Public Transport in Wuhan Suspended Due to Coronavirus Concerns | Hacker News Reader

Public Transport in Wuhan Suspended Due to Coronavirus Concerns

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81 pointstheseadroid65 comments

Earlier today, researchers at Imperial College in London estimated that a total of 4,000 cases of Coronavirus in Wuhan City (with an uncertainty range of 1,000 to 9,700) had onset of symptoms by January 18. This compares with a Chinese government report of 440 confirmed cases as of January 21: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-ana...

According to the Imperial College researchers: "Exit screening (which reportedly came into force on the 15th January) had no impact on exported cases reported up to 16th January. Exit screening may have reduced exports in recent days, in which case our baseline prediction may be an underestimate of the true number of cases in Wuhan."

The researchers also write: "We assume all cases in travelers flying to destinations outside mainland China are being detected at those destinations. This may well not be the case. If cases are being missed in other countries, our baseline prediction will underestimate the true number of cases in Wuhan."

If anyone has more recent or higher-quality data or information (especially if it contradicts the Imperial estimates), please post it here!

Are you sure 440 is an estimate? According to LA Times that is the number of cases reported.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-01-21/anxiety-...

Changed. I meant to write report. The 440 cases are officially confirmed. Thanks!

A local doctor estimated that the number of infected has surpassed 10K in a chat group (images in simplified Chinese [1]).

[1]: https://lihkg.com/thread/1834475/page/1

You realize you can fake wechat messages with a simple graphics template, right? LIHKG is not a verifiable source

You realize the number quoted there is a reasonable estimate (if not an underestimate) of the number of infected, right?

Here is a thread on what Weibo was saying two weeks ago, when Weibo users thought that Hong Kong was overreacting to the outbreak (images in simplified Chinese [1], again, the images are hosted on LIHKG, but you can search Weibo to verify).

The fact that disease-related information is censored, hence the misjudgement of the public, is named a reason for the spread of the virus [2].

[1]: https://lih.kg/1835161 "【回顧】兩星期前既微博"

[2]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-censorship-helps-spread-...

This is textbook fake news

> Imperial College in London estimated that a total of 4,000 cases of Coronavirus in Wuhan City (with an uncertainty range of 1,000 to 9,700)

This is an estimate with a whole bunch of assumptions (may or may not be true) and known factors and applied to a probabilistic formula (a very simple one too.) Some I'd say this is a very rough attempt.

The 440 confirmed cases released by the daily official press release is a fact, with all of them confirmed with lab tests and been quarantined. Those are live numbers: https://3w.huanqiu.com/a/c36dc8/9CaKrnKp248?agt=8

There is no reason to believe the simply probabilistic model would be accurate (this is also why they suggested that the accuracy is between 1000-9700, almost an order of magnitude difference). And there is no reason to believe their assumptions were right either.

So you are comparing Apples to Oranges.

The best modeling for estimates about infectious disease is to use ordinary differential equation (ODE) to model and estimate with a set of assumptions. It talks about why the ICL's model only applicable to the early stage of the outbreak.[1]

[1]: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Ab0fLOWr_9AvU4RA15rMCg (in Chinese)

I also thought parent was comparing the two at first, but after his/her clarification I think parent was just reporting the latest (at the time) numbers for us.

Given the reports of patients being turned away from hospitals, and the images of flooded hospital corridors and ERs, it would be highly odd to conclude that the Chinese gov't "confirmed" cases represent the extent of those infected.

The only accurate method at this point is a probabilistic method.

China needs to crackdown on the ridiculous open air weird animal markets, and have people stop sleeping with their goddamned poultry. Seafood, fine -- no one's breathing in fish feces, getting some squid diseases. But birds, reptiles, weird shit like that running around contaminating the air people are breathing. I've seen it firsthand. Please, enough already.

It's demonstrably hurting their own interests at this point, after 3 recent outbreaks of world news-worthy diseases originating in such circumstances.

This.

But seriously, you can't stop individual eating weird stuff.

This might be more like a cultural issue. Somehow some people still believe eating wild exotic animal strengthen their body.

Eating isn't the issue, and it's not the "exotic" animals that are generally the issue. It's the widespread exposure to large populations of animals that act as reservoirs for these viruses (where they can run through many, many generations very quickly and spread once a variant that is transmissible to humans pops up)

I would argue it is the eating that creates a market and incentive for such encounter to happen in the first place.

The previous Coronavirus (SARS) to come out of China was traced back to wild bats (that were not being sold in markets). It remains to be determined where 2019-nCoV originated.

