MWC 2020 canceled over coronavirus health concerns
theverge.com
theverge.com
When MWC is ocurring in Barcelona, public transport (subway) goes on strike (because of the maximum impact). But usually this only fucks over non MWC attending people, because tickets are so expensive that only people which can use a taxi anyway will go, greatly diminishing the impact of the strike for attendants while making inhabitants lives miserable for that time period.
Also, Barcelona already has a very severe problem of houses being rented out to tourists with very high markups, producing a gentrification of the city (along with other factors, not only the tourism is responsible for this). Events like MWC do not help this situation.
BCN is already overloaded with tourism, events like MWC only make it worse for those of us that live there.
I'm completely aware that this is not the responsibility of MWC organization or tourists, this is a regulation problem. But since regulation is stacked against us, I can only get happier that this year we won't have to suffer all the inconvenience of the event while reaping almost none of the benefit.
> When MWC is ocurring in Barcelona, public transport (subway) goes on strike (because of the maximum impact).
So won't they just choose any other date with the next highest impact for their strike now? Why is that better?
> BCN is already overloaded with tourism, events like MWC only make it worse for those of us that live there.
100.000 visitors for 4 days, that must be less than 1% of Barcelona's hotel nights/year. It's also happening during off-season, so shouldn't lead to more housing capacity being taken away from the locals.
I get when people complain about the Olympics in their city or other costly events with unclear rewards, but this seems pretty harmless?
1% of visits to Barcelona is 50k[1]. So 100k more is a 3 fold increase.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcelona#Tourism 5.5M in 2011, it must be much more now.
It's about $500m Euros of revenue, and I saw an estimate of something like 15k part-time jobs due to MWC. No small thing.
But most people will look at the misery of temporary overcrowding, look at their bank account and think “no, I don’t want this” without considering second order effects.
I mean, yeah, some guys benefit from having the MWC for sure but I'm not sure most residents do - I'm not letting out flats or running venues etc. I'm trying to get to work on time and pay my rent.
It reminds me of the similar arguments people make about the big cruise ships that come here - I mean sure, it massively benefits tourist attractions and restaurants etc. but most citizens don't see any of that money, they just get lungfuls of air pollution.
This isn't necessarily true though.
Honestly, the MWC doesn't bother me that much - yeah the metro always goes on strike but that's a problem with the metro unions and the Ayuntamiento not the MWC in my opinion.
But take the case of the cruise ships which do irritate me - every citizen gets to suffer worse air quality so a few can enrich themselves on the tourist money.
I understand that in theory that money might 'trickle down' to the citizenry at large, but it is far from obvious that this actually occurs sufficiently to compensate the downsides.
If the money's not being spent in the right place, that's a local political issue that can't solved by anyone except the locals (e.g. those who can vote).
It is less trendy to complain about the relatively low unemployment and well-maintained civic infrastructure; both of which are boosted by a strong international business presence which employs a lot of people and brings a lot of wealth to the city.
Losing that international presence risks turning the city back to the dirty, poor, backwater it was in the 80s. If living with a couple of major international events a year is the alternative, I know which one I’d choose.
I think the cancellation of the MWC is a disaster for the city, not just in terms of short term economic loss, but in terms of longer term strategy, as the MWC is already muttering about following other events to Madrid or elsewhere.
I guess that MWC is not the problem per se. And it is part of the reason of the exploding international presence at least in the IT sector. But it is part of the problem of the worsening in the quality of life for many people.
My argument is that much of the wealth generated by tourism doesn't necessarily benefit citizens of Barcelona. I'm sure a lot of people are getting a lot of benefits, but I'm not sure it is the people that need it the most.
I know this is politics but other places would welcome tourism and professional conferences with open arms.
When I see a group of tourists cueing in front of something in Copenhagen - sure - I might get annoyed but those people are bringing in money. Not to me personally. But that tourist money gets taxed or spent again. And ultimately it ends up being spent on a nicer park or causes some new cool restaurant to be viable, all benifical to me.
