Seriously, this breathless "plague!" nonsense absolutely must stop and its purveyors should feel bad for doing so. Bubonic plague has an untreated mortality rate of fifty percent! This, on the other hand, is a nontrivial though increasingly global outbreak of a disease that is unlikely to seriously harm healthy people--CFR rate of mortality seems to be about three percent--and is predominantly a threat to the very young and the elderly.
If this sounds familiar that should be because it maps rather closely to the flu. There are 650,000 deaths per year from the flu--who's suggesting closing the airports over such a Threat To Humanity?
Turn the news off. If you have a brain predisposed to low-information panic it is bad for you.
I feel like we've seen at best mixed information about that. I'm not sure that is the case.
It is certainly worth watching, much as SARS and H1N1 were serious health concerns that needed to be managed at state and international levels. It is not worth John Q. Public panicking about. It is certainly not worth stopping the world over. It is not bubonic effing plague.
There's a lot of mixed information, particularly strange news about cases where folks seem to be recovering and then sort of "relapse" a week or two after it is identified.
The analysis that at least sounds a bit more scientific to me seems to indicate there are a lot of cases where the typically healthy folks are hit hard.
China has seen 804 deaths and 2,374 recoveries the majority of cases still at significant risk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019–20_Wuhan_...
The good news is the official rate of new infections has been in steady decline and has finally dropped below 10% per day. Though that may not necessarily be completely accurate either.
Additionally, a lot of people care for the very young and the very old, and they’re not comforted with the sentiment, “well, if you’re healthy you’ll live,”
And I'm going to be frank: the very young and very old could just as easily die of influenza and the people who care for the very young and very old are not, for the most part, even screening for flu shots. I have trouble mustering the emotional energy to care for their fear of the scary black swan when they're standing in a flock of white ones that are themselves dangerous.
No, it is more because SARS was only communicable when the patient was at their worst. This can spread during all phases.
The mortality is lower than SARS but much higher than the flu.
To put it in real terms. If you take the number of people you ever met in your life and gave them a bad flu you might find one who dies. Compare that to taking your mother/father/brothers and immediate families and giving them corona where at least one would die. Compared to SARS where someone in your immediate family would die or ebola where either you or your wife would die.
There is evidence that the study claiming the virus can be transmitted by people without symptoms was flawed.[1]
Also, according to that article, even if asymptomatic people transmit the virus "asymptomatic transmission likely plays a minor role in the epidemic overall, WHO says. People who cough or sneeze are more likely to spread the virus, the agency wrote in a situation report on Saturday."
[1] - https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/paper-non-symptomati...
I was in this region both during SARS and now. It's very clear from your comments that you weren't really paying attention during SARS and you're misinformed now.
More people have already been infected by this coronavirus than the entire cumulative SARS infections to date. There have been more deaths too, despite its relatively "low" virulence.
> And I'm going to be frank: the very young and very old could just as easily die of influenza
No. This is completely false. Please stop.
A seasonal flu kills 2 per 100k infected and this virus kills ~2,000 per 100k infected. SARS was much more lethal but this is not a garden variety influenza and telling people it is is actively harmful.
The Chinese figures can’t be trusted as the CCP is trying to save face.
Li wenliang died from the virus and was a healthy 33yo.
Honestly all these distractions cut into my Left 4 Dead play time.
>Peng: Based on my observations, a third of patients exhibited inflammation in their whole body. It was not necessarily limited to young adults. The mechanism of a cytokine storm is about whole-body inflammation, which leads to a failure of multiple organs and quickly evolves into the terminal stage. In some fast-progressing cases, it took two to three days to progress from whole-body inflammation to the life-threatening stage.
It is at least noteworthy that Dr Li Wenliang died in his late 30s...
Also the mortality rate seems to be very hard to report on due to compounding issues:
1. Chinese death certificates not recording compounding illnesses as cause of death - making attribution hard.
2. There is a two-three week lag on infected to death but a ~4 day lag on infected detection thus a naive mortality calculation of:
mortality = deaths / infected
3. There is a mixture of factors making reporting accurately hard: Wuhan health services are at max capacity and everything from detection to care is strained. There is also some mixture of political factors which may mean that numbers coming out of China could be tailored towards some kind of narrative.
I agreed there's a lot of FUD which is probably unnecessary, especially outside of Asia. I think within Asia it is a bit more founded given that population density is so high (just think about things like aircon usage in places like Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand) AND we've just come out of Chinese New Year which is the largest annual human migration event.
My current read on the situation is that everyone else's fear and overreaction will keep me safe at the very least. I also imagine that there will be a degree of y2k type ignorance revolving around the issue once the dust settles: people on the ground who worked on it will say it was a big fucking deal and crisis was averted through a lot of hard work and coordination. People who were unaffected by it will think it was all a bunch of BS and there was nothing to ever have worried about.
In addition to mortality rate, a highly contagious illness that puts 10-20% of infected in the ICU will quickly overwhelm even the most developed healthcare systems.
“Panic” is never really warranted, but there’s a reason China put their entire economy on lockdown. They have the data that you don’t, and they seem pretty concerned.
Whether we should shut down airports is a discussion worth having, but whether this is a serious global threat has already been well established. Unclear on why you seem determined to ignore the experts, none of whom seem to think this is no big deal.
https://sinopsis.cz/en/an-analysis-of-reported-cases-of-2019...
The deaths are really mostly old people with preexisting conditions there.