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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I'm assuming this new virus has already gone global, with the scale of the outbreak in most major metropolitan areas a few weeks behind Wuhan. For practical purposes, I'm already lumping this new virus in my mind with the "seasonal flu," variants of which travel around the globe every year, requiring annual shots. It seems that most people who get infected have only mild symptoms.

Consider: Many major cities in China already have infected populations in the hundreds or thousands, and growing: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h... -- these are official, confirmed figures.

See also https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2820... for maximum-likelihood estimates of the size of the outbreak as of month-end.

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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.

The mortality rate is unknown. The best estimate is on the order of 1%, but it could be a factor of 10 either way.

The mortality rate will be different depending on the health system, since a significant number of people with this virus require either supplementary oxygen or more seriously ICU care.

If this were to become an epidemic in India for example, a higher mortality rate would be expected. In Africa it could be severely bad due to the large numbers of people with AIDS and the tendency of this virus to suppress the immune system.

Also Sub Saharan Africa only has 2 labs (South Africa and Senegal) capable of technically confirming cases. Which might be a reason there aren't any confirmed cases on the continent.

> Which might be a reason there aren't any confirmed cases on the continent.

There is not a single confirmed case of coronavirus in the entire Central and Eastern Europe, yet[1]. Most likely because there are almost no direct flights from Asia to this region, since it lacks major international metropolitan areas and global tourist attractions.

[1] https://ig.ft.com/autograph/graphics/coronavirus-map.svg

There are strong links between sub-saharan Africa and China as China has been heavily investing there and there are many Chinese people there. So we would definitely expect to see some cases there by now.

Hungary has a pretty big Chinese community mostly in Budapest, plus plenty of Chinese tourists, and I would assume there was a lot travel around the New Year.

If we are guessing about why (and whether) there is no Coronavirus in CE Europe, “no Chinese” is probably not a good guess.

but the amount of traveling chinese is still much much smaller than to larger western european countries.

Consider that Italy has had 3 cases to date: a chinese couple from Wuhan and an italian who was repatriated from Wuhan and is in quarantine.

There are 300k chinese nationals in Italy and about 20k in Hungary, and while I love Budapest the amount of chinese tourists is nothing compared to those in Rome.

Prague is usually full of Chinese tourists and to a lesser extent also Budapest.

From yesterday's article it seems unlikely to be at the 10% end. The doctor estimated deaths amongst those hospitalized at around 5% and for each person hospitalised there are probably a lot who just stay home so it's looking nearer the 1% (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22263022)

Unlikely to be at the 10% end in Wuhan. Mortality rates are properties of epidemics, there's no such thing as a mortality rate of a disease per se, because mortality depends on the prior health of the people infected, the sophistication of the health care system, and the load on the healthcare system.

If this coronavirus becomes an epidemic in a region with poor access to healthcare then we may indeed see mortality rates at or above 10% if people cannot get access to supplemental oxygen.

On the other hand if you get coronavirus now in a country with an advanced healthcare system and have access to an ICU then you have excellent chances to recover.

Since we do not know what countries will be affected in the future we cannot begin to guess what the eventual mortality rate will be.

Why do you say it suppresses the immune system? And how could it do that?

One of the possible symptoms of coronaviruses (this one, also SARS and MERS) is a decreased white cell count.

Source?

"The biggest assault the virus launches is on a patient's immune system. It causes a fall in the count of lymphocytes"

https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/reporters-notebo...

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

Thanks. It doesn’t say how that’s possible. I’d be more interested in the sars and mers case. I had never heard that before.

From what I've read, the virus can be a pretty nasty and long one even for those that recover from it. https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/reporters-notebo...

The current outbreak is expanding exponentially, with a frequency of approximately 20% severe infections requiring advanced respiratory supportive care. Mortality is at least 3%, and probably higher given the time lag between reported infections and deaths.

Analysis of Wuhan Coronavirus Deja Vu: Conclusions http://virological.org/uploads/short-url/z0cOhZzme3C6HtlcOcE...

Well this is the typical French reaction to a slightly hot day. For sure.

It's the appropriate reaction in this case however.

> I'm not afraid of the sanitary aspect of this virus. I don't think the mortality is extremely alarming per se.

Agree. It seems to be most like another global strand of flu.

Do doctors typically suit up in full biohazard gear when confronting flu?

> Do doctors typically suit up in full biohazard gear when confronting flu?

This was posted earlier on HN

Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU - https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/reporters-notebo...

And the flu kills 10s of thousands annually in the US, despite our widespread vaccination system.

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.

The WHO is in a somewhat difficult position if the numbers published by a big member state are questionable. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a degree of diplomacy involved in what the WHO says.

I do realise that this argument could easily be used as a carte-blanche for making completely baseless claims. But I think the best we can do is use many sources and remain somewhat sceptical of all of them - not necessarily in equal measure.

And some reasonable estimates are way different from the official Chinese numbers. For example:

>Professor Neil Ferguson said coronavirus could be infecting around 50,000 people a day in China.

re the official numbers:

>A steady rate of 3,000 diagnoses per day points to the upper limit of detection kits that are available to the health workers

He runs the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London - not some random crank https://www.ccn.com/professor-says-coronavirus-infecting-500...

I agree that WHO is the place to go. Here's the link for their daily reports: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

Also, one reason people use other than official reports is that some are more often updated or emphasize more interesting details. One that I found good is https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/02/the-latest-coronavirus... which is the one referenced by the wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Wuhan_coronavi...

The WHO and CDC are not allowed in China. The WHO’s data is the same as the CCP’s data. CCP historically provided false info to “save face”.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/health/cdc-coronavirus-ch...

The figures in that map at Johns Hopkins are official, confirmed figures. Did you actually look at the map?

Unless number increase by a factor 10 since February 7th official, confirmed cases in China are 31,211. Source: WHO situation report from Feb. 7th.

EDIT: Counter point to the infected population in the hundreds of thousands you made in the parent.

EDIT 2: Misread 100s or 1000s for hundreds of thousands. So yeah, official numbers.

GP said hundreds OR thousands

Damn, thanks for pointing it out! I thus stand corrected!

FWIW, I just re-read what I wrote, and noticed how easy it is to misread misread "hundreds or thousands" as "hundreds of thousands." Next time I will use "to" instead.

Don't worry, luckily someone else called me out on it! Funny what a single letter can change right?

Yes indeed. Thank you.

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.

The New Year holiday in China clearly accelerated the spread of the disease there, so I don’t see how you could extrapolate from the situation there to other countries.

well all for the better

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.

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