Coronavirus outbreak likely now ‘gathering steam’

First, note that Eric Feigl-Ding is a nutritional epidemiologist, not an infectious disease epidemiologist. Infectious diseases are weird for a lot of reasons, and require something of a different skillset.

For example, in a Tweet of his he has now deleted: "never seen an actual virality coefficient outside of Twitter in my entire career." about the estimate for R0 for this novel coronavirus.

Similar R0 estimates existed for SARS, and MERS. Measles, Rubella and a number of other diseases have vastly higher R0s.

He also messed up some things like conflating R0 with secondary attack rates, and was generally very sensationalistic. Basically, the things that boosted him to prominence in this epidemic built on fairly sloppy reasoning from someone outside the field.

He's calmed down now, but one might as well go to sources for people who are both good at science communication and actual outbreak scientists.

https://www.moh.gov.sg/2019-ncov-wuhan

Air conditioning is actually very conducive to colds and the like. When you go from outside to inside you're usually sweaty and the air conditioning tends to make you too cold until you dry out. I've caught way more sniffles in the tropics than in the freezing climates.

On a tangent, I'd love to see a graph of illnesses during summer before / after the widespread adoption of AC.

There was a paper that talked about 24 days but that was a single patient and the more likely scenario is that the person was wrong about the timing or got infected at a later time period.

> The median incubation period was 3.0 days (range, 0 to 24.0 days)

One of the first symptoms of this coronavirus is a dry cough. These people would not be considered asymptomatic in the technical sense because clearly they have a symptom.

However a cough is such a common thing that healthy people do all the time, in a practical sense a person who only has a cough is functionally asymptomatic and able to go about their daily lives. It is only when they develop a fever that they become sick enough to notice.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/11/uk-man-linked-...

https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2020/02/255501851d48-half...

> At least one of every two instances of human-to-human transmission of the new coronavirus is believed to occur while the first patient is not yet showing symptoms, according to an estimate by a group of Japanese university researchers.

> Based on its determination, the team, headed by Hokkaido University professor Hiroshi Nishiura, has called for preventive measures as well as reinforcing the medical care system against a potential sharp rise in coronavirus patients, rather than focusing exclusively on isolation as a way to contain the disease.

A worldwide pandemic would primarily exert its economic effect through supply shocks. The productive capacity of the economy genuinely shrinks. Stores can't open during a quarantine. Sick workers can't show up at the office.

A pandemic might have second-order demand shocks, particularly if panicking investors flee to quality. But there'd still be a genuine contraction in real and potential GDP, most of which would get absorbed by contracting corporate profits. Monetary stimulus can't route around those constraints.

My understanding is that masks offer only minor protection against getting it, but help a lot against spreading it. They don’t stop a virus but they catch the snots.

James Burke covered this in Connections² : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yLa_IrAj-o

Antimalarial compounds quinine, chloroquine and mefloquine affect the electrophysiological properties of Cys-loop receptors and have structural similarities to 5-HT3 receptor antagonists. So they might act at 5-HT3 receptors.

In 2006, the FDA banned sale of unapproved drugs containing quinine because of the risk of serious side effects or death.

I hear a lot of "it is just the flu." Maybe. The Spanish Flu was horrific, though. And when was the last time a city the size of london was quarantined for the flu?

I believe in data-driven fear. Care to go over the data?

I might need more measures if I was in the middle of Wuhan (or even just feeling ill, I guess) but frankly where I am it feels like any additional steps would be done out of fear, not reason.

I looked into doing a diy trial but some issues and the docs are on to it:

>A third drug, known as chloroquine, used to treat malaria, is being tested against coronavirus in China, the Times reported. https://nypost.com/2020/02/14/doctors-attempt-to-battle-coro... also 18 trials: http://www.chictr.org.cn/searchprojen.aspx?title=chloroquine...

So I guess I'll leave 'em to it and see how that works out.

It's not a well-defined phrase, I think this is the more likely interpretation.

(Even that article that you linked says, 'The definitions of both terms, "modern history" and "contemporary history", have changed over time, as more history has occurred, and so have their start dates.')

https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3874490

> In a notice issued by China's National Health Commission (NHC) on Feb. 6, it wrote that the classification of new Wuhan virus infections will be divided into four categories: "suspected cases," "clinically diagnosed cases," "confirmed cases," and "positive tests." Among these, "positive tests" refers to "asymptomatic infected patients" who test positive for the disease but have no symptoms.

> There is also a clear stipulation in the official document stating that "If the reported 'asymptomatic infected patient' has clinical manifestations, their status shall be revised to 'confirmed case' in a timely manner" (highlighted text in Tweet below). This indicates that even if a person tests positive for the disease but does not exhibit any symptoms, they will no longer be included in the daily infection reports.

(the notice cited: http://www.gov.cn/zhengce/zhengceku/2020-02/07/content_54758...)