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Comment by aqme28 | Hacker News Reader

Simply because it has a mortality rate a couple of orders of magnitude greater than the flu's. Something like 8 percent of the world gets the flu in a given year. Millions will die if that happens for this one.

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Assuming the CFR remains stable. Most new infectious diseases rapidly drop in mortality because of natural selection: those variants of the virus that make people sickest result in their hosts not surviving or not coming into contact with other people to spread the virus, so the strain that becomes endemic tends to become less virulent and more adapted to its host. This has happened with leprosy, syphilis, HIV, and Ebola, and there's no reason to believe it wouldn't happen with nCOV (if the outbreak isn't contained entirely, as SARS was).

In fairness though, the containment ship has sailed for nCOV.

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.

It's highly unlikely that those ambulances are related to the virus. There are 0 confirmed cases in Northern Ireland, and if it was a suspected case the government and media would be all over it to find people who were potentially infected.

I’m afraid you have more faith than I do in local government.

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.

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