I've been checking for updates on the virus several times a day since it first started being reported in Western media around Jan 20 (in part because it's been a fun distraction, in part because I have friends in Wuhan). I like to think I'm generally an optimist, but I think it's been clear for several weeks now that this is going to have a significant worldwide impact.
There are just too many factors in favor of uncontained worldwide spread at this point - within the 1st week of reporting it already looked like China's numbers were incomplete (and potentially manipulated) and the scale was greatly underestimated.
Untraceable transmission all over the place, relatively low-traffic countries like Nepal and Sri Lanka seeing cases very early on, extremely long incubation periods with airborne transmission without symptoms, false negative tests with people either catching the virus after leaving quarantine or not testing positive (both really bad signs), governments demonstrating weak and ineffective containment of potentially infected travelers (Japan: "no symptoms so they can go home!"), more infections than SARS in a small fraction of the time, the US only testing ~400 people thus far, entire families in Wuhan being wiped out. Basically everything is in place for this to be a serious pandemic.
I think when this all comes to an end, China will be one of the countries that dealt with the virus the best. Countries without authoritarian governments likely don't have the means to effectively quarantine major cities and shut down massive portions of their economy immediately without major problems arising. Given a couple weeks, sure, but by then it will be too late.
As an aside, BNO has been doing an excellent job of posting timely and sourced updates that make it easy to keep up to date with every new confirmed case (scroll down to the Timeline section):
> I think when this all comes to an end, China will be one of the countries that dealt with the virus the best. Countries without authoritarian governments likely don't have the means to effectively quarantine major cities and shut down massive portions of their economy immediately without major problems arising. Given a couple weeks, sure, but by then it will be too late.
It may well seem that way in retrospect. When it does, just remember that those same authoritarian governments are the ones who played down the threat, lied, covered up to save face, imprisoned whistleblowers, and refused to let international experts in.
Do you really think it will be any different in the USA or Europe? Will the governments ban conventions? Close restaurants and bars? Shut down shopping malls? Or will instead, in the interest of "the economy" (ie, money) keep too light a hand on things.
Basically I don't expect the west to be able to react to this any better if it gets big. Their populations are uncontrollable (for mostly good reason) but in this particular case that feature will turn out to be bug.
> Do you really think it will be any different in the USA or Europe? Will the governments ban conventions? Close restaurants and bars? Shut down shopping malls?
Look at Italy right now.
> Or will instead, in the interest of "the economy" (ie, money) keep too light a hand on things.
Sure, but this has nothing to do with authoritarian states vs democracy. You'll find a ton of authoritarian states doing exactly the same. It's just a matter of who's the ruling class, and in most places in the world (100% of liberal democracies but also most authoritarian states), it's the business owners, so of course they will try and save their business before their people.
> Basically I don't expect the west to be able to react to this any better if it gets big. Their populations are uncontrollable (for mostly good reason) but in this particular case that feature will turn out to be bug.
Western people aren't uncontrollable. The one who are, are the one who are pissed of by their plutocratic governments and have lost all faith in them. I'm pretty convinced that Switzerland will be fine, and I'm not surprised Italy is in the same kind of shit than Iran.
I'm French, and we've been lucky so far, but I expect chaos when it's going to start. The government has long lost all political legitimity here, and people absolutely distrust them, so I don't think they will not peacefully comply to government attempt to limit the propagation.
Here's the thing with Italy. They're the first Western country to get a major outbreak. They're being told to do things and assuming that it will stop the virus. But the truth is, containment does not actually stop the virus. It simply slows it.
When or if this hits the US or elsewhere in Europe, and it becomes obvious that despite the quarantine in Italy, the virus still continued to spread, they will question the measures being taken. As time goes on, the West will become critical of government response and may be difficult to control.
In China when the government tells its citizens to do something, they just do it. They don't ask why. They don't deliberate on whether it's the correct choice. They simply follow the directions. In the West, everything is up for debate. People don't like to be told what to do.
> Here's the thing with Italy. They're the first Western country to get a major outbreak.
Here is the other thing with Italy: differently from other neighbor countries, they have been testing people without symptoms.
Numbers: until February the 24th, Italy performed ~8500 tests (mostly on people without symptoms, but that were in contact with confirmed SARS-CoV-2-infected patients), while UK did ~6500 (focused on people with influenza-like symptoms), Germany ~1000 and France ~500.
This is better from a safety point of view (you get to discover all problematic patients earlier and you can quarantine them before they spread the infection even more). But is makes "your stats look worse" (cit. The wire) because now you look like the epicenter of the infection.
Guess what? The testing method has now been changed ("aligned") to what the other countries are doing, so that the numbers do not look that much worse.
> In China when the government tells its citizens to do something, they just do it. They don't ask why. They don't deliberate on whether it's the correct choice. They simply follow the directions. In the West, everything is up for debate. People don't like to be told what to do.
Sigh, this is so cliché… I don't know where you're from, but the “west” as the unified entity you describe doesn't exist. When it comes to authority and how people comply with the rules, France and Germany are more different than China and the US.
Can't comment on France, and of course it's a generalization, but in Germany people love to follow the rules. Just watch how people cross the road without looking left or right, but obeying only the light. Sometimes other pedestrians will shout at you if you walk across the road when the light isn't green.
That isn't the experience in noticing here as a tourist in Berlin, where locals seem to cross against the light quite often. But yes, I realize Berlin is not the typical German experience.
I'd consider it suicidal to blindly trust the lights, no matter if as pedestrian or bcyclist. But then i'm bicycling since 40 years plus in different parts of .de, always wary of every other traffic :-)
Can speak of Hamburg for about 15 years now, and since maybe about 10 years i have the feeling that at least 50% of traffic participants are absolutely insane, again no matter which mode.
I don't like the way how you characterize Chinese people. The fact is that most of Chinese trust the government and believe collectively they are making the correct choice. Maybe we don't think the same way as you, it doesn't mean we don't think.
> But the truth is, containment does not actually stop the virus. It simply slows it
Isn't slowing it the best we can hope for? I mean, I'd rather the pandemic slowly take its course so that there's maximum chance a ventilator will be available if I need one when I get it in six months time. If everyone gets it on the same day.....
>containment does not actually stop the virus. It simply slows it
If containment slows the virus then it might be wise to slow the virus if any of the following is true:
1. You expect to develop some treatment for it.
2. You think a slowly growing group of infected will allow you to study the infected and possibly discover a treatment (related to 1 but not exactly the same)
3. The virus is not expected to be a problem in the summer.
4. A slowly spreading virus means that you can better ramp up your facilities to take care of the infected. (related to 1 and 2)
Is it scaling up now? I live in Kazakhstan, we have huge border with China and a lot of people going through Kazakhstan transiting to other countries. I don't really see any scaling. I don't even see proper reporting, apparently we have no ill people. It sounds stupid and unrealistic, so nobody believe that, but officials say so. I'm prepared to get this virus soon enough, it seems inevitable. I'm young, so probably I'll survive, but I can't say the same about my parents. It's a stupid situation, really.
Due to lack of need. Creating vaccines for the common human strains of corrona virus would be spending a lot of effort to stop the common cold (possibly including a flu like seaaonal vaccine).
Work on SARS resulted in cadidate vaccines, but was abonded before human trials because of succsefull containment.
Work on MERS resulted in a vaccine that is currently showing succsess in humans.
Work on SARS-COVID-2 is starting from those, and already has canditate vaccines based on modifying ones we know showed signs of success against other corona virus.
Maybe this will turn out to be another HIV, where a virus proves ellusive, but I haven't seen anything to suggest that.
That's a hypothesis why young children aren't affected by COVID-19, maybe they had more exposure to related viruses due to school. Currently, no reported death for children; but mortality rate is significantly higher for 50+.
There was once a vaccine for the common cold. However it only covered a couple of the 300+ different common colds and so it made no statistical difference.
>In China when the government tells its citizens to do something, they just do it. They don't ask why. They don't deliberate on whether it's the correct choice. They simply follow the directions. In the West, everything is up for debate. People don't like to be told what to do.
>In China when the government tells its citizens to do >something, they just do it. They don't ask why. They don't >deliberate on whether it's the correct choice. They simply >follow the directions. In the West, everything is up for >debate. People don't like to be told what to do.
No, they do not. Chinas propaganda machine just tells you they do. That is why china- even with all its measures couldnt clamp down. Behind the waver thin authoritarian theater presented lurks the same chaos as in africa and india.
No matter where you were in the developed world, the majority in 1932 (though not necessarily the majority of the elites) would have held similar views or views that were even further away from yours. The US, for instance, had just recently passed an immigration law that was explicitly racist in design, which wasn't repealed until 1965, and even then the proponents of the replacement legislation had to lie through their teeth claiming it would not alter the demographics of the country. England similarly was cracking down on immigration during that period.
>The fact that millions of people are still racists nowadays doesn't mean we should accept that either.
You do have to share a country with them, and may rely on them some day to save your skin, so it would probably be a good idea for you to treat them like equals, unless you're looking for a civil war.
>Hopefully, Nazis will be defeated in the long run, but it looks quite far ahead of us unfortunately.
What does that even mean? There are no Nazis today. There's a tiny smattering of people that go around playing dress-up, probably mostly undercover government agents or informants, but the NSDAP is a defunct political organization.
> You do have to share a country with them, and may rely on them some day to save your skin, so it would probably be a good idea for you to treat them like equals, unless you're looking for a civil war.
Interestingly enough, this argument works equally well for immigrants. Some fascists have no problem with the idea of a civil war in that context though…
It is a whole lot easier to expel immigrants than it is to expel a large chunk of the native population, but yes you are correct. Everything I have said applies equally well to immigrants, though immigrants will tend to have fewer expectations about being treated equally.
> > The fact that millions of people are still racists nowadays doesn't mean we should accept that either.
> You do have to share a country with them, and may rely on them some day to save your skin, so it would probably be a good idea for you to treat them like equals, unless you're looking for a civil war.
See I actually think that it's a good thing to call for, say , "stamp out racism". Cause I don't think it's real healthy for a population to just accept racism because, well, you gotta share a country with them.
Would you say this if you believed there was an actual possibility that, one day the target of their racism would be you?
Just imagine that you're living in your country, born there etc, but the brewing racist population happens to not include your particular ethnic group, and it may not be right now, but there is really no reason why they would not continue being racists, well you know, they per definition don't like sharing a country with anyone.
Everywhere in the world and history where such a situation occurred, it happened with some amount of tension and suffering (ranging from economic inequality to holocaust).
I can only imagine someone saying "well they may be racist but you gotta share a country with them" if they were certain to expect to come out on top, given such tensions.
There will also be groups that come out on the bottom, badly. But apparently it doesn't matter if you treat them as equals and share a country with them?
> There are no Nazis today. There's a tiny smattering of people that go around playing dress-up, probably mostly undercover government agents or informants, but the NSDAP is a defunct political organization.
While you are technically correct about the NSDAP ...
>See I actually think that it's a good thing to call for, say , "stamp out racism".
Does stamping out racism to you involve preventing people from freely and equally participating in the political process? By which I mean being able to utilize the same means to advocate for their interests and political beliefs as any other law-abiding group would be - able to gather in public spaces without fear of physical retaliation, able to utilize the services of major companies that provide electronic resources like payment processing and social media communication and other internet services, and things of that nature.
>Would you say this if you believed there was an actual possibility that, one day the target of their racism would be you?
Yes, I would still say what I have said.
>Just imagine that you're living in your country, born there etc, but the brewing racist population happens to not include your particular ethnic group
Certainly I would not want to share a country with people that thought that way about me. You must be able to rely on your countrymen in times of serious crisis, and obviously I could not rely on those people. I would advocate for physically removing them if I believed that they posed an existential threat to people of my ethnicity and if I believed that such a removal would be feasible. If it was not feasible due to their numbers or influence or whatever I would get out of there for my own safety.
What I would not want under any circumstances is for them to remain in my country but be prevented from advocating for their perceived interests in the same way that everyone else is able, or in other words for them to see that the interests of others are being openly and plainly put ahead of their own perceived interests - if they are not themselves able to advocate for their perceived interests, why should they trust anyone else to further their interests for them, least of all people that are preventing them from advocating for those interests? That is a recipe for civil war, and that is the outcome I would most seek to avoid if I believed they were too powerful to be physically removed.
>but there is really no reason why they would not continue being racists
How many people are you talking about? Enough to influence the outcomes of a democratic government?
>Everywhere in the world and history where such a situation occurred, it happened with some amount of tension and suffering (ranging from economic inequality to holocaust).
What do you think that telling certain people that they can't advocate for their interests using the same means as everyone else is going to do to tensions?
The big issue with your reasoning: racism isn't an opinion, it's a crime. You're talking about freedom, but for good reason you wouldn't give the jihadists the rights you're claiming.
Neither fascists nor Muslim terrorists deserve those rights. And if you say it's not comparable, please reminds that for the past 12 months, there has been more terror attacks committed by white racists than Muslim jihadists in Western countries.
>The big issue with your reasoning: racism isn't an opinion, it's a crime.
Some manifestations of it are in some jurisdictions. How is that an issue with my reasoning?
>You're talking about freedom, but for good reason you wouldn't give the jihadists the rights you're claiming. Neither fascists nor Muslim terrorists deserve those rights.
Do you want a civil war against these "fascists"?
>And if you say it's not comparable, please reminds that for the past 12 months, there has been more terror attacks committed by white racists than Muslim jihadists in Western countries.
How many white racists do you think there are in Western countries?
Ideally, we put ourselves into a situation where it's not a matter of 'giving rights', but removing the ability to remove the ability for people to communicate from people.
What's he supposed to do? He went out of his way to put it in the polite way for you. Unless you want to go into complete incomprehensibility, it's a "rock and a hard place" situation.
Personally, I'd prefer such comments not to be made in a euphemistic way and just speak plainly. If you have concerns (valid or not) with immigrants not following the native culture and social norms then say that.
Well, looking at this sub-thread, I've just watched you keep your cool while pasabagi throws insults at you. So I would hope their behaviour would be more likely to result in bans.
The way people in a society think influences the character of that society, obviously. Do you disagree with that?
If people in some society like the way their society is, more or less, why should they want to import a whole bunch of people that think very differently from them, who will make their society very different in a way that they are not interested in it becoming? How would that benefit them?
It's a really fundamental tradition of french society, going back to the revolution (or even before) that you can think how you like. If you dislike this foundational principle, then you cannot say you like French society 'how it is'. You are in effect saying you would like to change probably its most fundamental rule.
I don't know if you're using this argument to convince the 'normies', and actually you don't like brown people because they frighten you, or if you actually believe it. People often believe in self-contradictory things, but then again, people with unwarranted self-regard often think they can convince other people with obvious nonsense. Perhaps a bit of both?
>It's a really fundamental tradition of french society, going back to the revolution (or even before) that you can think how you like.
That doesn't mean you have to want people who happen to think very differently to come in. You can like the fact that people in your country are free to think how they like, and also like the fact that most of them happen to like to think certain ways.
>people with unwarranted self-regard often think they can convince other people with obvious nonsense.
Perhaps you should consider that it does make sense, and you simply don't want to understand it. I don't think you're intellectually incapable of understanding it.
Yeah, but that goes against the rules. In civilized conversation, your only choice is to use incomprehensible euphemisms. He did a really great job - there is no kind of dog-whistle or outright strange language ("the urban crowd"). Perhaps he could have wrote 'normal french', but that's honestly a minor gripe.
You really have no choice but to phrase yourself in a way that's only recognizable to the in-crowd. Even here, with the polite expression, he is catching flak.
Personally, I don't discuss politics in real life anymore. Risks are too great. Just the Internet, where on some forums (not this one), you can be honest about what you think.
The point is that if doctors had been free to investigate and alert the existence of the disease very early on, it might have been contained to a small number of cases right from the start, and never gained any traction in the population in the first place.
The first few weeks of an outbreak are absolutely crucial, and the Chinese authorities actively obstructed efforts to address the issue in that period precisely because of their authoritarian system.
Well from what we've seen in Japan and South Korea, that seems to be far from guaranteed. Those countries had all the warnings they needed, and knew much more about the virus than the earlier days, yet they still failed to contain the initially small outbreaks.
How can they have all the warnings they needed if China didn't give them the right info from the start ? That 27 days incubation period got a lot of people infected and becoming carriers. It's like, China had a relatively well defined outbreak center while other countries started with a wide spread invisible web of carriers.
>How can they have all the warnings they needed if China didn't give them the right info from the start
So what country gave China info from the start? Japan and SK had a lot more info with regard to the disease (human to human transmission, asymptotic transmission, 14 days incubation period, hell even the RNA sequence was done on the virus) than what China had at the beginning.
I don't understand your statement. WHO didn't hid any information from China, neither other countries did. What kind of info could they have given to China when they didn't even know there was an outbreak (much less when China didn't even want to acknowledge it) ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_ou...
Having more info once contaminated people got reported doesn't change the fact that weeks went by with potential carriers spreading everywhere unchecked.
maybe not all. but from the moment china admitted they had an outbreak. maybe a more wary country would...ban all non-local travelers from china , quarantine all locals travelling from china, stop all flights to-and-from china, revoke all visas of chinese people...etc
Also China could have prevented people leaving, but by allowing infected people to leave they ensure that China does not need to fight it in isolation, and is not impacted more than other countries, ie. crab mentality
When you have an initial outbreak, you have a single original source of the incident and no possibility of people outside the area bringing in additional sources of the virus, because the virus hasn't spread outside the area yet. If you contain it locally, you have contained it completely, full stop.
The situation for other countries is completely different. Someone could fly into Japan right now from anywhere in the world carrying the contagion at any time. It was brought into Japan by multiple carriers at different times and different places. You can contain one incoming source, and three more will spring up. It's a completely different problem.
No you don't, there is 27 days incubation factor which means 27 days before the initial outbreak for things to spread and no possible way to do anything about that. Then you have whatever time for doctors to identify that this is something new and a big deal, again time that things can spread without your ability to control it.
Ok, which part did China mislead people? China told the world the virus can be transmitted asymptomatically, can be transmitted human to human, with a 14 days incubation period, and provided all the clinical data.
It misled people by hiding the extent of the problem, by harassing and prosecuting doctors who were raising awareness. Their first response was to suppress warnings.
It doesn't looks so. Chinese scientist did research and found that virus was originated outside of Wuhan. It just became wide spread in Wuhan.
IMHO, it's from Koltsovo.
There was an explosion at a virology lab in Koltsovo in September last year. There were no reported infections as a result and no apparent cases of Coronavirus or anything like it in the area or any established link with Wuhan, but apparently actual evidence isn't required for some people to come to all sorts of conclusions.
The idea that we are in possession of special knowledge or rare insights is very compelling. This is especially true if we often find ourselves disbelieved or shown to be wrong on a regular basis, because it creates a justification for being marginalised. Ok those people might be clever, but I know things they don't so I'm still special. As a result people will consciously seek out unlikely connections or speculative ideas and latch on to them to try to get ahead of the pack.
> The idea that we are in possession of special knowledge or rare insights is very compelling.
There's also evidence that people with lower levels of schooling particularly like conspiracy because it allows them to make sense of a chaotic world. Instead of feeling powerless and hopeless, they have a truth not even the smart and powerful have.
