Our RV Adventures

Tomorrow morning Jan and I have our annual doctor checkup appointments. I was wondering if they were still on, since we didn’t get the usual robocalls confirming our appointments. So I put in a call to the office and talked to them.

When I ask about our appointments, the lady went off for a couple of minutes and came back and told me that they were only doing Tele-Health appointments using FaceTime. When I reminded her that these were our annual checkups that involved a lot of blood tests and peeing in a jar, she again went off for a couple of more minutes. This time when she came back, she said ‘OK’, and that we could come in for our 8am appointment as long as we were feeling OK.

Jan was also supposed to get her yearly mammogram tomorrow afternoon at 1;30 and we got a robocall this morning confirming it. But then this afternoon I got a people-person call asking if Jan could come in at 9am tomorrow morning instead. When I told her Jan had another appointment at that time, she rescheduled her for 7:30am Thursday.

Yikes! That’s two days this week I have to get up way too early. But since it’s for my Sweetie, it’s OK.

Last week I mentioned Chloroquine and Hydroxychloroquine as a possible preventive/cure for the WuFlu. And now much more data is coming in. And it looks very, very promising.

New York State has acquired 70,000 doses of hydroxychloroquine, 10,000 doses of Zithromax and 750,000 doses of chloroquine, and the trials will start tomorrow.

And a doctor in a hard-hit area of the state has come up with a treatment regimen for the virus.

Hydroxychloroquine
   400mg Twice a Day on Day 1
   200mg Twice a Day on Day’s 2-5

Azithromycin (Z-pack)
   500mg Once a Day for 5 Days

Zinc Sulfate
   220mg Once a Day for 5 Days

The doctor and his associates have treated a total of 500 cases using these drugs.

The results:

0 Deaths, 0 Hospitalizations, and 0 Intubations (Respirators or Ventilators)

When asked about these results, another infectious disease specialist said that with this number of patients, normally you would have 30-40 hospitalizations and 3-5 deaths.

I certainly know what I want to take if I get the WuFlu (again). I’m going to ask my doctor tomorrow it they can check my blood for the WuFlu antibodies, which would tell whether I actually had it.

Finishing up, when Jan and I were at WalMart this past Saturday, I noticed that the Soup area was pretty stripped too, with only a few very unpopular flavors like Green Pea and Cream of Asparagus left. And this new release doesn’t seem to  be real popular either.

 
I wonder why?

Thought For The Day:

Be careful when you follow the masses. Often the ‘M’ is silent.

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As I mentioned before, I thought that as the WuFlu testing ramped up, the mortality rate would drop. This is because I thought that the number of deaths would continue its much slower climb. And that seems to be what’s happening.

• 4.06% March   8 (22 deaths of 541 cases)
• 3.69% March   9 (26 of 704)
• 3.01% March 10 (30 of 994)
• 2.95% March 11 (38 of 1,295)
• 2.52% March 12 (42 of 1,695)
• 2.27% March 13 (49 of 2,247)
• 1.93% March 14 (57 of 2,954)
• 1.84% March 15 (68 of 3,680)
• 1.83% March 16 (86 of 4,663)
• 1.70% March 17 (109 of 6,411)
• 1.57% March 18 (150 of 9,259)
• 1.50% March 19 (207 of 13,789)
• 1.34% March 20 (256 of 18,980)
• 1.55% March 21 (302 of 19,383)
• 1.24% March 22 (419 of 33,546)

And except for that one little upblip on the 21st, it’s been a constant decrease in the death rate.

Unfortunately I think there’s a lot of outrageous information roaming around on the Internet, especially on Facebook.

I saw someone posting that she had read some official saying to expect over 1,000,000 deaths in the U.S, even with how everything’s shut down now.

Or maybe like this Dallas County Judge who thinks there’s a possibility of over 580,000 deaths. And even his best-case scenarios aren’t very realistic.

The real problem with both of those numbers is that they’re in the range of the total U.S. deaths from the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic, which was about about 675,000 deaths.

And based on a 1% mortality rate, that would mean that 5.83 million people would have had to be infected. Right now we’re had less than 40,000. That means that the infection rate would have to go up over 145 times what is now.

In the next 3 weeks!  Does anyone really think this is going to happen?

The CDC is still saying that 80%-90% of those infected will show little or no symptoms. I heard from some friends and some readers who have experienced symptoms like mine, and at about the same time. So I’m not sure where some of these wild figures are coming from.

And, although every death is meaningful to someone, we’re now at 23,000 deaths for the seasonal flu so far since last fall.

DON”T PANIC!

Later this afternoon Jan and I went outside, and with her help, we laid the shed box down on its side and pulled the top off.

Since it was still sprinkling, all I really wanted to do was pull out the instruction manual since I didn’t want it to get wet. I do have a downloaded copy, but sometimes there are updates in the box, as there was this time, a change in the number of several parts.

We hope to get started in the next few days while we’re in quarantine. Though it’s hard to tell since I will be going into work tomorrow as usual.

And if you want something for your kids to do while you’re all cooped up together, you might try this latest offering from the Lego folks.

Fun for the whole family.

Ya’ll stay safe out there.

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Thought For The Day:

The WuFlu is the 21st Century version of Tulip Mania. At some point, people will wake up and wonder what madness drove them fill their living room with cases of toilet paper.

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