in China, there was a rather serious panic, but after a few months he disappeared.

Because he had a small infectiousness, the severity of the disease was significant, and these 2 things are connected, I'll tell you about it. Accordingly, all sick people simply ended and this disease no longer exists. She is not observed, is over. SARS is gone.

A little later, in 2012, a second case occurred, a disease called MERS. Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome. In the same way, from bats, but this time to camels, and then to people, I suspect that they still did not eat, but communicated with them, with these camels. In the Middle East, in Saudi Arabia, this virus transition has occurred. Everything turned out completely different there, although it is also a related coronavirus. MERS had a mortality rate of about 35-40%, but an interesting thing happened, it will not disappear in any way, all the time there are some outbreaks. And there are still outbreaks in the Middle East. Why? It seems that every time a transition occurs again. Not one event happened, well, it happened once and the event no longer repeats. And this happens again, so from time to time again these exact sporadic diseases,they continue to be observed, but nothing else happens.

And then a new event happened in our country, a third jump occurred in our memory, scientifically recorded, a jump of a coronavirus from a bat, probably through an intermediate host, this is where the pangolin is tried on , it’s a bit like an armadillo, such an anteater interesting, scaly, but maybe not. There was a transition to man, he happened somewhere in the area of the city of Wuhan, Central China.

To be honest, I think that. So, this is the first time I’ve been telling the truth, this time I’m saying that I believe that they are leading the market in vain, they say that this happened in a market where both living and dead animals were sold at the same time, as a result of this there was a jump.

I think that in fact the leap occurred earlier, but the market was the place from which the spread took place. Someone there was already from people who were infected with this virus and he spread it. But honestly, this is of very little importance at the moment. In general, for research, of course, this is of great importance. But - the epidemic began. The one, "help who can."

What do we know about how this disease proceeds?

And yes, I want to say that, again, I’m sure that this virus is not artificial. He was not taken to the laboratory. And if something escaped from the laboratory there ... There is a conspiracy theory associated with the fact that 300 meters from this same Wuhan market, there is a Chinese laboratory for the study of coronaviruses. And it brought to life completely understandable theories, but it will be very difficult to find out from the situation in China. It has no practical value at the moment, but it is not a designed virus, it could have escaped from the laboratory, but it is a normal virus, of natural origin, these things are happening. They occur constantly, wherever a person comes into contact with animals.

What distinguishes this virus and the course of the disease from other acute respiratory viral infections?

Its symptoms are similar to the flu: that is, the temperature is quite high, it is a muscle pain, headache, poor health, then a dry cough begins.
What does he not have? I suggested using the rule, especially in the initial stages, when this whole story began and when everyone began to look for signs in themselves. If there is a runny nose that simultaneously appears with the onset of poor health, then this is not a coronavirus. That's who sneezes, you can not drive him out of the room / bus and stuff, it's honest flu or SARS, so get infected, get sick, do not be scared :-).

The fact is that this coronavirus infects the lower respiratory tract. It is in the nose, on the nasal mucosa does not multiply. It turned out, however, over time that it multiplies on the mucous membrane of the throat, so many have a sore throat. And now, to take a test for coronavirus, they take a swab from the throat.

And this, apparently, gave him a little advantage in that it turned out to be more contagious than at the beginning they thought, due to the fact that it is in the throat and not only in the lower respiratory tract.
What happens next? What generally happens when a person is faced with any pathogen?

Here the coronaviruses came running on a person, coughing on a person. What could happen?
It is not very contagious (virus), if a very small amount of the virus has got on the human mucosa, you need to get into the respiratory tract or at least the mucous membrane of the eye, otherwise it will simply die or neutralize.

The virus is simply eliminated, that is, nothing happens. That is, it brought several viral particles, they were washed away in the usual way by the body’s protective systems and all, no one noticed anything, what it was. And the immune system by and large did not turn on, specialized. Well, that is, several macrophages or other white blood cells gobbled him up there or he was simply washed away into the drainage.

When there was enough viral particles, infection occurred. But in humans, the immune system turns on. Nonspecific at first, which generally responds to all the bad that comes to visit us. And a specific one, which said: “Ahhh, what a bastard you are, now I’ll put antibodies at you quickly, I’ll do it and let it go. Or do you look like someone I saw before, I don’t love you, "and eats him. And the infected person, as they say in English, was immunized, and they say“ he was epidemic in Russian doctors. ”The population was“ epidemic ”. Everyone either got sick, or such immunity was formed, for which he could not get sick, but he was immunized, now I’m not telling you about the specific situation with coronavirus, it’s with any virus in general.

