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Can touching a barbell in the gym get you sick with the coronavirus?
- Thread starter Michael Scally MD
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Are you hiding from covid-19? I am. The reason is simple: the high chance of death from the virus.
I was reminded of the risk last week by this report from the New York City health department and Columbia University which estimated that on average, between March and May, the chance of dying if you get infected by SARS-CoV-2 was 1.45%. Estimating the infection fatality risk of COVID-19 in New York City, March 1-May 16, 2020
That’s higher than your lifetime chance of getting killed in a car wreck. That’s every driver cutting you off, every corner taken too fast, every time you nearly dozed off on the highway, all crammed into one. That’s not a disease I want to get. For someone my mother’s age, the chance of death came to 13.83% but ranged as high as 17%. That’s roughly 1 in 6, or the chance you’ll lose at Russian roulette. That’s not a game I want my mother to play.
The rate at which people are dying from the coronavirus has been estimated many times and is calculated in different ways. For example, if you become an official covid-19 “case” on the government’s books, your death chance is more like 5%, because you’re sick enough to have sought out help and to have been tested.
But this study instead calculated the “infection fatality ratio,” or IFR. That’s the chance you die if infected at all. This is the real risk to keep in view. It includes people who are asymptomatic, get only a sniffle, or tough it out at home and never get tested.
Because we don’t know who those people who never got tested are, IFR figures are always an estimate, and the 1.45% figure calculated for New York is higher than most others, many of which fluctuate around 1%. That could be due to higher rates of diabetes and heart disease in the city, or to estimates used in the study.
It’s also true that your personal odds of dying from covid-19 will differ from the average. ...
New Orleans' city-run coronavirus testing site ran out of tests within minutes of opening on Monday, showcasing the high testing demand in the city as cases rise amid a national shortage in testing supplies.
More than 150 people were standing in line when the site at Dillard University in Gentilly opened at 8 a.m., which meant the city hit its daily testing capacity of 150 by 8:02 a.m., according to city officials.
(CNN)Refusing to wear a face mask during the Covid-19 pandemic should be as socially unacceptable as drunk-driving, or driving without using a seat belt, the president of the UK's Royal Society said Tuesday.
Venki Ramakrishnan called for everyone to wear a face covering in public -- particularly in enclosed public spaces -- pointing to new evidence suggesting that coverings may protect both the wearer and those around them.
Ramakrishnan said that people in the UK were "skeptical" about the benefits of using face coverings, and noted that the country was "way behind" other countries when it came to using face coverings, with inconsistent guidance and policies.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro announced Tuesday that he tested positive for coronavirus.
Why it matters: Brazil's coronavirus outbreak is one of the largest in the world, topped only by the U.S., and Bolsonaro has long downplayed the effects of the virus, pushing businesses to reopen over the last few months in order to jumpstart the country's economy.
LONDON — Ever since the coronavirus emerged in Europe, Sweden has captured international attention by conducting an unorthodox, open-air experiment. It has allowed the world to examine what happens in a pandemic when a government allows life to carry on largely unhindered.
This is what has happened: Not only have thousands more people died than in neighboring countries that imposed lockdowns, but Sweden’s economy has fared little better.
“They literally gained nothing,” said Jacob F. Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “It’s a self-inflicted wound, and they have no economic gains.”
The results of Sweden’s experience are relevant well beyond Scandinavian shores. In the United States, where the virus is spreading with alarming speed, many states have — at President Trump’s urging — avoided lockdowns or lifted them prematurely on the assumption that this would foster economic revival, allowing people to return to workplaces, shops and restaurants.
Implicit in these approaches is the assumption that governments must balance saving lives against the imperative to spare jobs, with the extra health risks of rolling back social distancing potentially justified by a resulting boost to prosperity. But Sweden’s grim result — more death, and nearly equal economic damage — suggests that the supposed choice between lives and paychecks is a false one: A failure to impose social distancing can cost lives and jobs at the same time.
[OA] TMPRSS2: Potential Biomarker for COVID-19 Outcomes
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) clinical data has so far shown that the mortality rate for men is higher than for women. This disparity is observed worldwide and across different ethnic/racial groups (Table 1).
