that doesn't explain why Italy is so overwhelmed that they ran out of beds and respirators.

It doesn't have to. Italy has its own problem of a population of elderly people who smoke a lot. There can always be localities which will have problems during this season. Hopefully the excessive attention given to this time will help now and in the future.

The media will keep milking the COVID-19 issue as long as they can use it against Trump.

I would like to take the antigen test to see if I have already had it and just not known. I had a really bad flu or something back in the fall. It's what made me end up in the hospital for a month after my bypass surgery. I ended up on a respirator for 2 weeks. I wonder if that could have been the covid-19 spreading around before anyone even knew about it?

FWIU, for things like respirators and other supplies they were relying heavily on other member states in the EU if the need arose. When it did the other members said they couldn't spare any and left Italy to fend for themselves (one report even claimed that Germany forbade doctors from leaving the country to help).

If any of this is true I cannot see Italy staying in the EU after the dust finally settles.

Have you been checking for the rate of this virus in your part of the country?

I have wondered if this virus had been widespread in America during this whole season. It may not have become a headline until after the Wuhan events.

When was the last time you had bat for lunch? Haha. We may not have evidence that this came from bats--I have not looked into this nor do I plan to eat a bat stew.

That is nuts. Almost baghdad Bobish. We can see what is happening daily. We are already at 23,621 dead and the number of cases and the number of deaths looks like a rocket headed straight up.

Global_03262020.jpg

You have something saying that UK deaths exceeded 20,000?

Maybe you misread the initial post.

As I understand it, the panic in America is largely based on Feguson's projections for the UK.

I'm not sure why people don't like good news.

They have bunches of OLD people and they ALL SMOKE.

Yeah, I suspect that's what I had in the Fall, when the doc told me "this stuff (cold/flu/cough) is staying on in people for over a month, when it used to be just about a week".

A couple years ago, my dad had a cough that lasted for 3 months or so. This can happen any time. Again, I wonder how much this virus would have been found 4 or 5 months ago in the States. We just were not looking for it.

guys - there is a reason this is called the NOVEL coronavirus. It is new. It is not a flu virus. AFAIK, They are a completely different kind of virus. This virus evolved from a kind of virus that lives in bats or pangolins, and it evolved in China. The DNA has been sequenced and the mutations required to be transmissible in Humans identified. We know what it came from. And there is no evidence it has been floating around the world for months and months before this happened in China. If it had, given it's mortality and it's genome, we'd have noticed and we would know.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/release...0317175442.htm

Considering the measures China took to suppress this, I wouldn't be surprised if it was "in the wild" long before the rest of the world knew the Chinese coronavirus was even a thing.

There you go again - off with the paranoid conspiracy Thing. Again, we know its origin both genetically and geographically.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/release...0317175442.htm

I've been wondering that myself. Anytime something positive is posted concerning the Wuhan flu, folks like oxmixmudd and carpe run in yelling, "But look how scary these projections are!!!!" It's like the liberal pundit who suggested that conservatives and Republicans were more likely to get sick because our optimism would make us less cautious.