Day 51 of the Coronavirus in France (part 2)
“Head of the infectiology department at the Pitié-Salpétrière hospital in Paris, Eric Caumes, also trained in epidemiology, is these days taking his “lucid pessimism” to TV sets. The 63-year-old clinician sees his department filling up with coronavirus patients. “I hope I’m wrong, but I think a major health crisis is looming,” says the specialist, who adds: “We’re too selfish. We refuse to understand that by isolating ourselves we also protect others.”
If you wait until it’s trendy then you’ll be calling your loved ones regretting to inform them that you just found out you had been exposed prior to seeing them.
We just got our first call. A colleague just called us to let us know that they have been exposed. Earlier last week, and prior to the last time we saw them, they enjoyed time together with someone who had no symptoms and did not know they were exposed.
The concept of six degrees of separation has been engrained in our society. We have seen other contagions with long asymptomatic incubation periods. But we have never seen anything super spreaders in our lifetime that infects this many people this fast. When one person has the flu they might infect one person around them. With this it’s more like hundreds.
Our thoughts are focused on this day and night. Yesterday my husband had a sore throat, today I have nasal drip. Neither of these are symptoms of acute coronavirus.
Our neighborhood is fortunate to have a well-connected doctor Nicolas About who in addition to being a Physician is also a Former Senator, Honorary Member of Parliament, and Former Mayor. He recommends make-shift masks like these coffee filters.
Today one of our stay at home activities is fabricating face masks.
Our thinking, how we process the world, will forever be altered. Cami wanted to color her mask. I’m all for banalizing the new normal. My husband instructed her to go get markers. She raced upstairs and as down in a flash. And then the thought hit me. No markers. Why? Well, it is a liquid, and we don’t know if that will compromise the protective barrier that we are trying to create.
The best advice is to throw away your mask after one use.
This is not a time for a scientific experiment to see if exposure to other liquids also deteriorate their effectiveness. Choose the path that errors on the side of safety.
Things will hit you after the fact that you realize you should have done differently.
I just caught myself telling my six year old to stop monkeying around. Usually I’m the mom that encourages climbing and learning new developmental growths. But today I had to tell her to stop climbing. Because normally if she fell, we would have hospitals to go to. No more climbing until this is over.
Purell® announced today that they are actively hiring employees to produce more hand sanitizer. If you are healthy and unexposed today then don’t go to work as usual. Close the office and volunteer at the hospital, volunteer in factories producing masks, volunteer at Purell. Stop family gatherings. Wherever you are, start getting used to the idea that you are stranded there.
Musician Elias Wallace is still active but when he comes home he has a clean room set up where he removes all of his outside clothes and dresses in inside clothes after taking a full shower to protect his family. His daughter has diabetes. Take every precaution to not spread the contagion to people who are trying desperately to protect their loved ones.
Remember the same number of people will get sick in the end. But the treatment is long so there is very little turnover of hospital rooms and ventilators. Slow the spread so that hospitals can keep up.