Early reports from Italy and Germany show that while infection rates are similar between sexes, nearly 70% and 65%, respectively, of deaths are males. In New York City, an epicenter of the US outbreak, 54% of those infected are men, yet men account for 63% of deaths.
Epidemiologic data from the previous coronavirus infections, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), also indicated sex‐based differences in disease susceptibility and outcomes. This discrepancy was attributed to many factors, including smoking, immune differences, and other comorbidities.
An initial report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on population‐based surveillance sampled across 14 states, representing 10% of the US population, has indicated that age and comorbidities are associated with increased hospitalization rates of patients with COVID‐19. 1 The data on sex also suggest sexual dimorphism consistent with reports from other countries (Table 1).
The preliminary data on race suggest that minority populations may be disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus, where blacks contributed to 33% of the hospitalizations despite representing only 18% of the sampled population. As more data become available, correlations between race and disease severity can be interrogated more thoroughly, including the role of socioeconomic factors on influencing this disparity.
Investigations into the genetic and molecular differences between women and men are warranted to identify relevant biomarkers for disease susceptibility and outcomes. Based on data from literature, we propose a novel mechanism of the observed sex differences in clinical outcomes in patients and identify a role for the transmembrane protease serine 2 (TMPRSS2) as a contributing factor to the more severe outcomes noted for COVID‐19.
Strope JD, PharmD CHC, Figg WD. TMPRSS2: Potential Biomarker for COVID-19 Outcomes. J Clin Pharmacol. 2020;60(7):801-807. doi:10.1002/jcph.1641 TMPRSS2: Potential Biomarker for COVID‐19 Outcomes
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) clinical data has so far shown that the mortality rate for men is higher than for women. This disparity is observed worldwide and across different ethnic/racial groups (Table 1).
Early reports from Italy and Germany show that while infection rates are similar between sexes, nearly 70% and 65%, respectively, of deaths are males. In New York City, an epicenter of the US outbreak, 54% of those infected are men, yet men account for 63% of deaths.
Epidemiologic data from the previous coronavirus infections, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), also indicated sex‐based differences in disease susceptibility and outcomes. This discrepancy was attributed to many factors, including smoking, immune differences, and other comorbidities.
An initial report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on population‐based surveillance sampled across 14 states, representing 10% of the US population, has indicated that age and comorbidities are associated with increased hospitalization rates of patients with COVID‐19. 1 The data on sex also suggest sexual dimorphism consistent with reports from other countries (Table 1).
The preliminary data on race suggest that minority populations may be disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus, where blacks contributed to 33% of the hospitalizations despite representing only 18% of the sampled population. As more data become available, correlations between race and disease severity can be interrogated more thoroughly, including the role of socioeconomic factors on influencing this disparity.
Investigations into the genetic and molecular differences between women and men are warranted to identify relevant biomarkers for disease susceptibility and outcomes. Based on data from literature, we propose a novel mechanism of the observed sex differences in clinical outcomes in patients and identify a role for the transmembrane protease serine 2 (TMPRSS2) as a contributing factor to the more severe outcomes noted for COVID‐19.
Strope JD, PharmD CHC, Figg WD. TMPRSS2: Potential Biomarker for COVID-19 Outcomes. J Clin Pharmacol. 2020;60(7):801-807. doi:10.1002/jcph.1641 TMPRSS2: Potential Biomarker for COVID‐19 Outcomes
In this pandemic, R has leapt from the pages of academic journals into regular discussions by politicians and newspapers, framed as a number that will shape everyone’s lives. As Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, explained in a widely viewed video this April, an R above one means an outbreak is growing, and below one means that it is shrinking. In many countries, it is publicly reported every week. In June, epidemiologists at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, announced a website where anyone can look up the value for any country — and for many smaller regions — in the world.
But fascination might have turned into unhealthy political and media fixation, say disease experts. R is an imprecise estimate that rests on assumptions, says Jeremy Rossman, a virologist at the University of Kent, UK. It doesn’t capture the current status of an epidemic and can spike up and down when case numbers are low. It is also an average for a population and therefore can hide local variation. Too much attention to it could obscure the importance of other measures, such as trends in numbers of new infections, deaths and hospital admissions, and cohort surveys to see how many people in a population currently have the disease, or have already had it.
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