Roosevelt Island is a short distance across the East River from where seriously ill Coronavirus patients are being treated by health care professionals at
NY Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.
One of those health care professionals,
Dr David Price a critical care pulmonologist and recent Fellowshiip grad caring for COVID-19 patients at NY Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, offers some very practical advice
in video below on protecting yourself and family during the Coronavirus Covid 19 Pandemic.
Here's an excerpt from the video with Dr Price:
... What is Covid19?
I mean it's now every single news story it's political its economic but what is this disease? So this is a virus. It's from what we would colloquially think of as a common cold family the Coronavirus family but what's unique is that the human body has never seen this virus before.
And so this obviously started in Wuhan. The thought is that it came probably from an animal and then made its way into the human body for the first time and so one of the common questions I get is what does this disease look like?
So what commonly people have is they have fever and they have cough and then they have sore throat and when they get this the virus goes through their entire body and what we have found is that the most likely place that this will affect is your lungs. So people will commonly have cough but for about 80% of people you just don't feel good is the most common thing.
You have a mild cough maybe you have a little headache. The disease lasts from what we're seeing between 5 to 7 to 14 days is probably the best accurate description. Some people who have a mild disease by about day 5 are starting to feel better and then people who aren't feeling better usually start to get short of breath around a 3 to 5 and then start to feel better around that 7 day mark.
So what is the first kind of big topic we're going to talk about and I think the reason I wanted to have this call is how to protect your family. I think we've learned a lot and I want to kind of share all the stuff that I've learned so far with you guys,
So I think the first thing is how do you get Covid 19? I think that this is really important and we've really learned a lot over the last couple weeks, two months about how you get this disease. The overarching theme is sustained contact with someone who has this disease which the vast majority is people with fever and aches or someone who is about to get the disease. So someone in the next one to two days who's going to develop symptoms of this disease.
The way that you get this is the transmission of the virus almost exclusively from your hands to your face and so it's either into your eyes, into your nose or into your mouth. There's a lot of talk about contact or getting it through contact hands to face there's also a small thought that it can be aerosolized, that it can kind of exist a little bit in the air.
The thought at this point is that you actually have to have very long sustained contact with someone and I'm talking about over 15 to 30 minutes in an unprotected environment meaning you're in a very closed room without any type of mask for you to get it that way.
But to very simply state the overwhelming majority of people are getting this by physically touching someone who has this disease or will develop it in the next one to two days and then touching their face and so that actually I think is incredibly empowering and that's as I think in the hospital the last two days the thing that makes me smile a little bit is that I actually know now that I won't get this disease because I know how to protect myself and so I just want to give you guys a few very very practical tips to how to protect yourself...
and the full video.