It is of course not true, but therein lies the appeal.
This is not a special knowledge. Just Google it: Vector, Koltsevo, 16.09.2019. Moreover, even if outbreak will be traced back to Koltsevo (because it's only one bio-laboratory which had this virus), explosion will be used as excuse.
It gets even weaker, Harbin is the opposite end of China from Wuhan and has the second lowest levels of the disease of all the regions in China, beaten only by Tibet. But if it was spread to tourists through the population in Koltsovo, how come there isn't a significant outbreak in Koltsovo? How many Chinese tourists were given the special tour of a blown up virology lab?
I don't know. I need list of passengers from Koltsevo to Wuhan to make conclusion. I cannot get it. IF this is incidental, I will suspect a student with asymptomatic infection.
The Milan fashion show was basically cancelled and whole cities in Italy have been cordoned off under the threat of military action if the quarantine isn't followed.
>Will the governments ban conventions? Close restaurants and bars? Shut down shopping malls?
I've had a dig around the BBC News website and despite Italy being the lead story, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-51638095, quarantine and control of population movement doesn't get any 'column inches' - all they do say is borders aren't closing.
I'd guess the UK government have told them not to report quarantine in order to keep the UK population calmer.
> Do you really think it will be any different in the USA or Europe? Will the governments ban conventions? Close restaurants and bars? Shut down shopping malls?
You are poorly informed. The Italian government did precisely that this weekend.
Just wait until it happens on a massive scale, and does not appear to be stopping the spread of the virus. People in the West are going to be tough to keep on lockdown. The entire purpose of lockdowns and quarantines at this point seem to be delaying until a vaccine is ready.
This will be hard for the average person to understand, and people think much more critically in the West.
>People in the West are going to be tough to keep on lockdown
Historically they haven't been proven particularly tough to lock down, stir up by authoritarians (Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, etc), be surveilled, sold lies, and so on...
As for those "obedient" Chinese, they got this authoritarian party they have today by doing a whole revolution thing first...
It's very easy to lock people down. have you ever been in New York before a declared snow day? How about Houston just before a big hurricane? Absolute ghost towns.
People are actually eager to be told to stay home and not go to work. They don't have to be forced. Especially if it's for their safety.
Many parts of China have been on lockdown for over 4 weeks now. Hundreds of millions of people have still not returned to work. I am not sure a lockdown of this scale will be accepted in other countries.
Yeah exactly. It's one thing to board up the windows for a day or two, a completely different story to do it for a month+. People get restless and impatient. They start working each other up about perceived ineffectiveness of the lockdown.
Why yes; cities / counties in Italy are on lockdown, a hotel in Tenerife is quarantined, the biggest mobile conference, Mobile World Conference in Barcelona was cancelled (a move which will affect the sector for months / years), etc.
I'm not sure if you just haven't heard of these things or if you're intentionally ignoring them to make a point.
this is childish. "the economy" is the thing that makes everything you have, and the food you eat and medicines you need. there's very good reason to not just turn it all off.
By now we know much more about the virus and the threat is evident so the situation is not really comparable to the start of the outbreak.
I guess a lot of "what if it started in another country" scenarios can be debated, ranging from "another government wouldn't cover up the real situation so the virus would be quickly contained" to "western governments wouldn't have the balls to quickly enact proper quarantine measures so the virus would spread much more quickly" but is it really productive? At this point these debates are pure speculation.
I the 21st century we should be able to do better then speculate and have a clear idea of what the proper response is to a virus like this or any other.
Did it ever occur to you that if there is open / reliable information about the disease people might choose not to go out and/or engage in these conferences? The whole reason all of these cancellations are happening in the first place (MWC, etc) is because rational actors have decided (without government intervention and even with incomplete information) that the risks are too great.
Honestly my main concern in the United States is the complete and utter panic that will be caused by something that is only marginally less dangerous than getting in one's car to go to work each morning.
A government concerned with "not screwing up" can at times take drastic "emergency" measures with an overly cautious basis (at best) and with malintent (at worst), and we should be skeptical and continue to push for reasons for any actions. I don't see how this turns out to be a bug. They can have more impact on peoples actions with a press conference presenting skewed data than with any sort of attempt at straight-up bans or enforced quarantines.
> Honestly my main concern in the United States is the complete and utter panic that will be caused by something that is only marginally less dangerous than getting in one's car to go to work each morning.
If the fatality rate of COVID-19 is 2% as feared, that is dramatically more dangerous than getting in your car every morning.
The flu kills somewhere around 20-30k Americans every year. The common flu has a fatality rate of around .1%. So for something that is potentially 20 times as deadly, we're looking at hundreds of thousands of deaths. By contrast, car accidents only kill around 35k Americans per year.
Absolutely. It's scary as hell in that context and I likely was typing that trying to cope with the reality.
I'm really hoping we get more data on this so we can figure out what's happening. With the lack of testing / confirmation and light symptoms it must be impossible for our science community to track things right now.
In no way is this refuting or at least commenting on the original post.
> [..] played down the threat, lied, covered up to save face, imprisoned whistleblowers, and refused to let international experts in.
Diverting a sensitive topic to a false-equivalence seems to be a go-to tactic of those in favor of China (Chinese government to be precise, the actual Chinese people are the biggest victims here).
I would have had to go to a convention/trade show in Paris next week, but luckily it got postponed for two months. So far people are getting more cautious.
Between the two standard criticisms "too little, too late" and "unnecessary panic" there is very little margin, especially in public opinion.
Here in Germany, people are starting to stock up on supplies, which is reasonable unless they completely plunder the supermarkets. Otherwise, it's all wait-and-see over here. Of course it doesn't help that Europe is also in the midst of flu season...
I'm guessing most countries have laws allowing the authorities to forcibly quarantine people if they feel they are at risk of spreading disease, and similar laws for limiting public activity. Certainly they do for shutting schools and other public buildings.
Institutions in developed countries are far better equipped to deal with this level of crisis than China has been. Australia, where I'm from, has had infections since mid Jan but has been able to effectively quarantine people and prevent community transmission thus far.
> those same authoritarian governments are the ones who played down the threat, lied, covered up to save face, imprisoned whistle-blowers, and refused to let international experts in.
I'm scared that it will become a lot worse than that. The pandemic gives them a real-life stress test and lessons to harden the surveillance state and further improve technical controls and tweak the technology to become more effective. It's another step on the road to integrating and normalizing intrusive and outrageous ideas for government to retain control. (-> both in China and the West!)
From the videos I watched from Chinese pigs (aka LE) in uniforms beating old people not wearing a mask and welding the doors shut of giant apartment blocks where people live like ants (or slaves), I tell myself this will not happen in the West. Then I look at our current research and Europe's own ambition to create a central biometrics database (along with tweets from the UK LE which ask you to report anything people see online that may look like terror and all I think is "STASI!" neighborhood watch. These days I see a uniform and my first reaction is disgust mixed with fear, the sort of claustrophobic feeling normally only Orwell brings up in me.
I get that quarantine laws (locking people in their homes, issuing a curfew, rations etc) can be harsh but important to combat a deadly problem. But looking at the authorities in charge in the West I wouldn't trust them for a second and think it's also a play with fire. There are lots of edge-cases everywhere for this to be a massive human rights violation (elderly care facilities, prisons, migrants, the homeless, and more power to the rigged justice systems and corrupt EU institutions and generally everyone already wielding lots of power)
The CDC and WHO have utterly failed. Why are there no hand-outs of free face-masks and other PPE - oh because there are no stocks! - instead the problem is downplayed (by both WHO and the dear leaders). Why is there no transparency (constant news) about how many people an individual country is testing? Oh because we don't have adequate testing right now. Instead medical professionals were arguing on France24 yesterday whether the game between Juventus/Lyon should go ahead and they felt that they're not qualified to make a statement on a complex subject like this. Instead Italy and other countries are reminding us not to press the panic button just yet and media should be "more responsible in their reporting".
What would have to take place for you to stop thinking this virus is going to push the entire world over the edge and fully in to 1984?
CDC and WHO are probably not perfect but saying they "utterly failed" because you're angry over not getting a free face mask is a bit disrespectful toward the many people their working their asses off in times like these.
> because you're angry over not getting a free face mask is a bit disrespectful toward the many people their working their asses off in times like these.
my partner is a health care professional and there aren't enough masks for them (this is central Europe btw). but yeah tell me about how hard they work and how I don't appreciate them.
Here in Belgium it's almost impossible to find masks as well, except if you want to pay 70+ EUR https://i.imgur.com/dGd56Ng.png I suspect Asian customers have been plundering online EU shops for a while.
Having said that, I don't think it's the responsibility of the WHO to distribute masks to health professionals like your partner.
An article in the Guardian just mentioned France will make 15 million masks available to the public.
So it looks like perhaps they have stockpiled. Until there's no recommendation to wear masks, any shortages are just private businesses that have run out. No failure of govt or WHO.
> Having said that, I don't think it's the responsibility of the WHO to distribute masks to health professionals like your partner.
it's the CDC's who acts on advise and recommendations made by the WHO. The WHO has in 2018 warned about a disease X[1], so the CDC and local health ministries would have had 2 years to prioritize and make sure there are enough stocks for PPE in the country. It's not only about the masks for a theoretical pandemic that may or may not play out. There are shortages in other areas as well on a daily basis which are more complex and require structural cahnges. Take Germany as an example that hires Eastern Europeans as health-care workers (mostly for disabled people and elderly facilities) with salaries of ~€600-€800/month where they are placed on contracts from Slovenia and Poland to avoid paying the local insurance. (so some of the people working in healthcare can be put on crazy shifts under what is for EU standards a slave-labor condition). I won't even mention the health-care facilities in Croatia, Romania, Slovenia where elderly facilities buy drugs illegally because they want to pocket the difference, or where somebody who is hired as a nurse has actually never had any training as a nurse.
I know of some elderly care facilities in Croatia which are run by a lovely Albanian couple that branched out into this (their other businesses is bars/cafes). The wife of the entrepreneur/owner drives a fat Mercedes and goes on holidays to Paris, but the residents are lying in their own shit and swallow counterfeit drugs - also their employees are paid cash because they are usually elderly women themselves who have a lot of private debt - so this is the only way for them to survive.
This isn't whataboutism but an example of the places which won't stand a chance when this disease really hits. They aren't rare either, we just don't see them because it's disgusting and easier to look away.
As you said the price of masks has increased (in my experience by a factor of 10x !!) because people see an opportunity.
Hiring practices of elderly care facilities in Croatia aside, I very much doubt that EU hospitals are already short of facemasks at a time when there's less than 500 cases among a population of over 700 million.
That there are no facemasks available to the general public is a result of people plundering the stocks of private businesses.
European disease control agencies aren't even recommending that people wear masks. Until they do and they can't provide any I don't see any failures on their part.
A gov run healthcare facility certainly isn't going to order masks from "ebay". I agree that they should though if their normal supply chain isn't able to deliver and there are no other ways.
The common surgical face masks you'll often see people from Asia wear in public are only useful if YOU have the virus by reducing the chance of people catching the virus from you. There are, however, N95 respirator masks that are useful for protecting the uninfected from catching the virus.
They do stop you from breathing in contaminated particles, from spreading them when coughing / sneezing and they stop you touching your face with contaminated hands.
They aren't perfect because you still need proper technique when removing them and they "leak" along the sides etc. Still better than nothing, especially in crowded places.
They won't help you at all. All they do is creating false sense of safety. Viruses are too small and will go through the mask anyway. Also they may protect half of your face against your hands but they won't protect other half, say, against rubbing your eyes.
They may help you to minimize the spread if you are already sick, sneezing and coughing. Droplets are big enough to be stopped by mask. This is actually the reason why surgeons are wearing masks in the first place - not to contaminate the patient.
Unless we are talking about something more advanced. Like above mentioned N95.
Even a regular surgical mask that doesn't have the effectiveness of the N95 can stop water droplets (as you said) and hence, it can stop viruses.
The key insight, though, is that water droplets carry viruses; viruses can travel through masks, but they can't travel by themselves without hitching a ride on a water droplet.
This is why flu season is during the cold winter, when there isn't enough heat to instantly evaporate the moisture in the air. And this is why even a regular surgical mask can offer some protection for a healthy wearer.
That may be. But wearer of surgical mask creates moisture by breathing and a lot of it. One would suspect that kind of environment works in favor of a virus.
The N95 masks require training, and they're not for everyone. It is possible for young children to suffocate because their lungs are not strong enough to pull air through (it takes some effort).
I have asthma, and even a few hours of wearing a procedural mask, let alone an N95 mask are very taxing. Maybe for brief periods in public... But sweat transmitted by hand onto a surface is enough. Sewage in a building is enough to infect residents that don't otherwise encounter each other.
To add to your point, if one is worried and wants a face mask, in the US, right now, they can make effective masks in a few minutes using some gauze (cheap and plentiful in pretty much any US pharmacy), tape, a stapler and a few ribbons.
While this may not be beautiful and might be slightly less effective than a standard surgical mask, it should be good enough unless one is spending significant time inside with infected, coughing folks. In which case one should be doing more than just wearing a face mask. My 2c.
Surgical masks are three-layered with an outer layer that’s waterproof and an inner layer that stops microbes. Pretty sure your makeshift gauze mask would be largely useless at stopping anything.
(Source: Family member who worked in the operating theater for 30+ years.)
> Pretty sure your makeshift gauze mask would be largely useless at stopping anything.
That's a pretty bold statement. As someone who grew up in a less-well-off part of the world where medical supplies were not always available I have personally seen makeshift masks made and used by both doctors (rarely) and visiting relatives (more frequently).
The key problem with homemade masks is durability -- they do fail much quicker than a professional surgical mask that lasts many hours. But then, unless you are a medical professional, you do not need to wear them for hours. Wearing one in the open air environment is almost always an overkill.
First link that comes for me (below), when Googling for evidence, seems to indicate that homemade masks in some small trial were worse than professional but still pretty decent (1 hour with homemade ~ 3 hours with professional mask), although I barely skimmed it and might have misunderstood the results.
You can make this claim about any group, minority or not. Every single group of people has bad apples and some groups are even 51%+ bad but trying to use anecdotal evidence from twitter as proof is really not great.
Additionally using epithets and dehumanization of any group no matter what they've done is a road to more hate and violence and will never resolve anything. I find it pretty ironic that some on the left are ok with insults and dehumanization as long as it's of the right group of people that they've deemed "undesirable" even if that group of people really should stop what they're doing, using insults and animal comparisons is a road that takes you right back to what they claim to be fighting.
This got kinda long winded and preachy...
tl;dr calling cops "pigs" is a slur like any other and will only cause more problems.
my brother is a pig and he has no problem being called that. He is also suffering from depression because 9/10 of his colleagues are literal Nazis in a uniform and openly admit that they vote far-right (in my place that is the people who still use the Nazi salute until today). They not only hate just foreigners but are constantly abusing their power.
The other pigs I met were happy to take bribes and one (in Ireland) even bragged about how much he loved to use his pepper spray every time he gets a chance (he rarely does).
fwiw, pigs in colloquial english is not just a slur but silly slang, unless you are bold enough to call a whole class of blue-collar people (who hate pigs) problematic. Maybe read Orwell (Animal Farm) or the later Irvine Welsh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filth_(novel)
Never ever trust a uniform whatever country you're in. Btw I also do consulting for LE and the "sane" ones usually don't deny that they have a problem with racism. I'm not even talking about the videos from China where people get beaten with sticks or dogs get clubbed to death by men in blue while their colleagues are laughing before they move on to terrifying citizens.
I don't think getting upset about what is "natural language" in blue collar surrounding is going to do any good. I know the pigs are OK with it. (watch out for those who are not though)
You have a good reason for your paranoia. Even today, we have flights from Italy, South Korea, and Japan coming into U.S and nobody is bothering to contain this situation seriously. Unsure how Insurance is going to treat a spread in U.S. We are not set up for success.
Yeah, but if 2% of all the Chinese die that's going to mess their economy up real good. Considering the whole thing is a house of cards, I'm bullish on the coronavirus.
For the virus the biggest challenge is if it survives the weather. If it’s in the same family as SARS, summer will kill it. The window is closing and My bet is it won’t have chance to infect more than 1M people within China. Btw I think 1M infected Chineses are bad enough to bring the economy down seriously, let alone 2% died of the whole population (280M dead people? Oh lord)
The recent explosion in cases in South Korea, Italy and Iran would seem to suggest that in fact perhaps the officials in Wuhan did not fuck up handling the early part of the epidemic, at least much more so that the officials in these other countries.
There are some indications of officials playing down the threat and lying, but this was also reversed quickly by higher levels of the same authoritarian government. Did this lying have a significant impact, more so than presumably-less lying in South Korea and Italy, that resulted in the same order-of-magnitude in explosion of cases, even though the world media was already on high alert?
Don't be so overconfident at fitting world events and a few selected media stories into your prejudicial ideological convictions.
If the Wuhan authorities quarantined everybody that traced back to attending the mass dinners at the same early stage in the same way that the Italian and South Korean authorities are doing now, then the people infected in Hubei be at 60,000 or so now.
The quarantine came in too little too late to control the situation in Wuhan, and only helped to contain the virus in other provinces of China, not fully contain it.
> the people infected in Hubei be at 60,000 or so now.
The people infected in Hubei are at about 60k or so now. Actually slightly lower. Were you trying to say something else??
60k is pretty impressive considering all the other apocalyptic "worse case" scenarios being published in various academic journals a few weeks ago based on "conservative models".
And 60k is not pretty impressive considering that many people already died without a proper diagnosis and was not included in the official counts. There is no trust that the reported numbers are reflective of the situation on the ground - in fact it is likely to be the tip of the iceberg.
It is impressive, Wuhan has 11 million people. Would you have done better?
> There is no trust that the reported numbers are reflective of the situation on the ground - in fact it is likely to be the tip of the iceberg.
The numbers are confirmed test cases, which will always be an underestimate of the true situation regardless of the government supplying the numbers. There's no indication to suggest that it's the "tip of the iceberg" especially since the "current case" numbers have been consistently decreasing for the past several weeks.
It rather seems that you've been so convinced by the sheer amount of anti-Chinese-government-propaganda, that even positive facts can't change your prejudice that everything they do is negative.
I don't know how you could conclude they did not fuck up when they imprisoned doctors who blew the whistle on the outbreak.
That's not to say other countries will fare much better. But China had by far the best chance at containment, and they blew it. And the rest of the world has to deal with the fallout.
> I don't know how you could conclude they did not fuck up
I explained in my comment - the sudden increase in cases in Wuhan in January, was not that much worse that what we're seeing in S Korea, Iran and Italy right now. These latter countries are also less dense than Wuhan, and also had plenty of warning time. Nobody was imprisoned in Italy, yet despite that we still have several hundred cases today. This suggests that this single imprisonment didn't have a huge effect on the epidemic in Wuhan.
> by far the best chance at containment
What does it mean to have a "chance" at containment, and what makes one "chance" "better" than another "chance"??
> the rest of the world has to deal with the fallout
If you acknowledge there's a possibility that no "other countries will fare much better", why maintain such an accusatory tone? No government can control where an epidemic starts.
