How might the coronavirus change our world? | Hacker News Reader

How might the coronavirus change our world?

exponentialview.co

100 pointsimartin2k123 comments

Prepping might become more popular, I think. Maybe supply chains become a bit more distributed, or less centralized. Skepticism of "official" narratives might grow, if the virus isn't sufficiently contained soon.

>Maybe supply chains become a bit more distributed, or less centralized.

This is one of the things that I've been wondering about the last few days. I recently read an article discussing how because China is essentially shut down, the supply chain has been disrupted for manufacturers in other countries. So much of manufacturing in other areas of the world depends on components made in china, and when those stop other manufacturers also stop. People get laid off, and it becomes a cascading problem affecting everyone.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/04/business/hyundai-south-ko...

Smart countries should be using this as a trial run for "what happens during WWIII?", and determining where the critical gaps exist.

Not just WWIII - what happens when (not if) a large solar flare [1] hits us or if Yellowstone [2] ends up erupting?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_Caldera

I wouldn't be surprised if the Chinese military is using this outbreak as a natural experiment for planning responses to a biological attack if WW3 breaks out. Figure out how well the state can quarantine large parts of the country while ensuring industrial and warfighting supplies can still get through.

I think there is a site called r/conspiracy for this.

The interesting question is: who would launch a biological attack on them? And will this trigger a nuclear response?

Without a doubt, this is going to slow global growth for the next year or so. One of the world's major economies is in hibernation right now. I also think there's a fair amount of distraction going on across the globe that is also silently draining some productivity. Whether this triggers a recession remains to be seen, however.

A potential silver lining then.

Not mentioned here, but definitely plausible: public health monitoring and enforcement action via infrared thermometers in public places. China has already deployed facial recognition all over the place, it would be fairly easy to add thermal imaging on top and actively track people with fevers if the temperature resolution is good enough.

Already in use at major Chinese airports/ports of entry.

Better not run too fast to catch your flight!

Now I'm curious how do security people react to people running in airports. Or maybe suspicious people never run because they don't want to attract attention (and do so in the process)

In Shanghai (pop. 24M), IR scanning is also required to drive into the city and to enter the subway. The paper says that anyone with a high temperature is held in a quarantine area for hospital pickup.

In my district at least, an IR scan is also required to enter shopping malls, and at least some apartment complexes (including mine).

This morning the nearest Starbucks started requiring IR scan.

Super interesting. Do you have any articles or photos with more info?

Isn’t this easily defeated by taking a NSAID(eg: ibuprofen).

Heh, or a wet napkin, a quick wipe will significantly decrease your face temp until it dries.

Yes, there was a famous incident a couple of weeks ago. [1]

I remember reading in the local paper that you have to register with the pharmacy in order to buy fever medicine but I can't find an online source now and I haven't been into a pharmacy to observe it myself.

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/wuhan-coronavirus-woman-avoi...

Paracetamol is even better and more commonly available

Also women have lower body temperature than men.

Is there some kind of infrared thermometer someone could buy for themselves and detect a sickness early and minimize the transmission by voluntarily isolate themselves for a moment?

If it’s just for yourself, a regular thermometer will do, certainly?

There is an instrument called an infrared thermometer. It measures the long-wave radiation emitted from a target object and computes it's temperature.

However that will only give you the measure of a single spot, which could be inaccurate due to thermal reflections, or noise, so ideally you'd want an infrared camera, which will provide a thermal image your target. They're a bit pricey though.

On the other hand, why not just use a regular thermometer?

It’s possible to remove the infrared filter from a normal camera and replace with one that only lets in IR. lots of articles online but no idea how hard it is.

Edit: for example https://www.extremetech.com/electronics/144388-how-to-turn-y...

That will only get you the near-IR range, not the long-wave IR used for thermal imaging.

There are two issues behind this.

First, the fever and temperature increase come after 2 to 5 days of infection (14 at most). So you are effectively contagious before showing any symptoms. This is why most detection measures at airports are useless. It used to work for other outbreaks though (e.g. SARS/MERS).

