Despite the fact that I'm positive, I have a realistic view of the whole events and don't approve the creation of fear and panic, I would like to share this eye-opening story by written by Professor Derave (a professor at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Department of Movement and Sports Sciences at Ghent University, Belgium) about the impact of the Corona virus. A well-founded call to take measures and take them seriously. Lightness is no longer really in place. An impressive story.
‘Laat me de verwarring wegnemen: er komt een drama op ons af’: prof UGent schrijft open brief
With translation...sorry upfront for this long post but things have to be said (Florida......can't believe my eyes...) Remember in Belgium and other European countries, they already took measures to "flatten the curve".
"Let me take away the confusion: a drama is coming our way": Prof. UGent writes open letter"
I understand that many people are confused by the corona crisis. Admittedly, it is not easy to understand: an invisible virus that can only be fought when it has not really hit yet. Let me remove that confusion: a drama is coming at us. If we strictly follow the current measures, it will be hellish, but maybe not yet catastrophic.
But it all went already wrong this weekend. So it will be catastrophic. We walk into the abyss with open eyes, out of self-interest.
There is no more time to be joking about the advice, and "live it up" and go organize a lockdown party. The measures announced on Thursday should actually have started on Wednesday. To make it organisationally feasible, the government only let them take effect on the night from Friday to Saturday;
not because they wanted to allow people to enjoy socializing with friends at a café or restaurant for one more evening.
Do not get me wrong. I fully understand the suffering of the restaurant and café owners, the organizers of all countless events that have to be canceled and who will be confronted with (almost) bankruptcies of organizations, self-employed persons and companies. But the revenues of an extra Friday evening is not going to offer any solace in this.
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It makes me sad. We are a stubborn and unruly people. Far too much on our individual desires to manage this epidemic. Our individualism is going to kill us. The only countries (such as Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore) that have so far managed to curb the epidemic, which have really realized '#FlattenTheCurve' are countries 1) trained in epidemics (SARS, bird flu, etc), 2) who have responsive governments that can and dare to intervene drastically, and 3) whose population has great civic spirit and a lot of discipline, and who place the collective above the individual. We don't have any of those in Belgium. We cannot do much about the first two ourselves, but we owe that third to ourselves.
Save a life
This is a historic opportunity. We can now really mean something for each other and for the country. Each of us can now save a life by acting responsibly, by placing the collective above the individual.
Our task is clear. The infection rate for this highly underestimated virus is 2 to 3. This means that every infected person infects 2 to 3 other people on average. This seems to be not too bad, you think, but it is not. Because if you infect two other people, they each infect two other people (so 4 in total), and they in turn (8) and in turn (16), and if you repeat this 10 times, you have in your one infected more than 16,000 people.
That was the optimistic scenario. If you each infect 3 people (and they do that in turn), you have infected 1.5 million people after as many days. Since you are not the only one who transmits infections, within a few weeks we will be in a situation where all fireplaces have merged and that 60 to 70 percent of all people in Europe are infected.
So we have to bring the contamination level below 1! You should come into contact with as few people as possible, so that you 1) do not become infected yourself, or 2) infect maximum 1 other person (preferably none) if so. Since most people do not live alone, and since it is almost impossible not to infect your housemates (partner, children) if you are infected yourself, the second is almost impossible in practice. So only the first is feasible: make sure you don't get infected.
Since we don't know who is infected and who isn't (the labs can't handle that many analyzes), you should assume that everyone is potentially infected. That's the nasty thing about this bug: you only know a week later that you had been infected a week earlier, so it is not read on anyone's forehead. Within a few weeks the chances are high that the people in front of and behind you in line at the bakery are infected. At present, there are supposedly only more than 500 people infected in Belgium, but that number is actually 10 to 15 times higher (scientists agree on those numbers), so 5,000 to 10,000 today in Belgium, but that is a multiple in a few days of this.
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Frontline
The war of the coming weeks and months will be fought in hospitals. That will be the battlefield, and it will not be beautiful. The front soldiers are the nurses, doctors and all heroes in health care. Most other people will notice that it's war, but will not face the enemy directly. They will feel the measures, but will only see the actual fights on TV. Unless you have to bring a sick (grand) father or (grand) mother to the hospital and be told that he / she is too old to be cared for and you should return home to leave him / her there to die. That's pure horror, and I hope you'll be spared from that.
The front soldiers will not be spared from that. They will have to make heartbreaking choices because they cannot help everyone who needs help. In Italy, many more people are currently dying than the virus should do. For every four corona deaths, three could have been avoided if there had been enough beds, caregivers, and especially respiratory machines.
The front soldiers risk their lives, because the protective clothing and masks will be worn out and cannot be replenished.
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According to the experts' calculations, our own clinics are not going to have enough capacity to survive this epidemic. Even in an optimistic scenario, in which only 30 instead of 60 percent of the Belgian population will become infected (provided that no one still has home parties and visit friends from now on), 150,000 Belgians will have to be hospitalized, of which 30,000 in the intensive care and ventilation. We don't even have a fraction of that capacity! They must absolutely not all come at once, we must slow down the epidemic. We will be able to save part of those 30,000, so the rest will die.
<snipped>
I am not at all pleased with frightening people, but as long as many people still do not understand the seriousness, we must be explicit.
We can do two things. The first is to create extra capacity. That is what hospitals are doing now (which is why yesterday and today you hear from all hospitals that outpatient consultations are canceled and non-urgent interventions are postponed). But that remains completely insufficient. So we depend on the second strategy, the discipline of the population, to make the epidemic less likely to rise. So flatten the curve. We are not succeeding in this at the moment. We are still in the beginning, but we are currently following the group of European countries that are chasing Italy. No "flattening the curve" like in Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore. But also not as dramatic as in the US
Those who are unlucky enough to fall seriously ill in the coming weeks will depend on the courage, self-sacrifice, and selflessness of the heroes of care. They will skip breaks, run double shifts, continue to work exhausted, take the work of their colleague who has been corona down, and this for weeks, even months on end.