Eventhough we have extreme political parties here; noone is bad-mouthing tourism. Everyone knows we live of trade and we need to be an open and welcoming place; and it is out own problem to make sure our public transport can handle its peak traffic.
Please understand, I'm not complaining about tourists (although they come with their own problems, like a 24/7 unwelcome festive ambient in residential neighborhoods...), I'm complaining on how Barcelona is not able to absorb that massive amount of tourism and how it makes lives miserable for local residents, that are pushed out of the city because it is far more beneficial to land-owners to rent to tourists, and how restaurants/shops push prices up too, and how the center of the city is no longer targeted towards locals. And much of the city center's businesses are no longer locally-owned and bring outside supply chains and may employ non local people, so it is not even that beneficial to the community as a whole.
Yes, jobs are created, but tourism-related jobs are not famous for their ability for employees to be able to live in the city itself.
I know this is a local politics problems, one of electing people that will do the right thing, but it's not that easy unfortunately, since voting in spain is very polarized on ideological and tribal feelings. And meanwhile, locals will just suffer the negative aspect of all this while benefiting little.
Winter was the best time there
This is what politics is all about.
Crazy.
https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/f4a5kp/how_...
I personally believe we have gotten to the brink of chaos. Foxconn has major issues getting employees back to work, and Apple has shut down stores in China, but AAPL stock is up. AMD is taking market share from Intel, but INTC rallied almost 10% on earnings. Iran launched missiles at a couple of bases housing Americans, and the market rallied the next day. Boeing stock is trading more than double where it was when the 737 Max 8 took its maiden flight. Everyone mentions in passing that equity values are inflated but nobody seems to give a damn.
Maybe people have gotten burned so many times fading the rally during the past three years that they've just given up on trying to call the top.
My money says it's all going to come crashing down eventually. Markets can remain irrational longer than impatient traders can remain solvent, but they have a way of normalizing sooner or later.
What does happen, however, is that many modern buyback deals include a bid that gets more aggressive as the stock trades down. So in a selloff, the buyback actually supports the stock more than in a rally. This reduces downside volatility and prevents panic.
The debt problem is a huge issue, but with interest rates as low as they are, it's not entirely crazy to say "we think we will return more in capital gains from buying our own stock than we will be charged in interest for the loan to do so."
But here is some interesting real-time traffic congestion data plotted with 2019 averages for cities. Gives a sense of how many people are going back to work.
Scroll down and click "Last 7 days"
Notice SF & London are trending with 2019 averages:
SF: https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/san-francisco-tra...
London: https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/london-traffic
Then compare:
Wuhan: https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/wuhan-traffic
Shanghai: https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/shanghai-traffic
Beijing: https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/beijing-traffic
Shenzen: https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/shenzhen-traffic
Hong Kong: https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/hong-kong-traffic
(also how do you avoid a crash when interest rates stop being negative)
I also implemented a higher risk strategy when I rebalanced my portfolio at beginning of year: hedging a few healthcare stocks with predictions of around 6% returns, but could see a higher payoff if covid-19 hysteria sets in.
Skeptical of crypto performance during a recession, so rebalanced to 3%
Nobody knows how this will end, or when. Could be months, could be decades.
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5386693ce4b05d183bf2d...
Fundamentals try to explain and predict valuations; they don't dictate them. Only supply and demand, within the constraints of the market, can control valuations. And to be pedantic, price discovery is faster and tighter today than ever before, and that's part of the reason we have so many lively derivatives markets.
The problem, as you aptly point out, is that this price does not fit any model that is blind to the rates component of equity demand. The word "untethered" is totally appropriate for what's happening in the market; there's a disconnect between price action and corporate earnings growth because there's demand for equities in general when everything else yields almost nothing.
That has a certain ring of plausibility, though I'm skeptical of all explanations of market behavior.
We hope it's only a short term problem. It's far to early to say if this outbreak will be contained somehow, if it will continue into the summer, or if it will go away for the summer and come back in the winter again like the flu.
North Korea, Mongolia, Nepal, Northern Thailand, North Vietnam, North India, Eastern Russia, will keep this infection going until the next major outbreak next winter.
[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/02/12/corona...