Second, realistically most people would not want to isolate themselves. They will want to leave China and find a hospital in a neighboring country where they could be treated in better conditions (e.g less overcrowded hospitals, more staff). This is why a lot of Chinese people try to cross to Hong Kong or still attempt to fly to Europe even though they know they are sick.

Last, some people will just ignore the fever and hope for the best. We have seen people arriving in HK from China and straight refusing to be tested for the virus.

I’m not blaming anyone here of course. I don’t think this is intrinsic to the Chinese mentality, most humans would do the same in such conditions: unconsciously ignore the symptoms, refusing the rational solution and putting themselves before the risk to others; because faced with the probability of dying, your brain can make you believe anything, even that your fever will vanish.

The Whoop[1] does not measure body temperature but it does measure your heart. Several users claim it has detected their sickness before they realize. FitBit too.

1: https://www.whoop.com/

Surely this is a claim that warrants FDA approval.

There are too many confounding factors for resting heart rate to be a reliable measure of illness - stress, dehydration, a hot climate, alcohol and lack of sleep can all have an impact.

FLIR is the most well-known thermal IR camera

There's an interview with an African grad student in Wuhan who says that strange cases of pneumonia were happening all the way back in September of 2019. And this interview was the first I'd ever heard of that.

This could have been a non-starter had not the Chinese Communist party covered this up as long as they did. That's what needs to change. There might be a genetic predilection for Asians to be susceptible to coronaviruses, but if we attack these things head-on as they emerge, they won't amount to much.

If we pretend they're not happening, one day we're going to get a pandemic. That day might be today unfortunately but only time will tell.

https://youtu.be/8uIVf_o9aXM

It's been reported for decades that small-time livestock farmers in rural China live too closely to their animals, namely pigs, which are genetically similar to humans.

So that's the source of annual flu.

So search on that as a start.

Completely different viruses, but right before the coronavirus outbreak, there was a plague outbreak in Beijing and the CCP responded similarly ineptly to it. The article below is from November 2019.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/16/china-bubonic-plague-ou...

Indeed, I think thermal imaging for public health monitoring will hasten the spread of video surveillance and facial recognition worldwide. Thermal imaging technology is already commoditized and inexpensive, and as you point out, probably easy to integrate into existing security IT infrastructure.

It will start at airports and border checkpoints.

People are already taking fever reducers like aspirin to get through screenings where authorities are taking temperatures.

You say that as if everyone will be doing this. I believe there was only one case where a woman travelled through France and bragged about it online.

People also hide drugs to get past airport customs / security, does that mean security is not effective? Perhaps, but it mostly defers honest people from doing stupid things, there will always be people who'll try to get around it, but they're only a very very small minority.

> You say that as if everyone will be doing this.

No, I don't. That is just how you're choosing to read into my comment.

Which is why I used "You say that as if...", because it would be very easy to interpreted your comment that way.

Surveillance firms in China (and gov't) are already deploying a prototype of the thing you described [1][2]. No reports on how effective this system is though.

[1] http://www.xinhuanet.com/local/2020-02/06/c_1125536287.htm [2] https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1178554.shtml

"The drone project involves young tech enthusiasts from the Jinkui Community Youth Science and Technology Innovation Center. Every day — for two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon — youngsters wearing masks and gloves fly drones to patrol the community.

The drones carry loudspeakers which announce: “Please stay at home as much as possible. If you have to go out, don’t forget to wear a mask.”

The drones can also scan car plates and record which vehicles have entered the community.

The drones are also equipped with thermal scanners which can measure the temperatures of people idling in the community.

Those found with normal temperatures will be encouraged to return home. Officials will be alerted of people found with fever."

https://www.shine.cn/news/metro/2002051335/

That sounds exactly like some sort of population control mechanism from a dystopian novel. All it needs is a tazer for those that don't comply.

What should they do during an epidemic?

Not wear masks, if nothing else.

How about trapping people inside their homes?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7960471/Police-BARR...

Is it still correct that the coronavirus is still only as problematic as the flu, with the majority of eradication effort going into it with the idea that having two flus going around is still worse than one around? If so I don't really anticipate any real long-term effects at all, it'll just be another seasonal batch of sickness and death for society to deal with.

