Ah, the novel coronavirus! The way things are playing out, its story will be a novel, all right!
But does it have to be that way? Isn’t there anything that could turn it into a novelette coronavirus? One with a much shorter history of impact and grip on humanity?
It might well turn out that whomever labeled the coronavirus as “novel”, might have given it a far more meaningful name than they knew!
For all the news about support for dealing with COVID-19 and the associated pandemic happening, there’s been remarkably little about mental health support. That’s shocking considering:
People facing all kinds of new unknowns and uncertainties, with serious harm potentially at stake. People locked away for a few weeks at a time if they might have COVID-19, or just locked away in areas of extreme lock down. You don’t think people are going to need some mental health services in all this???
I hope someone is seriously planning for LOTS of additional mental health support to help people around the world get through all of this!
So will the rest of the world unless you’ve been piecing things together.
Next to no testing for weeks with sufficient number of cases going around, from government direction to a health care system that doesn’t incentivize doing so.
People can spread for 5 days without having any symptoms, never mind once they do and still don’t get tested.
People ignoring social distancing and actually bragging about it! Though they’re not ignoring stocking up on toilet paper, apparently, and bragging about it, too! Typical American bravado of we’re better, can’t happen to us, or at least me, we got it covered, etc. We’ll see about that, one way or the other.
So how much will be the shock? My best guess from learning about the DOTS model for spread, with parameters for COVID-19, is it’s going to easily outnumber China’s peak by summer, if not sooner, pending how much testing will actually be done. It’s easy to say you don’t have a lot of cases, and be “honest” about it, if you don’t test to know… kind of like now.
But please do NOT spread like fear mongering rumour. I’m not claiming to be an expert. I just believe I have enough to know to put out a plausible guess, to see if that self-assessment is correct, or incorrect, and to what extent.
So this is “for the record” to look back upon.
Yes, I’m encouraging you to go buy some toilet paper.
But it’s for a good cause! Is that wrong?
It’s not a matter of if, but when.
World leaders are around just too many people avoid it.
So how will the world react?
I can’t wait to see!
How will you react?
Digital Citizen 