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/02/china-virus-funeral-o...
If this situation gets out of control, it could trigger a global recession. Nobody is buying much from Wuhan for the foreseeable future. Imagine what would happen if it spreads across Asia.
The Fed ought to be smoothly unloading some of its balance sheet or otherwise increasing rates, but Mr. Trump doesn't seem too happy about that prospect. Most of the Americans who support him seem to think the Dow Jones is a report card for the economy. Mr. Trump has publicly badgered Powell regarding rate hikes in the recent past.
It definitely feels like people believe the market is going to get even more euphoric, in which case one is tempted to be long in order to ride the bubble all the way up.
I'm wondering what's next to be cancelled.
This video is basically an ad for DHL but goes through some of the logistics aroun F1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH6Loko0BOA
I was planning on visiting Japan this summer. Now I'm somewhat hesitant to do any travel.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/more-sports/canceling-tokyo...
Why?
People will die because it was cancelled. The worlds economy is starting to fail.
But it's not up to the MWC 2020 organisers to help prop up the world and save lives.
Why in particular was it a correct decision here?
China, and specifically Hubei Province and its capital Wuhan, suffer an epidemic that they are trying to control with titanic efforts. 99% of cases of coronavirus (COVID-19) infection, today more than 40,000 with a thousand deaths, have been registered in China. Of them, almost 70% in Hubei. Only 1% of cases have been registered outside China, in 24 countries (including Spain), with transmission chains (secondary cases from a first imported case) very short so far.
To put things in perspective, although perhaps inaccurate, the number of cases of COVID-19 infection in China is less than 3 cases / 100,000 inhabitants.
The flu, in Catalonia, this week has reached figures of 360 cases / 100,000 inhabitants: more than 120 times higher than the incidence of COVID-19 infection in China.[1]
Our Health Alerts and Emergencies system works, works as a team and the protocols established in the EU apply: detect the case, isolate it, treat it and follow all possible contacts. In this way, the transmission chain can likely be properly controlled.
There are many things we do not know for sure about this disease, but most cases (80%) are mild. Serious cases and mortality (2%) will be adjusted downwards safely in the coming weeks, as the detection of mild cases increases. There is WHO data that indicate that control measures are slowing the epidemic in Hubei and better controlling the situation in the rest of China.
[1]: http://canalsalut.gencat.cat/web/.content/_Professionals/Vig...
Suicide kills 47000 a year which makes you wonder why we aren't spending more effort on mental health given it's a bigger cause of death.
Edit: The point is, it's all about money. There's no rational reason to spend so much on terrorism and so little on mental health, yet we do.
A spike of emulation suicides after a widely publicized suicide is known as the Werther effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide
Unbelievably you are correct. You can "catch it". Amazing.
It was an article regarding the latter which made the general case (and I'll see if I can't turn it up). Effectively: if you have a phenomenon which includes transmission from carrier to susceptible populations, then you're dealing with a case of epidemic.
This generalises in some interesting (and quite probably controversial) ways. Richard Dawkins's notion of the meme -- a unit of transmissible cultural information -- falls squarely within the model, and suggests a further generalisation:
Epidemics exist where there is an infectious agent (biological, material, energetic, informational) originating from some source or reservoir which causes a negative functional or behavioural change in a susceptible population spreading along vectors of transmission. They further have characteristics of exposure-response, latency, transmissivity (e.g., source => individual, sometimes individual => individual), susceptibility or resistance, symptomatic / asymptomatic periods, morbidity and mortality rates, etc.
This means we can look at agents including the familiar bacteria, aemoebae, parasites, and viruses, but also more exotic notions: prions, chemical, physical, and radiological triggers (say, heavy metals, asbestos / PM2.5 matter, radon or plutonium), and cultural or informational ones: cults, religions, mythologies, ideologies, psychological disorders, stress, and the like.
What the model offers are notions of potential containment. I've done some research to see if there's an underlying theory or model of public health or epidemiology (and would expect it to closely correspond to the above). What I've found looking through introductory texts is that there largely is not, but instead the focus is on teaching statistical monitoring methods used within the field. I'm not sure if I'm looking in the wrong places, or if there simply is no such generalised model.