Mortality rate (outside of Wuhan) is 10x worse (0.16%)[1] than the flu (0.014%)[2].

I'm personally not worried about a virus with a 99.84% survival rate, but it's still technically 10x as deadly.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-...

[2] https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/influenza-and-pneu...

Plus, there might be a more efficient way to deal with it discovered soon. We are only in opening stages.

Plus, it's not a sure thing that it will mutate like flu does every year. It might be that it's going to disappear once enough people get over it and become immune

From what I understand the virus is treatable though highly contagious. China is having a tough time providing care for all those infected specially at the epicenter. If the virus starts spreading in poorer countries of Asia and Africa then mortality rate will go higher as I don't see them being able to control something that even China is facing hard time doing.

Exactly, there’s

“mortality rate when you have access to a mechanical ventilator”

“mortality rate when you have access to IV fluids and a floor to sit on”.

More common is the daily ritual of getting in line at the crack of dawn, hoping to get medical care and getting at best some IV fluids then kicked out each evening because you don't officially have the virus. Of course if you ask, there's no tests available.

There's numerous videos of people passing out in public, which could be just a non-representative sample. What makes it scary to me, is that everyone around just looks and seems to think it's normal/expected.

Those videos are alarming, although we should be cautious that they might be old videos from something else re-purposed for the sake of stoking panic.

Some videos, such as one showing a bunch of people passed out or passed away in an apartment, are from earlier unrelated incidents.

Agreed.

But if you look at twitter, WSJ, NYT, Washington Post, Aljazeera, Lancet, and the BBC you start to see a picture not really consistent with "only" 30k people sick.

After all CDC reported on a fairly normal flu season in 2018-2019 (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/mm6824a3.htm?s_cid=mm...), not as bad as the previous year. 43M sick, 647,000 hospitalized, 61,200 dead. The world didn't notice, no factory closing, no global supply chains halted, no stumbling economies, no rush to build hospitals, no halt of airlines, and no $174B injected (like last Monday) into the economy to stabilize things.

Somehow under 30k infected and 565 dead is a big deal? Should we ignore every crematorium in Wuhan running 24x7?

China is keeping a pretty impressive lid on it, but the cracks are starting to showing. The official numbers are a joke.

If it was spreading and killing as fast as you are thinking we would be reading a lot more about it from other countries. As much as chinese media is not to be trusted the western media and people are also not to be trusted to talk about china as they are biased the other way.

Spreading fast, sure. Killing fast, no. That's in many ways the issue - If this thing spreads strongly and asymptomatically, and eventually develops into conditions with high mortality, that's a really bad situation to be in.

Folks keeling over before they can spread it is one thing, but appearing fine until long after spreading it to other people means it's spread isn't known until the symptoms start showing up all over the show.

Not sure I can agree that western media is biased towards not hyping these kinds of events.

> From what I understand the virus is treatable though highly contagious.

As of now, there's no treatment for it. At best you treat the symptoms and hope the patient's immune system does its job.

Some antivirals might have helped in some cases. But they also might have had no effect at all and the people treated with them recovered on their own. It's way too early to tell one way or another.

> However, both of these estimates should be treated with great caution because not all patients have concluded their illness (ie, recovered or died) and the true number of infections and full disease spectrum are unknown.

Mathematically, the lethality of the virus is about 33% (565 died and 1163 recovered as of Feb 6th). Other 28,000+ cases are still in progress and they will resolve by recovery or death.

Yes, trick is that the tests are in short supply, paperwork load is high (reporting to city, state, and country authorities), and you need two positives tests to be considered definitely sick with corona virus.

The result is that there's many 100k that are sick, but only 25k are "official". China is actively deleting photos, videos, and posts on social media trying to keep a lid on it.

Right. They have also just admitted to BBC that they will not use the test kits on dead people, and their deaths are not counted towards the nCov count.

That being said, I think speculating about "the real number" is quite useless at the moment, as China is still being actively quarantined (i.e. Hangzhou which is a "Tier-1.5 city" and home to Alibaba and is kind of a China's SV has closed down yesterday).

