What Happens If I Start A Thread About That "Coronavirus" Thing...?

I’m freaking out. I’m not worried about self isolation at all. I’m really worried about my parents but the thing which makes me anxious is that I don’t know when I’ll see them (and if i’ll see them) I can’t visit them to travel restrictions (and I wouldn’t risk it anyway) and I’m freaking out because of all the uncertainty. All those questions without the answers: How long is it going to last? What about my holiday? When I see my parents? Will I be able to travel in summer? I was planning to look for another job? What now? Should I wait and for how long? I’m not diagnosed yet and I was supposed have my assessment this summer? Will it still go ahead? Or is it going to be postponed for who knows how long? I’m worried about my mental health. I have chest tightness and I know it must be stress because sometimes I can distract myself and I feel fine but then I feel anxious and it comes back and it makes me even more anxious. 

Join the club on pre-existing conditions and panic.  I live with my parents that are in their 70's.  We all have pre-existing medical issues, mostly asthma and immune problems.  I have ASD and anxiety, ocd and general malaise mentally.  In the last two weeks I have used benzos far more than I normally do due to the news and the fact I am now worrying about getting the virus, infecting my parents, everyone dying.  I used to take maybe 1mg of diazepam in a month.  I used that much in the last 5 days.  Self isolating for 4 months doesnt worry me, but my parents are under the impression they can still go out and go cycling and walking, where as i see any isolation being more of a you can not leave your house for 4 months.  Which one is correct i dont know.  Add to that the fact my parents have recently travelled to two different countries in the world, and well that is enough to really get me going.  Also to top it off I have flu or some sort of bug that ticks some of the symptoms of covid but also ticks alot of the same symptoms for 99% of all the bugs we get in a year.  I am self isolating for 7 days.  Probably taking even more benzo to try and cope with the stress levels that seem to be rising by the day.

I normally go to the gym everyday and work out heavily to take care of the stress, but that isnt possible currently.  So I do expect it to get a little better.  I am also thinking of avoiding the news for the forseeable future.  If it comes for me and my ticket is up, I guess I will get to checkout of this bs life I currently have.

I’ll be honest, i’m starting to panic a bit now. But more about self isolation stuff. I’m in the bracket of people with pre existing medical conditions and may be told to self isolate like the over 70’s for what could be up to 4 months apparently. What panics me about this are some personal stuff to do with blood tests And medication I need administered by a nurse, but they’re not seen as life threatening, though they certainly feel so to me mentally, if I go without for a bit. I hope they’ll regard my potential mental health as important and don’t leave me waiting! I also have medical stuff I need that is a case of potential life and death where my leaving the flat to go for my treatment can’t be something I have to wait for. Beyond that it’s not so much the lack of contact with others, though i’m sure i’ll Start to feel the repercussions of no contact, but it’s the Idea of being stuck in one area for such a long length of time. I know that will drive me crazy. 

The Passion Play is postponed until next year. I've increased my medication back up due to the medication levels and am now spending a rather unhealthy amount of time thinking about death.

I too think that it's been blown out of proportion. I've not bought anything in bulk and carried on as normal. You can just order online if you have to stay in! As said above, more people die from regular flu. The media want to sell stories at the end of the day. Theyll over inflate situations. The human race never ceases to amaze me however. Hospitals are have hand sanitizers ripped from walls and masks stollen! People are fighting for toilet paper! The human race is a disgrace to be honest

Yes, I do agree with you, and my apologies if any of my earlier comments seemed a bit flippant (I have a nastly habit of writing that way sometimes). So many debates these days seem to become extremely polarised, especially in internet comments, FaceBook posts etc. that one has to wonder whether some of the more extreme scare-mongering hasn't encouraged other people to pull too hard in the other direction ("if they're saying that, then the opposite must be true" kind of thing, just as some "conspiracy theories" do have a nugget of truth hidden within them which gets dismissed along with the more far-fetched fantasies).

I'm very glad to see that DC's fears about that happening here haven't come to pass - there's no guarantee that the "median" opinion will be the right one, of course, but it seems a good place to start searching for the truth.

I agree we shouldn’t panic.

i just think people misinforming people that it’s just ‘another flu’ is dangerous too. If people go around thinking that they may not take as much care, just writing it off as ‘another flu’ and it’s people like me, with pre existing medical conditions that will pay for people not taking seriously enough. 

It does seem to be somewhat more virulent, yes; but as pointed out it the article I linked to previously, there are many reasons to think that the 3.4% headline figure is an overestimate - especially in places like Britain, with a healthcare system leagues ahead of that in e.g. Wuhan before emergency measure were put in place. The "of those infected" is also very important to keep in mind, too - in areas where the numbers infected are still very low, there are many very simple things that we can do to minimise the danger ("we" including the responses of our politicians, media, and health-care systems, of course).

"Stiff upper lip" and just ignoring it is certainly not a wise response, and I wouldn't advocate that at all. But at the same time, nor is irrational panic a wise response - it can lead to large numbers of people who are at minimal risk diverting resources from those people who really need them the most, and who may then become vectors for spreading the infection. A balanced and proportionate response will yield the best results, and the danger is that media scare-mongering may actually make the situation worse. If Coronavirus turns out to be less nasty than predicted to people in our immediate proximity, overreaction now could also lead to future warnings being taken less seriously than they ought to be (I have already heard people saying; "meh, SARS was far nastier and we didn't all die of that"; for example).

