How is this worse than your normal influenza cycle with 3-5Mio infections and 290k-650k death to warrant such an emergency?
This thread is full of cringeworthy doomsdayers and armchair epidemiologists throwing around unsubstantiated nonsense. When your only knowledge of this comes from the media people should be a bit more selfaware.
The fact that qAnon folks are all over this and one day old accounts turning up saying millions will die speaks volumes for the level of discourse here.
Bet on the above comment stands for anyone. $1000 USD sound ok? Put your money where your mouth is.
The stock market has taken a hit over this outbreak fear. Go place your contrarian bets there if you’d like.
Put your money where your non-contrarian mouth is if you are so sure, the media told you so it must be true right?
Mark my words no one will mention this stuff in 3 months.
Yeah, well that was an entire year. This is a few weeks. The goal is to get ahead of things, not to wait until it's too late.
Comparing the total number of cases or deaths to flu outbreaks from previous years does not make much sense at this point, when the numbers are growing rapidly, but in a month they probably are easier to compare. Neither does comparing average counts per week, because the growth is not linear. The data for the progression of flu (or any other disease) outbreaks exists, and comparing to their growth rate would put it better in perspective. Regardless of armchair analysis, the WHO declaration means it's something requiring unusual action, which flu is not.
Consider the recommendations to thoroughly wash one's hands during flu season as a precaution against getting the flu. How many people take that advice seriously? You can bet there'll be a lot more hand washing all around once this coronavirus hits people's local areas, not to mention all the mask wearing that'll happen (though unfortunately, most people will be wearing those dinky surgical masks which will be of dubious effectiveness), and people isolating themselves.
On the other hand, we have vaccines for the flu that are available well in advance of flu outbreaks (though not nearly enough people take them), while we've got no publicly available ones for 2019-nCov. That's another confounding variable that makes it hard to compare the two.
That was one particularly bad season. It's usually in the 30k - 40k range.
> that still works out to be much more (1153 deaths per week)
That particularly bad season had ~45MM cases, so that was an average of 865k infections per week. 2019-nCoV is that 1% of that infection rate.
People are concerned because this has a high growth rate that, unless contained, would cause large number of deaths
The new virus has no vaccine.
That's not an option to stop this Coronavirus at all.
* Coronavirus has no vaccine
* Coronavirus infected can be contagious for longer than flu patients
* The longer incubation period means more chances for people to get sick, especially since the disease comes on gradually. People will think they have an ordinary cold, go to work, and infect people.
* We understand the progression of the flu in most variants. We don't know all the effects of the Coronavirus, we just have descriptions of the symptoms.
* Flu is basically everywhere already, Coronavirus is not. It's not a choice between one or the other, it's a choice between one or both. If we could declare an emergency and have some chance of stopping flu from getting to some part of the population, we would.
* People with compromised immune systems like the elderly, or babies, or people with existing illnesses or lung problems know to avoid people infected with influenza. Since it's possible for people capable of infecting others with Coronavirus to not even know they carry it, it's harder to avoid for those vulnerable to it.
It's much cheaper to respond to a virus like this in early stages than it is to wait until we see "how serious" it is. All in all, getting things moving now is a good idea.
> Worldwide, these annual epidemics are estimated to result in about 3 to 5 million cases of severe illness, and about 290 000 to 650 000 respiratory deaths.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/influenza-(...
> The flu has resulted in 9.3 million to 49 million illnesses each year in the United States since 2010. Each year, on average, five to 20 percent of the United States population gets the flu.
https://www.healthline.com/health/influenza/facts-and-statis...
Let's assume 10 mil Corona cases in US (like flu lower bound), with 2% mortality. That's 200k deaths. If we assume 49 mil cases (flu higher bound), it's 1 mil deaths just in US.
It’s scary to see it so close to home. I’m in Northern Ireland and saw two hazmat ambulances gunning it into the center of Belfast today.
I’ve never seen a hazmat ambulance in this country - wouldn’t have even known we had them or what they looked like.
I suspect we’ll get outbreaks in many more regions over the next few days.
I wouldn’t expect them to try to “cover it up” but I’d very much expect them to act slowly in notifying and not take it as seriously as they should.
The Spanish flu killed 50-100 million people. Worth reading about it.
The possibility has been raised that if this goes global, it could become an illness that, like the flu, just sort of continually floats around and we're stuck dealing with it. We don't really want another such illness. If freaking out about it right now can even move the needle on the odds of avoiding that scenario, it might be a good plan.
Where are you getting that number? It a magnitude of 10 off
That is not known at this point.
On top of that, it seems to have worse mortality rate, transmissibility rate, and asymptomatic contagion -- so a little worse in every way, probably.
As with the flu, you're very unlikely to be personally killed by it unless you're over 65, under 5, or in poor health.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/effectiveness-studies....
This is especially true for those with weak immune systems. As for a source, see the "Effectiveness" section https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/Infectious/Influenza/Pages/you...
Quote "One European study in 2008 found a 66% vaccine efficacy (VE) against confirmed influenza for children aged 9 months to 3 years, while a Japanese study of children aged 6 months to 6 years found VE against influenza A ranged from 42% to 69% depending on the vaccine match"
Another source with an effectiveness section has similar numbers: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/misconceptions.htm
That's very far away from your "flu vaccine is terrible ineffective" statement.