By your logic, if the epidemic had started in the US, the government would be at fault if it prevented the epidemic from spreading to any other countries? Is that what you're saying? That's an extremely high bar, probably unrealistic.
> When it does, just remember that those same authoritarian governments are the ones who played down the threat, lied, covered up to save face, imprisoned whistleblowers, and refused to let international experts in.
This doesn’t address the commenter’s claim that China did the best job of completely shutting their infrastructure down and quarantining the virus effectively. They did make their bed, but they also laid in it as well.
The OP said "I think when this all comes to an end, China will be one of the countries that dealt with the virus the best." Had they dealt with it better initially, the might never have needed such draconian actions. "They made their bed" implies they did _not_ deal with it well at least initially.
The authoritarianism is a red herring IMO. The real issue is economic incentives trumping everything else. For example in Japan if you test positive the hospital gets quarantined losing tons of money. In the US, you can end up payong huge medical bills. The fear is the same.
The lesson from WW2 should have been that people are all the same when pushed to extremes. This includes the people who make up the communist party leadership in China and every moral philosoher in the west as well.
My armchair belief is that China has ended up absorbing at a global scale, all of capitalism’s externalities. It is an integral part of the world that gives us many things we take for granted like cheap iphones and many others. We do NOT have the convenience to look away and scapegoat one aspect without taking into consideration the whole.
This ended up kinda ranty but every time coronavirus is used to bring up something whose purpose is to draw an “us vs them” line between the world and China I want to throw something.
I often think to the fable of Armus in ST:TNG, an advanced civilization achieved transcendence, but they left behind the black tar creature that gained sentience and represented all of their evils.
+1 I am not sure why, but your comment is the best thing I have read this morning.
A couple of my friends kid me about it, but I meditate almost every day for world peace and the reduction of suffering in the world. It can’t hurt and it makes me feel more connected to the world at large. I live in a small town, volunteering at the local food bank is one of my favorite activities, but I tend to think too much about just local life. I have a difficult time getting too excited about national/global politics, etc. Meditation on peace is the most effort I put into the global situation.
“in Japan if you test positive the hospital gets quarantined losing tons of money” is at least inaccurate, Japan has national healthcare that short-term “sales”/cash strapping don’t matter for hospitals. Economy wise there’s nothing for their corporate to lose OR gain.
Look at any government institution in the US - despite not having a profit motive, there are still plenty of incentives to grow the budget - increased influence in the government, funding pet projects,etc.
And not to mention shutting down a hospital likely means lost wages for a lot of people.
In the UK hospitals still have individual budgets, is that not how it works in Japan.
Yes, I'd expect them to be overridden in times of emergency, but nonetheless - do Japanese hospitals really have scope to spend at will without constraints?
Your comment is very reasonable and informative, please don't let the Hacker News anonymous downvote thoughtpolice mafia discourage you from posting comments to this site. They are the ones who should be getting banned.
I think that's apt. Authoritarian governments are environments least able to prevent novel problems and least able to react to them with agility, but best able to coordinate state-scale responses.
But in this case we'll see. China's problems don't end if they successfully contain the outbreak to Wuhan. Eventually everyone else will get sick too and re-infect the chinese via other roads.
considering the strong rumors that this is an engineered biological warfare agent escaped from the lab, authoritarianism still isn't looking so hot right now.
That's exactly my thought. Giving medal for dealing with the problem forgetting who let that problem get large in the first place.
The time when Chinese doctors screamed there is something wrong but instead being helped were downplayed or even threatened would be enough to prevent it from snowballing it to the size we face today.
> I think when this all comes to an end, China will be one of the countries that dealt with the virus the best. Countries without authoritarian governments likely don't have the means to effectively quarantine major cities and shut down massive portions of their economy immediately without major problems arising.
China's authoritarian government is largely responsible for the severity of the initial outbreak. Their extreme quarantine efforts happened more than a month and a half after the first case was detected, well after it was too late to effectively contain, and only when covering up the situation proved impossible. The government sponsored a 100,000 person banquet with shared plates 3 miles from the epicenter with people who travelled to get there/would travel back while it was arresting doctors and media reporters for talking about the virus. If major sectors in freer countries weren't shut down until weeks after it spreads, it would be an improvement over China.
Last time I checked they were still barring members of the CDC from going into China to help asses the situation. Crucial information such as mortality rate and recovery rate are only being discovered now, as the numbers from China are not accurate.
This virus appears to be something any government would have difficulty containing due to the long incubation period, and some of the false statistics coming out of China are simply a result of a system that has become overwhelmed. Any system in a similar situation as the Chinese now find themselves in would have trouble dealing with this, and I think it may have reached currently levels even with a more transparent system that tried to contain it earlier, but I heavily disagree with your statement. They were extremely irresponsible about early containment during the crucial period when containment had the best chance of working.
China can be held responsible for the slow early response and attempt to cover things up as well as being praised for the decisive efforts at containment later on.
I don’t want to let them off the hook for down playing this thing early on but I’m not sure how much more effective containment would’ve been if this happened in another dense country. Say Japan, India or somewhere in Europe.
By comparison pdm-09 would have killed somewhere between 8 and 60 people with ~78,064 infections not 2,715 and counting. Thus reasonably getting a vastly lower response.
> Their extreme quarantine efforts happened more than a month and a half after the first case was detected
I do agree that China and especially Wuhan could have acted faster - perhaps by 2 weeks though not month and a half. 1st December there was a case of pneumonia admitted to a hospital - that happens probably more than millions times a year. After 3 days it was clear that it's a viral pneumonia. That's more severe but still not uncommon. Only by the middle of the month it became clear to doctors that there are more and more such cases - but still spread through different hospitals of the 11 million Wuhan.
Obviously it takes time for this information to get to the bureaucrats. They should have done something - but then again, what? There are perhaps ~50 cases of viral pneumonia in a city the size of small country during an influenza season. If China hasn't gone through SARS it would take months to act on this information.
That's actually the critical difference. Incompetence and carelessness are normal - public administration and epidemiological control are difficult activities in any country - but active repression of medical personnel is not.
> Last time I checked they were still barring members of the CDC from going into China to help asses the situation.
I checked and the WHO team led by a Canadian epidemiologist has been working in China for more than two weeks, since Feb 10.
I fail to see why they are obligated to allow in a team from a nation that’s been openly hostile for a long time just because they asked and used the word “help”. Sounds like arrogance to me.
This is not an event for petty emotions. Also in high likelihood those who are there on behalf of the CDC are keeping quiet in order not to be kicked out. But you bet there's espionage going on. The Chinese government doesn't mess around.
And in this case it'd be justified. You're talking about the rest of the world at stake. This is no place for cover-ups and minimization. Transparency is critical.
1. Testing only 400 cases across the whole country.
2. Defective test kits which will only be fixed until Mid March
3. Hawaii now asking ask Japan(which by itself is doing a horrible job at handling the situation) for test kits because they have none, and test 0 people so far.
Doesn't seem first world to me honestly. Might have South Korea gives them some lessons as how to deal with the pandemic situation. Maybe they are transparent and honest, but I really don't want to understand much more about how little they can do.
I am watching the development almost hourly everyday and so far CDC is only giving me more reasons to panic.
We had been making due with Lab Developed Tests (LDTs). They work fine but they're only allowed to be used at the lab that developed them and we're going to need tests that can be run at hospitals.
The CDC can legally issue emergency tests that can be distributed the way we need to. But for these to be used the FDA had to issue an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). And that couldn't happen until the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) declared this was an emergency. All of which happened.
But When the HHS declared an emergency the situation is legally considered to important for LDTs to be used, which would normally be fine. But the original CDC tests had a reagent that was incorrectly manufactured. That's being fixed but last I heard the working testing kits hadn't been distributed yet.
This is sort of a huge problem because testing for a particular viral RNA sequence isn't especially hard and it should be within the capability of even a large hospital to develop their own tests, though there is a chance they'd mess up the way the CDC did. Our whole bureaucratic structure in the US isn't set up to deal with a new disease emerging quickly and we really need to fix this.
The USA is objectively corrupt from the top, have recently removed themselves from non nuclear proliferation and climate treaties .. as a country the message seems clear that USA don't care two shits about the rest of the World.
The idea Trump would open his response to an epidemic up to international inspection is just laughable - and I say his, rather than USA government's because that's how things appear to work there.
Trump has not even nearly as much power as you seem to think. We hear about his abuses of power because hearing ”California government implements reforms to reduce carbon emissions, in spite of Trump” doesn’t generate as much emotions as his corrupt practices.
Imagine a Chinese provincial government openly (key word openly) going against the CCP’s wishes. Or a judge, or a prosecutor.
Welcome to international politics. The US and Russia were in the UN together throughout the cold war -- cooperating on some issues while being at odds over others.
If only "openly hostile" was true. "open hostilities" generally means outright war or pretty close to it. Clearly something that has not been very close to happening.
the WHO has taken some not entirely transparent actions during handling of this epidemic and there are allegations that it's boss has a conflict of interest (his country apparently takes a lot of investments from China) and also that there are some pandemic-related financial instruments from which certain parties stand to benefit June 2020 if pandemic isn't declared. these are all hearsay but would explain trying to appease China and their choice of words in their press conferences. both are of course consistent with trying to not spread panic and make sure WHO has access to China, so I'm inclined to think that this is half politics, half good high level medicine work.
WHO politicking can be explained with other than an (IMO semi-bigoted) "China has a lot of investments in Ethiopia", it's got to do with trying to deal with an authoritarian country that doesn't like losing face. If WHO said something that can be taken as an insult, China can tell them to GTFO, and the WHO would lose first hand experience of what's going on there, which might make things more catastrophic..
"more than a month and a half after the first case was detected, "
The 'first case' of what exactly though? Nobody knew it's effects, transmissibility, etc. etc..
I actually believe that even if said doctors were not sanctioned, not much would have really changed.
I think the delay to the authoritarian clamp-down would have been roughly the same.
In the West, we have responsible actors but they're neither entirely knowledgable (nobody is) neither do they have the widespread authority to do what China is able to do.
But much worse are places like India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines ... these to me are the scary spots with high concentrations of people, crude medical practices, not a ton of gear, and no legit central authority to really turn the wheels on the disease.
And since the cat is out of the bag ... it doesn't look good.
No confirmed cases, that is. The thing is, that Indonesia mostly doesn't have the means to detect the disease, or only in specialized labs.
Also, if no "known" cases are present in a specific country, the awareness to check for specific symptoms is probably lower.
That's also the curious thing about why usually the detection rate in a country rises fast in the beginning - when the first infected patient has been found, as by then doctors start to specifically test for the virus.
Living in Tokyo and just returned from Seoul yesterday. It's striking how differently the countries are handling this issue. Korea is pretty much on lockdown -- the government and the population are being quite proactive. Masks everywhere, thermal guns at junctions with high human traffic. Water fountains shut down, etc. Even the airport staff at the eateries were undergoing temperature checks before interacting with customers.
Coming back to Japan; however, people seem kind of unconcerned in comparison. The airport was business as usual and no visible increase in mask usage.
I went to a GP just this morning for a shoulder injury and noticed some of the staff weren't wearing any face protection, and a few wearing them incorrectly. It was a bit unnerving, to be honest.
I have a feeling Tokyo is about to have a huge outbreak any day now. I'm not one to fear-monger, but knowing how casual people can be when out and about (unchecked coughing/sneezing, subpar handwashing in public toilets), it almost seems inevitable especially given how crowded this city is. As a resident, I'd like us to step up our precaution game before we hit infection levels that we are seeing with our neighbors -- but I'm afraid it might already be too late.
I’m in Tokyo and having a very different experience than you, nearly everyone on the trains are wearing masks and all customer facing staff I see now. Someone hit the emergency button on the train a few days ago because someone was coughing without one (there was a PSA asking people not to do that).
It’s mostly foreigners I see walking around without masks now, but I agree it’s still ramping up. I honestly don’t see the US getting close to this level of prevention, so if it fails here it’s going to be devastating there.
It might be the contrast that makes it so striking to me. South Korea is in full-on alert mode. As I said, in comparison, it seems like business as usual here.
Going from airport (ICN) to airport (HND) amid this really drove it home.
But yes, I am definitely noticing some measures happening here. Mask shortages, a few companies shifting to remote work, etc.
In the US we have an additional problem that 2 weeks of hospitalization means certain bankruptcy for many people (myself included). So it might be rather difficult to get people to voluntarily show up for tests and such.
I mean, if it hits here in a big way something is going to have to happen with this. Whether you're in a hospital for a 2 week quarantine, or laid up in bed for 2 weeks because you're sick -- either way you're going to have 2 weeks where you aren't working.
Beyond that, if it REALLY hits here, you're going to have entire businesses shut down temporarily. I saw a CDC estimate that if it goes pandemic, we should expect 40% - 70% of the population to contract it. Imagine your place of employment, but with half of its employees out sick.
This is why I said they're going to have to do something. When quarantines are imposed there is going to have to be some national consideration paid to these questions.
We are talking about quarantines. In other words, forced. Containing the virus as much as possible is well within the sphere of national security concerns. I don't know what the answer is, but if the CDC, HHS, and the government writ large are going to be serious about containing it, they are going to have to come up with some sort of solution that most definitely does not discourage people from self-reporting illness, and also doesn't bankrupt the populace.
Imagine you have no insurance, had contact with a coronavirus case, and are now feeling ill. What do you do?
If you do the right thing, you're looking at a 100% chance of having your financial life permanently destroyed.
If you just stay home and ride it out, it looks like you've got an 80% or so (correct me if I'm wrong?) chance of being perfectly fine in a week or two.
Booked when? Even if booked tomorrow, you’d be there two weeks.
Consider Korea. Two weeks ago, 28 cases, same as they had has for weeks. The current outbreak in confirmed cases only began growing one week ago, on Feb 19th.
The country is now entering lockdown, and some countries are banning flights from Korea.
If your flight leaves, say, tomorrow, you risk the same happening by the time you leave.
If it leaves further in the future, you have the good fortune of being able to wait and observe. If it gets worse you maybe able to get refunds on flights/hotels. Either directly or via cc. (As flights may be cancelled)
If it gets better, you can keep it. But if you leave now you’re taking a gamble you won’t have a lockdown before the end of it. This is moving fast, and japan is reporting new cases daily.
Note: the risk profile of being in a place is different from living in a place. If you live in a place you can just stay home. If you travel you have all manner of dependencies, and none of your usual supplies.
No, the handling of the situation is worse than has been widely reported in the west. Japan is functionally doing nothing to contain it’s spread right now:
Japan has very poor rankings on press freedom, reporters are routinely fired for questioning the government, and Abe has a long history of being a dishonest, self-serving, authoritarian.
Be prepared for travel disruptions. My connecting flight was canceled when my destination country decided no more flights from not only China, but a few surrounding countries.
Had to buy alternative tickets last minute to take a detour and get where I wanted to go.
Just FYI, this evening NHK news announced that most museums, theaters, and art galleries are being asked to close. Most events such as Sumo wrestling tournament are also considering closure. PM has asked all large events to be cancelled.
In my city, not on your itinerary, all elementary and junior high schools are being requested to close. All community volunteer oriented events and classes are being cancelled for whole month of March. All government employees are being asked to wear mask. All events in government buildings being asked to close.
Things are moving rapidly since government came back from long weekend.
I don't suppose you have an (English) link to that news story? Im getting concerned about my (tourist) trip next week if stuff I want to visit is closed.
Sorry I don’t have a link. Check /r/japantravel on Reddit. They have a Coronavirus megathread going and lot of other fellow travelers are posting information.
Personal anecdote as I've been in Niseko (flew in through Tokyo) for two weeks and people in the area don't seem all that concerned. All of the locals on the trains are wearing masks while foreigners don't seem to be. There is hand sanitizer literally everywhere (alcohol based) and we brought masks to be safe.
I have noticed a high number of Chinese tourists in the Niseko region on vacation though and overheard some families from Hong Kong talking about vacationing outside of China to avoid the virus. Not sure this is something to be that worried about - I'll leave it up to you.
You’re probably fine? Most things are running, though big events are cancelled and a lot of companies are implementing mandatory work from home policies.
I'm quite literally in the same position as you right now. As long as the CDC doesn't bump their warning up to a level 3, I'm going. The cost of the flight + no refund makes it difficult for some of my party to walk away from. I'm still fairly worried and my company is having me self quarantine for half a month when I get home.
I think people forget whilst they are themselves fit and in a low-risk category, they will still get ill just probably not severely, and importantly will be a carrier to spread the virus to others. To near-family, children, nieces & nephew and grandparents, or just to more at-risk people they meet on the bus, cafe, office, hospital, etc.
Or indirectly to other fit people who eventually down the line infects a high-risk person.
So I think it is quite selfish to expose yourself unnecessarily. I don't think we should stop everything we do, life still goes on, but just be considerate of others.
Why are you going to japan/what do you want to do there? If it's not essential for you to go, then it's probably an unnecessary risk. With how quickly the disease is spreading, 2 weeks is a long time for things to get worse, and there's always the risk of you becoming a vector for disease so it's more than just your own health to worry about in terms of safety.
That's an interesting observation since when I were in Tokyo at peace time, many people did wear masks. It's also important to remember that basic sanitary and hygiene are also important which I'd like to believe that the Japanese are better than probably the rest of the world.
The difference is that maybe South Korea is in "panic mode" and Japan is yet to get there. They are less than half of Japan population and had 10 times more new cases in the last 24 hours.
> basic sanitary and hygiene are also important which I'd like to believe that the Japanese are better than probably the rest of the world
When I traveled through Japan their hygiene culture came across as theatre more than anything. It's more of a social performance than a practical reality. I think 'very tidy' better describes Japan (if you ignore the beaches).
Same impression when returning in Japan at the beginning of month after a stay in Taiwan. In Taiwan something like 99% of people outside in bigs cities were wearing masks. In Japan only the usual 20%.
However, things are starting to change? At least my lab cancelled a conference we planned to organize (call for paper deadline next month, and conference itself in August).
My favorite thing in Tokyo (I wrote sarcastically) is being on over crowded trains in the winter and their policy of not running the ventilation systems "because it's winter".
My favourite thing is trains and buses heated to 30C (85F) because it's "winter", so that you nearly have heatstroke even if you strip down to just a shirt and whatever pants you are wearing.
I'm in Shizuoka, only about an hour "south" on the bullet train, and I have the same experience here. People don't seem any more proactive about this than they are already for the flu (many wear masks already at this time of year to avoid flu and allergies while there are still plenty who do not).
There's a bit of "anxious hesitation" in the air, but apparently not enough (yet?) to warrant more direct prevention...
I also will add a note of admiration for how the people of China have handled this. Their backbreaking work and sacrifice has probably slowed the spread by weeks. You can blame the authorities for not acting sooner, but it's kind of difficult to react to a killer virus until it starts to kill people and by then the horse has left the barn.