I think we also need to start looking at how our societies work more generally. Ever more of the world's population are living in big cities, and many people expect to be able to travel all over the world on a whim. That many of those new city dwellers live in places with poor habitation, sanitation, and health-care is something that really needs dealing with at a systemic level (as the situation in Wuhan clearly demonstrates). Even in the supposedly "advanced" USA, the need for health-insurance is quite rightly being highlighted as a deterrent to seeking confirmation of possible infection. We may also have to look at changing economic systems whereby necessary restrictions on air and sea travel cause widespread repercussions, and such measures as using video-conferencing much more widely as a substitute for business travel.

Before COVID, we had SARS, MERS, "swine-flu" etc. - it appears that, as a species, were setting ourselves up for these kinds of epidemics. It seems very unwise to get into a blind panic whenever a new one is discovered, only to then allow a slip back into complacency as soon as each scare passes. Whatever the eventual outcome of Coronovirus, we should continue with the sensible (and hardly all that inconvenient) precautions we're advised to take to minimise its spread - epidemic or not, I cringe whenever I see anyone sneeze without thinking to cover their face, or sneezing into the palm of their hand.

Quite right - I should watch what I might be seen to be encouraging, even if only in jest.

3.4% of those infected have died so far, less than 1% of people infected by the flu die generally speaking. 

And people still want to take the British stiff upper lip approach of "I don't understand, it's no worse than the flu." LOL. 

I really am autistic, with a self centred mind.

I never considered selling at profit.

I'm just stocking up for my own personal use.  The rest of the community can go to!!! 

They're actually taking a big risk - toilet paper is low profit but takes up a massive space and there's a chance that they'll get stuck with tons of the stuff.   Small/high profit items are a much better bet.

Unfortunately, where there is chaos, there is profit.

Then there are the people who buy up all the hand sanitiser and masks to later sell at a profit when demand peaks.  They single handedly create a bottleneck in both availability and affordability, which arguably causes further spread of infection because people either can't or won't pay the inflated price.  People say well that's capitalism, but it's literally facilitating the spread of the virus.  But hey, as long as some selfish *** makes a buck.

Yeah - the inconvenience is annoying - I've just been to order some stuff in the local town and popped into the Aldi there on the way back - no toilet roll or paracetamol!     What did people do in the old days?     It's ridiculous.    Could you imagine trying to run a war with stupid, selfish people like this?

I get it.

It's irrational panic,  mob hysteria and herd mentality. 

Thousands of people are killed and injured in traffic accidents every year,  but nobody talks about banning cars or not crossing the road.

I'm not really worried about illness or death because I'm already suicidal. 

My main concern is the inconvenience to my life, if we get quarantines or shortages etc.

I don't get it - the death rate of this virus is much lower than most other flu types  (we normally have about 1500 deaths per year)  but the hype around it seems strangely artificial - almost like the planned 2020 recession wasn't going to happen so certain powers have decided to force it via panic & scaremongering.   Interesting that it's a US election year and the swamp is desperate to get rid of Trump to stop him digging into their scams and fraud activities.   In the US, without any truth or evidence, CNN (The Clinton News Network) has started to headline this as a pandemic to panic the population - even though almost all of the (few) deaths in the US were in one old people's home.

It also coincides with a global oil price-war so suddenly reducing demand will make that much nastier for a lot of the countries and companies involved.

It also demonstrates the lunacy of open borders where knowingly-infected people are deliberately travelling West so they don't get stranded in third-world conditions.

I'm concerned - I have no immune system - but sceptical.

Bear in mind you can't flush newspaper down the toilet.

Indeed, there seems to be little attention being paid to the negative consequences of such relentless focus on the negatives for people with mental health and neurological conditions which make them more prone to catastrophising and anxiety. It may also lead to unnecessary pressure on overstretched health services, who really need to be conserving their resources for those people who are genuinely at greater risk or who's symptoms and circumstances suggest that they may have been infected.

The sensible precautions which should be taken are no more than should be a matter of routine, and there's nothing wrong with emphasising them. But the panicked buying of anti-bacterials to ward off a viral infection seems to indicate that many people are taking home the message that "special and unusual measures" are necessary for protection, which if anything, might only give people a false, or even counter-productive, sense of impunity.

One of my coworkers is coming back from Italy tomorrow. I hope he’s not bringing virus to work because I don’t think washing hands would help. I don’t want to treat him like a leper but at the same time I feel anxious knowing I’ll be working with him. And I feel guilty that I feel anxious because I don’t want to treat him differently but then at the same time I don’t want to risk passing virus to my family (probably sooner or later I’ll catch it anyway but I prefer later than sooner)

I don't know whether to be worried about it or not, but I think there's no need to fear for civilisation just yet. From what I can gather, it seems to be an unpleasant variation on normal flu, but not much more severe in terms of mortality rate. (Not that that's much consolation for the unfortunates who die, I'm not intending to make light of it.)

Not wanting to cause further worry, but is antibacterial gel actually much use? The disease is, after all, caused by a virus not a bacterium. (There isn't any gel left in the supermarket anyway.) And yes, I have stockpiled toilet tissue, but only because I was worried that I wouldn't be able to get any soon. The shelves are nearly empty around here.