The Truth About the Coronavirus (COVID-19)

1. Coronavirus Basics A new virus – known as COVID-19 – has broken out. There is currently no cure, vaccine and immunity. The new virus is part of a class of viruses called coronaviruses because they sport spiky projections on their outer surfaces that resemble the points of a crown, or "corona" in Latin. Other corona viruses that have had global outbreaks are MERS and SARS. The common cold is also often caused by a coronavirus.

2. The World Health Organization has declared this a pandemic—which means it is all over the world. This chart – a screen shot from the Johns Hopkins University resource page on Thursday (3/19/2020) shows over 227,000 cases, 9,311 deaths and that 159 countries have cases. The curve with yellow dots in the lower right shows that the number of cases is rising rapidly.

3. Most scientists currently believe that this coronavirus existed among animals in some closely related form and that some small mutation made it possible for humans to catch it. This is a common pattern for the emergence of new diseases. In recent decades, such diseases have become more frequent and widespread, with new ones cropping up periodically—SARS in 2002, bird (avian) flu (repeated outbreaks since 2004), swine flu (H1N1) in 2009, and others.

4. Map of global air traffic One reason this is happening more is that human society is encroaching on animal habitats, so there is closer contact between species. Another is that the world is highly interconnected. Unlike 200 years ago, a person who contracts a new virus today may easily travel thousands of miles, spreading the virus before they even know they are infected.

5. Because this coronavirus in humans was first observed only about three months ago, there is still a lot that scientists don’t know, or don’t have great certainty or accuracy about. And some aspects of what we think we know now may turn out to be incorrect later.

6. As we understand right now, COVID-19 starts in the upper respiratory system. For an average of five days after infection, patients have no symptoms, but scientists believe they can spread the disease at this stage. Symptoms usually start fairly mild—typically a fever, dry cough, fatigue and shortness of breath. Other symptoms can be muscle and joint pain, stomach problems, or headache. If you have any of these symptoms you should call your health care provider and stay away from others. Many people continue to go about their lives, visiting friends and family—and spreading the disease.

7. After this, particularly if the person’s immune system is not strong, the infection moves into the lungs and potentially causes pneumonia. If the pneumonia becomes severe, people will need assistance breathing—oxygen, respirators, and other medical interventions.1 If they don’t get this help, they may die, and a significant number of people who reach this stage die even with proper medical help.

8. The virus is highly contagious – it spreads very easily from an infected person to others. One reason it is so contagious is that a person can spread the virus even if they are not showing symptoms. It gets spread through contact with people who have it, through surfaces they have touched or sneezed on, and in other ways. Scientists estimate that every infected person will infect between two and three other people. Using the lower estimate one person infects two people, then those two people infect four people, and then those four people infect 16, and so on.

9. Cases in the US (March 17) This chart shows how quickly the number of cases in the U.S. with 6,000 cases as of March 17. The way the graph starts to go almost straight up on the right means that the number of cases is increasing VERY rapidly.

10. The death rate for COVID-19 is not known exactly. Deaths from COVID-19 vary by the age of the person who gets it, the health of the patient, and the ability of the medical system to treat the illness. Estimates are that between 1 and 3% of those with the virus may die.  When you multiply this out by the tens of millions worldwide who could possibly get sick if the virus is not contained, this poses a great danger—and deaths in the tens or hundreds of thousands to possibly millions in a short time. This chart contains data from China that shows 14% of those over 80 who get the virus did not survive.

11. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 80 percent of confirmed cases—those who test positive for the virus—experience “mild to moderate” symptoms, lasting a week or more, that can range from symptoms similar to influenza to a pneumonia that is not bad enough to require hospitalization. The other 20 percent will have a more severe pneumonia marked by difficulty breathing that requires hospitalization. Of those hospitalized, as many as one in four may require intensive care unit (ICU) treatment.

