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Comment by hanoz | Hacker News Reader

I'm concerned about this virus. Most people I talk to (in the UK) think it's being over-hyped but I can't help but think it's being under-played.

The virus seems, in my completely inexpert assessment, to occupy a sort of sweet spot in a terms of virulence, mortality and incubation period, for wreaking maximum damage.

Based on its current trajectory I can't see any reason to believe the whole of the world won't be affected on the same scale as Wuhan at some point this year.

Am I right to be concerned, and if so what should I be doing about it?

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The biggest concern is health care capacities being overwhelmed. He died in a place under severe resource constraints, basically a warzone. Fatality inside Wuhan is 5%, the rest of china 0.17% and even lower outside the country. Regardless of how correct the numbers are at this point - available ICU capacity is probably the largest factor for fatality rates for the disease at this point.

Just like the flu, this virus causes number of very serious cases that require intensive care but care capacities in most countries are barely able to cope with a bad flu season before bed appear on hallways - and this year had a particularly bad flu season still ongoing. There are only so many ventilators and artificial lungs available in hospitals and there is limited capacity in the world to deal with a new, highly infectious pathogen hitting a population without any preexisting immunities and people requiring weeks care to recover and become non infectious

China has, for better or worse, sacrificed Wuhan to buy the rest of the country and the world time to shore up capacities and enact procedures to stagger the load that will hit healthcare systems if the virus becomes broadly entrenched. I don't think there is any healthcare system on the planet that won't severely strain if hit by the sudden load of a new, highly infectious virus with long, invisible incubation period.

> China has, for better or worse, sacrificed Wuhan to buy the rest of the country and the world

The point is centralized authority is worse. In a democratic country he would have had warned quicker and his life sacrifice would have made more meaningful.

Well it's a good thing then we have a president who is held to account by the people's representatives and firmly rejects autocratic tendencies.

I agree with your assessment. If the virus makes it in scale to populous countries or regions with poor infrastructure; for example India, Africa or Southern America then those places are going to really struggle to cope.

> buy the rest of the country and the world time to shore up capacities

The vaccine and blood product manufacturer CSL had a Zika virus vaccine ready to roll within a few months after the outbreak, done of their own accord, it was an impressive achievement.

I think the biggest concern is it seems quite capable of killing people that tend to be in the generally healthy age range.

Diseases that do that often do so by causing (even if indirectly) the person's own immune system to overreact or otherwise go haywire.

I belive SARS had a similar impact.

My son had a situation where his immune system overreacted. We had folks from the local university on call for updates every few hours and etc. Doctors have very few things at their disposal that they can do when that happens and they get really nervous.

My son pulled through but it was an enlightening / scary moment to see doctors that concerned / with few options.

For those interested this reaction is called a cytokine storm.

It has been observed in SARS and the 1918 flu virus they resurrected in 2007.

31 year old doctor died from it. That raises some alarms for me when media is saying it is like the flu. Do a lot of 31 year old doctors die from the flu?

I seriously hope China can contain this.

> I seriously hope China can contain this.

I don't think there's any chance of that. I'm sure that within a month most well connected counties will have multiple cases with no apparent connection to China, and the realisation will have dawned that the cat is well and truly out of the bag.

My only hope is that the infection numbers in China are being massively under reported, i.e. because most carriers have very minor symptoms, and that therefore the mortality rate is not at bad as it currently seems.

But that's a bit of a long shot I fear.

The Lancet article [1] describes smoking as an increased risk factor. I wonder if his lungs were compromised in some way. Tragic.

1. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Smoking in general is not exactly helpful with pulmonary diseases.

In a case like this where the virus causes viral pneumonia, shortness of breath, etc, basically all the various diseases you're predisposed to if smoking, so that shortness of breath becomes a lot worse, and the little hairs in your airways have been molested by smoking, so there's not much debris/mucus transport happening out of the lungs. Viral pneumonia will most likely be joined by a bacterial pneumonia when you fail to ventilate your lungs properly.

People worry about Corona virus killing 2-5%, and yet smoking kills about 50%, with an individual risk of dying at about 300% of a non smoker.

To be fair, a very, very stressed out 31 year old doctor died from it. Stress does truly awful things to the immune system.

We're all going to be pretty stressed if this hits hard.

> what should I be doing about it?

There is currently no vaccine to prevent 2019-nCoV infection. The best way to prevent infection is to avoid being exposed to this virus. However, as a reminder, CDC always recommends everyday preventive actions to help prevent the spread of respiratory viruses, including:

  Wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds, especially after going to the bathroom; before eating; and after blowing your nose, coughing, or sneezing.
  If soap and water are not readily available, use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer with at least 60% alcohol. Always wash hands with soap and water if hands are visibly dirty.
  Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth with unwashed hands.
  Avoid close contact with people who are sick.
  Stay home when you are sick.
  Cover your cough or sneeze with a tissue, then throw the tissue in the trash.
  Clean and disinfect frequently touched objects and surfaces using a regular household cleaning spray or wipe.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/about/prevention-t...

Should I stop eating the free lunch buffet at work?

Yes. And generally avoiding big gatherings of people is not a bad idea.

I don't see it on that list, so I think it's ok.

I completely agree. I fail to see any plausible scenario where this doesn’t become a global pandemic in 2020. It seems like the best case is that it either becomes much less lethal as it spreads, and / or we slow it down enough to develop a vaccine. Failing that, I’m unclear on why any rational person thinks this is no big deal.

There’s no way China goes from 27k infected and it growing 15% per day to zero infections. It’s beyond containment at this point, they can’t stay on lockdown forever. And while it has barely spread beyond China, are we just going to wall off 1.4 billion people from the rest of humanity for the foreseeable future? Unlikely, probably impossible. So it seems like just a matter of time until it spreads globally, just like the flu, but much more deadly. And likely to overwhelm our medical infrastructure for the people who don’t die, many of which end up in critical condition.

I’m not panicking, but I’m concerned. Please, someone smart and well-informed, make the case for why this isn’t that big of a deal. (Hint: if you start by comparing it to total flu deaths instead of flu mortality rate, you’ve disqualified yourself).

I'm not the smart and well-informed someone you seek, but FWIW I suspect that the infection rate is vastly under-reported, simply because mild cases resolve without "official" notice. Deaths on the other hand are nearly always noticed, and although I'll totally buy the theory that the chinese government are under-reporting deaths, I think we'll ultimately find out that a far greater proportion of mild infections has gone unreported.

All that to say, I have hope that this bug is less dangerous than it seems right now.

> Most people I talk to (in the UK) think it's being over-hyped

Not to be too snarky, but most of people in UK though Brexit was a good move.

I am too a bit concerned about corona, but its hard to judge how dangerous it is as long as all info goes through Chinese filter (Chinese gov prevents any outside help so they can have as much control over the PR as they can).

The cases in other countries are still too small to get a definitive answer, if this is something scary or not. All we can do is wait and see.

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