how to save yourself from corona virus

I haven’t stopped living my life, but I’m doing a few things.

1. I was always cautious enough to avoid touching surfaces with my bare hands. For instance, I almost always handle gas pumps with a glove. But it was not 100% of the time. Now, it’s almost 100% of the time.
2. I was already washing my hands more than anyone else I know, but I now combine that with the use of a hand sanitizer.
3. I disinfect my phone once or twice a day.
4. I’m avoiding crowds, and especially crowds in small enclosures. No airplane, no subway, no bus, no crowded restaurant, no medical conference, etc.
5. If I’m not sure if something is safe, I err on the side of not doing it until I can check.
6. I fist bump or elbow bump more often. That said, I gave a lot of hugs today. It was my last day at work, and I made the choice that I was okay with hugging.
7. I will go stock up on some food as soon as I get to Eugene. It’s not that I think this is strictly necessary, but the fact that so many other people are stocking up means that there is less available for everyone else.

I think that’s about it. I'm not panicked, but I’m concerned. The statistic a lot of people have learned is that 80% of cases are “mild.”

That’s not entirely accurate. “Mild” in this case means not requiring hospitalization. It includes everyone from people who barely know they’re sick to people who have a pneumonia, provided that they don’t need to be treated in a hospital.

Another way of putting it is that 20% of people with this virus have respiratory distress that is severe enough to warrant hospitalization!

It’s even worse than that. The data in Italy shows that about 10% of infected people need to be in intensive care.[1]

This is much more concerning than the mortality rate. Why is it so concerning? Because we lack the spare capacity to hospitalize that many people. I’ve seen estimates ranging from 20 to 70% of the population expected to get this virus at some point—in the absence of measures to fight against it, that is.

Let’s be very conservative, here. Let’s say that 10% of the population will be affected at some point. Let’s take the Fresno, CA metro area, which has a population of 1 million people. If 10% get this virus, we’ll have 100K cases. If the hospitalization rate is only 10%, the area would need 10 thousand hospital beds. Even if only half of those need to be in intensive care, it would mean that the area would need to find 5000 ICU beds and a commensurate number of breathing machines. No city in the US has the capacity to scale up this much.

Now, here’s the good news:

1. It’s unlikely that all those people would be simultaneously infected.
2. The measures we are taking to encourage social distancing are likely to reduce the transmission rate.
3. We’re probably going to scale up our capacity to test large numbers of people in the next few weeks. If we do that, it will be much easier to quarantine the affected people, and much easier to reduce the spread of the infection.

But we have to play our cards right. And that means that even people who are at a lower risk of becoming ill if infected should keep in mind that they might easily make others very ill. So, I’m doing my best to minimize my risks of becoming infected.