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Thanks for the tip!

Since I hadn't lived thru anything that threatened my society, I never believed in stocking up on non-perishables.

However, the fact that I'm living thru a potential pandemic convinces me that we as a race aren't nearly as resilient as our modern amenities and high QoL suggest.

News you can use: you’re living through multiple pandemics, all the time.

There’s a flu pandemic (several, actually), that are far more immediately threatening to you than this virus. Society has not yet fallen.

Yes, but we have vaccines for the flu, and as far as I can tell this is far more contagious. Even with a lower mortality rate, the death toll could be much higher.

If things do start getting bad, I expect it might happen rather suddenly.

It is about as contagious as the flu. Stop fear-mongering.

Also, not for nothing: most people don’t get the flu vaccine, despite endless begging on the part of health officials.

It’s much, much deadlier and more likely to put you in the hospital than the flu, though. The trite comparisons to the flu are honestly irresponsible at this point. There’s a reason public health officials all over the world are taking this very seriously.

It is not. You are making up “facts” and need to stop.

This virus disproportionately kills old and sick people. Aside from the fact that over 80% of cases are mild, the death rate in patients under 60 is well under 1%:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-asia...

Even these are based mostly on statistics from Wuhan, where a “confirmed infection” has to be severe to begin with; these rates are going to be overestimates of the real rates.

Nothing you’ve said remotely contradicts what I said. Feel free to provide actual evidence that my facts are incorrect.

Why shouldn’t we care about a virus that mainly kills old and sick people? Especially when that alone can overwhelm our medical infrastructure.

Additionally, even a 0.5% mortality rate for young and otherwise healthy people is much higher than the flu, and serious cause for concern. I’ll take a 0.5% chance of dying over 2% any day, but I still will take a lot of actions if I can to avoid a 1/100 chance that my daughter has to grow up without one of her parents.

As long as we’re talking about facts and misinformation, let’s talk about your assertion that mortality rates are going to be lower than Wuhan. They may be, but it’s way too early to say. We don’t yet have reliable data on how many mild cases are missed in the official figures, how the remaining unrecovered patients will fare, or how many deaths have been caused by the virus but are not attributed to it in official figures.

Look, I get that you’re scared and lashing out at people who are saying you have reason to be, but you’re not going to make any difference here. This is a serious global issue, which is why every country with significant infections is going to incredible lengths to try and contain it. I’d suggest you stop trying to police people on the internet who aren’t meeting your personal standards for reacting to this and instead do some prep to keep you and your loved ones safe and secure.

I provided a link to “actual evidence” in the post. Read it instead of posting rumor and opinion as fact.

Nobody said you “shouldn’t worry” about a virus that kills old people. But if you’re not old or sick, you should worry about it less than other things. Like getting the flu.

”I get that you’re scared and lashing out”

What manner of gaslighting is this? I am absolutely not scared, and I am trying to spread accurate information, in order to counter fear-mongering posts like your own.

See, there you go again. You’re suggesting that someone young and healthy should be more concerned about the flu, which is absolutely ridiculous and not supported by any data. The only “evidence” you posted is that the elderly and sick are most at risk, which no one was disputing, and which does not support your position that the flu is more dangerous to young and healthy people than this virus.

Your accusations of fear-mongering are ill-founded and un-productive.

I'm of course completely factually correct that there is no vaccine for COVID-19 (although there is a SARS vaccine that may help). Which, even if it is only as deadly as the flu, is still a huge issue. I have immune-compromised family members, so I get the flu vaccine. I have no such luxury in this case.

The fact that the symptoms are mild for most people only makes it more of a danger, because people are less likely to self-quarantine if they only have cold-like symptoms.

All the confirmed cases in the U.S. are currently under quarantine. However, the CDC does fully expect that the disease will spread free here in the states.

Northern Italian states have closed all public schools, universities, and public events.

