How about a CDC on-line questionnaire

[Ole Anderson]

How do they determine how many folks get the flu each year if most just wait it out at home and never tell their health care provider? Wonder if there would be value in an on-line "risk assessment tool?" Go to the CDC website and fill out a questionnaire if you have symptoms which then would categorize them as just the common cold, maybe stomach or respiratory flu or possibly COVID-19. Would include questions of recent travel, contact with sick people, extent of social distancing and so on. You would do a series of yes-no questions on symptoms including your temperature. You would give risk factors such as age, location, underlying illnesses. It would return a qualified opinion, maybe with a percentage, of your likelihood of having a suspected condition as well as whether it warrants a doctor visit, trip to the ER or getting a test for COVID-19.

This would give them a huge database to analyze.

This concept could be taken to the extreme and be used to screen for most any disease, particularly those with a rare combination of symptoms. Just a thought. Too many of those as we sit in semi-quarantine with both of us hacking and in the high risk group.

I went to five stores yesterday just to find a thermometer. Found the last one at a CVS, reason it was the last one is that it was the $50 Exergen Temporal scanner. No toilet paper to be found, we are down to 2 rolls. Good news is that I got out into the Gulf fishing yesterday with my BIL, got to soak up some vitamin D. No luck on keeper size fish though. But we went out last Friday in Tampa Bay and I landed a big 5# 10 oz sheepshead though!

[Matt Day]

You’re supposed to call your primary care physician if you’re sick. They’ll ask questions over the phone and determine what to do next. People can be over dramatic, and erroneously self diagnose. An online survey might be helpful, but a call to the doctor is necessary before showing up in the ER. Where you might get COVID19 even though you didn’t have it to begin with.

[Ole Anderson]

The reason for such a questionnaire is screening to avoid unnecessary trips to the ER or your doctor, or to encourage folks to indeed seek treatment. There are folks that don't go when they should and others that go when they shouldn't. But there are plenty of folks with time on their hands and an internet connection. Ever try to get your doctor on a phone?

[Frederick Skelly]

The reason for such a questionnaire is screening to avoid unnecessary trips to the ER or your doctor, or to encourage folks to indeed seek treatment. There are folks that don't go when they should and others that go when they shouldn't. But there are plenty of folks with time on their hands and an internet connection. Ever try to get your doctor on a phone?

IIRC, Matt is married to a doctor Ole. So his perspective is bound to be different on some things. For example, he can just ask her questions at supper.

FWIW, my health insurance provider has a number I can call for such consults. But not everyone's may.

[Mark Daily]

This would give them a huge database to analyze.

And therein lies a problem: Who designs & implements the database? Who sifts through it? What do they do with the info?

And being a federal project, it will be easy to hack and soon all the information gathered will be for sale on the dark web.

:cool:

[Edwin Santos]

Governor Cuomo's guidance to the state of NY this morning is that if you have symptoms, don't do anything except self isolate. Even if you got a test and tested positive, unless you become acute and needed hospitalization, there is not any special treatment they can do because we do not have an antiviral treatment identified yet. So self-isolate unless your symptoms become acute at which time you should go to a doctor, urgent care or ER. For most their symptoms will not become acute and over time their body will develop immunity and recover in a similar process to what often happens with the conventional flu.

As inconvenient as it is, I think everyone should self isolate and shelter-in-place as much as possible. I'm shocked Florida's officials are letting spring break continue on the beaches.

A report came out of the NIH yesterday that tested the lifespan of the virus on various surfaces. It found that the virus can remain active (infectious) on surfaces such as plastic or stainless steel for up to three days. Less for copper or cardboard. Here's a link for anyone interested: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/new-coronavirus-stable-hours-surfaces

One other thing - the CDC does have an assessment flowchart on their website, but I'm not going to link it because any fool can see it is already way outdated (asking if you've traveled recently from Hubei, China). The whole situation is fluid.

[Ole Anderson]

Maybe I am just overthinking things. Comes with being an engineer. But this whole event might change the way we do things in the future. We should be looking for how to make new things work, not why they can’t.

[roger wiegand]

The data I would want would be random surveillance data-- go into an area, collect say 10-20,000 anonymous samples over a three day period, then measure virus prevalence in the general population. Collecting the samples would cost some money, but the assays themselves are dirt cheap. This presumes a functioning public health system.

[Ole Anderson]

Looks like that there is an on-line risk assessment tool: https://secure.beaumont.org/covidrisk

[James Waldron]

Current practice is for primary care docs to report the number of "flu-like" presentations in the office. Very quietly, the keepers (at NIH, I think) apply a fudge factor for the hypochondriacs reporting with minor sniffles (usually reasonably filtered out by the docs). Then there is a fudge factor for under-reported flu-like folks who never present to the doc. And, depending on the use to be made of the data, there is a fudge factor for the "flu-like" presentations which are not influenza. The result is not a lie and it is not a damned lie. But it is statistics. In the last analysis, it is reasonably stable and consistent and represents the best the white coat folks can get and it's far more reliable than self-reported data from sick folks entered on-line.

The same system collects data on actual flu tests as well, but far fewer than all flu presentations in the office get a flu test (some insurance companies won't cover the test, some docs won't deploy the resources to provide data they don't need to decide how to treat their patient, etc.).