I think slowing the spread is the best we can hope for now. The main problem is healthcare throughput. Some quick back of the envelope calculations:
I live in an area of aprox 1,000,000 people, for which probably about 75 ICU beds that can support people on respirators, maybe we can double that in an emergency, but with widespread shortages of basic consumables we are going to be lucky to maintain existing capacity. If ¾ of that population catches the virus and 5% of those need intensive care, the average stay in Wuhan is around 3 weeks, we can calculate the burden on healthcare: (((7500,000 / 100 ) x 5 = 37,500 ICU patients ) / 75 ICU beds) x 3 weeks = 1500 weeks, or nearly 29 years at current capacity to treat everyone.
Obviously there are many simplifications and assumptions in there but my main point is that given existing conditions there is not enough capacity for more than a small fraction of patients. Therefore everyone working to slow the spread of the virus will aid healthcare throughput and save the maximum amount of lives.
>I think when this all comes to an end, China will be one of the countries that dealt with the virus the best. Countries without authoritarian governments likely don't have the means to effectively quarantine major cities and shut down massive portions of their economy immediately without major problems arising. Given a couple weeks, sure, but by then it will be too late.
I don't buy this argument at all. After various failures in handling the early phases outbreak, the authoritarian measures introduced at the later stages meant to contain the outbreak may have increased the infection and death toll in the areas that are quarantined, especially with the type of quarantine that China introduced. As the transmission of the virus is via vectors such as sewage and ventilation, forcing millions of people to stay at home in densely populated cities may actually increase the chance on infection within these communities.
I see lots of people attacking Japan's handling of the cruise ship quarantine, but these same people hardly bat an eyelid when China locks millions of people into their high-rise tower blocks which are as dense.
It may have prevented further transmission outside of Hubei, but are they not able to achieve the same by securing the borders of the region as opposed to locking in the local population?
Fear unfortunately tends to lead people to praise authoritarians because identifying with them a gives a greater (if illusory) sense of control over the situation.
It's worth reflecting on how many novel pandemics a 40 year old person has experienced in their lifetime.
HIV, SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika, COVID-19...
For some reason it feels like a "only in the history books" event -- and yet it's actually quite common. The average-aged American (38) has lived through multiple epidemics -- including one that has killed 30 million people (HIV) -- and yet we barely talk about it.
COVID-19 is unlike anything before (in modern times).
Especially HIV. You don't catch HIV by boarding the subway, eating in a restaurant, or running a marathon. For most people, avoiding unsafe sex is enough to avoid HIV. But if COVID-19 spreads to their country, people's daily lives will be significantly disrupted.
SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika are a little more like COVID-19, except they never propagate that far.
Ebola pretty much requires you to come into contact with someone so obviously ill they're about to die. It's not like SARS, Covid 19 or even MERS. It spreads well mostly due to scepticism of health services.
Of the resolved cases, the recovered are only those that were reported. Very likely there are many more recoveries with a mild trajectory. Much less likely that there are many unreported deaths at this point (at least in Wuhan where the vast majority of deaths is concentrated)
HIV is an incredibly manageable disease these days. The day to day effects are on a similar scale to Diabetes ie take regular medication and watch for specific symptoms that could imply it worsening.
Otherwise there relatively little day to day impact other than the stigma.
I should caveat that I'm referring to countries with a modern and available health system.
But in the early days in the 80s the case was different. Especially I think, in those who contracted it through blood transfusions, the progress of the disease was swift, with toxoplasmosis infection.
And having Ebola is a even worse outcome. But few in developed countries worry about Ebola at all. Why? Because it is not easy for them to catch Ebola at all.
This is a disease with a high spread rate, medium fatality rate. That's far more of a public threat than low spread rate, high fatality rate. Spread rate is far more relevant than death rate, and to top it off someone can be spreading it for weeks with no symptoms.
It’s almost exactly like every other respiratory virus, except that the case fatality estimates for old and sick people are higher.
There’s nothing mechanistically new about the infections we’re seeing. It’s a pretty bog-standard respiratory virus, in terms of its transmission and overall virulence.
”But if COVID-19 spreads to their country, people's daily lives will be significantly disrupted.”
If so, it will be primarily due to blunt attempts to prevent transmission of the virus in order to protect the sick and the old. For most people, this virus is little more than a mild chest cold.
Once this becomes a true pandemic, we will see a rapid shift away from quarantines and travel bans, and an increased emphasis on protecting vulnerable populations directly.
I see you’re still hard at work spreading the falsehood that “it’s just like the flu, unless you’re old or sick”.
1. I find the lack of concern about dramatically higher mortality rates for the old and the sick to be reprehensible. They’re people, even if they’re older or sicker than you.
2. It doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense for China to shut down the economy over something so minor.
3. The hospitalization rate is a serious concern that you’re overlooking.
4. Most importantly, your premise that it’s no more dangerous than the flu for the young and healthy is completely false. The fatality rate for flu for 18-49 year olds in the US is 0.02% [1], and this looks to be at least 20x higher than that for that age group, based on the data we have so far.
World health officials, medical experts, epidemiologists, virologists, etc, all seem to be taking this very seriously and are quite concerned. I think I’ll take my cues from them.
The virus is like the flu unless you’re old or sick.
More specifically:
0) In the case of the parent, I was saying that the virus spreads and infects people in the same manner as other upper respiratory viruses. It does, this is a fact, and fatality rates are not relevant.
1) I’ve never said that I have no concern about old or sick people. I said that young healthy people should not panic.
2) It would indeed be concerning if hospitals are overwhelmed. Currently, they are not (anywhere) and therefore, again, people should not panic.
3) Comparing tiny ratios with large error bars and freaking out over a “20x” difference in relative risk is pointless; the risk is still quite low. It also overlooks the far more relevant fact that you’re thousands of times more likely to get the flu than covid-19. At this point, you should not panic.
Get the idea? The relative risk to most people is lower than...well, most things in life. That’s why my argument is, and continues to be, that most people, in most places, should not panic.
The virus is like the flu unless you’re old or sick. These are facts and you are still wrong. More specifically:
0) In the case of the parent, I was saying that the virus spreads and infects people in the same manner as other upper respiratory viruses. It does, this is a fact, and fatality rates are not relevant.
1) I’ve never said that I have no concern about old or sick people. I said that young healthy people should not panic. You’re simply virtue signaling to stoke fear.
2) It would indeed be concerning if hospitals are overwhelmed. Currently, they are not (anywhere) and therefore, again, people should not panic.
3) Comparing tiny ratios with large error bars and freaking out over a “20x” difference in relative risk is pointless; the risk is still quite low.
It also overlooks the far more relevant fact that you’re thousands of times more likely to get the flu than covid-19. At this point, you should not panic.
Get the idea? Regardless of your obsessive-compulsive downvoting of factual information, the relative risk to most people is lower than...well, most things in life. That’s why my argument is, and continues to be, that most people, in most places, should not panic.
1) No one should panic, period, even if they are old and sick. But just because you're young and healthy doesn't mean you shouldn't be just as concerned because it's less likely to kill you specifically. Do you seriously not have any loved ones or coworkers or friends who are old or sick? Or can you just imagine that other people do?
2) Hospitals are overwhelmed in Wuhan, which is why they're furiously building more and sending thousands of medical staff there from all over China. I genuinely don't understand how you can be unaware of this and be so dogmatic at the same time.
3) The error bars are large, but it's not like they overlap or come remotely close to it. And again, your personal assessment that this mortality rate isn't worth worrying about means nothing to me, especially when virtually every credible expert disagrees.
Finally, please drop this lazy "do not panic" rhetoric. No one is panicking, or suggesting panic. The only hysterical person here is you.
All I’ve ever said, in response to your numerous citation-free rebuttals, is that healthy young people are not at great risk (fact), and they should not panic. So I’m glad we agree.
I’ve never said “don’t be concerned.”
Your other arguments are made up. Wuhan has built a number of facilities, but currently appears to have the epidemic at hand. No other areas have been “overwhelmed”, even within China. Representing medical facilities as “overwhelmed”, at the current time, requires citation from a reputable source.
Maybe in some theoretical future world it’s possible that medical facilities around the world will be overrun with sick patients. This is nowhere near the current reality.
Overlapping of error bars on fatality rates is irrelevant to my arguments; the absolute risk is much, much lower than the flu, for most people, in most places.
Everything you’re arguing here is a scare tactic, twisting kernels of truth to panicked ends.
How do you know that it's just fatalities in old and sick? If that's the case, I don't understand why many younger people in Wuhan are dying including the whistle blower doctor who was only 33 years old. We don't even know what the disease will do in terms of long term damage to survivors or the possibility of poor immunity and reinfection. I haven't seen any good statistics on the fatality rate vs age.
Also note the mortality rate outside of Wuhan seems to be 0.7%, a bit more than the common flu which I think is around 0.1% but not really a massive deal.
I don’t know where these numbers will land ultimately but I can think of many reasons why people with mild symptoms that are similar to a cold wouldn’t want to show up in a hospital full of infected people, or would think they just have a cold, so I would expect the denominator of the mortality rare in Wuhan to be understated.
For the moment the panic this thing is creating, fuelled by medias eager to make some money by crying wolf, looks like the real threat to me. Lots of people will loose their job as a result of the economic impact of the panic.
If you are looking at the mortality rate of CORVID-19 by age group you should do the same for the common seasonal flu. The 2018-2019 flu had a mortality rate of 0.0018% in the US for ages 18-49[0]. CORVID-19 is then 0.2%/0.0018% = 111.11 times more deadly for people ages 18-49 than the last seasons flu.
But a .2% mortality rate from COVID-19 means that if you're in your 20s and catch it, your odds of dying this year will have more than doubled! You think that's not worth worrying about? On a global scale that is millions of potential deaths beyond the prior statistical expectation.
Relative differences can be completely meaningless if the absolute numbers are tiny. The chance of you being hit by a meteorite in your lifetime is 1 out of 700'000 and being bitten by a shark is 1 out of 8'000'000. Does that mean you should worry more 10 times more about being hit by a rock from space?
No, both are such small numbers that you shouldn't worry about either.
The doctor you mentioned was exposed to a lot of cases before proper quarantine, it's likely he was exposed to an immense viral load, which seems to be the reason healthcare workers are generally at risk even if they're young and healthy.
You really need to keep up with the literature. A paper recently came out which says it can survive ten days at ambient temperature a on most plastic and steel surfaces. And others have reported it is aerosolized. It spreads through cough, sneeze, and breath.
Edit: I found this literature review [1] that sounds similar to what you're referring to. Note that this is only a summary of previously published results on similar viruses. If you check the source data in Table I the persistence times are from hours to days, and the author's conclusion is "up to 9 days" (emphasis mine). In my opinion this is very weak evidence to say that it can survive 10 days "on most surfaces".
Perhaps if your church likes to pack in people so closely that they're touching and thinks that it's your duty to God to repeatedly drag yourself to church no matter how sick you are. (The likely index patient apparently attended services 4 times after symptoms started.)
Afaik none of the churches where it has spread were the sort that has that kind of a practice — more pentecostal or cults. (Cults who knows, they could do that. But pentecostals ime don't much like wine and I've never participated a recreation of the last supper when I've been to a pentecostal church.)
It's unlikely, wine's alcohol content is only around 13%, you would need about 4 times that to kill the average virus. It would also be on the lip of the cup rather than in the wine.
You could ask the same of many of the responses. All of your examples are "strong" responses that reassure the public, like the flight restrictions which public health experts have argued against. By the way, public transport is, and has continuously been, running in most cities in China, and people in many cities (I have direct knowledge of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai) are now slowly returning to normal life.
Because they're an authoritarian state, grasping at straws, and they can. The new politicians in Wuhan are connected directly to Xi, and they're doing all kinds of stuff that has no scientific basis, just to be doing stuff.
COVID-19 is much more powerful than any of these you mentioned before.
It is SARS+, less fatal but much more infectious. In a way, it is a very successful virus (in a nightmare scenario), that aspiring to become the next flu.
The Chinese scientists had admitted that, we might have to live with this virus from this time forward. It won't go away like SARS-v1.
Also to note, fatality rate might seem low, but 20% of ALL patients will develop severe lung issue, that is what makes this virus pretty damn dangerous to us.
>Also to note, fatality rate might seem low, but 20% of ALL patients will develop severe lung issue, that is what makes this virus pretty damn dangerous to us.
I don’t know how reputable that website is, the company that owns that website has less than 10 employees and was founded in 2016. I’d rather get the info from CDC/WHO/other reputable organizations for info.
Lots of grand claims on this website too, makes it seem sketchy:
It’s been widely reported by health officials all over the world that 80% of cases have only mild illness, but the remaining 20% have very serious illness.
2% may be still too high, it might even be high sub 1% (e.g. .7%), but the big problem is how many of cases require hospitalization and especially intensive care. if number of ICU patients grows 10x in one month, we're all in trouble and that's seemingly what happened in China.
I don't understand how this figure keeps getting quoted.
Out of cases that have been fully resolved we're now at an 8% mortality rate. 2% is counting ongoing cases, that's not the figure you should be looking at.
Because the 8% mortality rate is based on resolved cases, and it generally takes people longer to fully recover than it does to die, so it is skewed upwards. A couple of weeks ago, the same mortality figure was near 30%, because most people with the disease who were not going to die hadn't had time to recover yet. Things are still early enough that the 8% figure will continue to go down.
Additionally, it is widely acknowledged that the actual number of cases is undercounted, with the mildest cases less likely to have been tested and included in those numbers, again resulting in overly high numbers.
And finally, it would appear that Wuhan in particular is skewing the numbers higher, as being the site of the outbreak it was caught off guard and has struggled to manage the number of cases. Elsewhere in both China and the world, the death rate is far lower.
The estimate of 8% is unquestionably much too high. Exactly what the mortality rate is will still take more time to discover.
How many people do you know with malaria? It's a tropical region disease. In a pandemic of Covid-19, it is going to affect people all over the world in every region.
> How many people do you know with malaria? It's a tropical region disease.
Malaria is not inherently a tropical region disease. It routinely plagued Europe until the 1950s. Russia for one example had a huge Malaria outbreak in the early 1920s as did Eastern Europe broadly.
"Gustavo Pittaluga (1876-1956) estimated that in 1923, 18 million people suffered from malaria in Russia, and that sixty thousand deaths occurred out of a total population of about 110 million (Anigstein, Pittaluga, 1925). Similar observations were made throughout the whole of eastern and south-eastern Europe and the former Ottoman Empire."
Europe and the U.S. used to have Malaria. The name -- bad air -- is Latin, the Romans thought it originated from bad swamp air. Shakespeare mentioned it time and time again in his plays.
> Shakespeare mentioned it time and time again in his plays
I'm pretty sure what Shakespeare was referencing is a much more general idea prevalent in his day - that smells (not necessarily unpleasant ones) could be poisonous, and could be warded off by opposing "good" smells. This roughly coincided with an explosion of scented-good manufacturing as a cottage industry, although I'm not sure which way the arrow of causation ran there.
Yes, but malaria isn't transmitted between humans but requires a certain mosquito to spread. So unless that mosquito reappears (which is an actual threat due to climate change), the malaria isn't randomly spreading to other countries. But the corona virus doesn't have these bariers as it spreads from humans to humans.
Yes, I guess my point was that malaria can and has existed in europe and america. It is defeated by
1) Wiping out mosquitos (DDT)
2) Limiting chance of mosquitoes biting people (aircon)
3) Limiting the population with malaria (the fewer people with malaria, the less chance of a given mosquito biting someone with malaria and thus becoming a carrier)
How many people do you know with malaria? It's a tropical region disease.
No. The name is Italian. It predates Italian colonies in the tropics. It's a disease which was endemic in marshlands believed to be caused by bad air Mal aria and was in Scotland amongst other places.
Malaria is not exclusively tropical. Nor is dengue or mosquito borne encephalitis. Tropical wet regions sustain mosquitos. So do cooler climates.
Is it that anti malaria or HIV drug happens to be effective or are those weak poisons used in the hope that the subject individual outlive the pathogens under its influence
Yes, because it infects so many millions. Covid-19 right now looks a magnitude more deadly with significant long term health consequences for many who survive.
Probably not. Case fatality rates don't accurately show the "deadliness" since many people have likely been infected but been asymptomatic or had mild illness that didn't cause them to seek medical advice.
> significant long term health consequences for many who survive
There is no evidence for that, and it doesn't make sense given the available data. Some number of people have long-term health consequences, and if you only compare that number to the number of people who went to hospital with serious illness, you might see a high percentage, but that's a huge distortion of reality.
We now have 4 independent estimates that place the Infection Fatality Ratio at about 0.5% to 1.7% which is between 5x and 17x deadlier than the flu (0.1%): https://twitter.com/zorinaq/status/1230977769795776512 Incidentally, this makes COVID19 comparable to the 1918 Spanish Flu (IFR ~2%) according to experts (see link above). And keep in mind the IFR, unlike the CFR, is the metric that takes into account undetected mild or asymptomatic cases.
«There is no evidence for that»
There is, see https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... :
In those who survive intensive care, [...] aberrant and excessive immune responses lead to long-term lung damage and fibrosis, causing functional disability and reduced quality of life.
I agree that exact rates are difficult to determine, will change over time and one should not overreact, but there is plenty of evidence for what I said. If this virus would be just like flu, then Wuhan wouldn't have much problem coping.
If it was a brand new flu, to which people had no immunity, which was initially covered up and then largely "responded to" by crowding everyone who might possibly have been infected into overcrowded, shared quarantine centres where they are now virtually guaranteed to get it, I bet they would have the same problem coping.
> Probably not. Case fatality rates don't accurately show the "deadliness" since many people have likely been infected but been asymptomatic or had mild illness that didn't cause them to seek medical advice.
I agree with this point but would also like to point out the possibility that way more people get infected by SARS-CoV-2 than the flu.
I also want to note that the flu also has the same asymptomatic or mild illness factor and that the deadliness would be only comparing people who sought medical treatment.
Agree, I hate to quote Trump, but there seems to be many “doomers” among us, who seem to take some kind of pleasure in entertaining the idea that we are in the middle of some big disaster. For the moment the numbers I see (mentioned in my other post [1]) seem to support something slightly worse than the common flu, but nothing that should be really concerning.
Also the comparison to the Spanish flu often ignores the fact that we are way better equipped to deal with the symptoms than in 1918.
I don't know about you but I'm bombarded every year with campaigns to get people immunised, and the meetings I go to talk about availability of the vaccine for the public, and for healthcare professionals, and how many professionals have been vaccinated so far and how we can ethically increase that number, and on top of that every year for the past however long in the English NHS there's been a lot of talk about winter pressure.
Fair enough, but there is nonetheless a lot more hand-wringing about covid-19 than there is about seasonal flu despite the fact that the total number of covid cases is still less than the number of annual flu deaths.
Covid is very serious and we should not be complacent about it. But I think it's important to keep some perspective, especially since we seem to be on the brink of shutting down the entire global economy.
Yes it does. After we have vaccinated vast amounts of global population with flu vaccines that mostly work. Try flu without vaccination and potentially 10x mortality rate: CoVid-19.
Maybe. We don't actually know how many mild or asymptomatic cases of covid are out there, and so we don't know what the mortality rate is. 2% is an upper bound, but almost certainly not the true mortality rate.
I'm not saying that we should not take covid very seriously. I'm just saying that before we allow it to shut down the global economy we ought to maintain some perspective on the magnitude of the risks society already faces year-in and year-out.
