Coronavirus

[Dr Nowt]

9 minutes ago, Saintslfc13 said:

My father is 79 (yes I was born when he was 50) but spry as fuck and absolutely pissed they shut his work down where he bartends. I've explained to him that it's for his own interest, it took the full order for him to stay inside, and he's absolutely loathing every second of it. He only just quit the biffs 2 years ago. He's been a lifelong boozer, although no liver issues as far as we know. The main issue is his mother is 100. She's currently hospitaliized unrelated to COVID-19 but just that shes in there wants him to go see her, yet he can't, for both of their sakes.

My old dear is similar. Taking it as a personal affront and continually making sour comments about the over 70’s being singled out. Tiresome. I keep speaking to her and explaining what’s going on and it will seem like there’s been a breakthrough, then she’ll mention something about what she’s doing each time she gets back into her car!

 

In the end I told her if she gets it, even if they don’t refuse her treatment based on her age, my brother won’t be able to come and see her from Japan for obvious reasons and I won’t be able to come to the hospital as it’s the most infectious place going. And that’s if you don’t occupy a bed someone else in a critical state needed and/or pass it on to someone more vulnerable.
 

Then she’ll say she’s really frightened now I’ve said that. How hard is it to just follow the fucking advice? She’s got tons of people offering to drop stuff and support her, it’s pure vanity for many and taking umbrage at being seen to be vulnerable.

[mattyq]

Cheers All

Had the Flu over the New Year and that was worse

Only 2 days in but, fingers crossed, it doesn't start running wild on my sorry arse

I'm of a firm belief that avoiding beans in all circumstances is saving me from death. Beaners will suffer terribly like the dogs they are

[AngryOfTuebrook]

2 hours ago, aRdja said:

 

whatever happened to “Herd Immunity”? Thoughts @Strontium Dog™?

Reality happened. 

 

 

[skend04]

Local Tesco's stripped bare by 9 this morning. People are fucking crazy, they'll end up chucking most the stuff as it'll go spoilt before they can consume it surely. Plus, haven't they seen survival horror movies? The cunts that stockpile, without guns, are usually the first to get killed when society collapses.  

[Saintslfc13]

3 minutes ago, Lizzie Birdsworths Wrinkled Chopper said:

My old dear is similar. Taking it as a personal affront and continually making sour comments about the over 70’s being singled out. Tiresome. I keep speaking to her and explaining what’s going on and it will seem like there’s been a breakthrough, then she’ll mention something about what she’s doing each time she gets back into her car!

 

In the end I told her if she gets it, even if they don’t refuse her treatment based on her age, my brother won’t be able to come and see her from Japan for obvious reasons and I won’t be able to come to the hospital as it’s the most infectious place going. And that’s if you don’t occupy a bed someone else in a critical state needed and/or pass it on to someone more vulnerable.
 

Then she’ll say she’s really frightened now I’ve said that. How hard is it to just follow the fucking advice?

Yea I've had to explain to him as well that if he ends up hospitalized they won't allow anyone in. They're already doing with his mom and he can't belive they don't make an exception because she's 100 but that's exactly why there is no exception. It's a shitshow really the people most at risk are trying to skirt it, the people in the middle are obeying albeit begrudgingly, and the college kids here are having parties like nothings changed.

[Scott_M]

41 minutes ago, elvis said:

Last time I looked China wasn't in the Middle East mate

I thought I was quite clear with my disclaimer...

 

Anyhoo, even if it’s just this, it’s bad enough to force changes of habits. How long is this going to last and how many people are going to die?

And then there’s the downstream effects, Trillions wiped out of the worlds economy, millions out of work....how long will it take to recover? Will it ever recover?

 

Even if it ended tomorrow, 12k people have died. That’s bad enough. 

[Saintslfc13]

4 minutes ago, skend04 said:

Local Tesco's stripped bare by 9 this morning. People are fucking crazy, they'll end up chucking most the stuff as it'll go spoilt before they can consume it surely. Plus, haven't they seen survival horror movies? The cunts that stockpile, without guns, are usually the first to get killed when society collapses.  

Are they stockpiling the toliet paper there too or is it just the food. First 2 weeks here was the TP, Paper Towels, Paper plates, etc.

Now it's as you say, shelves emptied daily and restocked and emptied again.

