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KBOO's Daily COVID-19 News Updates from March 2020 - May 8 2020

What to do - flatten the curve:

Flattenthecurve.com says Americans should Assume that the virus is already in your city / town / workplace / church / etc. It almost certainly is “here” and is simply not yet detected due to the shortage of tests. Moreover, there are 6 states that still don’t have a single lab ready to carry out the test even if they had one in their hands. 

Estimates from Italy are that in the early outbreak, the number of actual infections was four times the number of cases than it was possible to confirm at the time. Cryptic transmission in the community was happening for weeks before it was detected in Seattle. Seattle and Stanford are doing an amazing job of getting up to speed with their own testing kits; about 5-7% of tests in Seattle are positive and anyone (with a doctor’s indication) can be tested.

Nationwide, local and state health departments have lost nearly a quarter of their work force since 2008, according to the National Association of County and City Health Officials. As the nation’s local and state public health officials confront a pandemic that has paralyzed much of the world, many of them have made their situation plain: They are heading into a crisis without the resources they need.

In the US, our health care capacity is under 1 million staffed beds; this is not adequate to accommodate the number of hospitalizations we are expected to see -- which is likely to be 4 to 8 million, according to Bloomberg News.

Flattening the curve slows the rate at which new cases arrive in hospitals, easing the burden on health care infrastructure and improving the odds that individual patients will survive. Social distancing and choosing to stay home right now will play a huge role in ensuring the epidemic spreads slower and with less impact. More information about this can be found on flatten the curve dot com.

The Washington Post has also created powerful visualizations showing the spread of the virus with no action, with quarantining of certain areas, and with social distancing - showing how important social distancing is right now, in the early stage of the pandemic in this country and state.