HIV, SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika, COVID-19...
For some reason it feels like a "only in the history books" event -- and yet it's actually quite common. The average-aged American (38) has lived through multiple epidemics -- including one that has killed 30 million people (HIV) -- and yet we barely talk about it.
Especially HIV. You don't catch HIV by boarding the subway, eating in a restaurant, or running a marathon. For most people, avoiding unsafe sex is enough to avoid HIV. But if COVID-19 spreads to their country, people's daily lives will be significantly disrupted.
SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika are a little more like COVID-19, except they never propagate that far.
Sure you can catch COVID-19 more easily, but it seems like having HIV is a far worse outcome.
Otherwise there relatively little day to day impact other than the stigma.
I should caveat that I'm referring to countries with a modern and available health system.
It’s almost exactly like every other respiratory virus, except that the case fatality estimates for old and sick people are higher.
There’s nothing mechanistically new about the infections we’re seeing. It’s a pretty bog-standard respiratory virus, in terms of its transmission and overall virulence.
”But if COVID-19 spreads to their country, people's daily lives will be significantly disrupted.”
If so, it will be primarily due to blunt attempts to prevent transmission of the virus in order to protect the sick and the old. For most people, this virus is little more than a mild chest cold.
Once this becomes a true pandemic, we will see a rapid shift away from quarantines and travel bans, and an increased emphasis on protecting vulnerable populations directly.
1. I find the lack of concern about dramatically higher mortality rates for the old and the sick to be reprehensible. They’re people, even if they’re older or sicker than you.
2. It doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense for China to shut down the economy over something so minor.
3. The hospitalization rate is a serious concern that you’re overlooking.
4. Most importantly, your premise that it’s no more dangerous than the flu for the young and healthy is completely false. The fatality rate for flu for 18-49 year olds in the US is 0.02% [1], and this looks to be at least 20x higher than that for that age group, based on the data we have so far.
World health officials, medical experts, epidemiologists, virologists, etc, all seem to be taking this very seriously and are quite concerned. I think I’ll take my cues from them.
1. Source: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm
0) In the case of the parent, I was saying that the virus spreads and infects people in the same manner as other upper respiratory viruses. It does, this is a fact, and fatality rates are not relevant.
1) I’ve never said that I have no concern about old or sick people. I said that young healthy people should not panic.
2) It would indeed be concerning if hospitals are overwhelmed. Currently, they are not (anywhere) and therefore, again, people should not panic.
3) Comparing tiny ratios with large error bars and freaking out over a “20x” difference in relative risk is pointless; the risk is still quite low. It also overlooks the far more relevant fact that you’re thousands of times more likely to get the flu than covid-19. At this point, you should not panic.
Get the idea? The relative risk to most people is lower than...well, most things in life. That’s why my argument is, and continues to be, that most people, in most places, should not panic.
0) In the case of the parent, I was saying that the virus spreads and infects people in the same manner as other upper respiratory viruses. It does, this is a fact, and fatality rates are not relevant.
1) I’ve never said that I have no concern about old or sick people. I said that young healthy people should not panic. You’re simply virtue signaling to stoke fear.
2) It would indeed be concerning if hospitals are overwhelmed. Currently, they are not (anywhere) and therefore, again, people should not panic.
3) Comparing tiny ratios with large error bars and freaking out over a “20x” difference in relative risk is pointless; the risk is still quite low.
It also overlooks the far more relevant fact that you’re thousands of times more likely to get the flu than covid-19. At this point, you should not panic.
Get the idea? Regardless of your obsessive-compulsive downvoting of factual information, the relative risk to most people is lower than...well, most things in life. That’s why my argument is, and continues to be, that most people, in most places, should not panic.
2) Hospitals are overwhelmed in Wuhan, which is why they're furiously building more and sending thousands of medical staff there from all over China. I genuinely don't understand how you can be unaware of this and be so dogmatic at the same time.
3) The error bars are large, but it's not like they overlap or come remotely close to it. And again, your personal assessment that this mortality rate isn't worth worrying about means nothing to me, especially when virtually every credible expert disagrees.
Finally, please drop this lazy "do not panic" rhetoric. No one is panicking, or suggesting panic. The only hysterical person here is you.
I’ve never said “don’t be concerned.”
Your other arguments are made up. Wuhan has built a number of facilities, but currently appears to have the epidemic at hand. No other areas have been “overwhelmed”, even within China. Representing medical facilities as “overwhelmed”, at the current time, requires citation from a reputable source.
Maybe in some theoretical future world it’s possible that medical facilities around the world will be overrun with sick patients. This is nowhere near the current reality.
Overlapping of error bars on fatality rates is irrelevant to my arguments; the absolute risk is much, much lower than the flu, for most people, in most places.
Everything you’re arguing here is a scare tactic, twisting kernels of truth to panicked ends.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...
Look at the mortality by age table.
Also note the mortality rate outside of Wuhan seems to be 0.7%, a bit more than the common flu which I think is around 0.1% but not really a massive deal.
I don’t know where these numbers will land ultimately but I can think of many reasons why people with mild symptoms that are similar to a cold wouldn’t want to show up in a hospital full of infected people, or would think they just have a cold, so I would expect the denominator of the mortality rare in Wuhan to be understated.
For the moment the panic this thing is creating, fuelled by medias eager to make some money by crying wolf, looks like the real threat to me. Lots of people will loose their job as a result of the economic impact of the panic.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html 1.8 deaths per 100000 is 0.0018%
A 30yo male has a 0.18% probability to die that year. It's a small enough number that it is irrational to worry about it [1].