[Barrington Womble]

11 hours ago, Sugar Ape said:

Can’t find the article now but I was reading before that there isn’t a shortage of goods in the warehouses it’s just not been possible to sort the logistics of getting the extra amount needed to supermarkets on a daily basis. 
 

It was saying for example a Co-Op store will have space for, say, 50 loaves in the shops and 30 to be stored in the back. 30 packs of bog roll in the shop and 10 in the back. 80 bottles of milk in the shop and 20 in the back. You can’t suddenly just send double the amount of everything to all Co-Op stores because they need more van drivers to deliver the goods, more staff in stores to restock the shelves when things sell out and more space to store the additional goods than they currently have. 
 

Replicate this problem in all supermarkets around the country and you can see why they are all scrambling to employ extra staff in stores and on the road. 

That makes sense, but if that's the case they should be asking people to volunteer to deliver. 

3 hours ago, aRdja said:

 

whatever happened to “Herd Immunity”? Thoughts @Strontium Dog™?

I think they backed away from that when global scientists were taking the piss out of them and the increasing numbers of cases and deaths were backing up the global view, not the Dominic Cummings , sorry British scientists view. 

48 minutes ago, Anubis said:

Remember those dodgy hot dog carts that used to be stationed outside Anfield on match days.

 

 

There's still one of them on the exit of Stanley park on priory road! 

[skend04]

7 minutes ago, Saintslfc13 said:

Are they stockpiling the toliet paper there too or is it just the food. First 2 weeks here was the TP, Paper Towels, Paper plates, etc.

Now it's as you say, shelves emptied daily and restocked and emptied again.

Can't find the link but one was reporting people taking suitcases in to a shop in Edinburgh or another Scottish city and packing in raw meats. Absolutely insane.

[1892-LFCWasBorn]

 

[Dr Nowt]

https://www.radiotimes.com/news/radio/2020-03-20/audible-just-made-hundreds-of-titles-completely-free-to-help-during-coronavirus-crisis/?fbclid=IwAR33fV--9yXZBdFjQKFTqFoswXZpIzabf_aQCIHnv1gcjd_G7JOXXYN1xF0

[Saintslfc13]

9 minutes ago, 1892-LFCWasBorn said:

 

To speak to the point he makes, New Orleans Fire Department (again I'm not currently a firefighter, and I live in California rather than Louisiana) have decided to stop putting their exposed members in quarantine because they just don't have the resources. I can't imagine NOEMS is any better at this point. That's a big issue, healthcare workers are going to at the least be hit by attrition and there's only enough people with the capability to go around.

[Babb'sBurstNad]

1 hour ago, elvis said:

Hmm here  on the isle of man , anyone arriving by boat or plane since Tuesday have been told they must go straight home and self isolate for two weeks. 

Coppers have just arrested a bloke ' of no fixed abode' for said offence.

According to their Facebook media page

 

 

[Bjornebye]

I’m sure it’s not connected to this virus but i’m back sat on the bog. 

[1892-LFCWasBorn]

 

Fucking hell. We're truly fucked.

[Carradona]

Well this is a depressing read.

 

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/the-story-of-a-coronavirus-infection.html

 

MAR. 18, 2020

How the Coronavirus Could Take Over Your Body (Before You Ever Feel It)

By Jeff Wise

 

Photo: Dr. F.A. Murphy/Getty Images/Visuals Unlimited

You call a friend and arrange to meet for lunch. It’s unseasonably springlike, so you choose a place with outdoor seating, which seems like it should be safer. As usual, you take all reasonable precautions: You use hand sanitizer, sit a good distance from other customers, and try to avoid touching your face, though that last part is hard. A part of you suspects that this whole thing might be overblown.

What you don’t know is that ten days ago, your friend’s father was a guest of his business partner at the University Club, where he caught the novel coronavirus from the wife of a cryptocurrency speculator. Three days after that, he coughed into his hand before opening the door of his apartment to welcome his son home. The saliva of COVID-19 patients can harbor half a trillion virus particles per teaspoon, and a cough aerosolizes it into a diffuse mist. As your friend walked through the door he took a breath and 32,456 virus particles settled onto the lining of his mouth and throat.