Then there are people who, in general, get sick, the virus multiplies in them, then what happens, a specific immune system is launched to help the ordinary and in 2-3 weeks they deal with this matter and destroy the virus. But a person’s level of health is such and the viral load is so controlled by his immune system that he has no symptoms. Asymptomatic patient.

A question that is not clear with coronavirus (and in the case of it, there are definitely such patients). Now, if you look at those countries that do a mass check for coronavirus with a test, up to half of the patients they find, they say: we don’t understand whether they are asymptomatic, or they’ll still get sick, but haven’t yet. Because we find the virus in them, and they have no symptoms.

And finally, there is a third group that is still sick.
That is, if the coronavirus gets to someone - here you have 4 options.

1) Just contact
2) Contact with immunization
3) Asymptomatic infection and carriage
4) Clinical disease

In the 3rd option, the test will show that the virus is there and nothing else will happen to the person.
In the 4th embodiment, a person became ill.

For obvious reasons, at the moment, no one in the world can say how much varint 1 we have (they are not interesting at all), but those who were immunized and who have an asymptomatic course are unknown at all. There is no way yet to find out how many of them. Because in order to find out how much, everyone needs to be tested. [Or screening a sample at a later date - author's note]
We know something about those who are sick. About symptomatic patients.

Symptomatic patient at the moment (first of all, these are statistics for China, until recently, 98% of cases were in China, more than 80 thousand cases of the disease were collected for them, in the near future we will get statistics for Korea and Italy, there is something appears, but in principle, I don’t see much difference). The idea that this ethnic disease, designed against the Chinese, did not stand the test of time, you see what is happening in Italy.

That's all those who got sick. 80% of the registered cases in China (because you understand that it is impossible to find all cases) Either lungs (when you find fault, you can find some symptoms: muscle pain, unhealthy, coughing, something like that, the temperature rose to 37, 5). Or mild cases in which the situation can develop even before pneumonia, but this is an inflammation of the lungs that itself goes away and does not threaten life, all these cases end in recovery.

Further we have severe cases (15%) and critical cases (5%).
But I remind you that this percentage is not from everyone who got infected! This is from those who have been identified in a test in China. That is, these are people who were accidentally discovered during contact testing, or sought medical help.

The main problem that occurs with coronavirus is viral pneumonia. The mechanism of the development of viral pneumonia is, in principle, the following:
The virus enters the epithelial lining, which covers the alveoli through which air exchange occurs.
Through the alveoli, oxygen enters the human blood into the bloodstream, and from them carbon dioxide, which must be removed from our body. This is the air exchange that happens there.

The virus that gets there begins to multiply there. And this, firstly, causes the death of some of the cells that are responsible for air exchange, but even more seriously, it causes local inflammation, that is, the body's reaction to the invasion of the virus. And the difficult moment in the development of viral pneumonia occurs not at the moment when the virus multiplied there, but at that moment when the body thumps the immune response there. When a battlefield arises there, incl. a cytokine storm, if you have heard such an expression, this is when immunity factors are released en masse to destroy the virus and the cells that the virus infected. As a result of this, the ability of the lungs to provide complete air exchange, that is, to supply oxygen in the right amount and remove carbon dioxide in an unnecessary amount (but primarily to supply oxygen), decreases. And the state comeswhen there is not enough oxygen. These are severe cases in which additional oxygen support may be indicated. This is a situation that requires hospitalization and assistance in a hospital setting, possibly lung ventilation.

In critical cases (5% according to available statistics), the situation is exacerbated by organ failure - arising from primarily oxygen starvation and the general severity of the condition. And in a bad situation, it can end in death.
What do we know about coronavirus mortality today? Today it is a complicated story. Nevertheless, I will try to explain it.

About lethality

You probably saw the figure of 3.4%. Pretty scary figure, mortality of 3-3.5%.
Firstly, it is not mortality. Mortality is the ratio of all deaths from various causes to the entire population. That is, if out of 1000 people dies from all causes, 34 is mortality.
And this figure is not even mortality. Mortality is when 34 out of 1000 cases died.
This is the so-called Case Fatality Ratio (CFR) - how many people have died from reported cases. It is for practical evaluation of the prospects of someone who has become infected or ill - he does not give anything.