Actually I find that the HIV epidemic rarely discussed when the press is discussing the current epidemic. US didn't reply crown themselves with glory in handling the HIV situation, iirc more than 4000 people had died before the President Regan started to act anything about it.
70 year olds too have their own virus stories outside the 40 year period you mention. Especially 1957 and 1968 (indian context). Biowarfare paranoia aside, I don’t think there is anything special about the modern era when it comes to the genesis of new viruses.
And diseases like this must have been forming and quickly dying off throughout history. It wasn't until the advent of globalization and intercontinental travel that they've become pandemics.
Your thoughts echo mine very closely. Uncontained spread seems fairly well unavoidable at this point.
By all accounts, the Chinese have so far done a good job of containing the spread inside their borders (outside of Wuhan). But I feel there's a significant lesson to be learned from how the virus exited Wuhan in the first place: containment measures applied too late, after the scale of the problem became too obvious to ignore. I fully expect this response to be the norm, across all scales from community to city to nation.
I think that China and other large (in terms of area) countries like the US will come out of this "OK", modulo the economic impact. For the most part, intranational travel is funneled through long-distance rail and air routes, which are relatively easy to monitor and control. I have more concern for e.g., Western Europe, where there is not a significant geographic separation between the major population centers, and where there is a strong expectation of free & untracked movement.
The strong expectation for free untracked movement is no different between eu countries and us states - though I think our geographical distribution of population is indeed different.
I'm from Spain, and as soon as I saw people tested positive in Italy I knew we were going to fall too. Sure enough, we quickly had some cases in the canary islands and now it's already in the mainland, in my city (Madrid). The differences in intra city transportation are gonna be a big difference too, compared to an American city: everyone in the center uses the subway and buses, which are packed at rush hour. It's going to spread like wildfire.
> as soon as I saw people tested positive in Italy I knew we were going to fall too.
And transport connections between Northern Italy and Spain are worse than the ones with France, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany.
The cat is basically out of the bag. The question now is if we can keep it subdued enough to reach the warmer season, when it might stop on its own like SARS did and/or make it easier for people to develop antibodies.
This is a BIG modulo, China alone was already a disaster but now that we can see the rest of the world will be hit, the economic consequences will be disastrous.
2008 was a walk in the park compared to what may happen.
I seriously doubt it will. Once the panic subdues, things will go back to pretty much normal. Flu kills a lot of people every year without serious effects on the worldwide economy. You'll need a mortality rate significantly higher to make a dent in global supply and demand. Of course panic is the key word here. If governments impose severe movement restrictions it could disrupt the supply chain, but nothing about this virus seems to justify it. All the measures taken so far have been extreme because the goal was to stop worldwide expansion at early stages but that has already pretty much failed. Media will get bored of it eventually, vaccine will come a little later. World will keep spinning around.
I think this is going to happen to a lot of manufacturers and industries in the West who are going to lose a lot of money in the short to medium term.
Looking further out, this and the general push back of the last few years with being so dependent on China, may be what further forces the West to start ensuring supply chains are not so dependent on China and the far East.
Companies may start seriously consider the true cost of doing business in China due to unknown events like this, and even more likely ones like military and economic confrontations occur (e.g. tariffs).
This might actually help juice the Western world for a few years as more manufacturing and supply lines are repatrioted.
Viruses don't really pay much attention to economic rivalries and supply chains can be disrupted wherever they exist. As for "helping" the west, you're misunderstanding how gains from trade work.
> I think it's been clear for several weeks now that this is going to have a significant worldwide impact.
I don't want to be flippant, but it's already have a "significant" impact. The question is now whether it's going to have a _disastrous_ impact.
> China will be one of the countries that dealt with the virus the best
You're talking about the country that lost precious days, if not week handling the crisis by persecuting whistleblowers.
> Countries without authoritarian governments likely don't have the means to effectively quarantine major cities
I'd like to point out that non-authoritarian countries haven't needed to quarantine major cities. India, which is both poorer and more densely populated, hasn't originated deadly epidemics while it's the second China has graced us with them. I'd argue their nationalistic-motivated toleration if not encouragement of ridiculous "traditional medicine" practices is making them more likely.
> I think when this all comes to an end, China will be one of the countries that dealt with the virus the best. Countries without authoritarian governments ...
Except China's system of government got us here in the first place:
> Contrary to common belief, the killer digital app for authoritarianism isn’t listening in on people through increased surveillance, but listening to them as they express their honest opinions, especially complaints. An Orwellian surveillance-based system would be overwhelming and repressive, as it is now in China, but it would also be similar to losing sensation in parts of one’s body due to nerve injuries. Without the pain to warn the brain, the hand stays on the hot stove, unaware of the damage to the flesh until it’s too late.
> During the Ming dynasty, Emperor Zhu Di found out that some petitions to the emperor had not made it to him, because officials were blocking them. He was alarmed and ordered such blocks removed. “Stability depends on superior and inferior communicating; there is none when they do not. From ancient times, many a state has fallen because a ruler did not know the affairs of the people,” he said. Xi would have done well to take note.
The authoritativeness suppresses the very information flow that is needed to know what's going on. Dr Li Wenliang tried to warn people and the police paid him a visit and told him to stop:
> since it first started being reported in Western media around Jan 20
It was on Canadian television news just a few days into the new year, at the latest. I'm sure of it because I was away in Canada and that's where I first saw it.
It's been bothering me because every article a British newspaper runs since (and I thought The Times had covered it while I was in Canada, but couldn't say for sure) seems to include a graph of infections or death toll since outbreak compared to Sars, and puts day zero at around Jan 20 (can't remember exactly) like you said.
Surely it's not rampant disinformation, just an unstated definition of 'outbreak' that isn't familiar to me or matching my layman's one, but I don't get it.
> relatively low-traffic countries like Nepal and Sri Lanka seeing cases very early on
Sri Lanka is/was already in season and a significant amount of their tourists are Chinese. Or would be, as Visas are now cancelled so there aren't any anymore.
Wouldn't call that low traffic or put it into a two items list.
Non-authoritarian governments quarantine areas after natural disasters / weather events. No reason to think a pandemic couldn't trigger an analogous response, if it's within the public interest.
The BNO link is a great resource, thanks for sharing. A slightly different take on how the Chinese government is handling this outbreak can be found below, (explaining why so many Chinese citizens are actually voicing discontent on social media).
While I appreciate the attempt, I have some suspicion that none of these quarantine efforts, China included, will look particularly effective when we look back on the event in a year or two.
I get the distinct feeling that many of these efforts are more about reassuring the public, than any real confidence that they can limit the spread.
Well it has clearly slowed the spread in China. You couldn't cover up an exponentially growing death rate forever. Of course, it might not prevent everyone getting infected in the long run, but there might still be hospital beds available for the worst cases if it is stretched out enough.
That curve is pure bullshit. No real life event fits a polynomial with that much precision when it is sampled so poorly. They're cooked, both intentionally and because of limitations in equipment, personel, and ability.
Interesting data points from today's presser with Dr. Bruce Aylward of WHO[1]:
"Aylward pointed to an analysis from Guangdong province suggesting that, at least there, most of the infections were coming to the attention of health authorities.
When the virus started to spread in Guangdong — the province where the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak began — worried people flooded fever clinics to be tested. Of 320,000 tests performed, just under 0.5% were positive for the virus at the peak of transmission there, he said — which suggests that only 1 case out of 200 was being missed.
Transmission of the virus has subsided in Guangdong, and the number of positive tests at the fever clinics has declined; now only about 1 in 5,000 people tested at the fever clinics is positive for the virus, he said."
>Of 320,000 tests performed, just under 0.5% were positive for the virus at the peak of transmission there, he said — which suggests that only 1 case out of 200 was being missed
These numbers don't make sense. What, are they assuming 100% accuracy for the tests? China is an authoritarian dictatorship with a very personal need to save face - in order to maintain order it cannot show weakness. China is lying. There is motive, circumstantial, and now with the spread in Korea and Italy, empirical evidence that China is full of it.
I think China was looking at an existential threat to the government, and so made a calculation to trade a recession for survival. Their response was unprecedented, brutal and effective. I think it goes beyond face - lying at this stage would just lead to more Wuhans and eventually collapse.
At least that’s my current thinking - I was in your camp until a week ago or so.
Do you have examples of other epidemics where it was impossible to fit a quadratic? I've seen this argument a lot, but I've never seen anyone attempt to analyze how hard it actually is. I suspect that any data with positive first and second derivatives is pretty easy to fit closely to a quadratic.
That's the first time I've seen n=45,000ish been described as a 'poor' sample.
The only suspicious part I can find is the peak at the first of February, but that just seems like that date has been used as a catch all in case the exact date was unknown.
> none of these quarantine efforts, China included, will look particularly effective when we look back on the event in a year or two
Containment has failed. At this point, quarantine is about slowing transmission to avoid overwhelming healthcare resources.
The entire population is likely to get exposed. If it happens in a single month, that's a disaster. If it happens over a year, it's a manageable crisis.
The real reason, I think, for quarantines is to buy time for preparations and spread out infections to prevent overwhelming the health system. PR is certainly important for government as well, but I don't think it is much for experts working in public health field that argue for much of the same.
> Chang's father, mother and sister also died from the disease, Chinese financial news outlet Caixin reported. His father first exhibited symptoms of the coronavirus on January 25, but was turned away at hospitals because of a lack of beds, leaving him to fight the disease at home. He died days later, followed by Chang's mother, who also succumbed to the illness.
> After caring for their parents, Chang and his sister were infected with the coronavirus; according to Caixin, Chang died on February 14, and hours later, so did his sibling. Chang's wife also contracted the virus and remains in serious condition.
I've also heard of some totally unconfirmed posts on Weibo, WeChat, etc. with similar stories of entire families being infected and stuck at home without treatment, but those are of course just rumors.
Completely speculating here but this specific case sounds like a bad luck situation in which the family in question had an extreme genetic susceptibility to suffering the virus at its worst. As other comments have pointed out (and the data so far seems to back) the vast majority 81%+ of cases are fairly mild or even asymptomatic and the elderly are those who suffer the higher 2%+ mortality rates (based on what I've read, the mortality rate adjusted for younger age groups is roughly 0.2% or less.)
Except, of course, in the example given, the two parents won't share any genetic material (coming from different families originally) and neither will the son and his wife.
if you give a million monkeys a typewriter and wait a million years, you're bound to get all works of Shakespeare by chance alone. yes, bad luck, but the fact it happened illustrates the scale.
I'm not concerned at all about getting the virus or having an outbreak in my community. That's part of life and we'll deal with it if it happens. But I am concerned that people may start panicking and become irrational. There's so much fake news out there about this. People will be panicked into buying all the food they can (whether they need it or not) and stay at home. Sort of like a snow storm forecast but worse.
News outlets really need to cover this responsibly and not incite panic. Those that do ought to be held accountable.
We don't really have enough facts to be certain of anything, the uncertainty is what causes people to respond aggressively and worry about worst case. What we do know is death rates are around 2% which is a legitimate concern.
>extremely long incubation periods with airborne transmission without symptoms
2 out of the 3 things in this sentence are not true. Incubation period is not extremely long, it's quite a normal length of time for a respiratory virus. There has been no airborne transmission. And I would say the jury is out on asymptomatic transmission.
The timeline on the BNO site is useful, but have you seen this site by Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering that is tracking the cases (confirmed, deaths, recovered)?
> While South Korea has run more than 35,000 coronavirus tests, the United States has tested only 426 people, not including people who returned on evacuation flights.
If you assume that only 400 other people in all of the USA have been travelling beyond its borders and/or in contact with such travellers, then it's ok to assume that all potentially infected have been tested.
The US placed tight restrictions on people who'd recently visited China entering the country. Other countries did not. Testing regimes elsewhere have been focused on visitors from China and people who've been in direct contact with them.
I would take the other side of the bet about how well China is handling this. They are doing... intensely poorly. The rapid spread is in part due to the fact the Chinese government doesn't care at all about central China, and Wuhan only had(/has?) One critical care bed per one hundred thousand people.
How many of these critical beds do you think average african or other south asian countries have?
I checked with my wife who is doctor at biggest Swiss hospital - currently they could host around 30 people who need respiratory assistance. Surrounding area contains 1.5-2 millions of people.
I used to be critical of China in this, and still hate how they handled the start. But to be honest, unless tremendous luck would be involved, I don't think most western countries wouldn't be able to contain the epidemics neither, it would just be a bit slower. Its too sneaky and effective.
There is reason to think the fatality rate in other Chinese cities is ten times lower than Wuhan. This is not an issue of generically being poor, it's that the authoritarian government knows where their bread gets buttered, and it's on the coast. We don't know what's already happened in the concentration camps in Xinjiang. But I think we share the prediction of what will, as containment of the virus has failed. And it isn't "China being well known for caring about all Chinese equally".
(Also worth noting the single hospital you mentioned has a 50% improvement in capacity (actually much more, because your number is more specific than 'critical care', but I don't know how much more specific) over the city where people are using gutter oil. Capacity can be less when there aren't public defecation concerns, but your example is emphatically not that.)
> I think when this all comes to an end, China will be one of the countries that dealt with the virus the best. Countries without authoritarian governments likely don't have the means to effectively quarantine major cities and shut down massive portions of their economy immediately without major problems arising. Given a couple weeks, sure, but by then it will be too late.
Personally I think it was the PRC's actions that made the spread so bad in the first place. They tried to hide it at first and only stopped when they no longer could. I see no reason to expect their actions to be better than non-authoritarian governments when it's said and done, but I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
> Countries without authoritarian governments likely don't have the means to effectively quarantine major cities and shut down massive portions of their economy immediately without major problems arising
Hum... If people start dying¹, every country will. Democracy will just help ensure it's not done is a hush...
What leads to my second comment, China can not do it without massive problems immediately arising either. The only thing they can do better is hiding those problems, but you bet there are a lot of people dying there because of the measures the government has taken to stop people fro dying.
1 - That's still an "if". How much of the lethality is caused by bad health care in China? I don't think anybody can answer this question yet.
Specially since apparently on the USA, going to the hospital to take even test for the virus is costing thousands of dollars. I am afraid that a lot of people there will try to "ride it" as they do other health problems for the lack of money.
Similar level of interest and tracking, and I thought the same about CCP and their ability to enforce order, but this [1] gives an interesting counter argument, with an interesting hypothesis [2] below:
> Tufekci argues that one of the second order effects of a surveillance society is that people act strategically to minimise the chance of punishment - and so their behaviour (and the data it generates) ceases to be a good guide for policy. If there’s a strong incentive to suppress bad news, you won’t hear bad news, even when you need to.
Sure, it's like those stories about governments incentivising people to hunt pests by paying for body parts...eventually people circumvent the metrics in a counterproductive manner, in the animals case by breeding the pests instead of capturing them.
Indeed. Hopefully he didn't mean "fun distraction" in a positive way and was trying to convey it was interesting to watch develop. Especially considering he has friends in the area.
> in part because it's been a fun distraction, in part because I have friends in Wuhan
Yeah uh, poor choice of words on my part, I guess that's why I'm not a writer. I have a bad tendency to use "fun" as "interesting" rather than "enjoyable", should probably be more careful about that..
You really have no idea of the power of a municipal health authority in the US. They can order people confined to their homes, businesses shut down, etc. etc.
I can understand your point, but I think that is not going to be the case. As I understood, these viruses like mild climates. All souther countries are safer, in a way that virus can't survive for too long. And soon when the summer heat will reach China, the virus will whither there also.
No, the virus appears to be quite well contained in Singapore. The number of new patients in the last three days was 0, 1, and 1 respectively, all tied to known clusters and found through aggressive contact tracing and testing.
« I think when this all comes to an end, China will be one of the countries that dealt with the virus the best. Countries without authoritarian governments likely don't have the means to effectively quarantine major cities and shut down massive portions of their economy immediately without major problems arising.»
I sure hope the rest of the world can do better than kidnap or wall in people until they’re dead or healed.
I doubt infection numbers of India Pakistan Bangladesh Indonesia countries with huge populations not enough health care facilities neighbors to China. Especially after how fast it spread in South Korea and Italy.
Your first item is just a dumb misunderstanding of basic terminology. Recombinant doesn't necessarily mean man-made. It literally just means anything involving a combination of different DNA, whether that occurs naturally or artificially.
The second item is true but completely unrelated.
The third item was thoroughly debunked by a hundred real scientists the day it was posted. The paper had never passed peer review, and was retracted by the authors from the preprint server it was posted on the next day.
You should stop talking to your friend, who is an idiot. Frankly, this post is embarrassing, and you were right to use an alt.
Later it contrasts the word "recombinant" with natural recombination:
"Recombinant DNA differs from genetic recombination in that the former results from artificial methods in the test tube, while the latter is a normal biological process that results in the remixing of existing DNA sequences in essentially all organisms."
Can you give a reference in English that uses "recombinant" about any natural process? However it could be a translation error, so perhaps recombinant means artificial in English (per the reference I just gave) whereas perhaps the source they translated just mentions it is "genetic recombination" (not recombinant).
The Wikipedia article uses "laboratory method" and "artificial methods in the test tube" as explicitly contrasted with normal biological processes.
Just looking for a reference that this is not so.
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By the way the news you confirmed - i.e. "Chinese scientist made GMO human babies" IMO is much more salacious and spectacular than the news you debunked, so I am not sure why you took this tone with me.
It would be like if you debunked chemtrails and called me an idiot for asking you about it, while incidentally confirming that space aliens visited Earth but saying this has nothing to do with chemtrails. To my ears the idea of GMO babies, which you confirmed were being made in China, is way more outlandish than a GMO virus.
Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions.
Guarantee US will suffer unnecessarily from all this because, even if a vaccine is found, we likely have the highest per capita rate of anti-vaxxers of any country who will refuse to be vaccinated
> I think when this all comes to an end, China will be one of the countries that dealt with the virus the best.
Its either a bait and switch or humblebrag or just plain misunderstanding. The Chinese government and their insecurity of looking bad to the world are the reason we are in this mess. They lied about the virus, covered up the extent of infection and with all their "resources" its an American company that might just develop a vaccine. And should that be the case American capitalism might be the one that saves us from a pandemic. In retrospect it might just end up that China is great at brute force labour intensive methods but lag behind when it comes to high tech solutions.
I think the CCP did enough stupid things to balance out any benefit of swift and decisive action (taken way later than it should have been).
Part of the reason China has to weld people into their apartment buildings is that there is no trust, and no compliance in the society: every rule can be broken, even ones that should be obvious to any educated person.
The country's failed post-Mao culture, and worthless self-serving government organs, have conspired to make the infection dramatically more deadly than should have been necessary.
I think probably a lot of people will come away with the same impression that you did, but I think they'll be mistaken to think that China's authoritarianism has somehow saved them; after all, the government was sponsoring massive public shared-dish banquets in mid January within three km of the epicentre of the infection, televising crowds of people having religious experiences, wailing to the camera that they don't need masks, and that the government will take care of them.
Could you tell me in what way authoritatian countries (aka China) handles this situation better?
Italy closed 50k people into quarantine, government talks about military and EU was deciding about closing borders. All of this days after confirmed cases. I am sure officials would have no trouble to isolate major city.