 

Viruses have been multiplying inside his body ever since. And as he talks, the passage of his breath over the moist lining of his upper throat creates tiny droplets of virus-laden mucus that waft invisibly into the air over your table. Some settle on the as-yet-uneaten food on your plate, some drift onto your fingers, others are drawn into your nasal sinus or settle into your throat. By the time you extend your hand to shake good-bye, your body is carrying 43,654 virus particles. By the time you’re done shaking hands, that number is up to 312,405.

 

One of the droplets gets drawn into the branching passages of your lungs and settles on the warm, wet surface, depositing virus particles into the mucus coating the tissue. Each particle is round and very small; if you magnified a human hair so that it was as wide as a football field, the virus particle would be four inches across. The outer membrane of the virus consists of an oily layer embedded with jagged protein molecules called spike proteins. These stick out like the protrusions on a knobby ball chew toy. In the middle of the virus particle is a coiled strand of RNA, the virus’s genetic material. The payload.

 

As the virus drifts through the lung’s mucus, it bumps into one of the cells that line the surface. The cell is considerably larger than the virus; on the football-field scale, it’s 26 feet across. A billion years of evolution have equipped it to resist attackers. But it also has a vulnerability — a backdoor. Protruding from its surface is a chunk of protein called angiotensin converting enzyme 2, or ACE2 receptor. Normally, this molecule plays a role in modulating hormone activity within the body. Today, it’s going to serve as an anchor for the coronavirus.

 

As the spike protein bumps up against the surface of the lung cell, its shape matches that of the ACE2 so closely that it sticks to it like adhesive. The membrane of the virus then fuses with the membrane of the cell, spilling the RNA contents into the interior of the lung cell. The virus is in.

 

The viral RNA gets busy. The cell has its own genetic material, DNA, that produces copied fragments of itself in RNA form. These are continuously copied and sent into the main body of the cell, where they provide instructions for how to make the proteins that carry out all the functions of the cell. It’s like Santa’s workshop, where the elves, dutifully hammering out the toys on Santa’s instructions, are complexes of RNA and protein called ribosomes.

As soon as the viral RNA encounters a ribosome, that ribosome begins reading it and building viral proteins. These proteins then help the viral RNA to copy itself, and these copies then hijack more of the cell’s ribosomes. Other viral proteins block the cell from fighting back. Soon the cell’s normal business is completely overwhelmed by the demands of the viral RNA, as its energy and machinery are occupied with building the components of countless replica viruses.

As they are churned out, these components are transferred on a kind of cellular conveyor belt toward the surface of the cell. The virus membrane and spike proteins wrap around RNA strands, and a new particle is ready. These collect in internal bubbles, called vesicles, that move to the surface, burst open, and release new virus particles into your body by the tens and hundreds of thousands.

 

Meanwhile, spike proteins that haven’t been incorporated into new viruses embed themselves directly into the host cell’s membrane so that it latches onto the surface of an adjacent cell, like a pirate ship lashing itself to a helpless merchantman. The two cells then fuse, and a whole host of viral RNA swarms over into the new host cell.

All up and down your lungs, throat, and mouth, the scene is repeated over and over as cell after cell is penetrated and hijacked. Assuming the virus behaves like its relative, SARS, each generation of infection takes about a day and can multiply the virus a millionfold. The replicated viruses spill out into the mucus, invade the bloodstream, and pour through the digestive system.

 

You don’t feel any of this. In fact, you still feel totally fine. If you have any complaint at all, it’s boredom. You’ve been a dutiful citizen, staying at home to practice social distancing, and after two days of bingeing on the Fast & Furious franchise, you decide that your mental health is at risk if you don’t get outside.

 

You call up an ex, and she agrees to meet you for a walk along the river. You’re hoping that the end-of-the-world zeitgeist might kindle some afternoon recklessness, but the face mask she’s wearing kills the vibe. Also she tells you that she’s decided to move in with a guy she met at Landmark. You didn’t even know she was into Landmark. She gives you a warm hug as you say good-bye, and you tell her it was great to see her, but you leave feeling deflated. What she doesn’t know is that an hour before, you went to the bathroom and neglected to wash your hands afterward. The invisible fecal smear you leave on the arm of her jacket contains 893,405 virus particles. Forty-seven seconds after she gets home, she’ll hang up her coat and then scratch an itch at the base of her nose just before she washes her hands. In that moment, 9,404 viral particles will transfer to her face. In five days, an ambulance will take her to Mount Sinai.