In reality, we should be interested in a completely different indicator: IFR, where I is infection. That is, how many die from the number of infected. Infection Fatality Rate.

The difference is because in the first case you registered cases, and in the second - how many of them are in total. It is clear that you are skewed due to the fact that you report severe cases: either they are brought to the hospital or they are just dying people. And mild cases, they elude registration. You can’t test the entire population, for now, at the moment.

The first indicator is actual and it changes all the time, at the moment when you have the beginning of an epidemic, it is always high, because very severe cases are identified first. How do they know that a new disease has begun? People are dying of unknown reasons. But all those who have lungs, nobody knows anything about them until this moment, you have not seen them.
Accordingly, the CFR of each new serious illness at the beginning is very large, and then begins to fall.

For the second indicator, there can only be an estimate. Which is done using mathematical modeling methods. For the current COVID 19 virus, according to various estimates, the IFR is in the range from 0.2-0.94%.

The difference is very big. Make sure that such a difference really exists, you can, for example, if you compare the situation in different countries.
For example, there is a situation in South Korea (firstly, they have a lot of resources, secondly, they very aggressively decided to take testing and in those territories that they consider at risk of infection, with a high risk, they began to test for 10 thousand people literally everybody, the cars are stopped and tested, especially since at the moment the test, as I said, is a throat swab, it takes a few seconds to take it). So they conducted to date 140 thousand. Tests. Therefore, they currently have a CFR of 0.67%. Just because with such mass testing they pulled out those very mild or asymptomatic cases that are not visible elsewhere.

Is it a lot or a little?

The usual seasonal flu has a mortality rate (IFR) of 0.1-0.2%.
Influenza, which is new (Asian, Hong Kong etc), is 0.4%.
That is, based on the data that we have at the moment, the mortality rate of COVID19 is approximately at the level of a fairly aggressive strain of influenza.
The second thing that interests us very much.
In case of illness, 2 things are interesting to us and this is always a balance.

All diseases known to us that are transmitted from person to person, the so-called anthroponous, which have no intermediate hosts. (The plague has an intermediate host - a flea, so the dynamics of the plague are different).

But for pathogens that are transmitted from person to person, they all have a certain balance: either you have a very contagious disease, for example measles, which is considered to be the record holder today (from known, popular diseases), it is believed that one sick measles infects 16-20 people (if they do not have immunity).
Here is this indicator of how much one person infects non-immune others, it is very important, called Ro. But for measles they are like that - 16-20. Mortality in measles is 0.01-0.02% (before the era of vaccination). As you may know, there is no cure for measles.

On the other side there is something like Ebola. This is a serious illness. Mortality is about 40%. And Ro 1.5-2. And this is understandable why, if it is a serious illness, a person has no time to walk and infect everyone. He lays down and dies. And who was in close contact with him, he could have become infected, but this story does not reach everyone else at all.
And if the disease is very mild, a person carries it on its feet, it can naturally infect a bunch of people.

And in the general situation, the evolution of all viral and other pathogens, it all goes towards infectiousness. They mutate all the time, change, and the virus that a person tolerates more easily has a better chance of multiplying than the one that immediately puts him to bed and the person does not recover.

This balance, it is almost always respected.
Accordingly, for the coronavirus, what we encountered (remember, I talked about SARS, about SARS epidemics that had 10% mortality or 35–40% MERS - they died out very quickly, because a heavy leak does not infect anyone) - we ran into in a situation where Ro of this coronavirus is visible, it’s slightly visible less than that of the flu.

Accordingly, since 80%, and actually more, 90% tolerate this disease relatively easily, they go and infect . As soon as this became clear, it became clear that it would not be possible to quarantine the disease within China.

There are things that distinguish this coronavirus from other viruses that we have encountered:
More men are affected, significantly, and more men die
Very pronounced age differentiation.

It is clear that from all pneumonia, as I have already said, including from viral pneumonia, mostly older people die in 70 years with concomitant diseases.
But this coronavirus has a characteristic feature (again, for these 80 thousand Chinese patients, Perhaps it will be different in the situation with Italy, but we still do not know anything about this) - under the age of 10 there is not a single fatal case.

