please don't believe the "it's no worse than the flu" BS. it is much worse than the flu. someone in your life must be a nurse or doctor treating COVID patients. ask them how much worse it is. right now there is no vaccine or cure for this disease. chances are your various family members have already gotten their flu shots for the current flu season so even if you carry flu cooties to them, they're much less likely to contract influenza. if you infect them with COVID there's nothing to stop it unless they get lucky and end up as an asymptomatic case, at which point they'll be spreading it to everyone they come in contact with. is it worse in nursing home type places? absolutely. do people outside of these facilities still get it and DIE no matter their pre-COVID health status or age? yes they do. even if you don't die, depending on severity it can do irreparable damage to your lung tissue.
yes, between 24k and 62k people die in the USA each year of the flu. https://www.cdc.gov/...n-estimates.htm
Canada is naturally lower, 500 - 1500 deaths. https://ipac-canada....es.php#SEASONAL
80k have died of COVID in the USA in the last FOUR+ months.https://ncov2019.liv...ta/unitedstates
5k have died of COVID in Canada:https://ncov2019.live/data/canada
I don't believe we need to lock ourselves away for eternity but I do believe that some common sense safety measures are needed right now and for the foreseeable future.
I'm very well versed in the data - here are a few issues with the link you provided re the USA - the actual covid 19 death count is just shy of 50k from 2/1 to 5/9... straight from the CDC site: https://www.cdc.gov/...vid19/index.htm
Once you start lumping in influenza, pneumonia OR covid, you start reaching the 100k number the media loves to float around. Now remember, the 49k number is cases with "confirmed or presumed covid 19"... we also know that hospitals have shut down all elective procedures and doctors, nurses and other staff are getting furloughed or laid off (I have a family member that is an ER nurse whose whole ER shut down and she lost her job) and they are hurting financially in general due to lack of elective procedures happening. Medicare pays $5k to the hospitals for lets say garden-variety pneumonia but $13k for covid19 related pneumonia and 39k for a vent for covid... after the CDC relaxed guidelines from a positive test to a presumption of positive, it's not hard to see that broke hospitals have a financial incentive in this.
Furthermore, in places where widespread testing has been done, such as Marion County Prison in Ohio or the Charles de Gaulle French Navy ship, there have been a huge percentage that were positive with absolutely no symptoms - in Marion County, 78 percent of inmates were positive, 60 percent experienced little to no symptoms and would not have been tested otherwise... when you look at that or the preliminary antibody testing numbers in NYC, we see that the infection rate is way greater than reported, but that also means that the hospitalization rate and mortality rate are significantly lower than being reported and percentage-wise, are actually on par with the flu. Where covid differs and is more serious than the flu, relatively, is in the incubation period as well as the part of the respiratory tract that it attaches to... I get that part of it. That said, on a percentage basis, it's very similar.
Beyond that, everyone is hoping for a vaccine being the answer but the track record of respiratory vaccines is really bad. Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) has been around and killing individuals since the mid-1960's, and there is still no vaccine over 50 years later, not for lack of scientific effort. Same deal with SARS since 2003 - still no vaccine. The reality that people need to wake up to is that there isn't always going to be a shortcut to health - a pill, a shot, a vaccine, even hospital care at times as we've seen with this - health starts from within and what you put in your body, and America specifically is horrible about this.
But to bring this full circle back on topic, I lived in Atlanta off and on for over 10 years up until last year and showered 3x a week at the rink you are talking about and never had any issue healthwise from there.
showers are not my concern during all of this. being around people who take no safety precautions in their daily life and possibly being asymptomatic is more of a concern. I am not in a high risk group and my parents have already passed so I would not be afraid of spreading it to them but I don't want this disease either if I can help it. perfectly healthy people are being hospitalized (exception not the rule but it IS happening) and ending up in the ICU. if I can prevent that by common sense safety measures then why not take those measures. it's pretty much the same reason I get a flu shot every year.