 

Like a retail chain gobbled up by private equity, stripped for parts, and left to die, your infected cells spew out virus particles until they burn themselves out and expire. As fragments of disintegrated cells spread through your bloodstream, your immune system finally senses that something is wrong. White blood cells detect the fragments of dead cells and release chemicals called cytokines that serve as an alarm signal, activating other parts of the immune system to swing into action. When responding immune cells identify a cell that has become infected, they attack and destroy it. Within your body, a microscopic Battle of the Somme is raging with your immune system leveling its Big Berthas on both the enemy trenches and its own troops. As the carnage mounts, the body’s temperature rises and the infected area becomes inflamed.

 

Two days later, sitting down to lunch, you realize that the thought of eating makes you feel nauseated. You lie down and sleep for a few hours. When you wake up, you realize that you’ve only gotten worse. Your chest feels tight, and you’ve got a dry cough that just won’t quit. You wonder: Is this what it feels like? You rummage through your medicine cabinet in vain and ultimately find a thermometer in the back of your linen closet. You hold it under your tongue for a minute and then read the result: 102. Fuck, you think, and crawl back into bed. You tell yourself that it might just be the regular flu, and even if worse comes to worst, you’re young(-ish) and otherwise healthy. You’re not in the high-risk group.

 

You’re right, of course, in a sense. For most people infected with the coronavirus, that’s as far as it goes. With bed rest, they get better. But for reasons scientists don’t understand, about 20 percent of people get severely ill. Despite your relative youth, you’re one of them.

After four days of raging fever and feeling sore all over, you realize that you’re sicker than you’ve ever been in your life. You’ve got a dry cough that shakes you so hard that your back hurts. Fighting for breath, you order an Uber and head to the nearest emergency room. (You leave 376,345,090 virus particles smeared on various surfaces of the car and another 323,443,865 floating in aerosols in the air.)

 

At the ER, you’re examined and sent to an isolation ward. As doctors wait for the results of a test for the coronavirus, they administer a CT scan of your lungs, which reveals tell-tale “ground-glass opacities,” fuzzy spots caused by fluid accumulating where the immune-system battle is the most intense. Not only have you got COVID-19, but it’s led to a kind of intense and dangerous pneumonia called acute-respiratory-distress syndrome, or ARDS.

With all the regular beds already occupied by the many COVID-19 sufferers, you’re given a cot in a room alongside five other patients. Doctors put you on an intravenous drip to supply your body with nutrients and fluids as well as antiviral medicine. Within a day of your arrival, your condition deteriorates. You throw up for several days and start to hallucinate. Your heart rate slows to 50 beats a minute. When a patient in the next room dies, doctors take the ventilator he was using and put you on it. By the time the nurse threads the endotracheal tube down your throat, you’re only half-conscious of the sensation of it snaking deeper and deeper toward your lungs. You just lie there as she places tape over your mouth to keep the tube in place.

 

You’re crashing. Your immune system has flung itself into a “cytokine storm” — an overdrive of such intensity that it is no longer fighting just the viral infection but the body’s own cells as well. White blood cells storm your lungs, destroying tissue. Fluid fills the tiny alveolar sacs that normally let the blood absorb oxygen. Effectively, you’re drowning, even with the ventilator pumping oxygen-enriched air into your lungs.

 

That’s not the worst of it. The intensity of the immune response is such that under its onslaught, organs throughout the body are shutting down, a process known as multiple-organ-dysfunction syndrome, or MODS. When your liver fails, it is unable to process toxins out of your blood, so your doctors rush to hook you up to a round-the-clock dialysis machine. Starved of oxygen, your brain cells begin to expire.

You’re fluttering on the edge between life and death. Now that you’ve slipped into MODS, your odds are 50-50 or worse. Owing to the fact that the pandemic has stretched the hospital’s resources past the breaking point, your outlook is even bleaker.

Lying on your cot, you half-hear as the doctors hook you up to an extracorporeal-membrane-oxygenation (ECMO) machine. This will take over the work of your heart and lungs and hopefully keep you alive until your body can find its way back to equilibrium.

 

And then, you are flooded with an overwhelming sense of calm. You sense that you have reached the nadir of your struggle. The worst of the danger is over. With the viral attack beaten, your body’s immune system will pull back, and you’ll begin the slow, painstaking journey to full recovery. Some weeks from now, the doctors will remove the tube from your throat and wheel away the ventilator. Your appetite will come back, and the color will return to your cheeks, and on a summer morning you’ll step out into the fresh air and hail a cab for home. And later still, you’ll meet the girl who will become your wife, and you’ll have three children, two of whom will have children of their own, who will visit you in your nursing home outside Tampa.