Children from this coronavirus do not die, unlike the flu. There is a slight mortality from influenza in children. Moreover, it is believed that the flu is the most dangerous for children and the elderly. Here coronavirus at the moment for children is not dangerous.

In China, there were several cases where the whole family was hospitalized, testing them, symptomatic, and since the number of tests is limited for them, children who did not show any symptoms did not test them, and the family said, well, like so, there are five of us, and two children they somehow did not become infected, they were tested - yes, they became infected only they have no symptoms, in general. This is an unusual story.

What else happened that distinguishes this epidemic from other epidemics.

Due to the fact that the Chinese tried to hide this story. They arrested 8 doctors who wrote in social networks about the disease. They detained these doctors, very communist and Chinese. And one of these doctors, as you may know, later died of a coronavirus, and this caused public outrage.

And the Chinese at that time, when the disease had already begun and it became impossible to hide it, they tried for a long time to imagine it as a disease transmitted from animals to humans. Then everyone was told in detail about this wildlife market in Wuhan, where everyone seemed to be infected. Why did they insist on this version for a long time, because in this case, if the virus is not transmitted from person to person, you do not scare the whole world, you do not need to start quarantine measures, it means you need to find the source of these animals from which everyone was infected, and on this it's all over.

Well, we already know for sure that this is not so. That infection between people began literally from the first days. But what happened in China, then in Korea, and in the most stupid way (I apologize) in Italy, was the phenomenon of the so-called hospital hospital animation. The first, second, third sick people are brought to the hospital, a place, firstly, with high traffic and concentration of people, and secondly, in which people are already unhealthy, including those very people with chronic diseases, etc. And they infect everyone there. We don’t know exactly how it happened in Wuhan. Because there is nobody to tell us this. But we know exactly what happened in Italy, this 38-year-old patient was brought to one of the hospitals in northern Italy and he infected there, the last time I saw 28 people, and then it scattered.

Unfortunately, if you remember, I drew an arrow there: “the severity is weakening, the infectiousness is increasing”, here are hospital cases, they work against this. Because they are hospitalized in serious condition, and this leads to the fact that their severe strain can be amplified.
So far, nothing of the kind has happened. I saw that the joint commission of China and WHO analyzed more than 100 variants of the virus genetically and it seems that they do not differ much from each other, that is, while this virus does not evolve anywhere much. But it can happen at any moment.

What happens to treatment and prevention?

There is nothing to treat it at the moment, all treatment, as they say, is symptomatic. That is, when a person begins to experience a lack of oxygen, he is given oxygen, if his lungs begin to fail, they put him on artificial lung ventilation.
They also try to do the so-called extracorporeal oxygenation, this is when the blood is enriched with oxygen directly, not through the lungs, but it is so complicated and expensive and it is not clear how effective the method is.

That is, the basic problem is the number of mechanical ventilation devices that are needed for any severe pneumonia, and not just this. There is no medicine. Of all the lists of medicines that the Chinese managed to sort out. Why do we always speak Chinese, because again, until recently, 95% of cases were with them. Today they are the only ones who have experience in treating this disease at least somehow. They tried everything, including arbidol, about which we all heard very well. Today there is only one medicine left, of the registered ones - _remdesivir_, this medicine was made in order to fight Ebola, also with the virus, but from Ebola it turned out to be ineffective. It seems to be somehow effective against other coronaviruses, those that I talked about at the beginning.And now, perhaps, tests are underway in China, but I would not really hope in this direction especially, frankly.

As for the vaccine, about which you probably already heard a thousand times during this time.
There are several problems. The first one. This is an RNA virus, he has the ability to quickly mutate, for this reason it is generally not possible to make an effective vaccine for such viruses. As you know, flu vaccines are not particularly effective. A vaccine that will provide protection in 20% of cases, or in 30%, is fine, but it will not stop this epidemic.
The second significant point is that if an effective vaccine is found tomorrow, it will take at least a year to put it into practical use. This period cannot be bypassed in any way. Because you need to test this vaccine, make sure that it:
a) is safe, and then there is 0.2-0.9% mortality, and how it will give something else,
b) make sure that it is effective, start producing and distributing it.

