Preprint Article Version 1 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

Association of COVID-19 Disease Severity with Transmission Routes and Suggested Changes to Community Guidelines

Version 1 : Received: 13 March 2020 / Approved: 15 March 2020 / Online: 15 March 2020 (14:39:19 CET)

How to cite: Wu, J.; Ping, Z. Association of COVID-19 Disease Severity with Transmission Routes and Suggested Changes to Community Guidelines. Preprints 2020, 2020030246. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202003.0246.v1 Wu, J.; Ping, Z. Association of COVID-19 Disease Severity with Transmission Routes and Suggested Changes to Community Guidelines. Preprints 2020, 2020030246. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202003.0246.v1

Abstract

In the war against the COVID-19 pandemic, the world is experiencing severe resource constraints. Although transmission routes are well understood, we suspect that they cause different disease consequences. We evaluate them in different forms to understand how they affect infection rates and disease severity. In determining how they affect disease outcome, we evaluated target tissue vulnerability, functional role, defense mechanisms, viral concentration, infection vicinity to target vital tissue, and host factors. We found that direct lung infection is the most lethal transmission route followed by bronchi infection. Transmissions by physical contacts, foods, and blood by low viral concentration (as expected in normal human activities) pose lower or much lower risks unless the infection is followed by subsequent lung exposures. After adding transmission route, treatment timings, and improper treatments into the list of known risk factors, we found that death rate and disability rate for young or healthy persons are nearly zero. We show that population based medical model improperly shifts nominal death rate from few vulnerable people to the population resulting in unnecessary population panic, and such panic is responsible for shutting down human activities and the world economy. Finally, we examined limitations in population-based mitigating measures and proposed for governmental and private adoption community guidelines, which are mainly to enable vulnerable people avoid exposures, prevent non-vulnerable people from serving as viral transmitters, get rid of high-risk exposure modes in working environment, improve safety for people in buses, ships and planes, and reduce death and disability rates for infected people.

Keywords

coronavirus; COVID-19; disease severity; transmission route; infection route; lung damages; cold flu influenza

Subject

Medicine and Pharmacology, Pharmacology and Toxicology

Comments (1)

Comment 1
Received: 20 June 2020
Commenter:
The commenter has declared there is no conflict of interests.
Comment: I agree that transmission route is important.

See the findings tab of this doc: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15ml1IWPy_rdaPxVMSFmU1vCiG7bsui8tRHFthm5Yo6c/edit#gid=1078385797
Staff safety section, papers listed as "dose effect"

You could also consider secondary prophylaxis:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1q5IH2hGjjdPi-vcs4zOBlArgFJ9iSDdZVoceevUPI9c/
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