Because that's the age where the actuarial table is 7x worse for a man than at 30.
A couple hundred thousand dead here, another hundred thousand dead there, and soon we're talking about big numbers.
No, both are such small numbers that you shouldn't worry about either.
There's no evidence that you are remotely likely to catch COVID-19 by doing any of those things either.
This one is different.
Edit: I found this literature review [1] that sounds similar to what you're referring to. Note that this is only a summary of previously published results on similar viruses. If you check the source data in Table I the persistence times are from hours to days, and the author's conclusion is "up to 9 days" (emphasis mine). In my opinion this is very weak evidence to say that it can survive 10 days "on most surfaces".
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019567012...
It is SARS+, less fatal but much more infectious. In a way, it is a very successful virus (in a nightmare scenario), that aspiring to become the next flu.
The Chinese scientists had admitted that, we might have to live with this virus from this time forward. It won't go away like SARS-v1.
Also to note, fatality rate might seem low, but 20% of ALL patients will develop severe lung issue, that is what makes this virus pretty damn dangerous to us.
Source?
- 4.7% as critical and can include: respiratory failure, septic shock, and multi-organ failure.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-sympto...
Lots of grand claims on this website too, makes it seem sketchy:
Out of cases that have been fully resolved we're now at an 8% mortality rate. 2% is counting ongoing cases, that's not the figure you should be looking at.
Additionally, it is widely acknowledged that the actual number of cases is undercounted, with the mildest cases less likely to have been tested and included in those numbers, again resulting in overly high numbers.
And finally, it would appear that Wuhan in particular is skewing the numbers higher, as being the site of the outbreak it was caught off guard and has struggled to manage the number of cases. Elsewhere in both China and the world, the death rate is far lower.
The estimate of 8% is unquestionably much too high. Exactly what the mortality rate is will still take more time to discover.
Malaria was responsible 405,000 deaths globally in 2018 according to [0].
[0] https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/world-m...
Malaria is not inherently a tropical region disease. It routinely plagued Europe until the 1950s. Russia for one example had a huge Malaria outbreak in the early 1920s as did Eastern Europe broadly.
"Gustavo Pittaluga (1876-1956) estimated that in 1923, 18 million people suffered from malaria in Russia, and that sixty thousand deaths occurred out of a total population of about 110 million (Anigstein, Pittaluga, 1925). Similar observations were made throughout the whole of eastern and south-eastern Europe and the former Ottoman Empire."
http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104...
Europe and the U.S. used to have Malaria. The name -- bad air -- is Latin, the Romans thought it originated from bad swamp air. Shakespeare mentioned it time and time again in his plays.
I'm pretty sure what Shakespeare was referencing is a much more general idea prevalent in his day - that smells (not necessarily unpleasant ones) could be poisonous, and could be warded off by opposing "good" smells. This roughly coincided with an explosion of scented-good manufacturing as a cottage industry, although I'm not sure which way the arrow of causation ran there.
</digression>
2) Limiting chance of mosquitoes biting people (aircon)
3) Limiting the population with malaria (the fewer people with malaria, the less chance of a given mosquito biting someone with malaria and thus becoming a carrier)
...which actually isn't that far-fetched for a pre-medical society to conclude, given that mosquitoes breed in warm, still waters.
No. The name is Italian. It predates Italian colonies in the tropics. It's a disease which was endemic in marshlands believed to be caused by bad air Mal aria and was in Scotland amongst other places.
Malaria is not exclusively tropical. Nor is dengue or mosquito borne encephalitis. Tropical wet regions sustain mosquitos. So do cooler climates.
I agree that covid-19 seems to have a larger potential breadth, and didn't intend to downplay its significance.
Probably not. Case fatality rates don't accurately show the "deadliness" since many people have likely been infected but been asymptomatic or had mild illness that didn't cause them to seek medical advice.
> significant long term health consequences for many who survive
There is no evidence for that, and it doesn't make sense given the available data. Some number of people have long-term health consequences, and if you only compare that number to the number of people who went to hospital with serious illness, you might see a high percentage, but that's a huge distortion of reality.
We now have 4 independent estimates that place the Infection Fatality Ratio at about 0.5% to 1.7% which is between 5x and 17x deadlier than the flu (0.1%): https://twitter.com/zorinaq/status/1230977769795776512 Incidentally, this makes COVID19 comparable to the 1918 Spanish Flu (IFR ~2%) according to experts (see link above). And keep in mind the IFR, unlike the CFR, is the metric that takes into account undetected mild or asymptomatic cases.
«There is no evidence for that»
There is, see https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... : In those who survive intensive care, [...] aberrant and excessive immune responses lead to long-term lung damage and fibrosis, causing functional disability and reduced quality of life.
I agree with this point but would also like to point out the possibility that way more people get infected by SARS-CoV-2 than the flu.
I also want to note that the flu also has the same asymptomatic or mild illness factor and that the deadliness would be only comparing people who sought medical treatment.
Also the comparison to the Spanish flu often ignores the fact that we are way better equipped to deal with the symptoms than in 1918.
Covid is very serious and we should not be complacent about it. But I think it's important to keep some perspective, especially since we seem to be on the brink of shutting down the entire global economy.
I'm not saying that we should not take covid very seriously. I'm just saying that before we allow it to shut down the global economy we ought to maintain some perspective on the magnitude of the risks society already faces year-in and year-out.
Over decades. Airborne viruses have the potential to large numbers of people in a matter of months.