Most of the diseases that come out of China and spread to any great extent are avian or swine flus, which originate in chickens and pigs on massive, largely unregulated, farms.

I think when you compare the scale and scope of SARS with the WNV, I think there should be slightly less finger pointing. The US, North America and Europe are not immune to sharing their viruses globally. Lets not pretend 'the west' has the problem of virus control sorted. It starting there less often because there are less wild and animals around.

Oh absolutely. I don't necessarily agree with the top level comment (or at least I think it's incomplete, as you've described).

Worse, a double digit chunk of population in China not only doesn't believe in Western medicine, but Western medical science as such, like really not believing in microbes...

Unlike the popular notion, it's not only the "cultural revolution generation" of 60+ people. The amount of weird people believing in all kinds of cults, antivaxing, and trying treating cancers with yoga and unicorn poo peak in people in their forties.

China is a picture of society where the type of loonies like "new agers" have won. TCM now gets peddled from Chinese state TV, just like a certain yoga practice was 20 years ago.

When it will pass the boiling point, I feel TCM peddlers will get steamrolled just like them, but that's not gonna happen while Xi is standing in for it. Yes, Xi believes in TCM

TCM, I assume, means Traditional Chinese Medicine.

I am not surprised that traditional Chinese medicine gets advertised in China.

I would be very surprised if they started advertising traditional Indian medicine there though.

The thing is it has never been in that position to begin with. Out of hand quackery is a relatively new phenomenon.

Even just 20 years ago, "TCM" was still considered something only lunatical old people do.

But then China opened, and new wave of weird novelties deluged the society: "new age" cults, antivaxers, hipsters, gurus, psychodelics, psychics, antiscience and other stuff like that.

The contemporary brand of quackery has gotten into mainland China from... Hongkong out of all places.

Back in times when just anything Honkongese was considered super cool in the mainland, quack pharmacies that were treated like jokes in HK somehow managed to slip in, and became the new fascination of Chinese nouveau riche, and a token sign for their "sophistication"

And then over the time, it turned to out into what it is now, now being believed in quite seriously

Nitpick but the capitalisation is important. TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) is not just traditional medicine from China, it was a concerted state effort by Mao to modernise and standardise it, drawing from various local and traditional methods. Notably it was developed to create standard cultural identity and also notably, he did not use it himself.

Ayurveda and TCM are actually extremely similar in theory.

This sounds like a first-world comment, those open-air markets form because the merchants are subsistence farmers or people living outside the city without a lot of money and have to travel into the city. The farming in China isn't as industrialized or corporatized as in America and you will encounter poorer farmers or small traders who basically sell at these markets without having to spend a lot of money for rent because it isn't a high-margin business. Think farmers' market but filled with poor farmers. These merchants aren't forming open-air markets for fun, it's because they have to. If you force them out, then you will end up destroying poor people's lives.

The food and grocery companies in China who are selling in supermarkets are already in the supermarkets.

EDIT: I dislike eating 'exotic' meats and discourage the practice, however there's a fine line when you enforce the ban live animal market policy. Note that it has been enacted in Wuhan when the disease started. I also support stronger regulations and animal protections on these live animal markets and am not deflecting blame from these live animal markets but straight-up banning is not the right solution.

At some point it’s the job of the government to protect people when they can’t protect themselves.

Live and let live is fine until your actions are causing people to die all over the world due to completely new, evolved and deadly viruses.

All the brutal shit starts in places like this where humans and animals are mixing in dirty environments and freak meetings literally birth a destructive new threat instantly.

So on one hand you can interpret this as a “first world comment” but on the other hand you need to acknowledge that this level of negligence is no longer limited and isolated in scope to one tiny part of the world. It goes global overnight. There is absolutely no excuse for that.

It's about tradeoffs, if you ban live animal markets all over China for long periods of time, you will instantly cause far greater destruction on peoples' daily lives in China as people will suffer from poverty. There's probably millions of people going to go hungry because they lost their source of income and poor farmers in China don't have that much social mobility to get another job.

And it's a part of their culture as well. They probably use these markets to socialize, these are primitive social networks and strengthen ties between neighbors and visitors alike.

I think you and commenter above have some weird romanticized (and uninformed) notion of simple country farmers who are scraping a living, country peasant style, trading stories on their grizzled/smiling faces as they keep a 100 year old family tradition alive.

The Wuhan market in question was a professional concrete block building with heavy trucks bringing in stock and organized stalls with fluorescent lighting and walls.

