Hacker News Reader

Comment by quelltext | Hacker News Reader

IIRC the SARS outbreak in 2003 was "contained" within that year.

We were able to essentially starve SARS out of new people to infect. It had a 2-7 day incubation period, was not contagious before symptomatic, and spread by bodily fluid (coughing up water droplets, spread by touch to another).

COVID-19 has a 21+ day incubation period, is contagious before you're symptomatic, and is possibly airborne (I haven't heard strong confirmation of that yet, but it's definitely more virulent).

And apparently it can survive on a stainless steel surface for 36 hours. [0]

Also from [0] however:

"Sunlight will cut the virus ability to grow in half so the half-life will be 2.5 minutes and in the dark it’s about 13m to 20m. Sunlight is really good at killing viruses. That’s why I believe that Australia and the southern hemisphere will not see any great infections rates because they have lots of sunlight and they are in the middle of summer. And Wuhan and Beijing is still cold which is why there’s high infection rates.

In regards to temperature, the virus can remain intact at 4 degrees or 10 degrees for a longer period of time. But at 30 degrees then you get inactivation. And High humidity the virus doesn’t like it either. That’s why I think Sars stopped around May and June in 2003 – that’s when there’s more sunlight and more humidity. The environment is a crucial factor. The environment will be unfavourable for growth around May. The evidence is to look at the common cold – it’s always during winter. So the natural environment will not be favourable in Asia in about May."

I believe this is the main reason May is the deadline for containment.

[0] https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/puzmZFQGRTiiquwLa6tT-g/confere...

If it's inactivated at only 30 degrees (86F), that suggests an unconventional combat strategy of just heating buildings to that temperature—that's basically a hot summer day. We're not talking an autoclave here.

Good luck convincing a landlord to heat a building to 86 degrees in the wintertime, and then convincing tenants not to turn on the AC.

It depends what they mean by "inactivation" : is it dead or does it "reactivate" at cooler temperatures ?

> That’s why I believe that Australia and the southern hemisphere will not see any great infections rates because they have lots of sunlight and they are in the middle of summer. And Wuhan and Beijing is still cold which is why there’s high infection rates.

Wouldn't Singapore already have shown this by now? They've had to devote considerable effort towards management and it's basically summer year-round there and it's quite humid..

Winter also means people wear gloves, touch their face less, and don't sweat as much.

SG interiors are ACed to ice age levels though.

The thing to watch is the southern hemisphere.

There are very few cases right now in South America or Australia -- and so far I can't find any evidence of person-to-person transmission on either continent.

If the outbreak continues to fail to take hold there for even just a couple more weeks, then it seems likely that the northern-hemisphere outbreak will die down when the season ends.

Other coronaviruses and most human respiratory viruses generally exhibit very strong seasonality. It seems likely that this virus will too. But, again, watch the southern hemisphere.

Of course, the flu is seasonal -- and returns every year. Even if this does burn out in late spring, it may be back next year.

This refutes several of the claims in [0]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17mWPx-HTE1F2RKkbJlt4VkSY...

well I can tell you we probably don't have many 30 degree days left in the parts of Australia where most people live. tomorrow in Sydney it will be a top of 23 probably. we are heading towards Autumn quickly and I'm already seeing people sniffling on the train.

> COVID-19 has a 21+ day incubation period

I read that it's an extreme outlier. It's mostly 3-6 days.

   > COVID-19 has a 21+ day incubation period

[citation needed]

Study suggests a median incubation period of 3 days, with a range of 0-24 days: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.06.20020974v...

Example of a 27-day incubation: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-incubation/i...

I didn’t think it was airborne, but also transferred via droplets

We're already at 10x the reported infections of SARS and countries aren't even really testing for the coronavirus. Most countries' policy seems to be asking if you think you're infected and willing to be quarantined for two weeks, and writing it down as a "not infected" if you decline. Or in Japan's case, quarantine people in a mismanaged way to maximize new infections, then let the infected people out to freely mingle with the public.

We're reaching a point where people far from typical travel hubs are showing up infected, but nobody around them is reported as being infected. That means there are silent cases lurking everywhere, undetected. To me that says two things. One is that it's highly under-reported, and two is that it's probably evolved to become something fairly mild and not much worse than a cold in most instances.

The third option is that people you think should be infected are not infected.

could you please elaborate on why you think it may be more mild?

People were dying pretty quickly from SARS. People of all age ranges.

Data from China is limited, but outside of China, it seems like only the elderly (as in around 80 and up) are dying. I've seen one report of a 40-something dying. While reports are easily well over a thousand outside of China, deaths are still quite low. Recovery numbers are still low, so it's too early to say for sure, but it seems like the biggest problem now is insufficient medical facilities and unprepared staff.

We are orders of magnitudes larger than the SARS outbreak at this point.

> We are orders of magnitudes larger than the SARS outbreak at this point

an order*

SARS had ~8500 cases, ~800 deaths [1]. COVID-19 is currently ~81000 cases and ~2700 deaths.[2] It will be orders, plural, at some point, but remains to be seen how big (and I won't speculate on that).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2003_Probable_cases_of_SA...

[2] https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...

In my mind at least, all of these numbers are applesauce. Our ability to trust these numbers hinges on our ability to trust information reported by China's government and other authoritarian regimes (eg Iran and North Korea).

Numbers are suspect from everywhere. Most jurisdictions are only just beginning to test symptomatic patients who don't have a direct link to the initial outbreak locale. One of the difficulties of a disease with symptoms almost identical to the seasonal influenza.

But having some numbers to compare is better than having none (or trusting gut instinct).

For me, it's a question of false confidence.

When you have no numbers, you have high confidence that you have low information.

When you have some numbers that are reported as though they are very granular and accurate, you have extreme confidence that you have high information.

The latter, in my view, is a more precarious position from which to make decisions.

No. It's orders of magnitudes.

Look at the SARS timeline, it was > 100 times less at this point -

https://www.who.int/csr/don/2003_07_04/en/

It's also 17 years between then and now, and we've made great strides in antiviral drug research. Trials for COVID-19 specific antiviral drug have already started, and there already exists a vaccine for it as well. Let's not do doom&gloom here. The press does it for clicks, but there's no reason for normal, sane people to buy into this clickbait bullshit.

Not just within that year. If you look at the graphs, within less than 6 months. I remember those "we're all gonna die" predictions as well, and then poof, and it was gone by June, and where I live was not affected by it at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com