The virus is not “far more contagious” than the flu. It’s about as contagious as the flu, and maybe slightly more deadly, primarily to older/sick people.

You’re panicking, you don’t understand what you’re reading, and (assuming that you aren’t just trying to spread fear) you should stop posting on this subject.

> assuming that you aren’t just trying to spread fear

You are paranoid. Stop pointing fingers, stop making accusations, and back up your points.

Stop being dishonest. Comparing the flu to the Corona virus is comparing apples to oranges. They don't even share transmission rates.

Does this have a very different fatality rate that the flu does?

Also many at-risk patients are vaccinated against the flu.

Besides, even if you are likely to survive and all, it's still wise to plan for everybody else to panic ;)

The fatality rate is on par with the flu, except in older patients (over 60) where it is currently higher.

Ironic that you should bring up flu vaccination...despite the risk of death from flu being the average person’s greater concern (by far), we still have to beg people to get vaccinated, and the rates are low.

I’d wager that most of the folks fear-mongering about covid-19 on this thread haven’t had a flu shot this year.

This is absolutely false. You’re comparing the coronavirus fatality rate for young and healthy people to the overall flu fatality rate. Try comparing the fatality rate of 20-40 year olds only between each virus and then get back to us on how they’re comparable.

Also, I’m kind of horrified at how indifferent you are across many comments to the prospect of tens of millions of elderly and sick people dying. Just because you’re young and healthy, no one should be very concerned about this?

According to the most recent paper from CCDC, under age 40, the current estimate of fatality rate is 0.4%. Between 50-59, 1.3%.

For those with no pre-existing medical conditions, 0.9%:

http://weekly.chinacdc.cn/en/article/id/e53946e2-c6c4-41e9-9...

Death rates for flu vary widely by age, race and location, but these numbers are not out of the ordinary for influenza.

I’m not “indifferent”, I’m calmly assessing relative risks. You, on the other hand, are simply spreading FUD. Go breathe into a bag.

Fatality rate in US for 18-49 is 0.02%. Source:

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm

So using your most optimistic number of 0.4%, that’s a fatality rate 20x as high.

And again, you have many comments downplaying the significance of this virus based on your own assessment that it kills young and healthy people at acceptably low rates. What about the billions of people who are older, sick, or have the misfortune of being born in a country without access to decent medical care? Pretty easy to calmly assess relative risks to other people, especially if you get them wrong by a factor of 2000%.

I am concerned about other people. It has no bearing on my advice to you, which is that unless you are old or sick, you should stop posting misinformation to HN, and go breathe into a bag in a dim room.

Maybe play some relaxing music and light a candle. (Be careful, though: you’re many hundreds of times more likely to start a fire with the candle than die from covid!)

I also bought 3 months supplies of Emergen-C, Mucinex, Robitussin, and Alka-Seltzer orange and green Cold and Flu pills.

> At the same time you shouldn't assume experts, the media, etc. are somehow mass conspiring against your health/safety. Assessments are probably reasonable to follow.

True, but it's also not their job to work for my personal benefit. Mine is. Their job is to do the greatest good for the greatest number, but what is good for the most people is not always good for me. My job is to keep myself and my family safe, and I don't trust bureaucrats enough to make the call that I have to lose out for the "greater good".

All that aside, at least according to China, the mortality rates aren't all that high (a few percent). We'll see what happens elsewhere, but I don't think there's reason to panic yet.

> the mortality rates aren't all that high (a few percent)

That's about the same mortality rate as the pandemic flu of 1918, which wasn't exactly a walk in the park.

Tricky to compare, because health care is better these days so mortality would be expected to be lower (unless the system is overwhelmed, of course).

Uh, they don't calculate the mortality rate of the virus by guessing how many people would have died in 1900's care. The mortality rate is that high because that's the percentage of people currently dying.

Mortality rates are easy to compare - they are numbers that take healthcare and disease intensity into account because they are statistics from observation.

If anything, the numbers suggest that had the covid-19 struck in 1918, the mortality rate would have been higher.

