An October 2019 novel Coronavirus simulation by Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, World Economic Forum, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation [1][2], projected 65 million dead and widespread knock-on economic and societal problems during 18 months of pandemic. Not that this is a likely outcome for nCoV-2019 (which is likely less lethal than the imaginary virus), but it's worth understanding SARS-like viruses can be significantly more serious than the flu.
Secondly, the flu is "baked in the cake" in our general medical and societal infrastructure. A novel virus will be additive to flu infections and even at similar rates of infection/death could cause a noticeable impact. As an analogy, 1.25 million people die in road crashes each year, but if some catastrophic, widespread automotive software bug/malware caused an additional 1.25 million road deaths in 2020, it would rightfully be a massive story, could potentially overwhelm emergency and medical services, and would be something to be concerned about mitigating as much as possible.
[1] http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/scenario.htm... [2] https://youtu.be/AoLw-Q8X174
It predicts a million deaths in a month from now, based on the observed R0 of this coronavirus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Log-linear_plot_of_corono...
This seems to be a key quote.
When you're making a bet, you should know the odds. Influenza is a known thing. I'm not going to think about that facemask knowing that influenza is going around, etc.
He called on preparing for a global outbreak, calling odds not insignificant. His live interview is on YouTube. He estimates 44k already infected globally.
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/01/experts-n...
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/artic...
his live interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYyH4N8VXvA
https://www.tellerreport.com/news/2020-01-27---viruses--hong...
He expects 150k infections daily at some point: https://www.ccn.com/dramatic-hong-kong-data-predicts-coronav...
The consensus seems to be 30% population of the world was infected, with a case-fatality rate of 2.5% (which is another commonly quoted number), it doesn't add up to 5% of the world's population. The case-fatality rate will have to be around 20% for it to kill that many people. This happens even in the same academic paper (for example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3291398/ )
> An estimated one third of the world's population (or ≈500 million persons) were infected and had clinically apparent illnesses (1,2) during the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic. The disease was exceptionally severe. Case-fatality rates were >2.5%, compared to <0.1% in other influenza pandemics (3,4). Total deaths were estimated at ≈50 million (5–7) and were arguably as high as 100 million (7).
?!
Can anyone more knowledgable explain what is going on with all those numbers?
The CFR is estimated at between 10 - 20 %, i.e. a symptomatic member of the population (a case) has a 10 - 20 % chance of dying. 30 % of the global population of 1.8 billion were infected over the several year course of the epidemic, which equates to 600 million cases leading to 60 - 120 million deaths.
MR was >2.5 %, so more than 2.5 % of the global population died per year during the epidemic. With a population of 1.8 billion, this equates to >45 million deaths per year over several years.
But then, perhaps the influenza mortality rate is also an overestimate, in that people who aren't severely affected won't get diagnosed.
There is also some unsubstantiated talk (CDC has come out and said it's not evidence supported yet) that this virus can spread before the host shows symptoms which is unusual. Your healthy coworker could come into the office and infect everyone, then come down three days later with the symptoms, and a week later the whole office is out sick. Or school.
The article starts with:
> Some infectious disease experts
But only two experts quoted in the article predict a potential pandemic.
The main worry, though is that it's infectious while asymptomatic, which apparently was not the case with SARS:
> Tools like quarantine and isolation—which were key to controlling SARS—are unlikely stop spread of a virus that can transmit during the period from infection to symptoms, experts say.
Also, of those who died, how many were weak/immunocompromised to begin with, and how many were healthy adults?
25% of SARS survivors have lungs mangled so badly they cannot exercise or walk very much. Does that count as healthy adults not dying?
There are also additional risks like a higher fatality rate in otherwise healthy people and the likelihood of the virus mutating into something that can spread like wildfire.
There are vaccines, test kits and antiviral medications.
An anecdote: my daughter had some fever in Japan, so we took her to the doctor. No other symptoms. The doctor did a swab test which tested positive for flu. Next, a nurse came in and administered a drug that is breathed in by taking deep breaths. Next day, my daughter was all fine like nothing happened. No sign of flu.
(And I didn't have to pay a single yen. I looked up the price of the of the flu test kits and they will set you back at least $200 a piece in the US)
There are vaccines and antiviral meds available for flu though.
It’s the same reasoning behind the alarm behind HIV in Africa: not only it kills, it removes the economically active demographic from the economy while tying up even more in their assistance...
Everyone please take time to read and make sure you properly understand what you have just read before reacting.