PS: I live and currently in Shanghai.

Yo, the mortality rate is first) not calculable in any kind of real way right now (go check out what they thought the rate for SARS was a month into that battle) and second) not at all what the real is here.

The first to fall ill will have five doctors in plastic suits surrounding them, fancy beeping machines, low light. When they fully recover in a few days, media celebrations will be high-gloss and cheerful.

Then as the exponential growth bowls over the healthcare system like a meteor smashing into ten little pins, deaths from all causes will skyrocket.

This is what we’re seeing in wuhan. Certainly, the numbers don’t add up much (509 dead total as of today? Drop in an ocean for China, why the freak out?) But of the 25k confirmed cases check out the share that are in critical condition.

Those folks need ventilators and staff and food and beds and all sorts of stuff.

I’m not sure where I read it, some kind of military or intelligence book, but the idea was that by the time your healthcare system needs to help about 3% of the population it serves at once, it totally collapses.

It doesn’t just GET SLOWER (but it does that), but it just collapses, and huge numbers of avoidable deaths pile up real quick. That nasty knife wound from dinner really should get stitches but you know it’s hopeless so you do your best with a bandaid and risk infection. A car accident that would otherwise be a shock and a shake up and a day at the hospital getting your leg encased and your head checked out turns into a fatality.

Not great.

That's why China slapped together two hospitals in a few days: to cope with demand.

It wasn't just 'face', it's trying to stay ahead of that capacity and deal with the influx of new cases.

Ukraine is also kind of interesting right now, I'm reading that they have a lot of suspected cases of 2019-nCoV, but no means to send samples for testing to are unable to confirm any cases. That may be the same case in some African nations right now as well.

Those hospitals won't be enough to treat the sick, and they're mostly just quarantine wards that lock from the outside.

Don't rest your argument on official data coming out of China. There is evidence they are even burning bodies now (SO2 levels) to get rid of the evidence.

It's both more infectious and more deadly than the flu, but less deadly than, say, SARS. There is also some evidence that it can cause tissue damage. Should also mention that it causes pneumonia, which the flu typically doesn't, and pneumonia is no joke.

China wouldn't shutdown their economy and quarantine tens of millions of people over the flu.

People will start to wash their hands more, touch their faces less, and avoid sick people more because of checklists to avoid coronavirus that people are sharing online.

Except those same checklists were shared with H1N1, SARS, MERS-CoV and now nCoV. They are the same checklists/recommendations shared every year for season influenza. Nothing has changed.

I think that in Canada at least, the government launched an information campaign to get people to cough/sneeze into their sleeves instead of covering their mouth with their hands. From my anecdotal observations, it was pretty effective in changing many people's behaviour in a lasting way.

To be fair, none of those viruses received nearly the same level of news coverage nor had fear and awareness of them penetrated into popular culture in the way that 2019-nCoV has. And, many people today were only children during the 2003 outbreak of SARS (17 years ago!) so this will certainly help to reinforce it among the younger generation.

I work in infection control in a hospital. I did this work during all but SARS. So far I'd say H1N1 was the biggest since we had many cases in all parts of the world. Sure, access to news is different these days, but we don't get the same hysteria as we did during H1N1.

Or hey, how about shutting down wildlife markets?

> Pinning Coronavirus on How Chinese People Eat Plays Into Racist Assumptions

> The outbreak has had a decidedly dehumanizing effect, reigniting old strains of racism and xenophobia that frame Chinese people as uncivilized, barbaric “others” who bring with them dangerous, contagious diseases and an appetite for dogs, cats, and other animals outside the norms of Occidental diets.

https://www.eater.com/2020/1/31/21117076/coronavirus-incites...

Saying that a group of people in China made risky decisions and that others are suffering for them is not racist. Not all statements directed towards another culture are racist. Also, many Chinese don't eat bush meat, and no one is criticizing them.

It's also not directed specifically towards Chinese; the same criticisms have been leveled at Africans for the same reasons when the same practices caused similar outbreaks, so it's not a specific dislike of Chinese.

