I get sick to my stomach every time I watch the daily 5 pm presentations from Washington, because as learned as these people may be, nothing they predict is showing up later in reality.

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New viruses can be controlled, with fast strong actions. The two previous coronavirus threats were SARS in 2003 and MERS in 2012. They deservedly got a huge amount of attention but we (humanity) stopped them; SARS killed only 1000 in the whole world and MERS killed 862.

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This is an emergency.

If you haven’t been keeping up, here is a good concise summary of the virus situation – a 17 minute summary of the situation from Capt. Samuel Philbrick, an Air Force flight surgeon (doctor) in Anchorage. It covers the statistics of how this is going to overwhelm hospitals where it gets out of control. (Email readers, click the headline to come online.)

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This post is for information hogs. If you’ve had enough already about the virus, you’re not like me :-) and you won’t want this post, so move along. :-) Still with us? Good.

Yale cardiologist and friend Harlan Krumholz @HMKYale has been live-tweeting notes from a webinar Wednesday morning (US time) from Wuhan, China. Most of us won’t know all the lingo but you can google; most of us will recognize most of what’s going on. (If you’re not a regular on Twitter, just be aware that you can ignore most of what shows up in blue.)

First I’ll paste in a tweet from the end that summarizes a lot of information, particularly the image (click to view):

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Zubin Damania MD is a social media / video god – his ZDoggMD site is terrific. He’s snarky and smart. But this time he meets his match: he sat down – live, not edited – and did a 30 minute “ask me anything” with his 12 year old daughter, whose school just got closed for the virus. She. Has. Questions. And I bet a lot are questions you’ve had.

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