Italy imposes extreme coronavirus lockdown restrictions
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, issued a disturbing warning during a White House briefing Tuesday: “Americans everywhere need to change the way they live their lives. Right now”.
“We would like the country to realize that as a nation, we can’t be doing the kinds of things we were doing a few months ago. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a state that has no cases or one case,” Fauci said, referring Americans to the new federal Coronavirus.gov website for details on precautions to take at home, at work and out in the world.
“If and when the infections will come — and they will come, sorry to say, sad to say — when you’re dealing with an infectious disease… we want to be where the infection is going to be, as well as where it is,” Fauci said. “Everybody should say, ‘All hands on deck,” he added.
We are at an inflection point, according to Thomas Bossert, a former homeland security adviser to Donald Trump, writing in The Washington Post. It’s worth reading his entire piece, but the key point is this:
“Officials must pull the trigger on aggressive interventions. Time matters. Two weeks of delay can mean the difference between success and failure. Public health experts learned this in 1918, when the Spanish flu killed 50 million to 100 million people around the globe. If we fail to act, we will watch our health-care system to be overwhelmed.”
He compared the lax early actions in Italy, which is now under national lockdown, with the more strict and invasive early actions in Singapore and Hong Kong.
According to the CDC, there are 70 cases from repatriated citizens from Wuhan, the Diamond Princess, and the Grand Princess. According to CNN Health’s tally of US cases that are detected and tested in the United States through US public health systems, there are cases in 37 states and the District of Columbia. Thirty-one people have died.
The most deadly coronavirus outbreak site in the US is the Life Care Center nursing home in King County. Another patient who had been there died Tuesday, bringing the total to 19 from that site alone. It’s still not clear how that outbreak started.
Employees have now been tested at the site after a long delay when only patients were screened. Just determining who has the virus has been a struggle. In California, new commercial labs manufacturing testing kits are coming online, joining facilities in 18 states.
Mapping the spread of the new coronavirus
Recently, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore created a map compiled of all new cases reported, including total deaths, total recovered, and total confirmed globally.
See Coronavirus in real time map here
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It seems it is a matter of age. Italy and Spain, countries that are taking extreme measures because of the coronavirus, lead the list with the largest population of men and women aged 65 and over in Europe: In Italy, they are 22% of the population, and in Spain, 20%. In contrast, those over 65 in Mexico are 12%.
This data is of interest since the coronavirus rages the elderly: the average profile of a dead victim is a man -or woman- of 85 years of age and with previous pathologies. From the age of 80 onwards, the fatality rate rises to 14.7% of cases; on the other hand, the rate among children under nine is almost zero. According to experts, the youngest in the house can be infected, although the symptoms are so mild that many do not notice them.
This demographic data, however, should not be used to minimize the threat of the disease, but simply helps to understand the European hysteria in the face of the calm in countries like Mexico.
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