China has many internal problems, we just do not see them. Government refuses foreign doctors. If crisis continues long enough it may cause civil unrest. China also depends on foreign imports even for food.
I think US is best positioned to handle this well.
> Could you tell me in what way authoritatian countries (aka China) handles this situation better?
Singapore is a pretty authoritarian country and until recently had the most cases outside of China. Now most infected people in Singapore have recovered and other countries have more infected people.
> I think US is best positioned to handle this well.
A lot of people in the USA try to avoid visiting the doctor because they can't afford it. That single factor alone puts the USA at a massive disadvantage.
And you can shed the virus without symptoms. Who will take limited sick days for a 14+ day incubation before they're symptomatic? Who eats the cost of being out sick for multiple weeks? Business can legally fire people for not show up for work, even if they're sick. Essentially no one has wage insurance, and median savings $1200 per the Federal Reserve won't go far.
Even in a "socialist utopia" with public healthcare and good sick leave there are a lot of open questions like that and I get the feeling that the poor will be hit hard. If they shut down non-essential places then how do the people working there pay for rent and food? If they shut down schools then can the parents take paid time off to look after kids? What if the parents are nurses? So far I haven't seen an explanation of how all this plays out, or how it's playing out in already quarantined areas.
I'm about to finish my current job which wouldn't normally be worrying, but if hiring stops and interviewing becomes impossible the equation changes pretty fast.
Don't count on the EU doing anything other then slow talk. They are definitely not going to close any borders. At least I would be very surprised if they did.
Not so - there are many areas where the EU is involved: every EU citizen gets the same access to healthcare in each country as their own citizens, that's one of the rules of membership. Coordinated health research just to name another area...
Not the EU as an institution but single countries. I wouldn't be surprised if Austria closes their border if there are more cases in Northern Italy. Germany, Switzerland and France could also follow. I believe they'd still let freight through (maybe with tests for drivers) to not hurt the economy too much. Ironically, the refugee situation a few years back helped those countries as they now have the infrastructure to patrol borders better and built centers that could as well be used to isolate potentially infected people.
But I also wouldn't count on all of this happening too fast, there's still passenger flights arriving from mainland China in Europe.
Tourism, in all directions, is too important a factor that closing up borders is really on the table right now.
Austria for instance, where I come from, will definitely NOT close the borders to Italy in the upcoming days.
And in my personal opinion, there is really no reason to panic because of a media-hyped flu outbreak.
Just my opinion, of course, but I guess one very simple way I think about it is, a government that expends a lot of effort controlling its people even in normal times is naturally better equipped to do so than a government that generally encourages individualism and freedom among its population.
For example, North Korea reportedly executed a guy for breaking quarantine [1]. China may not be nearly as extreme, but the government is similarly domineering. If your choice is "be quarantined or be disappeared" then you shut up and stay home. But "be disappeared" is not the alternative in
many Western countries. Again, just my totally uninformed opinion as a coder sittin' at home. In any case it'll certainly be interesting to see how it turns out.
I believe you miss some crucial information in your argument. An administration which controls tightly a population must appear to be correct. The administration must make the perception its plans are infallible.
It is the perception that the administration’s plans and officials are infallible that it is after. Not the actual actions.
An administration which can confront when its officials can do wrong, which can act on errors instead of hiding them can do well. The perception of its actions take effort and steps to explain.
The reference on such institutions is outside the scope of the current comment. When I started writing, I realised it has to be a very long.
But my opinion is that democratic countries will do well. We might hear more, but their problems will be less. I used to live in an authoritative nation, so there is a difference between the information and the common communication on problems.
Check Hayeks’ writings to see how such communication becomes controlled by marketing ‘authoritative plans’
That is just power fantasy. Do you have any evidence that shooting people for breaking quarantine has effect? I think it just causes people to avoid doctors if they experience symptoms. People do not want to "disappear" into quarantine. I lived under authoritative government and know how it works.
Initial situation was made much worse because China policed their doctors.
Also I do not think that China actually shoots people. It shutdown transport and pumps money into economy. Other states could do that as well.
As someone tangentially attached to the sports community, the olympics is already a bit screwed up anyway, simply because the sports seasons (and thus the qualification pathway) for many events in the games have been significantly disrupted by the coronavirus. Many athletes who were in touching distance of qualifying will not be able to, and other athletes will be sent in their stead (if it happens at all) Olympic qualification in most sports is extremely complicated, and this is having a serious effect.
That being said, sport is not so important (imho) that public safety should be put at risk, and cancelling the games (or postponing them) would seem a sensible option if things continue to get worse.
I think it's already a certainty that it's going to be cancelled - they are just trying to lighten the blow by telling people they're just "considering it".
The dumb part of all of this is how the gov. and the IOC handled the summer olympics up to this point.
For instance there was the discussion around the marathon, where runners would be at serious risk when running outdoors in the middle of the summer in Tokyo. Yet it took months and months of discussions, stupid alternatives (including "let's change Tokyo's time during the Olympics so the marathon starts at the planned time, but it would actually be super early morning when the sun is still low") to finally move it to a place where people won't be dying.
The current administration is well above caring for public safety, but we can hope the international outcry will be huge enough of a threat to force their hand.
I have to imagine the heat/humidity is just as bad in places like LA/Atlanta that have previously hosted the summer olympics. Did they just not care about heatstroke back then?
Yes, and they ran the Atlanta one at 7AM. That was also the plan at some point for Tokyo.
There was a Doha marathon ran this year at midnight, still running at around 30°C and needing crazy heat counter measures to be runnable.
It was their test drive to see if the same setup would work for Tokyo, but it appeared the Doha marathon was still a hell to run so they gave up and moved the location to somewhere cooler.
You’re not wrong, but you have a bit of a dismal look at it. Sports, like other forms of entertainment, are a sign of culture, and culture is the touchstone of a good workforce. Just like it’s important to take short breaks in the office, even small amounts of entertainment is important to keep us happy and focused. Large events, such as the Olympics and Oscars, give a pattern to the years, something to talk about and look forward to. They provide cohesion and fraternity. The Olympics staying up isn’t a higher priority than health, but it’s a mighty sign of things going wrong when they’re not being hosted.
Plus, y’know, a lot of problems have been solved, so these kind of events provide jobs and boost local and global economies.
To be honest, I have never seen sports as "culture". Neither the Oscars. They are just PR events in this day and age.
By the way, hosting the Olympics does not boost the local economy. Quite the opposite, in fact, at least in many cases. They are a heavy loss and increase in debt for almost every city that did it, as well as detrimental for the environment overall. Governments do it as a long term investment in publicity.
> To be honest, I have never seen sports as "culture".
As always it is extremely important to remember that your culture is not everyones' culture!!! You may not view sports as any sort of culture and as far as I'm concerned that's totally fine. But I would say that I feel connected to running "culture", and I dare you to try telling an Italian 'ultra' (soccer super fan) that their sport is not part of their culture ;)
I'm curious how other folks who work at large tech shops in the valley feel about working from home for a while. There is nearly zero reason for me to show up at work. I can do nearly everything from home, often better. At work, I'm in a large, open building surrounded by thousands of people.
Am I overreacting? I know there's a good chance we're all going to get COVID-19, but if I can delay it a bit, I lessen the hit to our soon-to-be overworked heath care system and preserve resources for those who can't hide.
I think those of us who have the ability to work from home for a while might want to consider agitating for it to be official policy for the next month or so.
Probably not. Mortality rate aside (anywhere from 2% to 5% depending on source), the biggest issue is hospitalization rate (about 20% based on Chinese numbers). No country on the planet could handle that hospitalization rate all at once.
The priority going forward is about managing spread. Keeping spread as slow as possible so the absolute number of people who need to be hospitalized at any particular point in time is as small as possible. That makes it possible for hospitals to keep up and keep the mortality rate as low as possible. You want to have a trickle of patients coming in over a very long time, not a one-day tsunami.
The other thing is that this will absolutely result in shortages. China has already banned the export of many medical supplies and as this sort of nationalism spreads the shortages will be more tangible. New supply chains will eventually emerge for many things, but they will take a while to do so. If you need any medications, now is probably a good time to stock up with as much as reasonably possible.
That 2%-5% is based on the current detected cases and deaths attributed to the virus. You can sense where the problem is. Much like the flu, most of the deaths are older people with weak inmune systems that go haywire. Right now, out of an abundance of caution, anyone with symptoms is being hospitalized, that includes people that normally wouldn't be if this was a normal flu season and they showed up at the doctor with same symptoms.
The problem is even that you can't properly prevent catching it if people are isolated at home since masks and disinfectants start being sold out pretty much world wide.
Happened yesterday in my company. :(
Big tech company, 2000+ people, central Europe. First registered patient with COVID-19 in my country is from company I'm working for.
We all received notice to work from home.
It will be huge test now for remote work. I bet lot of people doesn't even know how to connect from home. (people from administration etc)
I personally am watching others around me do what I consider "overreacting". Once it starts spreading locally though, the response will be reasonable.
The biggest gain in working from home is not protecting yourself, but the spread to all of your coworkers and then to all of the next infections beyond them leading to actual deaths.
Exactly. I'm 0% worried about catching* COVID-19. I suspect I'm at much greater risk of dying from my daily commute. The reason to stay home is for others' sake. We in the tech industry often have jobs where we can stay home with no impact, so, why not do it now?
* There's probably a 100% chance I'll get it at some point, I just don't fear severe consequences from it.
I worry about the coming increase in home working where companies aren't prepared for it. What if this paints a picture of broadly lower productivity for the practice across the tech industry? Could this then be used as evidence against home working more widely for the long term?
Yeah, having been much more productive in a previous remote position, I had thought that I was always more productive working from home. During a recent remote stint in my current position (which is normally onsite), I realized how much company culture and having a dedicated home office (which I don't have set up now) were a part of my productivity.
Same here - there is absolutely no reason for me to be physically present in the office so I plan to work from home as much as possible in the near future
Probably overreacting. There is a much greater chance of you dying on your commute than catching the virus if you are in the US, so the virus has not significantly increased your chances of death. And if you are worried about being a carrier, it is far more likely for you to get the flu, which can also be deadly, so the virus has not significantly increased your risk to others either.
Maybe if the US had tens of thousands of cases it would make more sense, but right now I don't see why anyone in North America should be changing their habits given how small the risk is relative to the things we are already exposed to.
>I'm curious how other folks who work at large tech shops in the valley feel about working from home for a while.
Am in the UK and not the US but given that I'm healthy and relatively young I don't really see the point. This disease is scary in the aggregate, i.e it imposes huge economic costs. The average case of it is basically having flu symptoms, and I never stayed at home unless I got sick during bad flu seasons.
I'm not really sure why people paint being infected with this like the bubonic plague or something, there is already a bunch of corona viruses raging around all the time anyway.
edit: lots of downvotes because I don't lock myself in because of a corona virus? People here seem to love hysteria a these days.
You are being downvoted, IMO, not for not locking yourself in but ignoring the chance that even you may survive for having strong immune system, you may still potentially be a carrier and transmit to others with weaker immune systems. Don’t be selfish and consider safety of other less fortunate people.
As a society, cost is much higher than cost to yourself only.
>Don’t be selfish and consider safety of other less fortunate people.
In the country right now there are a few dozen cases on a population of 60 million people. Even assuming there is hundreds or thousands of cases, the idea that I stay home (which is a trade-off, because I'm needed at work) isn't rational at all.
If I get sick I'll obviously stay home, as I always do to avoid spreading any disease. But to preemptively lock myself in to avoid a disease that isn't particular dangerous in 80% of people and that has barely spread anywhere is ridiculous.
This is a more-deadly-than-average coronavirus, or so it seems.
It is really hard to tell, because it is still very new outside of China, and you can't trust any of the data coming from there -- so we won't really know for 2 more weeks, until the first big round of cases from open countries end in either recovery or death. That said, the Chinese statistics put median time between first symptoms and death (amongst fatal cases) at only 8 days -- and the 600 cases from the cruise ship are all older than that now, with 3 deaths as of yesterday, which suggests that the 2% mortality rate being bandied about is probably not wildly wrong. (It might be 1% or 3%, but probably not 10%+ like fearmongers are saying or 34% like MERS was -- unless fatalities from the cruise ship are being suppressed or there is something special about that group, or, I guess, if the median of 8 days turns out to be wildly, wildly wrong)
Concern seems highly warranted. Vigilance seems warranted. The "ZOMG we all gonna die!" going on does not.
But it sure does get ratings and score political points.
Edit: I have been using https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ to view graphs and tables of the coronavirus data chopped a bunch of different ways. They list sources for all of it, though I haven't vetted the sources.
One of their charts shows a breakdown of closed cases into % cured and % dead. That is currently at 92%/8%, with the recovery rate continually improving, but flattening out. That graph makes it look like the mortality rate may end up higher than 2% -- but still probably not radically so, and we really are extrapolating from very little data.
> One of their charts shows a breakdown of closed cases into % cured and % dead. That is currently at 92%/8%, with the recovery rate continually improving, but flattening out. That graph makes it look like the mortality rate may end up higher than 2% -- but still probably not radically so, and we really are extrapolating from very little data.
I think there's a really large number of people who have been infected who will never be a "case", so I think 2% is still really high. Just look at e.g. Italy where there was no awareness of it spreading until people were already dying - meaning that it had been spreading for some time. Given that a large number of people seem to be asymptomatic or have mild illness, it's highly likely that many other people were infected in the same "cluster" and never knew.
Seems worse than the average flu. Not likely that you'll die from it if you're young and not immunocompromised, but just because you don't die doesn't mean there won't be long term health effects. And if you have anyone over age 70 or under age 2 who you care at all about, their lives could be at risk.
For some reason, coronaviruses generally rarely affect children -- and those that get it rarely spread it to others despite children being fucking disease magnets.
This seems not to be very well understood, but it is really interesting.
So far there are no known cases affecting children under 2 (as of two days ago when I read the paper about coronavirus and children)
I know most people here like to defend the established ways of doing things. But in an crisis like this we need to go back to first principles and see which steps are really needed and what can be speed up.
a rushed vaccine that has poorly understood side effects like say cancer rate differences or is fatal for people with some other disease is more dangerous than the disease itself. Many more people will end up taking the vaccine than just those having the infection.
If this situation got really bad, what are the chances of this timeline being accelerated? The US has step 1 done now. Could we roll the dice on doing broader human trials immediately and also in parallel scale up production? Sure you might kill people in trials and waste lots of money, but may be better than the alternative of tens of millions dead.
My understanding is that it is very labor intensive and the manufacturing capacity is simply not there to make billions of doses in a short timescale (months).
The point of staying in even if you're young and healthy is not for your benefit, but so you don't walk around spreading the virus everywhere to people who aren't as young and healthy.
It's not about you, but it can be hard to think about people other than one's self.
At a nearly 2% mortality rate even for younger people, I think the odds are high enough to be worried. It's obviously not as deadly as the bubonic plague, but this disease is very infectious...
This is not true. A recent study from China showed the mortality rate for 30-39 year olds to be .2% I believe. And the rate goes down from there as age decreases.
I've been trying to find mortality rates for the very young. Infants and toddlers. I haven't been finding much information. Is this being reported? Having twins under a year at home has somehow managed to become an even more stressful event...
There was a study[1] released by China CDC that tracked 44,000 patients to 11 Feb. They found zero deaths under age 9, with 416 cases. The study doesn't load for me, so here's the wayback link[2].
I think the reported rate is 0, with contamination rates being low as well.
It seems that currently there are more reasons to be worried for your parents than for your kids.
This same tough decision-making process will play out thousands of times in the next few months.
Any event that draws an international crowd poses an elevated risk. You can't know where people have been or what kind of screening process has been applied. If you're planning on attending a tech conference with an international crowd, now is the time to reconsider.
The possibility of asymptomatic transmission through casual contact poses unprecedented challenges. As does the low number of cases on which to draw information from outside of China.
The problem right now is the extremely poor quality on the information around the disease. Maybe this thing will behave like other infections and "burn itself out" as summer in the northern hemisphere approaches. Maybe it won't. There's quite literally no way to know.
The disease has spread in places like Singapore and Thailand, which are warmer in February than most Northern Hemisphere cities are in summer. The notion that everything will just die down come Spring is blindingly optimistic.
Despite WHO-Philippines's warning that transmission in tropical/subtropical regions is possible, on February 7, the country only reports 3 cases. All resolved: 1 death, 2 recovered.
Influenza is a totally different virus though. That said, other corona viruses do tend to display seasonality but experts are uncertain about this latest one:
Outside of the behind the scenes stuff we can't know yet this thing is moving at a remarkably similar arc—save for the severity and fast incubation time of the virus in the film.
Thank you, this is very useful. Got a highly anticipated vacation in Tokyo and Kyoto coming up on the 8th and I'm trying to stay calm and reasonable about the risks. Cold, hard data in an easy to read format helps.
It's already been established that hosting the Olympics in the current fashion is generally a money loser for the host city. All of those resources expended to build state-of-the-art facilities, housing, transportation, etc...with rosy ideas of how they might be repurposed after the Olympics....which generally don't come to fruition.
And that's when the Olympics actually occur, and the host city is able to gain some revenue from visitors coming and spending a considerable amount of money.
If Tokyo builds the required infrastructure and then no one comes, I've got to think future host cities will re-think this madness.
Personally I'd like to see a distributed Olympics, with mostly pre-existing facilities being used. Maybe swimming happens in Copenhagen, basketball in LA, beach volleyball in Phuket, etc. Maybe some events could be held in smaller countries or cities that had never been able to complete for a full Olympics before. A larger percentage of the world population would be local to some part of the Olympics, perhaps for once highlighting sameness rather than differences.
Or screw it, we could just let dumb governments keep throwing piles of money at this nonsense.
The LA Olympics are, from what I recall from a Bill Simmons podcast[0], going to be one of the cheapest to host in history. Salt Lake City also continues to use most venues from the 2002 games[1].
Some of the highlights from the podcast on the 2028 LA Olympics:
* Only major construction that is occurring is an upgraded temporary track in the Coliseum, renovation on USC’s swimming arena, and building a train line to the airport (which, IIRC, was in the long term plans already and is just being re-prioritized). The track from the Coliseum will be broken down and split among various high schools who can benefit.
* There are some additional temporary structures going up, such as bleachers for beach volleyball.
* The LA games are doing what you suggested and are using existing venues for almost everything. UCLA dorms are going to be the Olympic Village and USC dorms will host media. USC, UCLA, MLS, NFL, and NHL/NBA arenas will be used to host various events. There is no brand new permanent construction.
Your base case scenario should be that this will be globally widespread. The tipping point was when Iran became an epicenter. This is problematic because of its porous borders with countries with weak government.
The good news is the virus is not too risky for an individual, excepting those who are old and with pre-existing conditions. The bad news is that there will likely be a lot of deaths in aggregate, globally. The other bad news is that the virus has been highly disruptive socially and economically in every country when the infection rate has started to climb.
The best we can do is calmly make preparations for how things will change.
The biggest impact will be on global supply chains. Also paints into sharp contrast our over reliance on China.