I'm sure they value your concern for their primitive social networks as they pay each other on Alipay and swap family stories on Wechat.

My advice is to stop using your desire for some fiction to be true to tell people how you think things shouldn't be done.

I'm always suspicious of "modernization" types like yourself. Mainly because they're quite often fascists in disguise. Populism and libertarian principles go hand in hand, because ultimately they leave the individual alone to live their life as they see best. They don't need your help, neocolonialist.

Personal attacks and name-calling will get you banned here, no matter how wrong another comment is or you feel it is. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here. We've had to ask you this before.

You've got the kernel of a fine comment here, but the first and last bits cross into personal attack, which is not ok on HN. Especially the last bit.

Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here.

What is this patronizing take. Wuhan is not some backward 1700s farmers market with maidens carrying pales of milk around on their shoulders. It's a fully developed bustling city.

This and the parent comment are weird romanticized (and uninformed) notions of simple country farmers who are scraping a living, country peasant style, trading stories on their grizzled/smiling faces as they keep a 100 year old family tradition alive.

The Wuhan market in question was a professional concrete block building with heavy trucks bringing in stock and organized stalls with fluorescent lighting and walls.

I'm sure they value the concern for their primitive social networks as they pay each other on Alipay and swap family stories on Wechat.

> All the brutal shit starts in places like this where humans and animals are mixing in dirty environments and freak meetings literally birth a destructive new threat instantly.

The solution isn’t as easy as you think it is.

These “mixing areas” are part of their culture. It’s part of their cultural context. Trying to impose Western cleanliness standards will take a very long time, it was tried in India with “Poo in the Loo” and I guarantee you there are people still taking a shit in open areas. And not washing their hands after either.

> These “mixing areas” are part of their culture. It’s part of their cultural context. Trying to impose Western cleanliness standards will take a very long time

Can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want to let your citizens shit on the side of the road and not wash their hands, or run open markets where human/animal waste and raw meat are mixed -- that is cool but then we need to say sorry no more planes are gonna be allowed from Wuhan because y'all don't know how to act.

First off, the US lets people shit on the side of the road too, maybe you've never visited SF. My point is that having a regulation does not entail its enforcement or its compliance by the populace.

This sounds like an uber-liberal comment, from the mentality that no one should be blamed and no one should be made to change their behavior because it's not their fault. By that logic we would never be able to have any regulations at all.

There are objective health and safety standards that countries need to impose to move their development forward. As the other commenter stated below, when it affects others internationally is one such time when the need becomes painfully obvious. People will deal, and move forward. You underestimate how people will deal with it.

China overnight banned gasoline powered motorcycles and mopeds, in the name of public health. Show me how that destroyed the lives of millions of people.

Sometimes you can't live with all the excuses why it can't be done, and just do it and see why it can.

You need to come up with an alternative for people to keep getting their income, before imposing knee-jerk regulations. Which is something that I'd guess you've accused "uber-liberals" of before.

One idea might be that China could some of the money they're currently using to build their overseas empire to instead renovate these local markets, and the farmers could continue operating but in a lower risk fashion.

Not that this would ever happen, but I doubt it's economically impossible.

No, I don't think an alternative is necessary. It might be enough to say 'this harm is unacceptable; finding an alternative is the people's responsibility'.

For example, this is how the law treats people who sell drugs. Do you make the same argument re: drug dealers needing an alternative source of income before we criminalize it?

> Do you make the same argument re: drug dealers needing an alternative source of income before we criminalize it?

Unfortunately, yes, I've seen people make that argument.

I've had people tell me drug dealing is the only job available to some people in some communities, thereby making it acceptable morally and it shouldn't be prosecuted criminally (at least not so harshly).

Selling food is a bit different than selling drugs.

Banning bad activity for a public good should not require the government to "come up with" alternate behavior.

That isn't the function of government.

I'm not versed in economics, but the solution doesn't have to be outright banning open air markets. Perhaps an alternative is putting work into building the infrastructure that would uplift the poorer farmers to a point where they wouldn't need these open air markets, and can instead support their livelihoods with less dangerous means.

These western romanticized talks of China like its some cute little network of farm villages while simultaneously calling people out for their "first-world takes" is really only showing your own ignorance. Wuhan isn't some backwater poor city, it's one of the bigger hubs for transit in China and fully developed. It has the money to regulate and maintain hygienic markets. I hate Shapiro but his "bigotry of low expectations" thing of not holding nations up to the same moral standards because you don't see them as on your country's level is bang on the mark here. The Chinese government can and should do better to subsidize here.