HIV, lassa fever, SARS, Ebola, and more have been caused by eating bushmeat. That's not racism, that's epidemiology.

Facts can be used as weapons, sometimes for racist purposes. That's certainly happening here in Australia in relation to this.

I'm not debating that food safety could be better in China and other developing nations, but saying we should shut down their markets is a big overstep and fails to understand the cultural significance. If a drug-resistant bacteria started in the US and spread to China they could just as easily say "Those supermarkets in the US need to be shut down"

The US is making equally risky decisions, but no one here is clamoring about that. Bush meat is no different than wild-caught meat, yet you use a derogatory term for it simply because it doesn't align with your cultural values.

> Even today, the U.S. is far from a paragon of food-safety regulations gone right. The routine use of antibiotics in factory farming has helped create drug-resistant bacteria that cause foodborne illnesses.

Yes. However a lot of the discussion on this quickly converge to culture difference or misinformation based straw man. At this point they are driven majorly by racism.

An example of the former case is people tend to blame others for consuming meat they don't usually do, even if the animals were bred in a farm. Check the controversy around bamboo rats for a more specific example.

Example of misinformation: see the controversy around a video showing Chinese woman eating bat soup. Except it is not even filmed in China, it is in Palau and being a tourist thing. The behavior is still questionable and should not be encouraged, but the public reaction on this is almost entirely missing the point. Unfortunately video spreads across language burden, but words don't, it is almost impossible to debunk.

Americans of all ethnic groups also regularly eat bush meat also known as wild animals. However, we have outlawed it’s sale due to public heath concerns and possibly some lobbing from the farm industry.

So, calling this a cultural or racial issue is very much a straw man argument.

PS: If anything it’s the term bush meat that’s confusing the issue. Eating deer, rabbits, quails, and squirrels etc represents real risks to human heath. But, outdoor markets significantly increase these risks in several ways.

Just try to browse Twitter or Reddit (r/China_Flu) and check where most of such discussion goes before drawing conclusion. Sales of wildlife is illegal in China, I agree the execution is simply bad and unlikely to be improved due to incompetence but this is not where those discussions go.

*incompetence: if the law is enforced more strictly, turkey will be banned too because the regulation on what you can sell hasn't been updated for decades and not including much.

> China made risky decisions and that others are suffering for them

Western people do eat "exotic" meat during special occasions too.

In France, for Christmas and New Year's eve, a lot of people will eat boar or roe, which is pretty much not consumed at all during other times of the year. Hell, I have even heard that ostrich and kangaroo were trendy some years ago.

We are just more lucky that western "exotic" meat does not carry as much viruses as tropical / equatorial wild animals do.

Farm meat causes its share of trouble, from swine flu to antibiotic resistance. Maybe it's time to go pragmatically vegan, that is, ban eating anything close enough to share pathogens?

Seems unlikely for cultural reasons. Consuming obscure, rare, and endangered species is a significant component of traditional Chinese medicine (which is also widely practiced elsewhere in Asia) regardless of efficacy.

And? The west is currently in the process of dismantling a lot of it's culture to accommodate minorities so I don't see why china gets a free pass for cultural reasons.

I don’t see how the west is undertaking this process. The west has adopted and successfully implemented classical liberalism and set up flourishing liberal economies. In order to support these economies and the form of government they prop up, the west needs a constantly increasing growth and workers. Given that birth rates are falling and westerners (read white folks) are not moving in search of work as much as they used to domestically and internationally, the west needs to attract workers from outside the west.

These workers allow the economies to grow and in turn demand they be treated as first class citizens.

I am not sure how this is “dismantling culture”

Odds are against it in the short term, I'd agree. But cultures do change, albeit reluctantly. There are Chinese animal rights movements. And there's a huge growth in tertiary science education, which 'traditional Chinese medicine' (really a misnomer) falls foul of

The current evidence points toward that the wildlife market was not the source of the epidemic. It was introduced there via human contact and spread from there.

Some outside researchers have concluded that. There is still conflicting information.

https://www.popsci.com/story/health/wuhan-coronavirus-china-...

And really, the researchers are just saying it may not have originated in that specific market, but are still saying it's likely related to trade of live wild animals.