But again: if you can identify specific agents (biological, material, informational, energetic), sources, vectors, susceptibility factors, and the like, then it's possible to apply fairly standard epidemiological notions to prevention.
Note that the direct medical intervention of cure is not on that list -- it's an expensive and uncertain intervention, and one that comes with very high costs. Far better to practice avoidance, increase resistance, and reduce transmission, as well as monitor aggressively for outbreaks. All of which are what we're seeing in the case of 2019-nCoV.
In the case of mental health, the study of suicide itself is foundational to sociology (Emil Durkheim's book of the same title, Suicide: https://archive.org/details/DurkheimEmileSuicideAStudyInSoci...), for numerous reasons. It turns out that rates are very consistent across time, with a few notable exceptions. There's considerable variance across place, whether triggered by culture or natural environment isn't clear. As David Simon, author of The Wire notes, dead bodies are hard to hide (see his excellent "The Audacity of Despair", ignore the recording and speaking quality issues: https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw). And suicide itself is an extreme act. So by looking at trends with time, you're finding a exceptionally strong signal of underlying social dysfunctions.
Looking at the epidemiological model, isolating yourself might reduce some dynamics of infection (vectors of transmission), but would quite likely increase others (susceptibility through social isolation). The model's underlying premise is that you simply cannot assess these factors in isolation, which would point out the flaw in your reasoning.
https://www.nationalelfservice.net/mental-health/suicide/sui...
This is a contagion. Read about the Spanish Flu. This looks to be both more contagious, and more deadly in most of the published studies. We hope they are biased and overly pessimistic, but whataboutism isn't helpful here.
Your argument is like if the rug in your living room is on fire, and you say "why worry about that rug--we should really invest in fixing that roof leak." I agree roof leaks are also bad.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...
We don't need a perpetual cycle of coronavirus in addition to the perpetual cycle of the flu that we already have, in addition to suicide and every other cause of death. The world's health organizations are trying desperately to curtail it before it becomes a norm.
Which is why saying "Oh, why cancel this it's no biggie" is just so misled.
If the world was in a situation where we could seriously contain and eliminate the flu, we would surely take every possible measure to do so.
Given r0, the Covid-2019 would infect 60,000,000 and kill 1,000,000 if unchecked in the US.
No idea whether the conference should be cancelled, but it's not an irrational idea. There could be a large number of silent cases outside of China already.
Can any of them come infected by the COVD-19?
The probability is very low. Almost all of the participants will come from areas where the presence of the COVD-19 is nil or extremely low.
By comparison, a number of passengers equivalent to three times the MWC go through the airports of Atlanta or Los Angeles, two times pass through the airports of London, Paris or Amsterdam each day, and 1.5 times through Madrid and Barcelona each day. And none of them closed so far.
The basic hygiene measures (handwashing, not sneezing or coughing to the open) and common sense are more solid and effective.
If we follow the same line of thinking (we shouldn't), we would have to close all the airports tomorrow.
edit: typo
I don't think this is known or knowable at the moment. Hence the worry.
You are right that airports are probably a greater risk. Perhaps they should be closed. On the other hand, that would be far more disruptive.
As for basic hygiene, yes, we all should. At the same time, we all know that a significant fraction of the population can't or won't do this.
Edit: Here's the proper method: https://www.who.int/gpsc/clean_hands_protection/en/
A significant caveat is that the sink/restroom must allow proper handwashing. Many lack paper towels, for example. If you have to touch the faucet handle or the door after you start washing (which takes two minutes), the method has not been followed. It's harder than it looks.
[1]: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...
It only takes one person leaving without washing their hands for the irony to be apparent.
Holding MWC without Huawei, ZTE, BBK, Xiaomi and co. is pretty much meaningless
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Wuhan_coronavi...
Wuhan is nearing the top of its S-curve, while other cities are still near the start. As such it would make sense for the number of cases to slow down even if it isn't actually being stopped.
