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Tag: COVID-19 Pandemic

With the Coronavirus, Hell Is No Other People

Via kOoLiNuS.

If we pay attention, we may value more fully the moment we’re released from our detention, and we may even make some changes in our lives as a result. It will be a relief, above all, when we’re allowed to get back to caring for one another, which is what socially evolved primates do best.

Flattening the Curve

The area under the curve represents the number of people who are expected to be infected by CVODI-19 will be the same independent of the height of the peak. That is, the summit may be suppressed, and the slope lowered, but the total of the number of people who eventually get sick will be the same. This is because there may be no natural immunity and no vaccine; therefore, everyone will ultimately be infected with COVID-19. This, in turn, means that the death rate will be very dependent on just how overloaded our health care system become, or more specifically, how many ventilators we have.

One other thing about flattening a curve where time is the horizontal line is that the timeline moves further into the future. This current two-week "shelter-in-place" is a deception. Our state and federal government officials are not adequately settings expectations on how long we need to hunker down inside our homes like prisoners.

NOTE: An normal distribution bell curve is often used to illustrate the spread of COVID-19, but the growth of COVID-19 will most likely follow a right long-tail distribution bell curve.

COVID-19 Health care limit. CC-BY-NC-SA by JoKalliauer.

Some are already predicting calamity from false expectations.

Typically in times of crisis, such as recessions, war, and natural disasters, people come together. But the coronavirus outbreak is not a typical catastrophe, and coming together is challenging, if not impossible.

Mental health professionals and addiction support groups warn that this public health emergency poses a serious threat to people for whom social contact is a key element of support and treatment. Social distancing and isolation are triggers for people with mental health issues, experts say. Christopher Miller, BuzzFeed

But it isn't just "us" stuck at home, isolation negatively impacts health care workers, many of whom are anxious about the impact on their families.

From Twitter:

For me, my anxiety comes from uncertainty and the indefinite nature of the "shelter-in-place" order. I have never lived my life just getting by day-to-day. I have always been a future planner, a person who can see a future state and work toward it. It's what helped me keep my chin up through the difficult health challenges in 2018 and 2019. I can't imagine that I would survive mentally if I were in a "rock-and-a-hard-place" situation these doctors find themselves in with no clear end in sight.

Socially distancing = loneliness, isolation, illness, and despair.

Another one in case you are not convinced.

Although there’s been no time to study the effects of social distancing related specifically to the coronavirus, we know a great deal about the impact of social isolation on mental and physical health. It’s often experienced as highly stressful, and the stress can become toxic. Isolation, particularly when it causes loneliness, increases the risk of anxiety and depression. Social isolation has the equivalent adverse impact on physical health to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It’s a greater threat to health than obesity, and is linked to an increased risk of a wide variety of health problems. In an interesting study highly relevant to our current situation, students who reported higher levels of loneliness responded less powerfully to flu vaccinations. Kenneth E. Miller Ph.D., Psychology Today