Coronavirus: Five Brits in French ski chalet catch virus

What is that you find reassuring?

This is from the WHO director’s speech on February 4: “Second, we reiterate our call to all countries not to impose restrictions inconsistent with the International Health Regulations.

Such restrictions can have the effect of increasing fear and stigma, with little public health benefit.

So far, 22 countries have reported such restrictions to WHO.

Where such measures have been implemented, we urge that they are short in duration, proportionate to the public health risks, and are reconsidered regularly as the situation evolves.”

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who-idUSKBN1...

It looks a lot more like viral pneumonia than 2009 H1N1. Healthy younger adults largely don't get infected or don't suffer very severe symptoms. In one study in the lancet no patients under 40 were admitted to the ICU. The MuLBSTA score of a patient for predicting fatality from viral pneumonia (which considers comorbidities like diabetes, heart disease, smoking, etc) is predictive of fatal outcomes with nCoV-2019. Everyone on the internet doing the math on this thing loves to assume it will naturally be as broadly infectious as influenza and will ultimately infect 1/3 of the planet (with the usually quoted 2% fatality rate). More likely the number of infections will be lower than that by an order of magnitude at least (even though it will still be a global pandemic). If you look at the quarantined cruise ship only 63 out of 3700 people have been confirmed as cases. At 1.7% (and of course still growing) that is still very far off from 33%.

It is still troubling because if you assume the impact is like viral pneumonia then the impact of effectively doubling the number of cases of that worldwide will stress our health care systems, and it will increase mortality in vulnerable populations (very young and older people with comorbidities). I'm a bit worried about my mom and dad who are pushing 80 now, I'm not much worried about myself (48 with no other issues). Healthy 25 year olds probably won't catch this at all, and if they do they'll just get a bad cold.

Personally I'm not afraid of the sanitary aspect of this virus. I don't think the mortality is extremely alarming per se. What I'm afraid of is the emotional population reaction and the practical impact on daily services fueled by FUD and sensationalist media coverage. Schools closing unnecessarily forcing many working people to stay home to babysit their kids. Teachers/Drivers/Cashiers going on strike to avoid risks while there is a now globally confirmed shortage of face masks (which might or might not be very useful anyway but it will keep people working if they feel it helps). It's virtually impossible to find a useless face mask where I am in the EU (at a normal non 10x inflated price from opportunistic vendors) and even less possible to find a useful one (N95/FFP2/FFP3 rating). Interesting times for sure.

Why is it that everybody is using sources other than the official reports? I mean it can't be that difficult to just go to who.int, right?

Maybe the best HN could do, is to help the WHO to get their Corona Virus content right on top of the Google search results. Also something Google could do.

It may in time reach the level of background noise of the flu, but we're years away, decades away from that. The human body has had a few generations to build up baseline immunity to the flu, and we're at minimum a year or so away from a vaccine, likely 3 or 4 before it can reach the industrial scale and distribution infrastructure of the flu vaccine. Even that flu virus, well established, had some minor snafu a few years back and it took months to get back up to speed. In the meantime, the death rate seems more than an order of magnitude higher, and is especially lethal in the > 70 population.

So, if this becomes an insurmountable pandemic, you're right that it may eventually reach a flu-like equilibrium and treatability, but we're talking deaths in the millions until then, unless it can be brought under control before that happens.

The mortality rate could be an order of magnitude higher than the flu.

The flu in the US kills less than 0.1% of infected. 12,000 - 80,000 people die every year, just in the US. (where nearly half the population gets a flu vaccine every year and there is health infrastructure to treat the worst cases).

The new coronavirus' mortality rate is very unknown, but if it's anywhere close to the 2% number, and it spreads in a similar way to the flu, it could easily cause the deaths of millions of people.

tbh epidemiologist said non asian countries would lag 7-14 days after China, and so far the yellow curve is still flatter than I thought it'd be.

I have read an opinion that it is just due to the Singapore government working really hard at tracking, containing and reporting all the cases.

That might look like more cases compared to countries that either don't care or under-report.

Actually Japan has 89 cases so far and Singapore has 40. But of course it’s much smaller than Japan.

Edit: Okay the 89 number I saw includes 64 cases on a Japanese cruise ship.

> Singapore seems to be the worst affected country out of China. If you read the news the virus is spreading person to person there in an uncontrolled way.

I am in Singapore right now, and this is untrue.

The government is just reporting infection cases as they show up, and tracing the patients' contacts to keep them under quarantine.

I suspect that some other countries in the region might have higher actual coronavirus infection numbers, but are reporting the cases as influenza or pneumonia.

Of course.

If you say: - The only cases that we will confirm have a positive trst

Then if you only test 3000 today and 4000 tomorrow that would define the curve not the real spread.

The fit is too good, and it has predicted subsequent stats with implausible accuracy so far.

Something like a hospital opening, and suddenly having a pile of patients to test, should result in a small spike in that graph. A quarantine being enacted in a city should cause a change in angle of the curve.

And how exactly did you count the dead in these videos? And how did you match the against the official reports? And for which time period?

It's no use, people refuse to see the truth for what it is, just as Shenzen [1] and Guangzhou have been put on partial lock-down.

Later edit: Add Tianjin and Chengdu to the list [2], which means that out of the 7 biggest Chinese cities only the first 3 are not yet technically on any form of lockdown (Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing).

