How to kill Covid-19 the invisible beast?
Stay the F*CK Home
We’re all consuming a lot of content at the moment — either for knowledge or distraction about COVID-19. My paramedic husband sent me this 10 minute video from a guy he follows on YouTube — Giaco who is an Italian maker and content creator. His video talks about what Italy has learned as they are 2 weeks ahead of most countries who are on the same exponential path of community spread.
He is silent for one minute which he uses as a metaphor for how the world is on pause, suspended in disbelief at the Novel coronavirus pandemic sweeping the globe.
His advice is STAY THE FUCK HOME. There is nothing greater you can do to suppress this trajectory of infection.
Today 19 March 2020, Australia is at 565 confirmed cases with 111 new cases since yesterday. On 2 March Italy were at 561 cases. Now 2 weeks later they are at 35,713 cases and 2,976 deaths with hospitals so overloaded they have to decide who gets a ventilator — who lives and who dies.
Our Australian government has not yet closed schools or put in place a national lockdown as it is likely trying to protect jobs and the economy, but this means we are choosing ‘mitigation’ strategy not ‘suppression’.
The latest analysis and modelling from Imperial College London shows that slowing the spread rather than stopping the spread will double the death rate. Quarantine, social distancing and home isolation until a vaccine is the only way to reduce the load on the hospital system and minimise fatalities.
Professor Neil Ferguson, head of the MRC GIDA team and director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Institute for Disease and Emergency Analytics (J-IDEA), said: “The world is facing the most serious public health crisis in generations. Here we provide concrete estimates of the scale of the threat countries now face.
“We use the latest estimates of severity to show that policy strategies which aim to mitigate the epidemic might halve deaths and reduce peak healthcare demand by two-thirds, but that this will not be enough to prevent health systems being overwhelmed. More intensive, and socially disruptive interventions will therefore be required to suppress transmission to low levels. It is likely such measures — most notably, large scale social distancing — will need to be in place for many months, perhaps until a vaccine becomes available.”
The 20-page report is worth a read if you can handle it but the take home is the same as Giaco’s advice from the Italian frontline — STAY HOME wherever possible.
If we don’t suppress this invisible beast, the data predicts 250,000 deaths in Great Britian, 1.1–1.2 million in the US and some 75,000 across Australia.