I was at a baby shower recently. Of the ~30 participants, over a dozen came down with a cold the following day. We later learned that, indeed, someone there was sick, knew they were sick, and came anyway. I didn't get the brunt of it, I've just had some minor throat irritation for the past ~2 weeks, thankfully, but a few folks were actually quite sick and had to take time off of work.

I'd love to avoid sick people. Can we make them wear signs saying that they're sick?

Make an app and track sick people to avoid /s

>Can we make them wear signs saying that they’re sick?

Not really, since people with viral infections (e.g. cold, flu, corona virus) are often contagious before showing symptoms.

If the only possibility for sick people is to either come, or stay home, then I think there will always be some of them that would prefer to come even though they might contaminate others.

In Asia, there is a culture of wearing face masks when you're sick. This serves as both a signal to others, and also helps reduce your infected droplet emission. Also it means you can still go to events and not have to stay home.

Enforcing this habit in the west is the best solution IMHO. Currently, it's too uncommon for people to wear face masks there. Once the critical mass of people decide to do so, then people won't feel weird about it and will all start to take that habit.

My (Asian-American) wife wears a mask at work because half of the people around her are sick. A few of the other Asian folks in her office do the same thing. No idea about the effectiveness of wearing a mask as protection, but if I had to go into an office for work I would do the same thing during flu season, weird or not.

> Enforcing this habit in the west is the best solution IMHO. Currently, it's too uncommon for people to wear face masks there.

Part of the problem is that people might get (subtly) shames/shunned for being out and about with a cold if they turn up wearing a mask. So they get pushed into the less obvious but more pernicious solution. (A measure that is managed ceases to be a useful measure)

Our local library has a great area for kids to play.

Only problem is about once a month we get sick after going there.

Usually its just a cold or something. But it's been the stomach flu at least once.

Would avoid it, but damn if its not a convenient place for the kids to play in the evenings.

I'm hoping the handshake dies off.

I would hope that ultimately, to the authors point #1 - collaboration - that it shows that we can all still come together to fight a common existential threat, or to accomplish a common goal.

Better equipped hospitals: more respirators, ecmo.

Or better yet distributed portable hospitals with icu beds at home with telemedicine.

Earlier Self driving cars moving people instead of mass infectious transit

>Better equipped hospitals: more respirators, ecmo.

And better supply chain tracking, I am looking for UV-C LED's and products containing them (desinfection equipment, like baby bottle desinfectors, desinfection boxes for CPAP masks and hospital equipment, desinfection lamps, ...)

Disturbingly even here in the west, going through sponsored advertisements on ebay local pages (named marktplaats.nl in the netherlands) I can easily find 20 euro desinfection lamps, supposedly 12W, having 65 LED's.

That is

1) surprisingly cheap: trying to find UV-C LED's through farnell, digikey etc that would easily cost 300 euros for the LED's alone assuming 250+ unit prices (5 euro's per LED).

2) surprisingly high radiant fluxes: 12W for 65 LED's gives ~ 200mW per "UV-C" LED, whereas most datasheets for real UV-C LED's would show just a handful of mW per UV-C LED.

If ANYONE can find me ~180mW UV-C LED's priced well below 0.30 Euros at bulk rates, please respond where, as I may be wrong and such incredulous products are perhaps not incredulous, but I would need proof.

Knowing that such prices and specs are totally realistic for UV-A (note the A), I can not help but think that somewhere someone decided it was a good idea to build UV-C type products by using UV-A LED's, both would cause fluorescence and phosphorescense on such materials and would be hard to distinguish as a user.

So now a large number of consumers, and possibly companies or even hospitals (!) might genuinely believe they are sterilizing surfaces because the products were incorrectly advertised as UV Germicidal Irradiation products.

All for what? A new garage door? A Tesla?

It truly is a dark world.

