Why Trump Isn't Overreacting To Covid19
Over at Powerline there's a new post up that is rather interesting. What it is--after a brief intro--is an email from a highly credentialed ("expert") medical professor and researcher. This is the author of the email:
Holding both M.D. and Ph.D. degrees, Dr. [Matthew] Meyerson is professor of genetics and medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is also Director of the Center for Cancer Genomics at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Meyerson takes exception to recent posts at Powerline which in his view "understimat[e] the seriousness of this epidemic.”
What I'm going to do is summarize the five points that Meyerson makes--you can read his full argument at Matthew Meyerson: Five COVID-19 theses . Then I'll provide some additional excerpts from an article I read early this morning. That article is by a professor of biology at Texas A&M (Texarkana) and sheds some light on why a virus like SARS-Cov-2 on the loose is an epidemiologist's nightmare. I believe the article lends support to Meyerson's Five Theses.
Here we go, and remember that my summaries are really just thumbnails--Five Theses re Covid-19:
1. COVID-19 is very highly transmissible. ...
2. COVID-19 causes severe illness in medical professionals and otherwise healthy young people. There are numerous examples of previously healthy young people, especially physicians, who are becoming severely ill or dying from COVID-19 infections. This almost never happens in other diseases. ...
3. It is hard to compare deaths from COVID-19 to deaths from influenza. ...
4. I do not believe that we are overreacting to COVID-19. We are seeing a highly transmissible disease ... That would suggest the possibility of [millions of] deaths in the US if we got to 300 million infections, and we could. We will likely have far fewer deaths than this ...
5. Until we have treatments and vaccines, preventing transmission is the only way to go. ...
Being a non-scientist, I'm in no position to endorse Meyerson's theses per se. However, the article I referenced above (What the coronavirus does to your body that makes it so deadly , by Benjamin Neuman) provides some specifics on SARS-CoV-2 that help explain why allowing this virus to become endemic within the US could lead to catastrophic consequences. As we've learned in the last few days, the people who are vulnerable to this virus span a large cross section of our population--one that is not limited to "old people." Smokers, fat people, diabetics, people with high blood pressure or other heart related diseases--we can't quarantine them all indefinitely. Moreover, even among those who "recover," there is the real possibility of serious damage to the lungs and possible other organs. Neuman's article--and I urge you to follow the link for the entire piece--provides facts that help explain all this. Here's my brief summary:
SARS-CoV-2 is highly transmissible and--by the standards that we're used to in infectious diseases, like seasonal flu--highly deadly. Since there is no immunity to the virus, if left unchecked it could spread to many millions of people due to its highly transmissible nature. The more it spreads, the more likely it will be to find those who are most vulnerable, and the more deaths we will have--deaths on a scale to dwarf all war deaths in our history. The virus' ability to block the immune system will help see to that. Even among those who "recover," there could be long term, serious health consequences. This explains the drastic action that Trump has taken. Excerpts:
A coronavirus infection usually plays out one of two ways: as an infection in the lungs that includes some cases of what people would call the common cold, or as an infection in the gut that causes diarrhea. COVID-19 starts out in the lungs like the common cold coronaviruses, but then causes havoc with the immune system that can lead to long-term lung damage or death.
SARS-CoV-2 is genetically very similar to other human respiratory coronaviruses , including SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV. However, the subtle genetic differences translate to significant differences in how readily a coronavirus infects people and how it makes them sick.
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... SARS-CoV-2 has a totally different set of genes called accessories, which give this new virus a little advantage in specific situations.
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The cells that SARS-CoV-2 prefers to infect have a protein called ACE2 on the outside that is important for regulating blood pressure.
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SARS-CoV-2 grows in type II lung cells, ... As with SARS, most of the damage in COVID-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus, is caused by the immune system carrying out a scorched earth defense to stop the virus from spreading. Millions of cells from the immune system invade the infected lung tissue and cause massive amounts of damage in the process of cleaning out the virus and any infected cells.
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The ACE2 protein that SARS-CoV-2 uses as a door to enter cells is also important for regulating blood pressure, and it does not do its job when the virus gets there first. This is one reason COVID-19 is more severe in people with high blood pressure.
SARS-CoV-2 is more severe than seasonal influenza in part because it has many more ways to stop cells from calling out to the immune system for help. For example, one way that cells try to respond to infection is by making interferon, the alarm signaling protein. SARS-CoV-2 blocks this ...
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At present, the transmission rate of SARS-CoV-2 is a little higher than that of the pandemic 2009 H1N1 influenza virus, but SARS-CoV-2 is at least 10 times as deadly. From the data that is available now, COVID-19 seems a lot like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), though it’s less likely than SARS to be severe.
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