That’s what your mind is telling itself, anyway, as the last cells of your cerebral cortex burst in starburst waves, like the glowing algae in a midnight lagoon. In the isolation ward, your EKG goes to a steady tone. The doctors take away the ventilator and give it to a patient who arrived this morning. In the official records of the COVID-19 pandemic, you’ll be recorded as victim No. 592.

[Mook]

15 minutes ago, skend04 said:

Can't find the link but one was reporting people taking suitcases in to a shop in Edinburgh or another Scottish city and packing in raw meats. Absolutely insane.

That's just Champ getting ready for barbeque season.

[Bjornebye]

4 minutes ago, 1892-LFCWasBorn said:

 

Fucking hell. We're truly fucked.

Where is that?!

[Anubis]

1 hour ago, Scott_M said:

IF it’s been 100% confirmed that MERS, SARS, Covoid-19 etc originated from these markets, then something really should be done about it.
 

We changed habits with BSE, China should be forced to do the same. 
 

Start with getting Trip Advisor out there and give them a cleanliness rating. 

How will that work. I don’t think people in a socially deprived area, buying from their local market, will give a shit about Trip Asvisor.

[Spy Bee]

2 minutes ago, 1892-LFCWasBorn said:

 

Fucking hell. We're truly fucked.

They don't appear to be standing 2 meters apart!

[1892-LFCWasBorn]

2 minutes ago, Bjornebye said:

Where is that?!

Hull, but it's probably the same for most supermarkets all across the UK today.

[Saintslfc13]

4 minutes ago, Carradona said:

Well this is a depressing read.

 

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/the-story-of-a-coronavirus-infection.html

 

MAR. 18, 2020

How the Coronavirus Could Take Over Your Body (Before You Ever Feel It)

By Jeff Wise

 

Photo: Dr. F.A. Murphy/Getty Images/Visuals Unlimited

You call a friend and arrange to meet for lunch. It’s unseasonably springlike, so you choose a place with outdoor seating, which seems like it should be safer. As usual, you take all reasonable precautions: You use hand sanitizer, sit a good distance from other customers, and try to avoid touching your face, though that last part is hard. A part of you suspects that this whole thing might be overblown.

What you don’t know is that ten days ago, your friend’s father was a guest of his business partner at the University Club, where he caught the novel coronavirus from the wife of a cryptocurrency speculator. Three days after that, he coughed into his hand before opening the door of his apartment to welcome his son home. The saliva of COVID-19 patients can harbor half a trillion virus particles per teaspoon, and a cough aerosolizes it into a diffuse mist. As your friend walked through the door he took a breath and 32,456 virus particles settled onto the lining of his mouth and throat.

 

Viruses have been multiplying inside his body ever since. And as he talks, the passage of his breath over the moist lining of his upper throat creates tiny droplets of virus-laden mucus that waft invisibly into the air over your table. Some settle on the as-yet-uneaten food on your plate, some drift onto your fingers, others are drawn into your nasal sinus or settle into your throat. By the time you extend your hand to shake good-bye, your body is carrying 43,654 virus particles. By the time you’re done shaking hands, that number is up to 312,405.

 

One of the droplets gets drawn into the branching passages of your lungs and settles on the warm, wet surface, depositing virus particles into the mucus coating the tissue. Each particle is round and very small; if you magnified a human hair so that it was as wide as a football field, the virus particle would be four inches across. The outer membrane of the virus consists of an oily layer embedded with jagged protein molecules called spike proteins. These stick out like the protrusions on a knobby ball chew toy. In the middle of the virus particle is a coiled strand of RNA, the virus’s genetic material. The payload.

 

As the virus drifts through the lung’s mucus, it bumps into one of the cells that line the surface. The cell is considerably larger than the virus; on the football-field scale, it’s 26 feet across. A billion years of evolution have equipped it to resist attackers. But it also has a vulnerability — a backdoor. Protruding from its surface is a chunk of protein called angiotensin converting enzyme 2, or ACE2 receptor. Normally, this molecule plays a role in modulating hormone activity within the body. Today, it’s going to serve as an anchor for the coronavirus.