So I predict there will come a "UV-C Provenance" protocol where:

1) the genuine UV-C LED chip manufacturer keeps a cadastre of ownership of UV-C LED's

2) resellers or product manufacturers must contact the original chip manufacturer with the buyer's email to transfer ownership of a number of contained LED's when selling

3) original UV-C LED manufacturers must contact the buyer to ask for confirmation of receipt of the UV-C LED (or the product that contained such a number of LED's)

4) resellers or product manufacturers may not use the "UV-C provenance" logo if the product does not actually use UV-C LEDs, if they can not prove the provenance by referencing unsold LED's in their name with the chip manufacturer, or if they don't perform their roles above

5) governments perform regular randomized trials of buying "UV-C LED" branded products, and measure the wavelength to verify truthfulness, with hefty fines for violations

One might think that a product designer could order genuine UV-C LED's, not use them, order UV-A LED's to use in the product, sell as if they were UV-C, and then afterwards sell their genuine stock. However who would be interested in this (genuine) stock if this hypothetical buyer can not sell the genuine stock under the "UV-C provenance" logo without corresponding UV-C provenance tokens?

BTW I am not trying to scare people away from UV-C LED desinfection equipment, they are better in many respects to mercury lamps, for example they don't generate ozone. The problem is the UV-A LED's being foisted off as UV-C LED's

Also, if anyone reading this happens to be one of the people involved in substituting UV-A for UV-C LED's in a product or advertisement: you can run but you can't hide, they are going to find you, regardless of your nationality, religion, ... by this time it is an international crisis.

Lost me at vertical farming.

This new flavor of the yearly flu is not much different from other rather harmless flu's of this kind. There's just no flushot for it.

But it's not as dramatic or deadly as the Spanish flu, which killed the healthy ones, because of the overreacting immune system. The death rate is minor, like with other flu's, the expansion rate is normal, should be not much different to SARS or similar flu's.

>Interesting contrast: a large number of critical Ebola research was inaccessible during the outbreak, and even today downloading a single paper could cost $45: a steep price for a healthcare worker in Liberia.

The internet has led me to believe that the authors are allowed to distribute copies to anyone that requests one. If true, it seems those in Liberia just need that info rather than the money.

I would imagine that during an outbreak researchers don't have a lot of time or patience to respond to hundreds of requests for their work.

I suspect further that publishers would be less cool if they found you were sending out copies by the hundred, rather than a few times, but that's probably a question better answered by researchers.

This might be ill-informed, but if it goes out of control, wouldn't it reshape worldwide demographics? Young and old would die at different rates. That seems like the potential biggest impact.

Also, poor (people and countries) would suffer more.

Imagine the political change that would occur from half of the boomers being wiped out.

Wouldn't it be more like ten percent of boomers? But the effect might be different you'd expect as fear of disease pushed society to adopt more conservative, insular moods.

A virus that disproportionately "culls" the elderly is useful eliminating unsustainable health care costs, and in China's case, the impending demographic crisis (growing old before growing rich). Though ideally that shift happens after 2040. Right now, it would shift voting patterns to bias towards younger generations. Which incidentally goes against Chinese short-term interests since the elder cohorts in HK and Taiwan are the only ones with pro PRC / reunion sentiments. Quarantine also killed the 2020 5-year plan of doubling 2010 real GDP which required 6% growth. I'll leave others to extrapolate what dead boomers mean for western societies.

We might take the flu (10,000+ dead so far in the USA this season) and other diseases (measles 140,000 dead world wide) more seriously.

We might actually prepare properly for a Contagion (2011) movie style outbreak.

I would be more curious on why this would change Chinese people's consumption habits, and how long lasting such change would be after the outbreak.

Will be very interesting to see it through.

Will it be the pin that pops our economic boom into a recession?

It is likely to break the back of China’s debt crisis.

Markets don’t appear to think so. There’s a lot of money to be had for you if you think so.

Fingers crossed. These trades are the most exciting.

>Markets don’t appear to think so

It's hard to say whether that's really the case because of interventionist policies by the PBOC.

And the Fed...

That's certainly possible if for no other reason than grinding global supply chains to a halt. If Chinese are being forced to self-quarantine or avoid work, factories will not be producing goods. That could cause considerable consumer inflation, too.

Assuming current trends, it will likely be though of as the 21st century's Spanish flu, though that is assuming that the trends continue.