To date, there is not even something that you can start testing. No, there are a bunch of candidates, but. Therefore, in 2020, the vaccine from COVID 19 will not be used. In mass trials - perhaps if she can be found at all, which I doubt.
The Chinese are using Chinese medicine, this is part of their clinical recommendations for today, but they have a nonspecific effect, they are not against the virus, they are aimed at ensuring that out of these lower 20% are severe and critical cases, a person due to the general physical condition turned out to be higher there (80%).

About masks and respirators

As for prevention. A wonderful story, the most amazing is it with masks. There is good news with the mask and there is bad news.

The good thing is that if all patients or those suspecting a disease will wear masks, this will limit the spread of the virus, because at the moment we know about it that it spreads by airborne droplets. When a person coughs, drops containing this virus fly out of his mouth, if the person is in the mask at that moment, the drops do not fly away, but remain inside him on the mask.
He himself is not having fun from this, because the mask makes his breathing difficult. But it doesn’t fly apart. Therefore, if you become ill, honest with respect to the international community and the people around you will wear this mask.

If people who do not get sick wear masks, this can worsen their prospects, because the virus passes through these masks in size. Secondly, the main infection occurs as follows: there is an option when you are coughing in the face, the second option is from the surface, when a person touches his face, nose or eyes with dirty hands. According to various studies, a person touches his face an average of 40-80 times per hour.

The only mask can help you if you don’t touch it with your hands. In fact, people who wear masks, they constantly touch their face because it itches, they correct it, they remove it to breathe, they lift it to smoke, and in addition, after 2 hours ... we also have a bunch of coronavirus all else. There, in 2 hours, conditions are created for the reproduction of anything. It needs to be changed all the time, nobody does it. Therefore, this makes no sense whatsoever.

Respirators with narrower holes that filter viral particles, yes, they make sense, but firstly you aren’t in them either, frankly, secondly, let us leave them to those who are obliged to work with really sick people on duty, let them use them .

What did the Chinese do that is interesting, what deserves attention and what we need to talk about.

They acted quite reasonably for China, when they realized that they couldn’t do anything pharmacologically, there was no cure. They decided the old fashioned way. It is believed that quarantine is useless to fight. But the Chinese people are stubborn. They entered quarantine, but such a real one.

[quarantine video]

This is an unprecedented quarantine of 150 million people in history. They made measures of social distance, in addition to declaring vacations, they stopped the work of office-factory-universities. They demanded that the population not move anywhere.

[ examples of Chinese slogans ].

Today, their epidemic is on the decline. The number of cases fell dozens of times.
The last days they have 100-200 sick people a day, against the background of the fact that at some point there were 2.5 thousand. They coped with this wave of the epidemic using such methods.

The deep surprise of the WHO specialists who came there to see all this is that, generally speaking, it is impossible to cope with ARVI in such an ancient way, quarantine. Just because it's impossible.

I deeply doubt that it is possible to repeat at least somewhere with such a disease. But if this disease had a really high mortality rate, society could support all of this. With the numbers that we have today, this is an overkill, which, this also needs to be understood, leads to the fact that mortality from the coronavirus in you, of course, decreases, but you begin to grow mortality from everything else. Because if you completely stop working the economy , the work of enterprises, the whole medical machine stops working for everything else, and starts working only for the coronavirus - this means that you are starting to grow mortality from other causes .

Because, so that it doesn’t happen, the numbers that we see show thatcoronavirus will not be the leading cause of death this year . Unfortunately, people die from many other diseases that need to be treated, which require a high standard of living, the more money you have, the more treatment opportunities you have individually and in the healthcare system.

Therefore, the global reaction that we see today, including economic, is in particular due to the fact that very many assume that something like this can be introduced in other countries. This cannot be ruled out, we already see that Italy, for example, has already canceled classes in schools, for 2 weeks until March 15. Which immediately gives rise to completely different problems, for example, who will sit with these children. If you have a nursery and schools do not take children, then you must take a nanny from somewhere, who also sit at home and do not go anywhere. This is a difficult situation.

Another reason why I would look at the situation a little more optimistic than it is now emerging, besides the unprecedented quarantine measures that the Chinese took, there are 2 more things that tell us that the outbreak of the coronavirus is epidemic, the coronavirus epidemic, it should China is currently moving toward attenuation, 90% of the cases are severe, are located in Wuhan, the epidemiological models that I have seen suggest that enough people have been immunized. It is clear that mild cases did not fall into any statistics, but they ceased to be infected.