A side project I'm working on uses a key component from a Chinese manufacturer. Their factory has been shut indefinitely and we are 40 days behind schedule. My rep told me that while they've been working on the marketing/tech side of things from home, the factory can't open since workers are simply refusing to show up, and neither coercion or incentives seem to help.
People are eventually going to realize that the economic costs of this reaction far exceeds the cost of letting it spread, and things will slowly return to normal.
The only real uncertainty at this point is if the HN/reddit fever-dream scenario of overwhelmed hospitals plays out, outside of Wuhan.
I think many people here on hackernews are being stupid that they are healthy adults so they don't need to worry. Even if you don't die you will be out of the work force for 2-3 weeks either because you are sick or quarantined. You could pass the infection to your children, parents Grand parents who might not be able to fight off the infection and die. Many people get flu vaccines or over the years have built up some immunity. This virus is new so no one has any immunity most people will get infected only some might die but the many that get sick will be out of the work force. You guys are aware of tech productions shortages but a lot of other goods like garments we wear come from China. If they are unable to start back up soon world will be facing shortages of many other items prices will start going up soon. Other countries have started hitting capacity production for garments as China is out and they still can't meet the demand.
Not to mention the virus is mutating and is now killing healthy people in their twenties in Hubei (if not at least serious disease requiring mechanical ventilation and supplemental oxygen). Also there is evidence the HIV drugs are no longer working due to the virus developing resistance.
Those of you thinking "oh I'm a healthy young person I'm just gonna carry on doing what I'm doing" is gonna be in for a rude awakening.
My understanding was that this virus has a molecular proofreading system that reduces its mutation rate, and makes it unlikely to develop a more deadly strain - was this dispelled in any way?
Maybe I'm just looking for comfort, but this passage (from your first link) seems like a big logical leap to me:
> The fact that patients not displaying symptoms are able to transmit the coronavirus indicates something alarming. As typically such respiratory viruses are normally transmitted thru the mouth via coughing in which minute droplets are exposed or thru the nose when the nasal fluids are released through sneezing or blowing of the nose.
> If a person is not showing any symptoms, then the only possible means is through the exhaled air of the infected individual, which implies that the virus is an extremely potent airborne pathogen.
People who aren't sick still cough/sneeze/blow their nose sometimes. (Especially so in the case of people with allergies, but everyone does it a bit.)
And surely people could transmit the disease through saliva (or other fluids) spread via their hands. People touch their face, pick their teeth, eat with their hands, pick their nose, bite their nails, etc. etc.
Then there is the possibility of transmission through shared meals, or even inadequately washed cutlery etc.
Don't get me wrong, asymptomatic spread is scary, and it probably provides some evidence in favour of airborne transmission. But I don't see how they can make such an absolute statement, when there seem to be other available explanations.
Interesting article, but what point are you making by posting it without comment? It doesn't confirm airborne transmission, unless that is implied by background knowledge I'm missing (?). And it certainly doesn't tell me anything about the logic of the passage I quoted, so I remain sceptical about that other article's quality.
How do you expect asymptomatic infected individuals to spread the virus? The viral load is highest in the nose, suggesting that they can infect others by simply breathing in their vicinity. This is different from droplet transmission when people are coughing/sneezing.
> This is different from droplet transmission when people are coughing/sneezing.
I know, and I thought that was what we were discussing: how strong is the evidence for airborne transmission.
> How do you expect asymptomatic infected individuals to spread the virus?
I gave a bunch of possibilities in my previous reply.
> The viral load is highest in the nose
Higher in the nose than the throat, according to the Medpagetoday article, but that doesn't imply it is absent from the throat -- rather the opposite, otherwise they would have phrased it differently. And people do pick and blow their noses, and sneeze occasionally even when healthy, so it's not like breathing is the only possible route out of the nose. Not to mention the connectedness of nose and throat, which makes it hard for me to imagine a virus being present in the nose but reliably absent from saliva.
I'm not arguing that airborne transmission is unlikely -- I don't know, and am trying to form an opinion. Which is why I'm questioning the argument that it is definitely happening, and responsible for all asymptomatic contagion: it seems overstated to me, but if I'm missing key background facts, I'd like to learn them.
With the spread specially being high in enclosed spaces like the churches in Korea, Singapore and the cruise ship in Japan. I do think either it is airborne or the virus can live outside the human body longer compared to other flu viruses. Most of the high spread patterns outside china where we have information is in enclosed spaces like churches or the cruise ship.
Given how Japan handled the Diamond Princess situation, it's a foregone conclusion they are not equipped to handle it, so more than likely the Olympics will be cancelled. They just can't risk it. Athletes/Peoples safety can't be risked, the "Olympic" brand cant be risked.
Japanese Gov’t seems yet to decide whether to go cannonball or call it off entirely, currently bit on cannonball side which is how this deadline story came up.
If cancelled, this’ll be the second time an Olympic Games in Tokyo is cancelled, that I personally find hilarious, but a lot will be fuming embarrassed, especially if historians later likely is to mark it an uneducated overreaction.
Seems like yes, but not because it mutates, it's just that the immune response can be weak. Probably more of a risk for people with weak immune systems to start with.
Everything I've read suggests that Coronaviruses are more stable, genetically speaking, than the flu.
> Coronavirus non-structural proteins provide extra fidelity to replication, because they confer a proofreading function, which is lacking in RNA-dependent RNA polymerase enzymes alone
AFAIK that's still to be determined due to the number of false positives/true negatives with the testing. Same with the incubation period.
Edit - on the more worrying side of things this article (https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/14-of-recovered-...) was released today saying 14% of recovered patients Guangdong tested positive for the the virus. One of the more annoying things during this is that I have no idea which sources are awful tabloids and which are trustworthy like I do in the anglosphere.
It seems like the world is gradually acknowledging its seriousness as it continues to spread. This is certainly the highest-profile event that has considered cancellation.
"The World Cup is the most prestigious association football tournament in the world, as well as the most widely viewed and followed sporting event in the world, exceeding even the Olympic Games"[1]
Is this a good time to flag HNs self-conceited hive-mind ? Two days ago, HN was full of - 'LOL this is some Alex Jones level conspiracy'. Warnings by Harvard epidemiologists ? No. Virologists ? No. China quarantining half the population ? No.
Only the tech 'wizards' from SV, have a monopoly on truth don't you know. The Orwellian censorship that has been unleashed by these idiots will do the world much more harm in the long run than we're led to believe.
I was watching all those stories and I’m pretty sure they were all flagged down pretty quickly. They’d be on page 4 with an upvote / time ratio that should put them in the top few spots on the homepage.
I don't think they mean there were no such warnings, but that those warnings were ignored here.
(FWIW, based on the threads I saw and participated in I don't think that's really accurate; there seemed to be a range of opinions, with plenty of people playing it down but also plenty taking it seriously.)
Meh, I’ve been warning people about the coronavirus for a couple weeks now. And our prepper contingent has been on it for years. The silver lining is by this time next year, we should have ~20% less throwaway accounts being created for comments like these.
Many years back I read The Coming Plague about epidemiology and the disease cowboys who fight it. There is always a coming plague, known or novel. It was only a matter of time before we got a repeat of the Spanish Flu, or the Black Death. If not this time, then someday. Thinking otherwise is folly.
In many aspects humans are more capable, but not all.
Humans don't have to look at an animal for a few days to figure out if it's a mouse or a fox.
But for people infected with the Coronavirus we are not more capable: the first 2-14 days a person is infected with the Coronavirus we cannot see it. Only medical tests can, and we can't test everybody around us.
So the smartest might be to run away 100 times to avoid the single person who is infected.
Tell that to the person who sat opposite of the Iranian under minister for public health while interviewing him and he was coughing all over the place. Fortunately she sat about 2 meters away from him, but still, I'd be concerned. Washing your hands and not touching your face certainly helps. But elevators, air travel, the subway, the tram, the bus, the train, places of work and events all pretty much guarantee spread of viruses all the time. This virus is no exception, it will spread. The question is how fast it will spread and how much we can do to limit that so that the health care system has time to absorb the impact. Washing hands helps.
I guess it defines on what you mean by getting it right. If you mean correctly predicting the specific disease that becomes a pandemic, then sure. If you mean being alive at the end of it, then I don't think it's so bad to have a high false positive rate as long as your false negative rate is low given how enormously asymmetric the costs of a false negative are relative to a false positive.
I think they mean that if a serious outbreak does occur, people will treat it more seriously next time (not that 20% of the population is going to die from Covid-19).
It's gallows humor. It is based on the latest mortality rate I saw, but made the assumption of 100% infection rate among trolls. This is likely not true as they are often found indoors on their computers.
With the 1918 influenza, 1.7% of the world population died, many of them young people. This was still very traumatic to society, despite the fact that Europe had done its level best to kill young men for the previous four years in the trenches.
Right now, influenza has killed more than COVID-19, but people tend not to worry about that. Not new enough. About 300000 people a year die from influenza in a quiet year. Take your flu shots every year, people.
The prepper contingent has been on pretty much every possible end of the world as we know it scenario, so it's kind of hard to say that they were "on this"
Our widespread abuse of antibiotics isn't helping. To think that we can go 100 years without a serious pandemic while also abusing antibiotics at an unprecedented scale betrays a sheer disregard for biology and nature.
Coronavirus will burn itself out in May when temperatures rise. Just like common flu virus, increasing sunlight and humidity will stop the spread of the virus during summer.
Source: professor John Nicholls a clinical professor in pathology at the University of Hong Kong and expert on coronaviruses had a conference call where he explained most likely outcome.
Additionally, even if there is seasonality, it may be that this has already spread too far to die out completely and cases will rise again in the northern hemisphere toward the end of 2020.
And what about the southern hemisphere? In addition to any suffering that might occur there, that also creates a huge reservoir from which the northern hemisphere can^H^H^Hwill be reinfected. And that's assuming that seasonality is even a factor for COVID-19, which is far from certain. A change of season might provide a temporary respite for some countries, but that's not the same as the pandemic fizzling out.
I'm projecting the same level of likelihood (not certainty) as one of the experts in coronaviruses (not just general expert in epidemiology)
Third of third of common colds are caused by coronaviruses and they they show clear seasonal pattern (SARS don't because it's mostly human-animal transmitted). You can't say for certain that it's the case for this virus but it's very likely.
Not only can I not find a source corroborating your statement by John Nicholls beyond this forwarded email of a transcript of a call that allegedly happened weeks ago, but what you stated ("This virus will burn itself out in May when temperatures rise.") is not even an alleged quote from him. It's a summary by the person who typed this up. The closest thing Nicholls (allegedly) said is this:
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.
Totally different from "it will burn itself out by May", which multiple experts across multiple fields increasingly consider uncertain at best.
Singapore is literally touching the equator, and the coronavirus there keeps spreading. Local transmission has outnumbered imported cases a while ago. Temperature & humidity really isn't going to help.
> Singapore is literally touching the equator, and the coronavirus there keeps spreading.
Most Singapore buildings and its public transport system are fully A/C.
"The coronavirus there keeps spreading" is technically true, but we're talking about 1-3 confirmed cases a day, and an absurd number of people who have been served quarantine/stay-at-home orders.
Yeah its pretty wild to compare the rates of infection and mortality inside main land china with the rest of the world.
The high infection/death rates aren't showing up in the rest of the world. The interesting follow question is why?
It could be a number of things, my guess is a sampling issue. Given how secretive the Chinese govt is we'll likely never know.
You're grossly misinformed. The China outbreak was so strong initially because they had no idea what they were dealing with. The spread and infection is invisible for weeks. There are many people spreading Coronavirus as we speak without knowing a thing.
Korea, Iran and Italy all have major outbreaks which only revealed themselves this week, but likely began 2-3 weeks prior. Iran has clearly no idea how many cases are in its country, its numbers are 15 deaths and <100 cases. That's over 15% death rate. Makes no sense compared to all other reported number, their real total cases are likely over 1000.
The significance of the 2020 Olympic games cannot be overstated. All of Japan has been preparing for this for far more than a decade. Just look at stuff from early 2010s regarding topic such as 8K TV and 5G networks. They have been working towards this singular event where Tokyo will be center at the world stage. It would be tragic (but understandable) to see it cancelled. I hope they can do it a year later instead or something like that.
For anyone looking for more, try the subreddits /r/Covid19 (scientific/medical info), /r/CoronaVirus (maintstream news), and /r/China_Flu (social posts).
I'm not sure I trust Reddit, or indeed any social media, for reliable reporting on such an emotive topic. There's already so much misinformation and conspiracy theories about the disease.
> Dr Jennifer Cole is an Associate Fellow at RUSI. She was previously Senior Research Fellow, Resilience and Emergency Management from 2007-2017. Her research interests focus on international threats from emerging infectious diseases and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and the UK’s emergency preparedness and response capabilities, with particular regard to CBRN(E), pandemics, flood management, cyber security, resilient communications and the role of training and exercising in resilience.
It's the same as with Hackernews. You should never trust unsourced claims but it can be a great source to find more articles and opinions on the matter.
A functioning bullshit detector filters most of the crazies on either side, so far I've been struggling more with working out which legitimate news sources are actually legitimate. With many of the sources being Asian and I don't know which ones are reputable and which are the tabloids/fox news equivalents.
Reddit is mostly links to other sources, though. If you're reading self-posts on reddit, obviously be aware that they're not intended to be even seen as 'reporting', but rather discussion topics. /r/covid19 and /r/coronavirus are both well-moderated to remove rumors and rubbish.
Turns out, reddit has been more reliable with its curated rumour streams. Google et al, heavily censored search results. (Also, what happened to google flu trends?). For those with knowledge and critical ability to examine every claim, it's good to consider every source.
Ive been somewhat surprised at the coverage or lack thereof that this story has been getting on HN.
This virus is disrupting manufacturing from China in a major way. It seems like one of the biggest tech stories of the last decade at least, and for some reason the stories about it seem to drop off of the front page really quickly.
Are people flagging these or something for not being tech? Any of my network who does manufacturing is pretty concerned right now about supply chain.
80 years ago, in 1940, Tokyo hosted the Summer Olympics for the first time, but it was canceled due to the outbreak of WWII and Japan had invaded China.
80 years after, in 2020, Tokyo Summer Olympics could be canceled due to outbreak of coronavirus from China.
Are the effect of the coronavirus on the stock market could be opportunity for investing?
The SP500 went down 8% this past 4 days. I'm wondering if that will go lower those next days.
I have a bit amount of money on the side, I didn't know where to invest. Would now be a good opportunity to lump sum all the money, or would you Dollar Cost Average?
Anyone else with the same dilemma, and would have more arguments?
Just my opinion but I don't think it's a good time. Supply chain disruptions haven't turned into shortages, yet. The USA and other countries are with all certainty hiding the extent of the problem and the media is going along with it.
There are going to be some more news bombshells before public perception shifts. You need to wait until everyone is in despair before investing.
You're never going to get a useful answer to a question like this. If the market is efficient, which is a good default assumption, it's already factored in a weighted average of possible outcomes.
Anybody who can reliably spot inefficiencies in the market is too busy making ridiculous amounts of money to respond on HN.
I'm only betting small amounts and money I could lose....but I bet a 6 month put option using robinhood app on SPY and VTI and it's ready made me a good chunk of cash.
Dollar cost average is your best bet since things are uncertain right now and you, as a retail investor, don't have up-to-date information and can't act very quickly.
Your best investments are things that people can't say "no" to; infrastructure and utilities. Banks, railways, power companies, mining companies, and shipping are all things that reasonably hold their value no matter the economic circumstances.
You could take a gamble on a pharmaceutical outfit, but if these companies are chasing a corona virus vaccine, they will probably take on a lot of debt to achieve it, which may bite them later.
> Japan’s leaders are so out of touch with the lives of ordinary people that they seem genuinely uninterested in their plight. That, in turn, allows an entire bureaucracy to wallow in denial, even over a crisis like the coronavirus outbreak and just a few months away from the Olympics.
Similarly, the mayor of Boston chastised Sony for cancelling its PAX East appearance, and accused Sony of supporting bigotry. The bureaucratic disconnect is universal.
I'm in the middle of writing a general update / reassessment (usual caveat: nonexpert space alien cat on the Internets).
1. The wider spread is concerning.
2. Institutional trust, capabilities, and competence in numerous countries is a key factor. Notably in Iran, though also North Korea (its zero case reports is increasingly implausible), and Africa (many ties to China, no cases outside Egypt's sole case).
3. Testing and monitoring are critical, but limited. Keeping ahead of spreads, testing and screening protocols, and back-tracing community transmissions to a confirmed source, will be key to limiting further outbreaks.
4. Second-order impacts are likely to be far greater than the medical consequences, all told. China's CO2 emissions are down by a quarter, not because a quarter of the population is medically impacted, but because preventive efforts, including transport, work, and education shut-downs, have tremendously reduced total activity. Reported cases are 0.005% of the population, deaths 0.0002%. It's concerns (valid), not medical severity itself, which are driving these impacts. Recognising that the present costs are well worth a potential future avoided risk are well-worth paying is a message that needs to be effectively communicated.
Here are estimates from MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College:
=> Estimated fatality ratio for infections 1% (including those who don't go to see doctors)
=> Estimated Case Fatality Rate (CFR) for travellers outside mainland China (mix severe & milder cases) 1%-5%
=> Estimated CFR for detected cases in Hubei (severe cases) 18%
The last line (18%) applies when the outbreak becomes prevalent in an area and overwhelm hospital capacity. If not contained, dozens of cities around the world may become Hubei!
From Report 6: "we estimated that about two thirds of COVID-19 cases exported from mainland China have remained undetected worldwide, potentially resulting in multiple chains of as yet undetected human-to-human transmission outside mainland China."
Mathematic models made by epidemiologist experts from Harvard and prediction from John Hopkins guys are giving huge numbers
between 40 and 70% world adult population will be infected in one year and numbers of deaths will be between 30 and 150 million if their predictions are correct and china didn't lie with the 2% death rate
Read the threads from their twitters, the situation is much much worse than the media is telling constantly with the influenza comparison, and this guys are not nuts, they are top minds of epidemic control.
A brief from their conversations and information would be:
- It is absolutely impossible to stop covid and will be a pandemic
- The death rate could hit 10% in some countries
- Expect between 30 and 70% of the world to be infected
- millions of deaths
- Governments duty now is not to stop the disease as they can't, but try to slow it until we understand it better, have real numbers (chinese ones cannot to be trusted), and we develop a vaccine so the R0 can be <1
- Governments are likely going to adopt the hardest restrictions they can get away, expect quarantines on every country
- Health services on third world countries will collapse, first world will have problems as we are not prepared
- CDC is already saying the virus will be with us more than one season
A lot of the links you provide have alarmist titles and big claims and confusing evidence. Which is strange since the twitter authors are clearly well educated virologists/epidemiologists. But the style of language makes it difficult for me to trust what they are saying. So far I am sticking to research papers and This Week In Virology [0], where there is a lot less dramatic clickbait language and a lot more skeptical analysis of statistics. My conclusion so far is that no one knows how this will play out, but the fear seems to be more dangerous than the actual disease in many places.
Alarming titles indicate quacks more than they indicate actual crisis and we don't have time to check the credentials and the work of the people involved to assess their credibility. Also facts speak for themselves, you don't need alarmism unless you have something to sell.
