Stay home. Best regards, coronavirus.
If you know just six people over the age of 80 and they all catch COVID-19, statistically, one of them will die. For ages 70–79, it’s eleven people.
If you have four grandparents and an elderly couple walks by you at the grocery store — all six of them over 80 — you may be responsible for one of them dying if you accidentally spread the coronavirus to them.
That’s hard for me to write. It sounds hyperbolic, and it sounds unbelievable to me. And yet, statistically speaking, that’s the science behind coronavirus and why folks should be staying home as much as possible. 18% of those aged 80+ who get the coronavirus disease die. 9.8% of those aged 70–79 die.
I have four neighbors that I suspect are over 70 (I’ve never asked their age) whose yards abut my property. I’m sure there are at least another seven within a block of my house. I’m not worried much about me or my kids getting the virus, we’ll survive this. But I’ll be damned (literally) if I let myself or my children be the reason that someone unnecessarily dies.
If you’ve heard this is just like the flu, it’s not. It’s up to 34 times deadlier (3400%). My understanding is that it can shut down your entire lungs. Pneumonia usually shuts down just a portion of them. I can see why this is much worse than the seasonal flu.
Stay home as much as you can. If about 70% of people don’t spread a virus (e.g. through immunity or by self-isolating) that’s similar to herd immunity and it can severely slow down a pandemic. Presumably, it’s less than 70% when you’re just trying to slow it down enough to give hospitals room to handle the load — like is being done in the United States.
Let the doctors, nurses, the clerk checking you out of the grocery store, and other important roles out there do their jobs. Limit your exposure to other people to what’s necessary — be that doing work your employer requires of you or buying food from the grocery. You can protect your neighbors from the virus, but without a vaccine, the best way to do that is to stay home, not get infected, and not spread it to others.
