Coronavirus: When Will Things Get Back To Normal?

hello health champions even though it's only been a few weeks of coronavirus

shut down feels like an eternity so the question on everyone's mind is when is

he going to get back to normal so today I want to talk about some of

the variables that we want to understand to see where we are in the process of

returning to normal coming right up hey I'm Dr. Ekberg I'm a

holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and if you want to truly

master health by understanding how the body really works make sure you

subscribe and hit that notification bell so you don't miss anything the number

one concern about returning back to normal is public health because the

sooner we go back to meeting people and working the greater the risk of

reinfecting people and not putting a stop to this the other risk is financial

because the longer we stay at home the less we can produce and earn money for

food and rent and so forth so it's always about weighing these two against

each other and making the best possible decision so a lot of this is a political

decision the White House just issued a plan on how to get back to normal and

they call it a phased approach we can do this state by state or even county by

county because everyone's at a different place in the process the number one

concern is to protect the vulnerable to save lives by not exposing those people

who have a lessened immunity and defense system and the second big concern is to

reduce the risk of having a second wave of having a new outbreak of having it

escalate again after it has started dying down and there are three phases so

in phase one they keep the schools closed everyone who is vulnerable needs

to stay sheltered and avoid contact everyone else needs to still practice

social distancing and good hygiene and so forth as far as employers they want

to encourage people to telecommute they want to limit staff and close all

common areas and then when we get to phase 2 it's pretty much the same except

that at this point the schools open up again but we still shelter the

vulnerable we maintain social distancing and so forth it's in phase 3 that we

really start going back to normal where the vulnerable come out even though they

still want to practice some good social distancing and reduce their risk for

exposure as far as employment they recommend full staff but to limit

interactions and avoid crowds and not have large gatherings over 50 people and

so forth the criteria are very general what they're looking for during a 14 day

period to have a consistent reduction in flu-like symptoms and coronavirus

symptoms they're looking for a decrease in documented cases or a reduction in

the percentage of positive tests so they want to maintain the testing but they

want to see a less and less percentage of people who are infected part of the

plan is to have enough resources for hospitals to treat all critical cases

but also to have a robust testing in place for all healthcare personnel

including antibody testing now these are very general guidelines and very general

criteria and even though they put some markers down they don't really tell us

when any of this is going to happen so I want to look at a few of the numbers on

a look at some of the trends and try to understand where we are in the process

the very first thing that we're looking at the first thing that has to happen is

that we want to slow down the doubling rate what we're looking for is a

reduction in overall numbers now if we had an increase a linear increase that

would be bad enough but the absolute worst is an exponential increase they

so-called doubling rate and here's how that works let's say on day one you have

a thousand people infected and then the next day you have 40

and 14 that's an increase by 41% if that rate stays and we have another 40 that

1% then we would have a doubling in two days

it goes from a thousand to two thousand in two days and that means in another

two days we'll have four thousand and then eight thousand and so forth this is

totally out of control and the quicker we can get away from that the better

another example would be if we had a thousand on day one but now it only

increases by 15% and it keeps going at 15% until day six so in five days we

double the rate again so obviously this is still a really bad scenario but it's

not as bad as doubling every two days so it's still a step forward so let's look

at where we are on March 23rd the world had an 11 percent growth rate of new

cases the US has 31 percent close to the 41 that we talked about most of the

other European countries were in the teens and Russia and India were also

very high that indicated a doubling rate for the world of seven days for the u.s.

in three days and every other country on March 23rd

was doubling the number of cases in less than a week if we jump forward to April

17th we see that all of these numbers have come down very nicely so that is

progress the only number we're concerned with is

Russia that still stays up very very high the doubling rate now for the world

is 18 days u.s. 15 days Spain Italy Germany Switzerland they're all

increasing their numbers but Russia is still doubling in less than a week

the second factor we look at is that the number of new cases are slowing down so

here's what the world looked like from March 25th up through April 17th and

I've smooth out the curve just a little bit by running a three

day average so every marker every bar here represents that day and the two

days before that way we see more of a trend and not so many spikes we see that

we have a slowing of the new cases they're not decreasing tremendously so

it's far from over but it's more of a linear growth because we have the same

number of cases today as we did a couple of weeks ago but at least it's not going

up exponentially Spain a little bit up and down and we thought that we would

have a good solid two weeks of decrease but then the last 3-4 days it's been

going up again Italy some ups and downs but a pretty good steady decline Germany

also some ups and downs but a pretty steady decline for almost three weeks

the UK we don't really know where we are yet because for the most part it's still