Also in these instances a general panic can do much more harm than the virus can ever do — we already see fears of an economic recession.
do you use twitter much? these look like standard Twitter threads to me with standard Twitter writing style. threads from blue checkmark guys do tend towards sensational though.
Just as the majority of people who catch the flu don't get tested for it, only the serious cases do.
So we know covid19 spreads much easier than the flu and is orders of magnitude deadlier than the flu for those that get tested/confirmed compared to those that get tested/confirmed with the flu.
Note that they are looking at people who were diagnosed up through Feb 11th. It normally takes people 3 - 4 weeks to die from the disease, and it hasn't even been 3 weeks from Feb 11th, so it seems like this figure is designed as a lower bound.
Current antivirals work on it. Shown effective in animal models and now in human testing in China. A US based test, the patient made a recovery and showed significant improvement one day after dose. This is just antivirals that are already out there that being manufactured. There will be vaccines on the market in 6 to 9 months and antibody treatments shortly after.
Do you have research links? Or this is just internet enecdata? I have been contemplating calling in my Truvada script early and mailing a 30-60 pills to my parents but from my googling seems pointless. that Emtricitabine / Tenofovir most certainly wouldn't help? but I couldn't find much and have no idea
That's absolutely nonsensical paranoia. It's the equivalent of making $1000 month one of your startup, $2000 month two, and immediately claiming that by month 24 you will be making over $16 billion.
Make no mistake, COVID-19 is likely to become an annual community disease. But it's not going to kill 30 million people until like 2120.
There's nothing nonsensical about it. That's a very poor analogy as well, comparing a startup's growth to the spread of a highly-infectious virus.
COVID19 spreads by default. If you leave it alone, it will spread uncontrollably. China went from 0 to 79,000 confirmed cases in 2 months, despite running the largest and most extensive quarantine in human history. If there was no quarantine, you could expect truly exponentially higher number of infections.
The problem with these things is, if the rate of spread is >1, then it becomes exponential. That is, if the average person infects more than one person, then the rate of spread is going to get completely out of control. Unless of course, you can impose measures that reduce the rate of spread to below 1.
With coronavirus, it's not possible to do this. The reason is that many people are asymptomatic for weeks, while at the same time passing the virus to other people. If you cannot identify infections before they have the chance to spread at a rate of >1, then the spread of the disease will by default be exponential.
A startup does not grow exponentially by default. Many actions need to be done correctly to continue growing. A business's default state is death.
COVID19 spreads by default. If you leave it alone, it will spread uncontrollably. China went from 0 to 79,000 confirmed cases in 2 months, despite running the largest and most extensive quarantine in human history.
Sure, but note that they started the strict quarantine protocol after there are already > ten
thousand ick people (and many more already exposed).
With coronavirus, it's not possible to do this. The reason is that many people are asymptomatic for weeks, while at the same time passing the virus to other people. If you cannot identify infections before they have the chance to spread at a rate of >1, then the spread of the disease will by default be exponentia
This is mostly speculation, maybe just applying basic things like hand washing, distance measures pushes it to <1 and it dies down eventually? Besides, we have no data about the rate of infection from people who does not show any symptoms (especially coughing).
There's been a lot of shifts in thinking recently, including by myself, as some things that were explicable via either the typically bad data from an emerging outbreak or "just so" stories about stochasticity, like the cruise ship cases, or the bulk of the cases in South Korea being due to a single massive spreading event in a fairly insular community, turned out to be...well...more common than would be desirable.
The field, as a whole, has started talking much more about mitigation, and less about containment, because attempts to intensively trace and isolate cases are only partially holding the line.
That being said, important caveats to all of this is:
- As Marc Lipsitch notes, those estimates don't tell us how many of those cases will be asymptomatic or mild, because we don't have good numbers for that yet. The difference between "Under the weather for a few days" and "Needs respiratory support in an ICU" is obviously massive.
- Epidemic models inherently assume exponential growth (because that's how epidemics work). But that does mean that small perturbations in how we understand how the disease "works" can dramatically chance projections.
I'm not an epidemiologist, and while I do not like to use argument from authority, I trust this guys because is their work, they do it in top institutions and they won't jeopardize their reputation for some fear-mongering tweets.
Besides my usual request not to follow Eric Feigl-Ding as an authoritative source?
Not really? This is the currently understood state of the science. I would say though that right now several things have broken the "wrong" way in terms of optimistic projections, so it's still possible for the situation to improve.
I know a guy who went to work as a post-doc at Harvard. He left behind experimental samples of human blood that were unlabelled, which I had to inform his former supervisor about. He also had a number of other professional failings. The takeaway is that just because someone has "Harvard" on their resume doesn't mean they are even remotely competent.
And I completely agree, that's why I said I don't like to use arguments of authority, but two of them are not educated in harvard, they are heads of departments and directors from harvard and john hopkins
People educated in those fields with enough renown to claim those positions with a lot to lose for just writing that.
And yes, while they can end being just wrong or spreading fearmongering information, they are the most trusted sources I found
It would be a crushing blow to the athletes, who get just a few chances to do this in their lives. If it looks like holding normal games would be a health disaster, perhaps they should hold the games, but without spectators. Everyone can watch it via TV or streaming.
I believe TV licensing fees generate far more revenue than the direct ticket sales anyway. I bet in some sports, ticket sales barely cover the costs of building the seating and stadium. If you didn't have a local public, most events could just be held in a field.
Containment is still desirable even in a scenario where this has spread to all countries and on-track to become endemic.
Why? Because it buys time. If a vaccine can be developed, which is likely but certain to take some months, then you can inoculate the populace and end up in a situation where it's endemic-but-managed.
If you don't contain, however, then you assuredly burn through whatever portion of your populace will succumb to this thing, all but ensuring your nation's health service becomes overwhelmed, and as a bonus you stoke mutation due to a greater number of hosts.
Fatalism is not useful here and should not be encouraged under any circumstances. Containment efforts are never in vain.
Not just development of the vaccine, you will need to perform sufficient clinic testing, get it approved by FDA or equivalent in other countries, and most difficult, get it mass produced. In addition, treatment would be a entirely different story.
I agree it should be contained, I just don't see it can be contained to an extent where the Olympic Games can still proceed as planned.
I wonder how long until other international events start to be closed? I live almost trackside at a formula 1 event in a few weeks and I'm not exactly enthusiastic about people coming in from all over the world and cramming onto the public transport while they're drunk and sweaty.
It probably can't be contained anyway but large international events could cause some huge spikes in transmission.
Many major exhibitors are avoiding trade shows at least in the gaming industry, from what I've seen. Not the same as the show being cancelled but you can only have so many no-shows before it's the same in practice.
Considering Hokkaido became hotspot within two weeks of Snow Festival and Brazil recorded first case soon after Carnival, there is a good chance that other countries will start to look unfavorably at events with large crowd.
Organizers have to take into account transportation costs and administrative costs. unless as close as possible, such as the World Cup in South Korea and Japan, but that also means no distribution.
This might be enough to kill the Olympics. There have been such near-cancellations before (consider Moscow and LA in the middle of the cold war), but the context was different: the Olympics were seen as an important trans-national counterforce to the conflict of the two superpowers' spheres of influence at a time when there were few such opportunities. This was ostensibly the original basis for the Olympics being revived/reinvented in the 1890s. Hosting the games could "make" a city (e.g. Melbourne and Tokyo in the 1960s).
Nowadays the Olympics are simply one of a set of large international commercial activities and one of the most corrupt of them. Hosting them is typically a disaster for the hosting cities and fewer are interested in doing so. If the games are cancelled people will still seek entertainment, and these days with so many other options, the Olympic Games may not be missed enough to survive.
Cities all know they have to be smarter but have not demonstrated an ability to do so. Just asserting they need to be doesn't really suggest any change might happen.
As for a single cancellation: I discussed why this time could be different from the two previous examples. If you think that's wrong I'd like to read the counterargument.
Look like things getting out of control, world need to assemble the core team which include world's top virology scientist, pharma company and top AI team and jointly discover the drug in faster way
and they open source they works on github or other plateform to invite others people to get involve to make thing on faster and best way
The problem is not discovering the vaccine, it is ensuring it is safe. See the recent Dengue vaccine incident of what can go wrong when new vaccines are rolled out without proper caution: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengvaxia_controversy
Wow, I've been reading Axios as my primary news source for years - first time I've seen it linked on HN, though!
I highly recommend it to other people here. The reporting tends to be smart and to the point, their UI/UX is smooth and modern, and their ads tend to be more subtle than similar news sites.
I'm pretty confident that eventually we will have effective remedies that will keep people who contract it from having to be hospitalized, which is the real problem here.
I know we haven't yet resolved what is happening now. But I'm curious - what happens this coming winter with this virus?
It is my understanding that SARS and MERS were extinguished - they are not circulating anymore in the general population. Given the dispersion of this virus already, I can imagine hotspots rotating around the globe until the winter.
Will it then explode in numbers once again in the colder temperatures/lower humidity of winter?
Every time COVID-19 comes up people talk about the "low" mortality rate. But that hinges on enough medical resources. This disease quickly drains medical resources due to so many becoming critically ill. Without effective containment, a country will see their medical resources exhausted, and then the mortality rate won't be 2% ~ 5%. Exactly how high that will be remains to be seen.
Nassim Taleb (author of “Black Swan”) wrote a quick mini paper on the risks of Coronavirus back in January. I think this crowd on HN would be interested:
Referencing the http://coronavirus-realtime.com/ website, the graph of the number of infections over time is suspiciously non-exponential right now. I think China and the rest of the world are both struggling to collect data on confirmed cases.
Yep, and they come up higher on the search results in bing and google. Not sure if I really recommend them, but their dang domain name sure is a hell of a lot easier to remember. Maybe I would recommend them on that fact alone- in a public health crisis, easy access to critical information is important.
Depends on what real-world businesses and processes the tech are supporting. Most tech doesn't exist in isolation and involves things like manufacturing and logistics. Other tech companies are supported by ads which are funded by the aforementioned.
Rather then cancelling completely, a limited option would be to run the games in quarantine with just athletes, officials, and media. No spectators allowed. Athletes confined to the Olympic Village for a couple weeks before and after the Games, and bused to event venues with no public contact.
My brother and his group of friends are all going to coachella and are talking about concerns with coronavirus, as its heavily visited by international goers.
Apparently in the past, a huge herpes outbreak occurred, so its a good litmus for massive spread of something.
Wonder if events like this will also be cancelled.
Because the percentage increase of foreigners coming into Tokyo as a result of the Olympics is negligible compared to the numbers going in and out on a daily basis.
I love a good end-of-the-world scenario as much as anyone. But, gimme a break... What rational benefit would there be in cancelling the Olympics? The only risk of disease arising from the Olympics is the spread of herpes, chlamydia, and ghonorhea in the Olympic village (a small price to pay to party with uber-fit gymnasts...)
We've heard these warnings so many times...
Ebola, Avian Flu, SARS, MERS, West Nile Virus, Mad Cow Disease, H1N1, Zika Virus, etc., etc....
Wake me when the dead start not staying dead... Now THAT would be a virus I could can get behind. Until then, I fully expect to watch the Olympics this summer (and maybe an episode or two of The Walking Dead), and read through some of these hysterical posts and chuckle.
Any news source on this? UEFA seems to be saying there is no chance of cancelling the Cup... which I find believable, as the governing bodies for the various soccer leagues and competitions tend to be more money-hungry than other sports.
given the importance of football (economic but mainly bc public entertainment #1) i expect it to take place
* in empty stadiums
* players and staff are waived to travel even when quarantine in place
but mostly bc the virus should hopefully succumb to warm weather as the cup is in summertime
Why? Spreading out the venues over the whole of Europe seems to be a good strategy (not intentional, of course) for an event like an epidemic. Less concentration of fans and teams that way.
Spreading out the venues means spreading out the transmission. You'll have 20000 people flying from country A to watch a match in country B, then they'll get on another plane together and fly to country C then some will go back home while others fly to country D for the knockouts. A single sick person and it could suddenly be a Europe wide epidemic.
Throw in the drinking, the hugging and the tears that these occasions create and it's almost the perfect recipe to spread a virus.
Cancelled or postponed? By now they must have already spent a huge amount of infrastructure. And why outright cancel? _why_ can't you "just do it in October"?
Asking athletes to perform in dramatically different conditions than they train for (which will be the case for at least for outdoor events) is practically asking them to drop out.
I will be working our precinct polls on Super Tuesday. I will try to practice the common preventatives for exposure. Wash or use wipes regularly (no need for anti-bacterial). Make a conscious effort not touch your eyes, nose or mouth with your hands until you have washed. Insist anyone coughing or sneezing cover their mouth (offer them a tissue). I've had my flu vaccine in preparation but of course that is worthless against this new strain. I'll do my civic duty on Tuesday as promised, but if things continue to degrade, there is no way in hell I'm working November. I'm in the "elderly" high risk group and not feeling especially lucky...
I believe a lot more things should be cancelled because of coronavirus. The less we travel, the less it spreads.
Effectively the entire world is connected with flights and transport. A contagious virus can prolly wipe out most of humanity in a short period of time.
I’d say Airlines should give free refunds to people who don’t wish to vacation in this environment. It’s prolly wishful thinking though.
I hope Americans will be fine but I fear it will get bad with the chaotic and ineffective leadership of Donald Trump combined with a privatized and highly individualized health care system.
The American idea that health care is a privilege you have to pay for will hit a brick wall when you deal with a pandemic which does not give a shit about how rich or poor you are.
With a minimalistic welfare state, lower class people will be forced to go to work and will not afford having health checkups. That will risk spreading the virus and cause more fatalities.
What happens when private hospitals have to take on lots of patients who cannot pay? Will there be a race to the bottom trying to push patients over to other hospitals, dump them off on a curb as soon as possible?
I cannot see how a relentlessly profit driven health care system can cope with a serious pandemic.
The US spends nearly 20% of GDP on welfare. More (as %GDP) than Australia, Canada, The Netherlands, Israel, Switzerland, and many others. In terms of total spending, it's #2 in the world.
The cat is out of the bag so to speak. On a personal level all we can do is hope we recover well and quick, if and when we are exposed. Every day you breath in millions of viruses. You don't die because you have an immune system that has earned you the privilege to survive on this planet. Short of a vaccine we're just waiting for the battle and the reward of a new skill in our immune systems armory.
That said, getting sick is terrible and it'd be great if we could nerf nature. I pray for everyone's health and recovery.
The problem is if hospitals are overrun, the death rate becomes much higher. I think there is a 10 to 15 percent hospitalization rate. We don't have enough beds if enough get infected at once.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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).
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.
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.
I saw a quote recently saying something like claiming they have a surgeon making claims about an amazing new surgical procedure because they have an idea and a scalpel working.
No proof that it works, doesn't have terrible side effects, or actually does anything useful on humans.
And with that announcement, their stock price rose almost to their all-time high. Just as the stock price of the in-silico drug discovery platform did that claimed to have a vaccine within a day or so.
I'll believe it when I see it. Until then the estimate of 1-2 years (which is already pretty fast for a vaccine that isn't already on a yearly-cycle like the flu shot), sounds far more likely.
A friend of mine who worked for defense creating viruses is convinced it's man made because of the way the virus is structured.
Whether it's true or not. It's an interesting case, and I wonder why no one is writing about this possibilty in the media. Those ideas are quickly dismissed as crazy conspiracy theory. Where every big government is actively working on creating viruses for both defense and offense.
Especially because in Wuhan there is one of these labs.
Around the world outbreaks out of viruses out of these labs happen regularly. Even on purpose sometimes, but most of the time accidently.
I don't know if it's really worth engaging with this nonsense.
It looks just like other coronaviruses, there is nothing about it that looks man-made.
If it was man-made, don't you think the Chinese government would have locked things down more aggressively as soon as they realised it was out? After all, in this scenario they would know exactly how dangerous it is.
>Where every big government is actively working on creating viruses for both defense and offense.
How many of those have been respiratory viruses with long incubation times, low fatality rates in military age people, and no vaccines or other treatments?
This is basically the worst candidate for a bio-weapon ever!
The ideal bio-weapon:
-Is something you can protect your own troops and people against
-Can be treated but only with high expenditure of resources
-Incapacitates the people it infects as soon as possible
-Has no or moderate spread person-person
Otherwise you are just releasing a pathogen that will come back and infect you as well. This is why Anthrax was such a popular bio weapon, person-person infection is extremely rare and it forms spores so can be spread over an area where it will linger but has little chance of causing an out-of-control epidemic. Smallpox was weaponised by the Soviet Union and that is very contagious but can be vaccinated against.
Not buying into this sort of conspiracy theory myself, but since I'm reading some Cixin Liu I'll indulge in some creative thinking.
-
This is pure fiction:
Seeing this as an offensive weapon, if it were indeed man-made, is a mistake imo.
Right now the market is cratering, China is pretty much in economic lock down (which would have been impossible to enact otherwise), while being self sustained. Population of elders (i.e. non-working population) are being purged. Aren't we in the middle of an economic war between USA and China? China and the world, even? Who is gaining from this situation right now? Or rather, who is suffering less, from a medium/long perspective? If it does get to the States, with no healthcare safety net in place, the country will go through a lot of pain, economic and other.
I think that by the end of whatever _that_ is, China comes out on top from a game theory perspective. It's a bit like the Schwabb vs Ameritrade commission cutting playbook: if we both suffer but you suffer more, I still win in the end.
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Again, pure fiction. I do not subscribe to any of those views. I am not that cynical! Just a fun writing exercise.
>I think that by the end of whatever _that_ is, China comes out on top from a game theory perspective.
The trade war has already been causing manufacturers to consider the wisdom of their supply chain strategies. China is currently an export driven economy trying to transition to a domestic consumption led economy but hasn't done so yet. Anything that leads manufacturers to put more of their capacity near their large markets in Europe and the US is very bad strategically for China right now.
This is a disaster for China if it causes a manufacturing shift out of China before they have made a consumer transition.
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There are just too many factors in favor of uncontained worldwide spread at this point - within the 1st week of reporting it already looked like China's numbers were incomplete (and potentially manipulated) and the scale was greatly underestimated.
Untraceable transmission all over the place, relatively low-traffic countries like Nepal and Sri Lanka seeing cases very early on, extremely long incubation periods with airborne transmission without symptoms, false negative tests with people either catching the virus after leaving quarantine or not testing positive (both really bad signs), governments demonstrating weak and ineffective containment of potentially infected travelers (Japan: "no symptoms so they can go home!"), more infections than SARS in a small fraction of the time, the US only testing ~400 people thus far, entire families in Wuhan being wiped out. Basically everything is in place for this to be a serious pandemic.
I think when this all comes to an end, China will be one of the countries that dealt with the virus the best. Countries without authoritarian governments likely don't have the means to effectively quarantine major cities and shut down massive portions of their economy immediately without major problems arising. Given a couple weeks, sure, but by then it will be too late.
As an aside, BNO has been doing an excellent job of posting timely and sourced updates that make it easy to keep up to date with every new confirmed case (scroll down to the Timeline section):
https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/02/the-latest-coronavirus...
Hopefully I can look back at this comment in a couple months and chuckle at my paranoia!