The Wikipedia page says:
"On 6 February, the Chinese National Health Commission started to change how cases were reported – asymptomatic carriers, who tested positive for the virus but did not show clinical symptoms, would no longer be included in the number of confirmed cases. This had the effect of reducing the total number of cases reported, but also meant that potentially contagious individuals were ignored in reports."
It is surprising to me that anyone would simply accept them as fact.
Infected case growth has slowed down primarily because of the quarantine of Hubei province. The virus has up to a two week incubation period, and today two weeks later we're able to result of this quarantine. Case growth in Hubei has slowed down.
The issue now is that every major city in China has local infection clusters, and these infection clusters are growing exponentially.
https://i.imgur.com/lQcyqAX.jpg
Even if the net case growth rate is decreasing, the situation is less under control than ever before. Look at China's actions; they're past containment methods and now acting on mitigation.
Many years ago, I remember my company canceling some sales event because of, I think, Gulf War I because they didn't want to tell European employees in particular to travel to the US often on American carriers.
Literally laughed out loud. Take an upvote!
The same companies that rejected to go to Barcelona are attenting ISE in Amsterdam. That makes me thing they junt needed a reason to pull out of Barcelona.
From your own source:
"The statistical methods used by the Chinese CDC should be revised, as deaths from pneumonia caused by the flu, for example, are not counted, the observer said."
If you ignore death by pneumonia, the deaths for coronavirus are very low too.
"An analysis led by Chinese scientists published in The Lancet Public Health in September 2019 found that there were 84,200 to 92,000 flu-related deaths in China each year, accounting for 8.2 percent of all deaths from respiratory diseases."
Oops.
That's literally the point. If the U.S. has 330M people and 30k flu deaths per year, then all else being equal one would expect that what China reports as 144 deaths is really 120,000. Which means that if Corona virus has already killed 7.8 times as many people who have died of the flu (per China's reporting), one would expect that it's really killed 936,000.
Obviously that's very simplistic, but that's basically why people are worried -- no one knows what the real numbers out of China are, so that kind of back-of-the-napkin math is about the best we can do right now.
What is the death rate for the 360 person flu group?
We need to stop comparing this to the flu. The flu is an established widespread virus with a very low mortality rate. This is a new, so far still spreading, virus with what appears to be a high mortality rate.
If you had to choose between being infected with the flu or COVID19 you’d chose the flu because you’re about 20 times more likely to die from COVID19 based on the data available at the moment.
If COVID19 has spread globally and becomes established then it will be similar in terms of deaths to the Spanish Flu. Nobody wants that and it is perfectly reasonable for people to be concerned about wanting to prevent that from happening.
If this does spread into a pandemic then you will be able to rightly come back in 24 months and compare the annual total deaths from COVID19 to the seasonal flu. Until then it’s an entirely incorrect comparison.
The key metric that determines whether COVID-19 can establish and generate a sustained outbreak is it's ability to reproduce, "R", which represents the average number of individuals to which each transmitter transmits the virus.
- If "R" is greater than 1, the transmission may become sustained; - If “R” is less than 1, then the transmission will simply dissipate.
In the current outbreak, it represents an R of 2.2 [1], meaning that on average each patient has been spreading infection to 2.2 other people.
Only a little bit more than half of the infections should be avoided so that R falls below 1. Preventive isolation and the measures established by the protocols should be sufficient.
Besides, there is little evidence to suggest the presymptomatic transmission of COVID-19
[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.10.20021675v...
[1]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.07.20021154v...
Can you justify this? I want to be convinced, because at the moment I think it's very optimistic. (There are different estimates for seasonal flu mortality, but it seems to be around 0.1%, so I'm assuming that's roughly the number you mean.)
So it looks like 2% is kind of the upper bound but that the actual rate will be lower.
You have to divide dead over dead+recovered, and outside of China those numbers are still too small to get a reliable number.
In China it is 2% outside Wuhan, but inside Wuhan it is over 4% since the medical system has broken down.
One more pandemic like the flu to contend with is also not a good idea.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/02/07/8036804...
Los Alamos study today suggests R0 is between 4.7 and 6.6:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.07.20021154v...
