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Comment by yingw787 | Hacker News Reader

I read on Reddit that Chinese New Year is the largest regularly occurring human migration event in the world. Millions of Chinese people gather on public transport and planes To go home to celebrate. It’s in a few days I think.

Also I’m not sure how the CDC is preparing for this under 45, but given the state of the federal government I would guess it’s less prepared than the days of the Ebola scare.

Hopefully things will not be too interesting. I hate it when things are interesting.

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Wow, I had been under the impression that the Arba'een Pilgrimage[0] was the largest human annual migration but the Lunar New Year easily surpasses it. This article has some good info on the sizes of a few recurring migrations and their size: https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2018/02/14/chines...

The infographic is absolutely crazy: https://blogs-images.forbes.com/niallmccarthy/files/2018/02/...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arba%27een_Pilgrimage

I was under that impression too! Maybe it’s because the Hajj has much more disparate travelers that I bin it under “migration”.

Whoops, confused Hajj with Arba’een. I did not know about the latter and I assumed that they were the same. Arba’een is much larger than the Hajj.

That's surprising, Hajj gets a lot more press/prestige it seems. Saudi is a similar sized population as Iraq, that infographic comparison is interesting to say the least:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Middle_Eastern_countri... (Iran, not listed, is 81.16M)

The Hajj is a once in a lifetime pilgrimage for most Muslims while the Arba'een is an annual regional event of Shia solidarity. The former is done by a far greater number of unique individuals but the latter can be bigger on an annual basis.

What about the Kumbh Mela known as the worlds largest congregation of pilgrims?

TIL!

A couple notes, from an infectious disease epidemiologist:

- The CDC Director is, in rare form for this administration, not someone devoted to dismantling the agency he's in charge of. I work with the CDC fairly frequently, and they're in pretty good shape.

- This is our third novel coronavirus, and the 2nd out of China. There's been a lot of prep work for this.

But wouldn't prevention require to screen all returning passengers from China and/or other Asian countries after Chinese New Year? I'm not sure how feasible that would be with the number of connecting flights with passengers from China arriving in the US each day. Or is it enough to isolate patients once they are ill enough to seek treatment?

Generally speaking in the U.S., quick isolation and contact tracing once cases do arise works well enough when combined with good infection control at the point of treatment.

That's wonderful to hear!

> Also I’m not sure how the CDC is preparing for this under 45, but given the state of the federal government I would guess it’s less prepared than the days of the Ebola scare.

Despite "45" apparently being such a comic book villain as to warrant "guess[ing the CDC is] less prepared", the CDC has actually had guidelines out since August 2019: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/mers/preparedness/checklist-...

This is part of how we even know of this case: the CDC under "45" was prepared, a local HCP was informed about what to watch for, and the system worked as intended. We have literally been through a very similar situation already with SARS and those protocols worked very well.

I mean, it’s not like I’ll be happy if the CDC and the federal government is unprepared and this becomes concerning and people die. If they’re prepared, then that’s good for everybody, and I am wishing the CDC success in its efforts to keep us safe. Thank you for posting links!

Guidelines for what in relation to the current emerging new coronavirus? Mers is an entirely different coronavirus that’s been around for a few years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East_respiratory_syndro...

Here’s the cdc page on the coronavirus that’s the subject of this thread https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/ much of this is still emerging re what we know, Afaics the mortality rate appears to be well below both SARS and MERS

It'll be on January 25th.

Like a coming tsunami of people travelling. At least it's all over the country, not just in one place, but still tons of close contact on the train systems.

There are some good docs on Chinese New Year transit on trains and it gets dicy and competitive for space.

To make it worse, Wuhan is one of the major hubs for people traveling east/west. It's a 11 million city that will see a lot more visitors and connecting traffic over the next weeks.

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