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Comment by jdshaffer | Hacker News Reader

I live in Japan, and the people here are definitely being cautious, but apart from the local stores being sold out of masks, not much has changed so far. (And here's hoping for the best!)

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I can second that. While more people are wearing masks than usual and Chinese tourists have nearly disappeared, things seem otherwise unchanged. I'm sitting in a cafe a few steps from the Hachiko Crossing in Shibuya right now—half past eight on Saturday evening—and it's full of cheerful, chatting people. But I'm sure most people are concerned about how things might play out in the days and weeks ahead.

Edit: Sunday --> Saturday

It Saturday.

Thank you for the correction!

Im not noticing anything either, considering finding some way to ban corona virus from my feed but they keep changing the relevant terms to get trough.

Unrelated: You go to any meetups in tokyo?

If it’s possibly being spread in the community and can take 14 days for symptoms to emerge, shouldn’t it be quite alarming that people are still congregating in public like nothing is wrong?

Has there been any concrete evidence of asymptomatic spread? Also from start I know most Pele fall in the 5 days range for showing symptoms. I think you'll find out much sooner if there is community spread. In Singapore they've done an amazing job at contact tracking and nearly all the cases are in distinct related clusters.

I see your point. But we're exposed to many risks in this fragile, densely populated metropolis, including flu epidemics, traffic accidents, terrorism, typhoons, earthquakes, and tsunamis, that we could avoid by staying home or living elsewhere. Once we have made the decision to keep living here, I guess many of us also decide to go on with our lives as best we can.

From my count there has been nearly a dozen large companies in Tokyo alone 'going remote' the past few weeks. Nearly 500k workers suddenly have the option to work from a satellite office or home.. Alcohol hand sanitizer at the entrance of nearly all events and people requested to wear masks. Think they are being fairly cautious. Definitely not a mask scale panic though! :)

Likely the Japanese response is not cautious enough. The virus seems to spread fast. However, its lethalness is likely overrated.

As of the morning, per Global Times, Hubei has 2.67% ratio of deaths to cases. For China outside of Hubei, the ratio is 0.55%.

Of course, these are raw figures, and the lower ratio outside of Hubei may be simply due to the cases being newer and that more of the current cases will ultimately be fatal.

https://www.globaltimes.cn//content/1177737.shtml

One of the things needed is a quick and inexpensive test for antibodies to COVID-19 virus in order to establish how many actual infections there are.

>As of the morning, per Global Times, Hubei has 2.67% ratio of deaths to cases.

This is a _confirmed_ deaths to _confirmed_ cases. Unless everyone has been reliably tested, we'd expected the number of actual cases to be higher given it can present with mild-to-no symptoms and such cases are less likely to be tested/identified.

There are also likely to be a number of deaths of patients who were never tested and therefore classified as ordinary pneumonia or flu deaths, rather than COVID-19. So it's not obvious that the long term mortality rate would be less than the raw figures.

Another concern is that the ratio of recovered to dead stays distressingly low, although that may reflect a rather long course for the disease of around 3 weeks.

If we had historical data on pneumonia and flu deaths there, we could compare current rates to that, and if the current rate was significantly higher than usual then it'd be reasonable to count the excess as COVID-19 deaths. I don't know if that data exists though.

An NTD reporter had a similar idea, but focused on total deaths in the city of Wuhan rather than just flu-like deaths. A funeral home staff member said that deaths per day was 4-5 times higher than before this epidemic started, but that only 6% of those deaths were labelled as "confirmed cases" that would count toward the official numbers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYYV1B1lRKY

Assuming a similar rate of undercounting across other funeral homes in the city, that would put the real death count so far at about 14,000. This is despite extraordinary efforts by the Chinese government to prevent the spread of this virus.

(NTD has an axe to grind on this issue, but they have a reputation for factual honesty. I trust NTD's numbers far more than those of the Chinese government. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ntd-tv-new-tang-dynasty/ )

> may be simply due to the cases being newer and that more of the current cases will ultimately be fatal

That's the big unknown. "A small percentage drops dead on contact" would be one extreme, the other and much worse would be "almost everybody enters a slow but steady decline towards death which can take months"

Even if you recover from pneumonia, it can take time off your life expectancy.

Pneumonia is linked to shorter lifespan: A discussion with Dr. Maurice Mufson

https://www.mdlinx.com/infectious-disease/article/883

Deaths lag infections by several weeks. Death rate will seem artificially low until infections plateau.

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