Working Paper Article Version 1 This version is not peer-reviewed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 Wu, J.; Ping, Z. Association of COVID-19 Disease Severity with Transmission Routes and Suggested Changes to Community Guidelines. Preprints 2020, 2020030246 Copy

Cite as: Wu, J.; Ping, Z. Association of COVID-19 Disease Severity with Transmission Routes and Suggested Changes to Community Guidelines. Preprints 2020, 2020030246 Wu, J.; Ping, Z. Association of COVID-19 Disease Severity with Transmission Routes and Suggested Changes to Community Guidelines. Preprints 2020, 2020030246 Copy CANCEL COPY CITATION DETAILS

Abstract

In the war against the C O VID-19 pandemic, the world is experiencing severe resource constraints. Although transmission routes are well understood, we suspect that they cause different disease consequences. W e 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, function al 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. T ransmission s by physical contacts, foods, and blood by low viral concentration (as expected in normal human activities) pose low er or much low er risks unless the infection is followed by subsequent lung exposure s . 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 shift s 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 propose d for government al 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 m o d es in wo rking environment , improve safety for people in buses, ships and planes , and reduce death and disability rates for infected people .

Subject Areas

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

Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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