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Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

WHO daily sitreps provide very clear stats on transmission outside China. The latest one for Feb 17: https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...

Japan (excluding the cruise ship): 59 confirmed cases (6 new), 26 cases with travel history to China, 33 cases (6 new) without (what they call “with possible or confirmed transmission outside China”).

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just wanna add to the discussion that there is a peer reviewed paper published today suggesting asymptomatic transmission is very likely.

https://academic.oup.com/jid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/inf...

Which is interesting because various sources reported very likely asymptotic transmission as far as 2 weeks ago. But proper research takes time. This virus is fast and unknown, and most likely will test every part of our world system in a very dramatic, Hollywood way.

it's hardly as remarkable or dramatic as you describe it (Hollywood). That's mainly the media upping the severity/alert level of the situation.

Even if asymptomatic people transmit the virus "asymptomatic transmission likely plays a minor role in the epidemic overall, WHO says. People who cough or sneeze are more likely to spread the virus, the agency wrote"[1]

[1] - https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/paper-non-symptomati...

This sounds reassuring until you realise that "People who cough and sneeze" = all humans.

It is reassuring. You can avoid and protect yourself against coughing/sneezing humans. You can't really avoid an invisible carrier.

You are shadow banned btw. Since this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22316460

He looks alright to me

New to the party -- what does that mean and how do you know they're shadow banned?

HN has an infamous feature called shadowbanning whereby mods can ban a user in such a way that they can't tell that their account is banned. As far as the user is concerned they are not banned, but the comments they submit are immediately marked as dead when they are posted and hidden.

This feature is supposed to be used for cases such as spam bots or crazy people. However for whatever reason sometimes normal users end up shadowbanned.

You can tell if a user is shadowbanned if you have showdead on and most of their comments are dead for seemingly no reason. Yet they continue to post new comments unaware that they are banned.

Shadow banning is not unique to HN.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning

It's also known as hell banning.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hellban

Much better link, if you want to see the most up-to-date sitreps: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

The chart showing cases outside China by date of onset of symptoms (Figure 2) looks reasonably reassuring: the peak seems to have remained in the same place (the end of January) for a week or so now.

On the other hand, they also say that this data is available for only about a quarter of the known cases.

Where is Figure 2? There ain't no pictures in the article.

Edit: oh sorry you were replying to another comment, not the original article. Figure2 is here: https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...

Semi-related, but the map surprised me. In my euro-centric world most maps I see have Europe at the center with the US at the left. Took me a second to realize the US was actually on there. :)

Kind of like looking at British D-Day maps. They show France at the top, so upside down! But they are driving on the wrong side of the road, so...

You have any examples of that? Feels like it could be a urban legend and searching for "British D-Day maps" on Google Images show all the maps with France being below UK.

Not at hand, but way back the day I saw some in old books covering D-Day. My uncle had one lying around where it was shown this way, no idea what the title was. But I remember it, I always turned it upside down to understand the map and then back again to read the text.

Not sure if that was something that was down after the war or already during d-day, so.

Similarly, in the US, world maps also usually (or at least "often enough that it doesn't look weird to me") put the Americas in the center.

Splitting down the Atlantic is normal in much of the world, possibly even the majority by population.

Semi-related, here is a map of Japan: U+1F5FE

It is the only country that has a map in unicode afaik

(and HN does not support unicode?)

> very clear stats on transmission outside China

Nobody knows the transmission outside China because nobody is testing anyone unless they are coming from China and show symptoms. Even people with the right symptoms aren't tested, because the general assumption is that it's being contained. But we know it can spread before symptoms show up.

Sadly I can upvote you once. This link should be the top comment on any thread about the Corona outbreak.

Another great resource is this map: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h... put together by John Hopkins University.

I learned about that one on HN, agree, it's a great resource as well!

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