going up this is hopeful as far as leveling but it's a little bit early to

tell Switzerland's looking pretty good

they've had a good two three weeks of a steady decline even though even at that

rate we see that things can come back a little bit in India is a big unknown

because there have very very few cases relative to the population it is going

up and we're seeing some some blunting here and we hope that it's gonna level

off and not take off but that's a lot of people in India so you never know where

that could go in Russia is a big concern because they are where a lot of other

countries were a month ago the new cases are going up at a very

fast rate the United States is looking pretty much the same thing we've leveled

off it's not going away anytime soon but at least it's not shooting straight up

the third thing I want to look at is the active versus total cases and when are

we going to pass the peak of the active cases and why does that matter well the

total cases are always going to go up and they're going to plateau at a

maximum eventually but the active cases they're going to reach a peak and then

they're going to taper off and in the beginning the two curves are going to go

together because there is a two to three week lag that people need to recover in

the beginning when people get infected a week later all those infected are

still infected but two weeks three weeks into the process some people are going

to be recovered and why is that peak important because that's the maximum

number of people that the healthcare system has to deal with at any given

time so once we've reached that peak then we're not home free per se but it's

gonna get easier from that point on so when the situation resolves then this is

going to level off and this is hopefully gonna get down towards zero

now that's an unknown because we don't know exactly what the residual long-term

level is going to be hopefully we'll get down to zero but we don't know really

what's gonna happen so here's the trend for the world as a whole and the yellow

is the number of total cases and we're seeing that it's between two and two and

a half million now but the red is the active cases so we have over 1 million

recovered people in the world but as we see with the red we see the trend is

still going up we haven't reached the max number of active cases when we look

at South Korea even though they're still having some new cases we see the yellow

slowly going up we also see that the red is steadily declining so they had their

maximum number of active cases of little over 7,000 on March 11th so they were

about here and then they have been steadily declining Switzerland is a

country that made a quick turnaround they had their maximum of 15,000 on

March 30th and since then it's been a good steady trend so here almost all the

cases were active but in two weeks they have most of their cases

recovered in Spain a lot of people started recovering but then it seemed

like it was a plateau that they still had so much new cases that it kind of

matched the people who were recovering so even though the active cases seem to

have reached a maximum there's they're still very slowly increasing but they

hopefully are plateaued and we'll be heading down now the u.s. is the yellow

is the total numbers the red is the active cases and as we see the vast

majority of the cases are still active and we see that the red is steadily

increasing which means that we have not reached the max there's no telling how

long that's going to take but it's still growing steadily let's look at the

percentage growth rate of active cases so on March 23rd most countries were in

the teens to 30% range and by April 2nd we had a good decrease or a dramatic

decline by then and Switzerland was even in the negative meaning that they were

getting fewer active cases at that point on April 17th most of the rates are way

down they're approaching zero and now we also have Germany at a negative growth

rate the main concern is Russia that's still growing very very quickly now

let's look at the doubling rate of the active cases so in the world we still

have a doubling rate of 21 days in if it keeps at this rate will have twice as

many active cases in 21 days now the longer that time is the more likely that

we will never get there that the growth rate will continue to decline and then

we'll never have another doubling and on the positive side we see Germany and

Switzerland they have a negative meaning in Germany in 23 days they'll have half

the number of active cases at rate the big concern is Russia still

doubling every five days the fourth measure I want to look at is recovered

versus total cases in the beginning the recovered is going to be very very low

because it takes a few weeks for people to get passed and beat the virus and

then as we go both total and recovered are going to increase but then

eventually the total will plateau and the recovered will come close to it but

not quite because there's also a death rate here are the percentages of

recovered versus total cases on March 23rd the world was at 27%

the US was only at 1% because it was kind of a new thing here South Korea was

well along into the process at 39 percent of total cases had recovered on

April 2nd the numbers were much better for most places South Korea was at 60

and the US had gone from 1 to 4 on April 17th the world was at 25 the US was at

9% Spain Germany Switzerland was doing a whole lot better and Germany and

Switzerland now had more than half the total cases recovered and South Korea

was at 74% now let's also look at the total number of infected people out of

any given population so if we measure the number of cases per million people

then a thousand people out of a million would be 0.1% so in the u.s. we had

twenty 163 people out of every million so that's 0.2% of the whole country had

been infected Spain was almost twice as many Germany closed and then we look at

the Western countries they were all similar to the US or a little bit higher

now we look at Russia India and Korea and we see very low numbers so that

either indicates that they did a really good job of containing it

or it means that they're just getting started so in the case of Korea we know

that they did a great job containing it because they're on the downslope of the

process India we don't really know where they are and with Russia unfortunately

we know that they're just getting started and everything kind of points to

Russia ending up in this range as well the yellow line is the world as a whole

with 296 cases per million people so far in New York as we all know has been hit

really hard and even if it's not the hardest hit it's the hardest hit of the

major metropolitan area so in the state of New York we've had 12,000 286 cases

per million which is over 1% of the people infected so when is it going to

get back to normal well as you can tell it's not a real simple answer we know

that South Korea is probably on the end of it we know that Switzerland is making

great progress that they're probably past the peak of active cases we know

that Spain is close to the peak and we know that the u.s. is not there yet

while Russia is unfortunately just getting started but here's what's really

important to keep in mind when we look at all these numbers that's public

health that's statistics for the politicians to

make decisions but what's most important for the individual the only one you can

truly affect is yourself and what can you do there's been a lot of talk about

risk factors and the number one risk factor is age

the second is obesity and the third is insulin resistance

now here's what most people haven't realized or thought about that these

risk factors account for almost all the cases not every single case because

there's still exceptions but almost all the death cases are because of age

obesity and insulin resistance and the other thing people

don't realize is you can do something about it you can change these you can't

change age but it's not age per se that's dangerous it's the fact that most

people of a high age have insulin resistance and cardiovascular problems

and metabolic syndrome and poor nutritional status and so forth so even

though age is the number one risk factor there are a lot of old healthy people

and if you want to change these risk factors regardless of age then what you

want to do is get healthy and health is not the lack of symptoms you don't wait

till you have a symptom you don't wait till you have insulin resistance or

diabetes or cardiovascular disease you change it beforehand and that's what

every video on this channel is about that's the purpose of this channel is to

help people get healthy to understand what it is and to prevent disease and to

build health so nutrition activation also known as exercise yoga stretching

going for a walk meditation relaxation training helping

the body balance out stress responses and obviously reducing stress all of

these are the factors these are the true risk factors because these determine

these these determine your biological age and these determine your obesity and

insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome and so forth one of the best

ways to reduce stress these days is don't watch the news we all want to know

a little bit about the coronavirus we want to understand where it's heading

and we want to keep up but don't bury yourself in the news because it's very

stressful and it's very worrisome and it will hurt your immune system if you

enjoyed this video make sure you also take a look at that one thanks so much

for watching I'll see you in the next video