 

As the spike protein bumps up against the surface of the lung cell, its shape matches that of the ACE2 so closely that it sticks to it like adhesive. The membrane of the virus then fuses with the membrane of the cell, spilling the RNA contents into the interior of the lung cell. The virus is in.

 

The viral RNA gets busy. The cell has its own genetic material, DNA, that produces copied fragments of itself in RNA form. These are continuously copied and sent into the main body of the cell, where they provide instructions for how to make the proteins that carry out all the functions of the cell. It’s like Santa’s workshop, where the elves, dutifully hammering out the toys on Santa’s instructions, are complexes of RNA and protein called ribosomes.

As soon as the viral RNA encounters a ribosome, that ribosome begins reading it and building viral proteins. These proteins then help the viral RNA to copy itself, and these copies then hijack more of the cell’s ribosomes. Other viral proteins block the cell from fighting back. Soon the cell’s normal business is completely overwhelmed by the demands of the viral RNA, as its energy and machinery are occupied with building the components of countless replica viruses.

As they are churned out, these components are transferred on a kind of cellular conveyor belt toward the surface of the cell. The virus membrane and spike proteins wrap around RNA strands, and a new particle is ready. These collect in internal bubbles, called vesicles, that move to the surface, burst open, and release new virus particles into your body by the tens and hundreds of thousands.

 

Meanwhile, spike proteins that haven’t been incorporated into new viruses embed themselves directly into the host cell’s membrane so that it latches onto the surface of an adjacent cell, like a pirate ship lashing itself to a helpless merchantman. The two cells then fuse, and a whole host of viral RNA swarms over into the new host cell.

All up and down your lungs, throat, and mouth, the scene is repeated over and over as cell after cell is penetrated and hijacked. Assuming the virus behaves like its relative, SARS, each generation of infection takes about a day and can multiply the virus a millionfold. The replicated viruses spill out into the mucus, invade the bloodstream, and pour through the digestive system.

 

You don’t feel any of this. In fact, you still feel totally fine. If you have any complaint at all, it’s boredom. You’ve been a dutiful citizen, staying at home to practice social distancing, and after two days of bingeing on the Fast & Furious franchise, you decide that your mental health is at risk if you don’t get outside.

 

You call up an ex, and she agrees to meet you for a walk along the river. You’re hoping that the end-of-the-world zeitgeist might kindle some afternoon recklessness, but the face mask she’s wearing kills the vibe. Also she tells you that she’s decided to move in with a guy she met at Landmark. You didn’t even know she was into Landmark. She gives you a warm hug as you say good-bye, and you tell her it was great to see her, but you leave feeling deflated. What she doesn’t know is that an hour before, you went to the bathroom and neglected to wash your hands afterward. The invisible fecal smear you leave on the arm of her jacket contains 893,405 virus particles. Forty-seven seconds after she gets home, she’ll hang up her coat and then scratch an itch at the base of her nose just before she washes her hands. In that moment, 9,404 viral particles will transfer to her face. In five days, an ambulance will take her to Mount Sinai.

 

Like a retail chain gobbled up by private equity, stripped for parts, and left to die, your infected cells spew out virus particles until they burn themselves out and expire. As fragments of disintegrated cells spread through your bloodstream, your immune system finally senses that something is wrong. White blood cells detect the fragments of dead cells and release chemicals called cytokines that serve as an alarm signal, activating other parts of the immune system to swing into action. When responding immune cells identify a cell that has become infected, they attack and destroy it. Within your body, a microscopic Battle of the Somme is raging with your immune system leveling its Big Berthas on both the enemy trenches and its own troops. As the carnage mounts, the body’s temperature rises and the infected area becomes inflamed.

 

Two days later, sitting down to lunch, you realize that the thought of eating makes you feel nauseated. You lie down and sleep for a few hours. When you wake up, you realize that you’ve only gotten worse. Your chest feels tight, and you’ve got a dry cough that just won’t quit. You wonder: Is this what it feels like? You rummage through your medicine cabinet in vain and ultimately find a thermometer in the back of your linen closet. You hold it under your tongue for a minute and then read the result: 102. Fuck, you think, and crawl back into bed. You tell yourself that it might just be the regular flu, and even if worse comes to worst, you’re young(-ish) and otherwise healthy. You’re not in the high-risk group.

