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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“mortality rate when you have access to a mechanical ventilator”
vs
“mortality rate when you have access to IV fluids and a floor to sit on”.
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.
Some videos, such as one showing a bunch of people passed out or passed away in an apartment, are from earlier unrelated incidents.
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.
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.
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