This is Sobering...
Posted by one of my high school friends Gaye Elder Hodge who is a nurse in the Petoskey or the "up north" area of Michigan (for those of you who are unfamiliar). I hope my friends and family who are pushing back against our governor's shelter in place orders read up and think twice before they complain about not being able to go to their 2nd home or the interruptions in their everyday routine. Be informed, stay safe and stay home! PLEASE

Let me introduce myself: I am a practicing ER doctor with a Bachelors degree in cell and molecular biology/genetics and a Masters degree in public health in addition to my doctorate.
COVID is not a flu. Not even a little. Here are reasons why:
1. It is a separate species. It is no more like influenza than you are like a hippo. DIFFERENT SPECIES.
2. It is an airborne virus. This means the tiny droplets can stay in the air for a full 2 hours. So if a person coughed in aisle 4 of Target 1.5 hours ago, they may be home now but their covid cloud is still hanging there just waiting for you to walk by and take a breath. Influenza is not an airborne virus. It is droplet spread- meaning someone has to directly crop dust you with their sneeze to get you sick. Covid is much more contagious.
3. Covid is more virulent. Virulence factor is a measure of how catchy something is. For example, the flu is like beer. It takes a bunch to get you drunk. Covid is more like tequila - A little goes a long way. You need to suck up a lot of flu particles to actually catch the flu; with covid, even a few particles is enough to infect you.
4. Covid has a longer incubation than the flu. When you catch the flu, you typically get sick in the next 1-2 days. This is awesome because it means you stay at home while contagious because you feel like a heap of fried garbage. Covid has a blissful 5-9 days of symptom free time during which you are well enough to head to the movies, gym or mar-a-lago while also being contagious enough to infect everyone you encounter.
5. Covid has a longer duration of illness than flu. With covid, you have a 5-9 days of blissful asymptomatic contagiousness. This then turns into about 1 week of cough and overall feeling like hell but still surviving. Week 2 is when things hit the fan and people end up unable to breathe and on a ventilator. Many stay on the vent for up to 15 days. 5 days incubating+7 kinda sick days + 15 days on a ventilator makes for 27 days of virus spreading illness, (assuming your don’t just die of massive asphyxiation and body-wide collapse from overwhelming infection somewhere in that last week).The flu has an average incubation of 1-2 days and sick time of 7 days for a total of 9 infectious days. In the world of deadly viruses, that 18 extra days might as well be a millennia.
6. Covid is more deadly. A LOT more deadly. The flu has about a 0.2% mortality rate, meaning 2 of every thousand people who get sick with flu will die. On the contrary, the death rate from covid is reportedly 2%, so 10 times more deadly than flu. Ten times more death seems like a lot more death to me. Whats more worrisome is that 2% is actually incorrect because it doesn’t kill kids so that skews the average. With covid, age is a major factor in survival. If we don’t include people under 30, the death rate for adults is on average 4.5%. 9 out of every 200 adults that get this will die from it. Do you know 200 adults? Do you think losing 9 of them is no big deal? Since mortality increases with age in covid, the risk gets worse as you get older so if we put 100 grannies in a room with covid, only 85 would make it out alive to make pies and tell great stories of the old days... and that just sucks.
I hope that helps to clarify why covid is in no way a flu, why you are in no way a hippo, and why staying home is the only way for non-essential people to do their part while I spend my days at work covered in a plastic poncho, sucking air through a stuffy respirator mask, leaving my scrubs in my driveway, showering the covid off at 4am when I get in, and thinking to myself “now do u still think it was just a flu?” as I risk my own life with my face 2 inches from their highly contagious, gasping mouth while I slide the plastic tube down their throat and start up the ventilator.

I have a Canon 80D which is about 3 years old and has the original Canon battery which came with it. I fear the battery is failing because after charging for over 24 hrs, the camera reports a 60% charge and after taking 80 photos I have only 2 bars left.

Here is my question. I was ready to pay the $63 B&H wants for an QEM battery. Several people have recommended I try a Wasabi battery. A single battery is $10.99 vs $63. Now I know when things sound too good to be true, they usually are. There has to be a reason the OEM is so much more money.

Anyone have any experience with Wasabi batteries who can shed some light on this?

Thanks to all who respond

A vaccine is likely, sooner or later, and should help to promote some return to normal. Pfizer says they will have it by September, Johnson and Johnson a slightly slower timeline, and realistically the latest is in around a year from now. No telling how long wide distribution will take. That said, therapeutics from plasma with antibodies appear to be on the way though not yet closely in sight. The amount we don't know about this thing is stupendous. The timelines I hear for my own area (Baltimore and Maryland) for peaking are wildly variable: anything from 2 days from now to mid May. I think that we are about to see profound changes in our society and economy and the world as we know it will be substantially changed even if we have a vaccine that works a substantial amount of the time.

Right now, I don't know of a more deadly modern virus here; in my state, in three months we already have lost three times as many people to this virus than we lost in six months to the flu this season. Yes, sometimes the flu has had a higher 'estimated' death toll after the six month flu season has ended, but we don't have any 'estimated' total of those who were not counted this virus.

The purpose of testing is not to identify those who are not infected, but to get back to putting those who are infected under quarantine; right now, the guy slinging hash at the local diner and then purchasing perfume for his girlfriend could be infected and we would never know. Hopefully we will eventually have some kind of vaccine. Then those who want protection have a chance of getting it - those of all stripes who don't want it are on their own. Right now I do not have a choice other than hiding out myself; my daughter, who works in retail, has no way of protecting her fiance {who has just one working lung and is very vulnerable}.

Dear PG...yes I am speaking to you. No serious scientist is opposed to testing. It is needed to find out how widespread this disease is among other things. Did I read it right that you know of a"workable vaccine..." That's quite a discovery! Why isn't it being produced? Then we can all get this vaccine and return to the world you seem to pine for. I am not a slave to the media. I am a slave to a FREE PRESS. No doubt some information they publish or broadcast is wrong and some is sensational BUT without the free press we'd all be lost, even a genius like you. Michael Singer

I'm not really sure what you are proposing. Drop all testing because it's futile?

Sure you can contract the virus immediately after being tested. That doesn't render the test useless.
The test can give some indication of the density of infected individuals in an area. That will influence lockdown/loosen recommendations.
How are we going to open the economy without knowing who can safely come in contact with the public?

I agree that the final answer is to develop a vaccine. But that will take a long time. Much longer than the time scale proposed for reopening the economy. And there's too much unknown about the virus. Will a vaccine work for everyone? Are there side effects? Is there variability due to genetics?

There are suggestions that some people who recovered from the virus and passed testing, are now showing new signs of infections. It's been suggested that the virus has "reactivated" rather than "reinfected" those people. Will a vaccine take care of that problem?

There's a lot of research to be done before we can consider ourselves to be in the clear.