Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

Dr. Brooke Herndon, an internist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, could not stop coughing. For two weeks starting in mid-April last year, she coughed, seemingly nonstop, followed by another week when she coughed sporadically, annoying, she said, everyone who worked with her.

Before long, Dr. Kathryn Kirkland, an infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth, had a chilling thought: Could she be seeing the start of a whooping cough epidemic? By late April, other health care workers at the hospital were coughing, and severe, intractable coughing is a whooping cough hallmark. And if it was whooping cough, the epidemic had to be contained immediately because the disease could be deadly to babies in the hospital and could lead to pneumonia in the frail and vulnerable adult patients there.

It was the start of a bizarre episode at the medical center: the story of the epidemic that wasn’t.
(a NYT article, well worth reading)

But there are some establishments, retail and restaurants, that will feel the pinch

What I wonder is, how sure are we of actually diagnosing this new virus?

And its efficacy is questionable, to say the least.

I was rather hoping they know what they're doing.

  Did you read the NYT's article?

Speaking to TheJournal.ie, lecturer in immunology and host-microbe interactions at the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Limerick, Dr Elizabeth J. Ryan, said that viral tests for current cases of Covid-19 are “very specific” for material that is “only expressed by the Covid-19 virus”.

“Having a cold or flu won’t change that,” Dr Ryan said.

Sorting all this out, as I’ve said over and again, will take years. Who died of what is not so easy. Medical data is a mess. This is why I have been insisting for months and months to look at the total all cause deaths to gauge the true severity of the situation.

The needle of that gauge is firmly on “DO NOT PANIC.”