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.07.20021154v...
>The novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) is a recently emerged human pathogen that has spread widely since January 2020. Initially, the basic reproductive number, R0, was estimated to be 2.2 to 2.7. Here we provide a new estimate of this quantity. We collected extensive individual case reports and estimated key epidemiology parameters, including the incubation period. Integrating these estimates and high-resolution real-time human travel and infection data with mathematical models, we estimated that the number of infected individuals during early epidemic double every 2.4 days, and the R0 value is likely to be between 4.7 and 6.6. We further show that quarantine and contact tracing of symptomatic individuals alone may not be effective and early, strong control measures are needed to stop transmission of the virus.
An upper end of 6.6 changes everything.
Once the big exhibitors pull out you then see attendees doing likewise as meetings they were travelling for get cancelled, and finally smaller exhibitors deciding it’s not worth the effort.
There are factors that could move that number in both directions.
Yes, presumably there are many mild cases that haven't been counted. But unfortunately coronavirus deaths are probably also undercounted -- for example, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/as-families-tell-of-pne...
This point I'm not sure about, because it seems bizarre that everyone would make such an obvious mistake, but: as far as I can tell, the death rate is simply calculated as [current total of recorded deaths] / [current total of recorded cases]. But when the fatal cases take quite a long time to kill (from what I've read, it tends to take a week or so from the onset of symptoms for them to become severe, and up to another two weeks for death to occur -- see https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/reporters-notebo...) and the total number of cases is rising dramatically, surely that skews the figure toward a significant underestimate?
In the cases of NCV, there is already significant evidence of under reporting of fatalities by Chinese authorities in Wuhan (some sources suggest that up to 90% of NCV deaths in China may be unreported).
And as the cruise ship stuck outside of Japan demonstrates, the virus may be far more virulent (i.e., contagious) than previously thought.
China just changed how it classifies NCV cases to reduce the number of cases by eliminating those who are infected but not symptomatic meaning the numbers are even less reliable than they were before.
The problem with this is that a number of the superspreaders, like the British fellow that infected 11 other people, and the passenger that infected the cruise ship quarantined in Japan, were not symptomatic when they were infecting others.
Those might still use it in conversation amongst each other, sure, but any actual analysis will be based on far more data than a single number. Fundamentally this is the press trying to boil things down to a double soundbite. As usual.
The case fatality ratio is literally defined as deaths over cases, and that's not useless, but it isn't something you should spend much time thinking about either. Reality is always more complex than any single number. Probably you want to know something like "What are the odds of dying if I'm infected" -- that's a different parameter entirely.
2% is almost certainly an underestimate, in this case. I read an article the other day which did statistical analysis on various groups of cases; it came up with a CFR of 18% for Wuhan (95%, 11% to 80-something), and while the expectation for cases in Singapore is still a little over 2%, that's because the medical system in Singapore isn't overwhelmed.
Reporting that would be an equally bad idea, though. The case fatality ratio only counts infections that are severe enough for the patient to go to hospital and become a case, and we know a large fraction of infections don't. Probably over 90%. Which would push that back down to 2%.
Not that a death rate of 2% of all infected is anything short of apocalyptic, but that's why they're trying so hard to quarantine it.
It seems completely unsurprising to me that we aren't seeing more cases in other countries so far - almost every country with the exception of Singapore are only testing people who have been in Hubei (or China, if symptoms are serious). Meanwhile Singapore, which actually has been testing more people, has been finding more and more locally transmitted cases, despite huge efforts tracking down and isolating contacts of previous cases.
>Serious cases and mortality (2%) will be adjusted downwards safely in the coming weeks, as the detection of mild cases increases.
Or it could adjust upward, as it seems to often take 3+ weeks to kill. In Singapore 8/50 cases are in critical condition in the ICU (And Singapore has detected many mild cases, even asymptomatic ones). For the flu in the U.S. it seems about 0.1% of cases end up in the ICU, so that's some compelling evidence that this is 10-100x as dangerous as the flu. And what happens to the fatality rate when we run out of ICU beds, as already happens during particularly bad flu seasons?