It is enough that about 30% [according to other estimates 60% - approx.] Of the population is immunized, so that the epidemic wanes, for this disease.
General Heat, Spring Army. With the onset of heat, SARS epidemics cease. For people from Russia, this is probably not necessary. Influenza, SARS get sick in winter. Once steady heat is formed, these epidemics fade. There are completely understandable biological reasons for this. These viruses, in particular coronaviruses, are unstable in heat and sun. As soon as the heat begins, airing begins, the balance of being inside and outside the room changes, which means that the concentration of people and virus particles decreases, humidity changes in the direction of more natural, the mucous membranes of the person are more protected, they are not dry. Why they say put a humidifier in winter, you will be sick less, because the dried mucous membranes with central heating or outdoors, when it is cold, it dries there too. In general, there are a number of reasons whythat such epidemiological processes fade when heat comes.

I must say that in this sense, an exceptionally warm winter in the northern hemisphere (including in Wuhan, where I looked: the average February temperature was 6 degrees warmer than the climatic norm), in this sense, it is also for us and against viruses in this the story is playing. Yes, in Russia, too, the story is the same.

How does this affect the economy?

The situation in which we found ourselves, including as a company, and as people. I think that you saw a serious plan of the Moscow government that has leaked over the past couple of days, plan A, plan B and plan C. We have already passed Plan A, because it worked until the first patient appeared, now they have found, already 2 first patients in Moscow already, respectively, we have plan B, well, at the end there are already military patrols on the streets and so on. I don’t think it will come to this, but we will definitely get some indicative quarantines. We will definitely have an epidemic of coronavirus. The question is how wide it will turn around before it gets warmer. I don’t know, let's see, it is very difficult to give predictions, especially when they relate to the future.

From an economic point of view, the situation is not very funny.
First, supply chain disruption. China produces about 16-18% of world GDP and, apparently, more industrial production. You know that even deliveries of some IT goods were delayed due to the fact that for almost a month factories in Wuhan and some other places did not work at all. And Wuhan is the center of China, it is an industrial hefty cluster that produced from antibiotics to microcircuits. Produced and collected a bunch of everything. But all this began to work, so there will be such a “hiccup” along the supply chain with delays, but I do not think that this will have a serious impact.
The situation with a double drop in supply and demand has a serious impact at the moment.

Firstly, because of this month-long, in fact, interruption in work, there is a shortage of certain things around the world, because the chains were tied to Chinese production.
And secondly, the population, as it should be, is buying up toilet paper, although it seems like diarrhea is only in a small number of cases, but it is bought up first. Everyone is in a terrified state, [sales and investments are falling]. The measures that some governments are taking, they do not improve the mood, despite the fact that the relative danger of this disease is about the same as I tried to tell you.

For Russia, the drop in oil prices that has already occurred will be significant, which reflects the very expected drop in economic activity as a result of the measures that everyone thinks that governments will take to do something. Tourism fell very strongly, obviously, around the world. Travel and hospitality are a direct impact.
Otherwise, I think everything will be fine, we will survive it, as we survived bird flu, swine flu, SARS and all the previous ones.

Which, of course, does not deny that those who have elderly and chronically ill relatives should be protected from the fact that it will not be a coronavirus, but the flu, or vice versa, it will not be easier for anyone.

Epilogue

In general, I do not think that we are faced with something new.

There is always some kind of Arkilian battle cruiser, or a Centauri death ray, or some kind of intergalactic plague that is about to erase all life on our small unfortunate planet from the face of the earth. And the only way people can live their lives happily is to know nothing about it.

This is what I quoted from the film Men in Black.

Many thanks to Eugene Peskin for the material .

Many thanks to Julia Vlasov for the transcript of the lecture .

PS

: , , medium.com habr «, ». , Tomas Pueyo, ( — « », «12 ...», « „.“). , 12 . , . , , , . -. , , . , , .

.

P.S.
— .
— .
— .

P.P.S.

… . , , ? , , , . , , , . . , . , , , , . , 14 144 , ! :) , , . ! , , , ? , . . , . , . , . . – .

Alexey Potekhin

Coronavirus: Possible Implications for Society, Economics, and Medicine

We urge you to be critical of any published information.