virusfest 2020 (part 2)

One of the mysteries (and mercies) about SARS-CoV-2 has been that it hasn't affected children: at one point, there had been no one symptomatic under the age of 10, and I've since heard 12. We don't know why, but there are some indications that kids can just hang out with the virus until whenever: one preliminary case study from China was a 6-month old boy, asymptomatic, who entered the hospital with his symptomatic mother. He tested positive for 16 days without ever showing symptoms, while his mother recovered.

I don't know if there's been a documented transmission from asymptomatic children to adults yet, but. Uh.

It's a bit of a truism that any pandemic contagion must be getting a bunch of parameters just right to nail us so well. Setting aside the many opportunities provided by a narcissistic Republican President with dementia, SARS-CoV-2 has:

1. Long incubation time.
2. Long time to symptom onset.
3. High, but not too high, fatality–given proper treatment, which leads to...
4. Very high health system resource usage.

#4 is the really striking one. It seems pretty clear that a whole lot of us have been exposed, and developed cases of COVID-19 that don't need a trip to the hospital, but the virus generates enough hospitalizations, and those hospitalizations can require such intensive and specialized care (ventilators and ICUs and things so exotic I'd never heard of them), that it can overwhelm a health-care system. This seems to have already happened to Italy, so around here, the hospitals and clinics are already at battle stations, getting ready.

In computing, we call this a "denial-of-service attack." It sucks.

Make good choices. Stay home. We haven't actually hit the really hard part yet.