I'm not saying this will be globally devastating, but I think the chance is high enough that I'm disappointed more extreme actions aren't being taken worldwide.
edit: I also assume the case numbers in China outside of Hubei have been looking better recently because they also can no longer rely on the fact that a sick person has recently been to Hubei to know who to test.
If we fail to stop the spread of the virus now, it may become a fact of life with an even higher annual death rate than the flu. We've already got plenty of infectious diseases and based on the data so far, it's worth extreme measures trying to stop it.
Thank you smart people in the WHO and global health community.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/coronavirus-...
China desperately wants to save face, at the cost of lives. They rejected help from the U.S. CDC as to not appear weak. They already thought they had it under control, before locking down over 50 million people and damaging their economy.
People at risk for the flu can get a flu shot. This disease kills the healthy and average aged. And we all have family members at increased risk.
Even a 2% mortality rate is absolutely horrific. Would you play Russian roulette with those chances? If 60% percent of the world gets infected we are talking many many millions of dead.
How are you going to track contacts, when someone working in a brothel gets it, or someone preparing food in a McDonald's? What if someone takes the virus back to India or Africa?
With 20% needing intensive care, even modern European countries will suffer badly. There simply are not enough beds available, even in the bigger cities.
Mortality is a red herring when you do not count the people still hospitalized after months! Look at the tiny amount of recovered people.
Despite their titanic and gruesome methods to contain it, China has failed. Imagine such an effort in Europe, where people gladly will walk away from quarantine and can not be cowered into compliance or snitching on their coughing neighbors.
We simply do not know enough about morbesity and mortality to say we overreact. Better safe than sorry when uncertainty abound.
Not a practical strategy for thousands of conference attendees packed closely together for a short period of time before flying back home. This virus is too infectious and has too long of an incubation period. That's why so many public events are being canceled. This exact scenario is playing out right now aboard the cruise ship docked in Japan.
> To put things in perspective, although perhaps inaccurate, the number of cases of COVID-19 infection in China is less than 3 cases / 100,000 inhabitants.
What kind of perspective are we getting by adding the entirety of China to a locked down Wuhan when considering the infection rate? And then to go on to compare that to flu rates in Catalonia. Really, what point is that supposed to make?
> Our Health Alerts and Emergencies system works, works as a team and the protocols established in the EU apply: detect the case, isolate it, treat it and follow all possible contacts. In this way, the transmission chain can likely be properly controlled.
How can this possibly work if carriers are infectious for lord knows how many days before symptoms appear? It's laughable. How does this crack team of contact follow uppers deal with the case of a single infected metropolitan commuter?
As for comparisons to the Flu, I see this so often and it always misses the point: it's not one or the other, so why would the medical establishment not fight in the extreme to stop many thousands of deaths that would result if another flu-like disease came along? Second, there is an entire industrial complex complete with seasonal ramp up in staffing to deal with Flu season, and we still see non-negligible fatality rates. Without that support network, which again we don't have for COVID-19, how much worse would things be with the flu? So we should all stop using the flu as some type of benchmark for what a reasonable COVID-19 response looks like.
Another perspective is that there were only 41 reported cases in China six weeks ago, and now there are 60,000. So while there are only 500 cases outside China so far, we might want to wait six more weeks before declaring victory.
Due to the size and fame of the fair, most big companies were forced to participate to "look better" than their competitors, even if they didn't have any great novelty to show there: it was a marketing arms race where each company had to invest more than the previous year.
On the other hand, the relevance of the fair has dropped, correlated to the smaller incremental improvements that get into mobile phones year after year: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=w...
So, the Coronavirus gave an awesome opportunity to exit the race: a big company can skip the congress this year without appearing defeated.
Let's see if the fair will have an edition next year.
(of course that's only MHO)
None of the various measures taken to contain the outbreak have affected those numbers.
This apparently has happened before with organ donation data: https://bmcmedethics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s129...
Recap of screwing Huawei history: Daughter of President jailed for business with Iran, baning their products ( network infrastructure, google apps in devices...), MWC cancelation....
🧐