ITT: hypocrites talking shit about TCM, which is fair enough, but then making non-scientific assertions about how eating "weird" stuff - presumably, organs & animals they don't normally eat - causes diseases.

PROTIP: it's actually microbes & other unsanitary conditions, and you can perfectly make "weird" stuff clean (& tasty). Go read a book, lol.

Apparently TCM is quite popular in Switzerland, I have no idea why...

Although true, Western meat agriculture isn't similar but different: zillions of animals, stacked one on the other and humans going in to clean up after them getting all that waste all over them. Either way, it's a bioreactor for evolving a pandemic. This is likely how we acquired many horrible persistent diseases: smallpox, avian flu, influenza, measles and many more.

I've seen panic buying of face masks in Palo Alto and San Jose, mostly by people who appear of Chinese ancestry. I was doubtful on its efficacy, but it appears there is some benefit combined with hand-washing. It's probably a good idea to have hand sanitizer and face masks on-hand rather than waiting until they're sold out.

But it certainly has altruistic value: if you are a carrier, wearing a mask should greatly reduce the chance of infecting others.

Isn't this overreacting?

In the US, the common flu has killed up to 61,000 people each year. This new virus has so far only killed 15 as of 2020/1/22.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

It depends on the lethality and whether or not they have vaccines to counter the threat posed. Also, we understand the flu. This virus and how it spreads and so on isn’t well understood yet, so I think caution is in order.

Yes and no.

1. This is a new virus, so you're less likely to have even partial immunity (in contrast, your immune system has been fighting variants of the flu virus for decades).

2. These are still early days so the numbers of infected/dead aren't reliable but the mortality seems to be a couple orders of magnitude higher. What this means is that if it spreads to as many people as the yearly flu virus does every year probably 10-100x more people will die.

3. It's good to keep an eye out whenever a new virus makes the species jump (as this one just did). It will likely fizzle out, but you never know.

You have to look at the CFR(case fatality rate) and how wide it will be spreading.

For flu, case fatality rate is usually <0.1% [1]. As comparison, SARS in 2003 is 15% [2]. This time it's still developing (17 of 444 as of today[3]) so hard to know for sure, but nature of this 2019-nCoV virus is close to SARS.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_pandemic

[2] https://www.who.int/csr/sars/archive/2003_05_07a/en/

[3] http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-01/22/c_138727379.htm

The unknown quantity factor of it is what's scary. How lethal and fast it will spread, etc.

Based on preliminary contagion rates thus far (R0=3.8), and assuming SARS-like fatality rates (25%), the death toll over the next month in China alone is likely to be in the tens of thousands - estimates are between 40,000 and 120,000.

...for just the next ONE MONTH.

They are definitely not overreacting. The only thing that can reduce the R0 level now is transit bans, public gathering bans, and quarantines.

It is reported that some Chinese are taking antipyretics to suppress symptoms of fever to evade quarantine checks, to get into other places like France (in traditional Chinese [1] and Google translated [2]), Japan (in traditional Chinese [3] and Google translated [4]) or other cities in China (in simplified Chinese [5]).

Edit: change one source.

[1]: http://www.rfi.fr/tw/中國/20200122-武漢發熱女承認用退燒藥降溫後入境法國

[2]: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%...

[3]: https://hk.on.cc/hk/bkn/cnt/news/20200116/bkn-20200116084329...

[4]: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...

[5]: https://i.lih.kg/540/https://na.cx/i/U1uhtVv.jpg

Three of your four non-duplicative sources are LTN or LIHKG, which are both extremely biased against China. I'd take what you're hearing with a grain of salt.

Thanks for explaining reasons for downvote.

I just changed one news source from LTN to a pro-Beijing news source Oriental Daily News, which reported the same news.

Also, although the image (1 out of 3 non-duplicative sources) is hosted and curated by LIHKG, the image is allegedly a screenshot on Weibo (Chinese twitter), which unfortunately is behind a login wall and hence must be screenshot.

I don't think Weibo is extremely biased against China, unless you're questioning the authenticity of the image, which yourself could verify by searching 逃離武漢 on Weibo.

I hope people can engage in a civil discussion instead of/after downvoting.

Given this SARS 1.5 has already spread around the world, what's the mathematics behind this?

Think about people who went there as a tourist and are suffering. ️

The last two books I read were Station 11 and Severance, and they make it tough not to be at least a little paranoid about this.

Great books, though.

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