Later later edit: Photos + video of people escaping the Shenzen lockdown just before coming into effect yesterday, February 7th [3]

[1] https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/20/2/8/n11853273.htm (Google Translate will help)

[2] https://news.ltn.com.tw/news/world/breakingnews/3061526

[3] https://twitter.com/IndoPac_Info/status/1226130936292499457 and https://twitter.com/freddie1999/status/1225754832751013888

Turns out that this is true, but you need four COMPLEX numbers. Not that that would have been something that von Neumann would have scoffed at. Source: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/06/21/how-to-fit-an-elep...

Mocking an idea by comparing it to something you feel has a low reputation is a quick way to discredit an idea. Why would you want to discredit the idea? Do you truly believe in what you are saying (only believe what the official release says, don't dig deeper because believing otherwise is something to be made fun of) At what point do you decide to start thinking for yourself and not accept what is being feed to you directly?

This site gives you upto date stats. https://wuflu.live

Question:

What do you make of the daily infection rate from China? What does your personal judgement tell you?

The top post from four days ago predict the numbers the Chinese will announce.

    08/02/2020 34506 cases 721 fatalities
    09/02/2020 38675 cases 808 fatalities
    10/02/2020 43084 cases 900 fatalities
    11/02/2020 47733 cases 997 fatalities

The 8/2 figures compare with 34 598 and 723 announced on the WHO site or almost spot on. You can check how well they've done with subsequent days here https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

Given the scenes of chaos on the ground the numbers do seem a little over smooth. You can also pretty much get the fatalities number by dividing the cases by 47.9.

I would go to the doctors office and get myself checked, if I were in your situation. Let’s hope and pray that you test negative and if not you can take immediate action.

Please, self-isolate and call 111 for advice.

Chances are you're fine and will be tested clear, but in the case you are not it would be a disaster to not receive proper treatments / come in to contact with loved ones / come in to contact with the general public.

> (--edit-- actually it looks like one Brit, I had thought the new cases were related to a separate traveller, but it looks like it was the same guy)

Yes, he was believed to have attended an international business meeting by Servomex: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-7977725/Britains-...

"that is unlikely to seriously harm healthy people and is predominantly a threat to the very young and the elderly"

I feel like we've seen at best mixed information about that. I'm not sure that is the case.

I’m not for stopping the world, but Coronavirus gets brushed off as no big deal a lot online. I feel like the big issue will be Coronavirus bogarting medical resources. Pneumonia in a healthy individual is treatable given proper treatment and resources, but if everyone has pneumonia, then we have a resource problem.

Additionally, a lot of people care for the very young and the very old, and they’re not comforted with the sentiment, “well, if you’re healthy you’ll live,”

> mortality seems to be about three percent--and is predominantly a threat to the very young and the elderly.

The Chinese figures can’t be trusted as the CCP is trying to save face.

Li wenliang died from the virus and was a healthy 33yo.

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

Truly, how about instead of headlines with body counts they say what the mortality rate is compared to this year's common flu.

Honestly all these distractions cut into my Left 4 Dead play time.

From here[0] it seems like there is an additional mechanism by which people can be at risk:

>Peng: Based on my observations, a third of patients exhibited inflammation in their whole body. It was not necessarily limited to young adults. The mechanism of a cytokine storm is about whole-body inflammation, which leads to a failure of multiple organs and quickly evolves into the terminal stage. In some fast-progressing cases, it took two to three days to progress from whole-body inflammation to the life-threatening stage.

It is at least noteworthy that Dr Li Wenliang died in his late 30s...

Also the mortality rate seems to be very hard to report on due to compounding issues:

1. Chinese death certificates not recording compounding illnesses as cause of death - making attribution hard.

2. There is a two-three week lag on infected to death but a ~4 day lag on infected detection thus a naive mortality calculation of:

    mortality = deaths / infected

Is not going to cut it and is misleading at best.

3. There is a mixture of factors making reporting accurately hard: Wuhan health services are at max capacity and everything from detection to care is strained. There is also some mixture of political factors which may mean that numbers coming out of China could be tailored towards some kind of narrative.

I agreed there's a lot of FUD which is probably unnecessary, especially outside of Asia. I think within Asia it is a bit more founded given that population density is so high (just think about things like aircon usage in places like Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand) AND we've just come out of Chinese New Year which is the largest annual human migration event.

My current read on the situation is that everyone else's fear and overreaction will keep me safe at the very least. I also imagine that there will be a degree of y2k type ignorance revolving around the issue once the dust settles: people on the ground who worked on it will say it was a big fucking deal and crisis was averted through a lot of hard work and coordination. People who were unaffected by it will think it was all a bunch of BS and there was nothing to ever have worried about.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22263022

A mortality rate of 3% is 30-100x that of the common flu. It does not “map rather closely”, and comparing total deaths from an endemic disease like the flu to a brand new one that hasn’t spread globally yet is highly intellectually dishonest, and I think you know that.

In addition to mortality rate, a highly contagious illness that puts 10-20% of infected in the ICU will quickly overwhelm even the most developed healthcare systems.

“Panic” is never really warranted, but there’s a reason China put their entire economy on lockdown. They have the data that you don’t, and they seem pretty concerned.

Whether we should shut down airports is a discussion worth having, but whether this is a serious global threat has already been well established. Unclear on why you seem determined to ignore the experts, none of whom seem to think this is no big deal.