Staying at work, staying at home


Health care workers stayed at work for you, stay home for them.

Comments

  1. A Lurker from Mexico says

    @John Morales
    Strangely yes.
    The virus seems to have a kind of 80-16-4 rule going on, where 80% of infected will experience mild symptoms or be outright asymptomatic, 16% will suffer severe symptoms and require a hospital stay, and 4% will need intensive care. The risk factors have been clearly determined (chronic respiratory disease, obesity, old age, kidney failure, diabetes, a compromised immune system, pregnancy) and the indicator of a more serious infection is also clearly determined (trouble breathing). Anyone who doesn’t have either a risk factor or trouble breathing should stay at home. If you feel sick but you don’t have any risk factor or trouble breathing, you’ll get better in a week and avoid infecting others, if it turns out you were sick but it wasn’t COVID19 you’ll avoid getting infected.

    The deadliest aspect of this pandemic is not so much the disease itself, but the chaos of an overwhelmed healthcare system. The other diseases and injuries that hospitals deal with on a daily basis are not going to do a cease fire on account of coronavirus, so the sudden influx of 16% of cases that will require a hospital stay and 4% that will require intensive care can easily overwhelm medical services. If the healthcare system collapses, not just coronavirus, everything will be more deadly than it usually is.

    The best way to not add fuel to that fire is to be responsible, if you don’t have any risk factors, stay at home, 4 times out of 5 that’s all you’ll need. If you develop difficulty breathing, then you go to the hospital. If everyone does this, the death toll will be minimal and the doctors will be able to deal with everyone who needs this. Otherwise, you’ll have infected but low-risk people clogging up the hospitals, demanding care that they most likely won’t need and people who don’t have the disease but have the flu or something else getting infected at the hospital where they didn’t even need to go to in the first place (most laypeople can’t really distinguish between a normal flu and COVID19, so going to the hospital because of mild symptoms is a very fucking bad idea right now).

    That’s the general strategy they’ve been communicating in Mexico, I don’t know about you guys but it seems to be working here.

    TL;DR Yes, 80% of sick people should ABSOLUTELY stay at home for the health workers (and everyone else).

  2. John Morales says

    Marcus, I can read, that’s what:
    Non-health workers should stay at home for the health workers, because health workers stay at work for you.

    (Do you really think one can be either dense or sceptical, but not both?)

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