...in 1918. When we didn’t have things like antibiotics or mechanical ventilators (or even a solid grasp on germ theory).

Non-adjusted comparisons to medical outcomes in 1918 are useless.

(pre-empting the criticism: antibiotics absolutely matter for a viral outbreak like this. Many people who die from respiratory illness actually die from secondary bacterial pneumonia.)

The observed mortality rate already accounts for advances in medicine that are actively being used, no? Mortality rates are easy to compare: x% died back then and y% die now. Those numbers take into account the various characteristics of the disease and health care.

People aren't saying this acts like the 1918 disease so it should have the same mortality rate. People are saying the observed mortality rate is the same. That's in spite of medical advances.

You’re making a lot of assumptions. Sure, if the reported death rate is correct (it isn’t; it’s going to end up much lower), and the medical system in Wuhan is up to first-world standards (it isn’t; they’ve had to scramble to build halfway adequate infrastructure for the population), and the distribution of victims is the same as the 1918 flu (it isn’t; this virus kills mainly old, sick people), then sure, you can just compare mortality rates.

But since none of those things are true, you can’t. It’s not like these parameters are fixed; they’re dramatically affected by the time and context in which they’re measured.

They're hardly useless, and if the current virus is killing the same percentage of people as the 1918 flu despite all of our medical advances, that's a strong indicator the current virus is significantly more potent, which makes the blithe assertion that "the mortality rates aren't all that high" even more dubious.

We don't actually know mortality. By the numbers, 2,470 deaths, 23,419 recoveries, and 53,105 undecided cases.

10% of all settled cases resulted in death. That is far higher than the 3% of Spanish Flu and reasonably close to SARS. Median time to death is around 12 days which is similar to time to recovery meaning the 10% seems likely to be an accurate metric.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/mers/clinical-features.html

The most interesting part is the ages of cases. Last I checked, there were ZERO deaths of children 9 and under. Mortality rates hover at around 0.2 to 0.3% until over 50.

The really big unknown for me is the weird SARS antibody Antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) effect. Basically, if the antibody levels get too low and reinfection occurs, the disease becomes much more lethal than if no antibodies are present at all. This effect is now known to be the reason mortality rates for a second case of Dengue fever are so high. In SARS, the disease disappeared before reinfection was an issue. In the case of a pandemic, a second, more lethal wave could be disastrous (if this is also possible with COVID-19). This could also complicate naive vaccines that don't account for possible secondary, enhanced infections.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006291X1...

All that said, I'm not super-worried.

Thank you for calling out the actual numbers:

> By the numbers, 2,470 deaths, 23,419 recoveries, and 53,105 undecided cases. 10% of all settled cases resulted in death.

The mistakenly low estimates of mortality rate are likely due to use of the wrong denominator. As Worldometer [1] explains correctly in their summary of Ghani et al. [2]:

> Once an epidemic has ended, it is calculated with the formula: deaths / cases. But while an epidemic is still ongoing, as it is the case with the current novel coronavirus outbreak, this formula is at the very least “naïve” and can be “misleading if, at the time of analysis, the outcome is unknown for a non negligible proportion of patients.”

[1]: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-... "Worldometer Coronovirus Mortality Rate"

[2]: https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwi230 "American Journal of Epidemiology Volume 162, Issue 5, Pages 479–486"

As the parent calls out, a better estimate of mortality rate for an ongoing epidemic is deaths / settled cases where settled cases is the sum of deaths and recoveries.

I'm seeing current numbers show 41,490 active and 45,112 resolved. Between your numbers and mine, the number of deaths increased by 507 and the number of recoveries increased by 21,693. This means the fatality rate for this set of resolutions is still lower, 2.2%. This trend is fairly pronounced downward as the WHO report on the matter calls out, we've learned a lot about the disease and are identifying a lot of totally asymptomatic cases [1]

[1] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-chi...