12. The new coronavirus (COVID-19) is a natural phenomenon, but how it gets dealt with occurs in a social context. Health care systems around the world—especially in poor countries, but even in wealthy countries like the U.S.—have nowhere near the capacity to deal with a sudden potential influx of hundreds of thousands of patients. For instance, the U.S. has less than a million hospital beds and 45,000 ICU beds total, and these were almost all in use before this pandemic. A makeshift emergency unit  at the Brescia hospital, in northern Italy

13. COVID-19 is being made worse by U.S. imperialist domination. As one example, Iran is now experiencing a major outbreak of COVID-19. This is a country where U.S. “sanctions” have already crippled the economy.  This picture, which appeared on international media, appears to show body bags of CoVID-19 victims being piles in the Iranian city of Qom.

14. The domination of the world by imperialism, including U.S. imperialism, has resulted in other parts of the world—the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America—facing extreme poverty, overcrowded living conditions, and poor healthcare systems. This makes billions of people much more vulnerable to these modern-day plagues than they need to be and results in untold needless deaths. In this picture a doctor walks past patients waiting to get examined for coronavirus symptoms at at a government run hospital in New Delhi, India.

15. There are public health approaches that can help to prevent or lessen the impact of disease spread. Two basic approaches are containment, which is used in the early stages of an outbreak to prevent the virus from becoming widespread. This largely involves finding people who have the disease, tracking those they have had contact with and preventing them from passing the disease to others. It can also involve restricting travel in areas where the disease is widespread.

16. The lack of testing made it impossible to carry out the “containment” stage in the U.S.—if you don’t have any idea who has the virus you can’t trace and isolate the people they infected. So, effectively, the virus has been allowed to spread, uninhibited by any serious intervention. 

17. If the disease becomes widespread then mitigation efforts take precedence. “Mitigation” means trying to slow the spread of the virus by “social distancing” (drastically limiting contact between people) and by promoting good hygiene, such as frequent handwashing. “Mitigation” doesn’t stop the disease, but it makes it more manageable and less damaging. It can also prevent the health care system from being overwhelmed. This also means potentially  locking down entire areas, closing factories, stores, businesses, and ordering people to stay in their homes for weeks as is currently being done in parts of the U.S. Measures like these are often necessary for public health and it seems like many of the measures being applied right now are needed.

18. Emergency measures are also subject to abuse by oppressive and repressive governments, including that of the U.S.  This photo shows ICE agents making arrests in Los Angeles on Monday as emergency measures are being put into place. nationwide.

19. The goal of mitigation is to increases the ability of the health care system to handle the lower numbers of sick people, saving more lives and further reducing new infections. “Mitigation” doesn’t stop the disease, but it makes it more manageable and less damaging. And it buys time so that scientists can develop better treatments and vaccines.

20. The anti-science Trump/Pence regime hid the danger of the COVID-19 virus, now a pandemic, for months, setting the stage for possibly catastrophic impact and placing those who have been targets of their overall program in the most jeopardy.

21. “Without science, you can only say what you as an individual think reality is, or maybe you can say what a whole bunch of people think reality is, or maybe you can say what a government, or religious authority, or some other authority might tell you reality is like, but that doesn’t make any of it true. Without science you are at the mercy of being manipulated, of having your thinking manipulated and not being able to tell what’s right from what’s wrong, what’s true from what’s false. If you really want to know what’s what, what’s true, and what to do, you need science–not fantasies or wishful thinking, but concrete evidence and a systematic process, a systematic method of analysis and synthesis.”-- ArdeaSkybreak, SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION, On the Importance of Science and the Application of Science to Society, the New Synthesis of Communism and the Leadership of Bob Avakian, An Interview with ArdeaSkybreak

22. But ask yourself this: Why can’t we have a society in which production was organized to meet the needs of the people? Why can’t we live in a system which moves to break down and heal the scars of oppression for real, instead of reinforcing them, whether openly or through deception? Why can’t we live in a world in which the divisions between people all over the world were being broken down and overcome and we move to a world community of human beings?