Why you should worry about Covid-19 (the coronavirus)

Heads turned when the attractive school teacher stepped off the train in Medicine Bow. She had been sent to Wyoming by her parents. They hoped she could escape an influenza epidemic that killed many back home in Minnesota the year before.

A handsome Colorado cowboy watched from a window of the nearby bank. Driving cattle to the Denver stockyards offering an uncertain future, he’d gone to business school and found indoor work. Now he put down his bookkeeper’s visor and pondered how to make the lady’s acquaintance.

Influenza changed the courses of theirs and many others’ lives early in the 20th century. In Europe more American soldiers fighting World War I died of the Spanish flu than on the battlefields. Worldwide over 50 million people, 3% of everyone on earth, perished in the epidemic.

A flu virus is a nasty creature. It mutates often. In its mild forms it attacks the cells of our nose and throat. Severe forms, as the 1918 version was, go deeper. They can damage our lungs, causing infections and pneumonia. The coronavirus, discovered in Wuhan, China, and now spreading around the world, is such a severe virus.

Of course, we do have a flu season — each winter about 30 million Americans get it. Even with only partially effective flu vaccines, about 30,000 of us, or one in a thousand, die from it. The victims tend to be very young, old or have medical issues already.

Given this reality, why worry about this new infection, called Covid-19? Worry because of how widely it may spread.

Most of us, having had seasonal flu, have some level of immunity to it. Not so with Covid-19, so the number who could be infected, worldwide, is billions.

Still, there are signs for hope. The World Health Organization says Covid-19 is spreading more slowly than seasonal flu. Over 80% of those who have had Covid-19 so far and recovered, about 50,000 people in China and elsewhere, had only a mild head cold or fever and cough. Those fortunate individuals have typically been healthy and under age 60.

The other 20%, though, have had it a lot worse. Most of them have needed hospital care. A third of those have wound up in an intensive care unit. In more than 2% of the cases reported, the infected person died. That’s 20 times the death rate for seasonal flu.

There’s a reason China built emergency hospitals and adopted draconian quarantine measures to control the spread of Covid-19. It is highly infectious and more lethal than seasonal flu.

The important question now is what can you, the person best situated to protect yourself and your loved ones against Covid-19, do? If it gets here, do all you can to keep Covid-19 from spreading.

Be prepared to spend time at home. Have enough prescription drugs, kleenex, electrolytes, etc. for a serious case of flu, enough so you don’t have to go out in public for at least two weeks.

Get 7 to 9 hours of sleep. Rest is critical to the function of your immune system.

Wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds, especially after blowing your nose, coughing, or sneezing; going to the bathroom; and before eating or preparing food.

Avoid touching your mouth, nose or eyes with unwashed hands.

Stay home when you are sick. Self-quarantine and avoid older or immunocompromised people.

Cover your cough or sneeze with a tissue, then throw the tissue in the trash.

Get medical advice if you’re ill. If you have reason to believe you have Covid-19 (symptoms plus known exposure or travel to an area with the virus) contact your doctor or hospital before going in so precautions can be taken to prevent you from infecting health care workers.

Beyond this we’re going to need some patience. An existing drug from a California company has shown promise treating other coronavirus infections. It is being tested against Covid-19 in China and the US. Developing any new drugs will take time.

At least a dozen vaccines against this new virus are already in development. It will be months before even clinical trials can be started, though. It usually takes 2 to 10 years to make a vaccine. Whatever wild promises have come out of Washington DC, even on a fast track a vaccine is 12 to 18 months away.

So the following link contains sound advice about controlling the spread of Covid-19. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/about/share-facts.html Study it and follow it.

The teacher and the cowboy,? They came out okay. They escaped the flu, married, worked and saved, then put money down on a farm in Jerome County. There they raised kids, cattle and crops and eventually lived out their years. The oldest of their children was my mother.

Dave Finkelnburg is a longtime Idahoan, a former newspaper journalist, and is currently semi-retired from an engineering career.