As a public health professional, I would like to remind everybody on Guam, while living with the islandwide shutdown order, to immediately recall what happened to your family last flu season.
If flu virus was passing around within your family, your workplace or your circle of friends, you and your family would be at a relatively higher risk for contracting the coronavirus during this pandemic because of your lifestyle. What you have to do now is to make major changes to start eating healthy, living healthy, covering your cough, and practicing good personal hygiene right away to protect your family.
After so many countries around the world reported cases, the coronavirus appears to be showing its flu-like pandemic pattern with its ability of easily spreading among people. Thoroughly follow flu prevention measures is therefore the most relevant protection for everybody. More importantly, a collaboration of Hong Kong University and Harvard University has estimated the case fatality rate (CFR) of COVID-19 should be around 1.4% while the CFR of a regular seasonal flu is 0.1% only. Obviously, we have to take the virus seriously with a right strategy.
In fact, most of infected people around the globe experienced mild flu-like symptoms only. According to a study published by Italy National Health Institute on March 17, 96.3% of fatal victims in Italy were patients over 60 years old. 99.2% of Italy’s coronavirus fatalities were people with at least one chronic medical condition, such as hypertension, diabetes and heart disease. Therefore, If the resources are limited, our system really has to focus on taking care of the elderly and people with underlying medical conditions in our community because they are at a higher risk for severe illness.
(Photos: Screenshots of Bloomberg's webpage)
References
Report released by Italy National Health Institute:
Bloomberg's report:
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