Balanced vitmins and minerals is important for general good health. That should be common sense. If I was to add one to your list that is vitally important that boosts immune (and so many other systems) would be Vitamin D. A high majority of Americans are low in it as well.

The US media is irritating me too. First was their “it’s nothing more than the regular flu” nonsense, ignoring the indicators showing much higher transmission rate and higher rate of severe cases. Not a reason to panic, but it’s dumb to dismiss it. Now that the media is freaking out and going all the way to the other extreme, I’m having to take the position of “calm the f*** down and take a breath”. Everything’s got to be an extreme angle with them.

So what is the real health threat? Seems to me that because of its isolation, large sample size, and environment, the Diamond Princess cruise ship might be a good baseline to use for what we may expect to see in wealthy, developed world countries: currently 705 infected, 599 active cases, 100 recovered, 36 serious/critical, 7 dead… so we have roughly ~1% fatality rate, ~5% in serious/critical condition which one would assume are getting hospitalization-level care. Statista also had a figure of 392 showing no symptoms on the ship, which would be about 56% of total cases. So would it be too much of a leap to take that and guess the number of real cases in places that are doing regular (but not universal) testing would be a little more than twice the official numbers? Maybe 200,000 or so total cases in China then?

By comparison, we can look at the 2017-2018 flu season (a pretty bad one they say) in the US from the CDC:
44,802,629 known cases, 808,129 hospitalized, 61,099 deaths; so that seems to have a 0.13% fatality rate, and 1.8% hospitalization rate.

So this easily has the potential to be a lot more serious than the flu if allowed to spread, and if it infects the same number as 2017-2018 flu then from the Diamond Princess stats maybe we could expect ~448,000 US deaths and ~2,240,000 hospitalizations. That’s bad, but it pales vs. the Spanish Flu. The biggest health danger would appear to be in overwhelming the hospital system with the number of cases requiring hospitalizations, which in turn could increase the fatality rate. This may be the difficulty Iran is experiencing now and why their death rate so far is a lot higher. Might also be why Mongolia’s gov’t has been so quick and strict (some might say paranoid) with their measures… they know our system here can be swamped easily. Maybe not as badly as Iran or the unfortunately-labeled “s***hole countries”, but badly enough.

So… perhaps the biggest coronavirus challenges are not on the individual level, but rather for governments and communities in balancing the need to contain the infection and keep the hospitals from being swamped with severe cases, but still keep the economy operating without too much disruption. On that note, at some point this spring or summer I half expect China and many other countries to declare “victory” (while secretly thinking “ah, screw it, let’s ride it out”) and prioritize their economy, moving from their very strict isolation/containment strategy to one emphasizing mitigation, selective containment, and surveillance measures on a level creepy even for China (they now have a quarantine app using the very widely used Alipay system).

I’m not in a panic about this virus for myself or wife; I’m 50 and in fairly good health, and I took this opportunity to top off preps in case of grocery store runs.  We mostly eat paleo/keto so I tend not to buy much that keeps a while as you would get in boxes and cans, thus the diminished supply of such stuff.  I do have 5 gallon buckets of rice and beans plus a dozen or so #10 cans of stuff, but I prefer not to break them open if the grocery stores are disrupted for just a few days.  Hence, topping off with canned goods and such that I’ll mostly eat, eventually, even if nothing happens.  I do hope economy does well enough though that I keep job (software engineer), which I really like and works out great for me.

My main concerns are my elderly mother, and my wife’s side of the family in the Philippines.  My mother doesn’t work anymore and is in a nice 55+ mobile home community.  I think she has little exposure, but I do want to make sure I don’t catch the virus and be asymptomatic then give it to Mom on one of our visits every couple of weeks.  She’s not healthy enough to have good odds surviving a difficult illness.  In Philippines, they’re poor, and have no concept of prepping.  And medical care is there although not always the best.  3 of my family are medical professionals too, so I don’t want them catching this.  We’re building a new house for them (80% done) but it’s taking every cent we have to do it so there’s no money to buy lots of food for 20+ people.

I do realize these details are uncertain and need more science behind them, but there’s a lot of talk out there about being able to get reinfected, with second infection much worse, with cytokline storm, ADE / ARDS, type of thing.  Plus, talk about the old SARS vaccine making things worse by causing this reaction and killing the test animal; how feasible is a vaccine for this really?  I’m also concerned about what happens for that possibly 20% or so “severe/critical” cases when hospitals can’t possibly handle that many at once.

But, grocery store panic, self quarantine, that kind of stuff I’m all set.

My 12 year old spent 3 weeks out of school last December with an unknown illness.

First they thought it was bronchitis, so they treated it with antibiotics and steroids. With no help

Then they felt it developed into a sinus infection – so different antibiotics

Then they thought she might have a heart condition — seriously

Then they landed on “must have gotten some secondary respiratory infection”

Basically — she coughed for 3 straight weeks and the only relief was albuterol treatments.

I am getting a T-Shirt made that says “I survived Corona 2019” for her to wear to school.

Thanks Jack!

Great show, very helpful for the real estate between my ears!  My biggest concerns at this point are economic-just can’t see how 2020 doesn’t turn into a s**t show with carona and the election. I’m in manufacturing and construction and we are already seeing supply chain disruptions and slow business. Can’t imagine what effect this has on travel industry?  I’d love to hear more thoughts from you and John P on the economics of all this.

JAck,

I worked for the FL Dept of Health.  We did a lot of Disaster Preparedness work.  I routinely sat on information calls from the CDC regarding Pan-Avian Influenza, the odd Ebola notice, and H1N1 etc.  You have been spot on in my opinion with your advice.  I am not an MD, but sat in the room with an Infectious Disease MD and Epidemiology people and listened to the conversations.  They were boring to say the least.  Those bugs were all more serious than this from what I can tell.  I would go home and see the news though, and wonder what they were talking about.  If it were not for the media, this might come and go and we wouldn’t even know it.

Jack, thanks for the quote from Jack Welch!   And for this wonderfully sensible podcast.

Can someone remind me which supplements were suggested in the audio without me having to go through it all again?  Quercetin, and what was the other… B6?  Quercetin makes sense but B6 is a new one to me in the context of antiviral.  Why B6 (if I got that right… it wasn’t B12 right?)