21st century Spanish Flu was the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic. Literally - Spanish Flu was also H1N1, though the strains were slightly different. The 2009 pandemic was estimated to have sickened about 1.5B people and killed about 150,000 for the relatively low death rate of about 0.01%.

We'll likely think of coronavirus the same way we think of the 2009 pandemic, i.e. it gets a Wikipedia article of its own, an occasional historical mention, but we forget about it when disease is not specifically the topic of conversation.

1.5B is a massive overestimate, where is that number from? 1 in 7 people in the entire world got sick?

WHO: 8,000 deaths, 630k laboratory confirmed cases, 43-89 million got sick.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemic_H1N1/09_virus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic

Spanish flu on the other hand killed 3-6% of the world's population!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu

It's estimated that 10-20% of the world population caught H1N1 swine flu. 1 in 7 is a rough midpoint of that:

http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2011/08/study-put...

The CDC estimated 60M cases in the U.S. alone, about 20% of the population:

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-h1n1-pandemi...

The WHO gave up tracking cases on July 23, 2009, 3 months after the epidemic started, when it hit several hundred thousand confirmed cases. At that point it just became a part of seasonal flu. It's circulating again this year: in recent weeks it's been the most common seasonal flu variant infecting people, and with 19M flu cases so far this year, there have almost certainly been more deaths from H1N1 than from nCoV.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic_timeline#Jul...

Overhyped, no change at all.

Curious if it will impact Corona sales.

You know what goes well with coronavirus? Lyme disease.

This makes me so happy.

I’m allowed to be happy.

That depends on how we define "our world".

For each individual, the most important parameter of "our world" is probably how (dis)satisfied we are.

Humans are not solitary animals, but a social species. We should not limit ourselves to solitary risk, but also consider social risk.

Consider listing your N closest loved ones (I will assume 20).

Consider a case fatality rate F (I will use China's average 2.1% which may correspond very well with any health care system that is pathologically overrun by sheer amount of cases, see [1]).

Consider I the fraction of the global population that has been uniformly infected.

What is the probability that not all of your N loved ones survive?

P( not all of my N loved ones survive corona outbreak)

= 1 - P( all of my N loved ones survive corona outbreak )

= 1 - P( a person was not infected or survives infection) ^ N

= 1 - (1 - P( a person is infected and dies from the infection ) ) ^ N

= 1 - (1 - P( a person is infected ) * P( a person dies given he was infected ) )

= 1 - (1 - (I * F) ) ^ N

For example:

Q: "What is the probability not all of my 20 loved ones survive, assuming 80% of the populace will experience infection, and a case fatality rate of 2.1%?"

A: P = 1 - (1 - 0.8 * 0.021) ^ 20 = 28.7% that one or more of these friends will die.

This is remarkably higher than the individual risk of 1.68% (0.8 * 2.1%) which only holds for egoists.

Let no one tell you what probability is acceptable for you, nor how many friends you should have, certainly let no government tell you to think only about yourself, by setting N = 1.

Another example:

Q: "Assume just 10% of the population was infected, with the same case fatality rate of 2.1% but this time you have 100 friends"

A: P = 1 - ( 1 - ( 0.1 * 0.021 ) ) ^ 100 = 18.96 %

And always remember, you may have many friends, but your best friend is statistics, like her or not. And this best friend can not die.

[1] According to [1a] China announced an average national fatality rate of 2.1% (their words not my calculation, us world citizens have no access to the WHO database of anonymized CRF CORE and DAILY forms).

Let us compare with the cases treated outside of China:

According to [1b] at their sum total of international (without Chinese regions) we have:

TOTAL 216 (infected) 1 (dead) 4 serious

Now 2.1% * 216 = 4.536 deaths expected following official China fatality rate.

Well, internationally we see 1 death and 4 individuals in serious condition. The out-of-china hospitals are not currently overrun. If they too at some point get overrun, I would expect those 4 to die as well, and our international numbers match up with China's 2.1%.

[1a] http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3048815/coron...

[1b] https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/02/the-latest-coronavirus...

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