 

You’re right, of course, in a sense. For most people infected with the coronavirus, that’s as far as it goes. With bed rest, they get better. But for reasons scientists don’t understand, about 20 percent of people get severely ill. Despite your relative youth, you’re one of them.

After four days of raging fever and feeling sore all over, you realize that you’re sicker than you’ve ever been in your life. You’ve got a dry cough that shakes you so hard that your back hurts. Fighting for breath, you order an Uber and head to the nearest emergency room. (You leave 376,345,090 virus particles smeared on various surfaces of the car and another 323,443,865 floating in aerosols in the air.)

 

At the ER, you’re examined and sent to an isolation ward. As doctors wait for the results of a test for the coronavirus, they administer a CT scan of your lungs, which reveals tell-tale “ground-glass opacities,” fuzzy spots caused by fluid accumulating where the immune-system battle is the most intense. Not only have you got COVID-19, but it’s led to a kind of intense and dangerous pneumonia called acute-respiratory-distress syndrome, or ARDS.

With all the regular beds already occupied by the many COVID-19 sufferers, you’re given a cot in a room alongside five other patients. Doctors put you on an intravenous drip to supply your body with nutrients and fluids as well as antiviral medicine. Within a day of your arrival, your condition deteriorates. You throw up for several days and start to hallucinate. Your heart rate slows to 50 beats a minute. When a patient in the next room dies, doctors take the ventilator he was using and put you on it. By the time the nurse threads the endotracheal tube down your throat, you’re only half-conscious of the sensation of it snaking deeper and deeper toward your lungs. You just lie there as she places tape over your mouth to keep the tube in place.

 

You’re crashing. Your immune system has flung itself into a “cytokine storm” — an overdrive of such intensity that it is no longer fighting just the viral infection but the body’s own cells as well. White blood cells storm your lungs, destroying tissue. Fluid fills the tiny alveolar sacs that normally let the blood absorb oxygen. Effectively, you’re drowning, even with the ventilator pumping oxygen-enriched air into your lungs.

 

That’s not the worst of it. The intensity of the immune response is such that under its onslaught, organs throughout the body are shutting down, a process known as multiple-organ-dysfunction syndrome, or MODS. When your liver fails, it is unable to process toxins out of your blood, so your doctors rush to hook you up to a round-the-clock dialysis machine. Starved of oxygen, your brain cells begin to expire.

You’re fluttering on the edge between life and death. Now that you’ve slipped into MODS, your odds are 50-50 or worse. Owing to the fact that the pandemic has stretched the hospital’s resources past the breaking point, your outlook is even bleaker.

Lying on your cot, you half-hear as the doctors hook you up to an extracorporeal-membrane-oxygenation (ECMO) machine. This will take over the work of your heart and lungs and hopefully keep you alive until your body can find its way back to equilibrium.

 

And then, you are flooded with an overwhelming sense of calm. You sense that you have reached the nadir of your struggle. The worst of the danger is over. With the viral attack beaten, your body’s immune system will pull back, and you’ll begin the slow, painstaking journey to full recovery. Some weeks from now, the doctors will remove the tube from your throat and wheel away the ventilator. Your appetite will come back, and the color will return to your cheeks, and on a summer morning you’ll step out into the fresh air and hail a cab for home. And later still, you’ll meet the girl who will become your wife, and you’ll have three children, two of whom will have children of their own, who will visit you in your nursing home outside Tampa.

That’s what your mind is telling itself, anyway, as the last cells of your cerebral cortex burst in starburst waves, like the glowing algae in a midnight lagoon. In the isolation ward, your EKG goes to a steady tone. The doctors take away the ventilator and give it to a patient who arrived this morning. In the official records of the COVID-19 pandemic, you’ll be recorded as victim No. 592.

Therein lies the double edged sword. The problem with these articles is that whilst they're factually correct in certain circumstances they drive up a stress in the general population and stress in and of itself negatively affects your immune system and its capability of fighting off the stressor

[J-V]

15 minutes ago, Bjornebye said:

I’m sure it’s not connected to this virus but i’m back sat on the bog. 

Having the shits is one of the symptoms.

[Anubis]

The only depressing thing about that intelligencer piece is that some cunt thought it would be a good idea to write a piece of virus slash fiction designed to spread panic amongst an already panicked population.

[Spy Bee]