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Comment by dfsegoat | Hacker News Reader

I find this to be pretty alarmist.

"If the pandemic hits" ... the virus has already hit.

The WHO itself has backed off the Pandemic classification [1].

The virus has an overall 98% survival rate, and most diagnosed cases in the US, are not actually showing any symptoms (which itself is a cause for concern re: spread).

The annual Flu, MERS and SARS were far far worse. The flu kills between 26,000 and 52,000 annually in the US [2], and as much as I love prepping, this just does not fit the bill for the amount of FUD it has generated.

edit: comments are making me re-think my position. COVID is far worse mortality rate wise in 65+ patients vs flu.

1 - https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/who-tries-to-calm-ta...

2 - https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

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>The annual Flu, MERS and SARS were far far worse

This is NOT TRUE. I urge you to stop relying on the news and look at the literature that is being published in real time. I don't have time for a full response but 15% of cases require ICU care to survive. There are less than 100k ICU beds in the U.S. and the virus spreads 2-5x (R0 estimates from 3 up to 8 depending on source) more readily than SARS or MERS or the 1918 Spanish flu.

Now is the time to be alarmed. The media is behind, for understandable reasons, do not rely on them when in 2020 you have access to the same sources they do. The literature being publishes is almost universally grave. At this point anyone minimizing ncov by comparing it to regular flu is being irresponsible.

”Now is the time to be alarmed.”

And this accomplishes what, exactly? Shortages of gloves and canned goods?

Being “alarmed” is not a positive choice, even if your worst-case projections of the future turn out to be true.

If people start trickling into stores to stock up now, as the Canadian government is urging it's citizens, there will be less of a rush later. Perhaps we can avoid the chaos of empty store shelves.

Your wording seems a bit off mark. The Minister of Health is recommending everyone to always have an emergency reserve in case of any unforseen event, from illness to power blackout.

I'd say the vast majority of people that I know don't have such a reserve, and are seriously considering it now.

If they all go and stock up, what with the JIT-style of many supermarkets, I wouldn't be surprised to encounter shortages.

Even just to avoid the inconvenience of that, stocking up now, while the majority of the population is not too concerned, seems prudent and even beneficial to everyone else

Oh hey guys, Comical Ali is back[1]!

In all seriousness, I'm truly baffled what motivates you to stand out so strongly in your anti-hysteria hysteria. I mean, I'm the anxious type who just like to prepare for stuff just in case, especially if the cost is low, but you appear to go actively out of your way to spend energy on countering any degree of concern, and it's frustratingly difficult to understand the underlying motivation.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Saeed_al-Sahhaf

What led you to believe I cited the news? I cite the WHO and CDC where I could. If I am interpreting that information incorrectly based on my previous experience in epidemiology, please educate me.

- SARS case fatality rate = 15% (WHO - 1)

- MERS case fatality rate = 34.4% (WHO - 2)

- COVID19 case fatality rate = 2.3% (WHO - 3^)

1- https://www.who.int/csr/sars/en/WHOconsensus.pdf

2-https://www.who.int/emergencies/mers-cov/en/ MERS case fatality rate =

3 - https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...

^ estimation efforts are ongoing and may change.

The numbers from China are totally innaccurate and underestimating the infection rate by at least an order of magnitude for a multitude of reasons. The WHO has been irresponsibly mirroring the Chinese numbers from the start and frankly cannot be trusted - the director of the WHO was accused by the NYT years ago of covering up 3 cholera outbreaks in his home country of Ethiopia.

China has been overwhelmed. They ran out of testing kits weeks ago. They have been turning people away from hospitals for months. Major infection areas have been under lockdown, where people are not allowed to leave their homes or drive, even for emergency trips to the hospital. Their official reported diagnosed cases are nowhere the true numbers. They've also punished doctors for reporting new cases. It's all a giant sham.

This pandemic is revealing just how incompetent global organizations and news media are.

Edit: I just read that the WHO also has some incentive to downplay the virus - $425 million in catastrophe bonds were issued that may default if the virus is officially labeled a pandemic...can't seem to find the actual default conditions but there's a clear conflict of interest here. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/pandemic-bon...

Regarding the bonds, that doesn’t seem true. The conditions for payout are:

“ On the face of it, the class B bond should have incurred losses during the 2018 ebola crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the recent coronavirus from Wuhan, China, as both have resulted in deaths north of 250 people, the primary condition for a payout.”

“ But an important secondary condition states that there must be at least 20 deaths in a second country for the bond to release any funds, a requirement that has not been met by the coronavirus or the ebola outbreak.”

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-world-bank-has-an-insu...

Iran is at 19, South Korea and Italy 13 and 12.

As of this hour, Iran's now at 26 deaths.

Curiously Iran's smoking rate is low - 1/3 of America's. I had thought that lung-compromised smokers were responsible for high mortality in some countries. Hm.

That could still be true. I imagine there are a huge number of variables that influence mortality rates, to the point where finding correlations is difficult.

If I understand correctly, even the effect of weather/heat on various strains of viruses is extremely difficult to predict because of how many other factors play a role (air-conditioning, for example).

You are citing case fatality rate for MERS and SARS, but not the flu (which is typically 0.1%), and yet in any given year the flu has killed many more people than MERS or SARS. Why? Because millions get the flu whereas MERS and SARS were contained.

Now consider that COVID-19 is much more contagious than the flu and it has a significantly higher case fatality rate than the flu.

Furthermore, people can and do protect themselves against the flu with a vaccine. There is no vaccine for COVID-19. And still further, no one is immune because the disease is new to humans.

So yes, while covid-19 has a 98% survival rate, a widespread outbreak could kill hundreds of thousands of people.

This was enlightening and has let me revise my original position. Thanks

Where can I find "the literature that is being published in real time"?

Nature and pubmed for starters. Search 2019 ncov. Most of the papers were originally being collected and circulated on 4chan - honestly, as vile as a place as it is, the threads have been 1-2 months ahead of media. More recently reddit.com/r/coronavirus has popped up which is sharing papers and there's a more official subreddit who's name escapes me.

This is an event which illuminates the folly of relying excessively on media and government. I think it's easy to forget that these organizations are managed and staffed by people just like you and me - worse in many cases, as the average person is not exactly sharing research papers with their grandma, so to speak.

Here's one of the conservative estimates for R0 straight out of China. There's another which estimates 6-8 but I'll leave that to you to look for.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197122...

The annual flu was worse in terms of numbers, but this illness is still early and was showing a much higher mortality rate, in proportional terms.

Of course, from what I can tell, growth in mortality has been shrinking in percentage terms. [1]

But if judging based on the early stats, it was literally hundreds of times more deadly than a common flu. Approximately to 4% of people in their 60s who contracted it died. And 15% of those in their 80s who contracted it were killed. The annual flu is not nearly that bad.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-...

I think the Flu mortality rate is 0.1% and Coronavirus is 2%?

That seems pretty dramatic, the earlier article about the disease in China stated that some percentage of people that get infected require ICU attention to oxygenate their blood or they die (and it doesn't seem like it's limited only to old or at risk people).

That seems a lot worse than the seasonal flu?

With SARS and MERS we got lucky because they didn't end up spreading that widely even though the mortality rate was higher. I'm not convinced that's evidence that this won't be a problem.

The higher mortality rate of SARS and MERS - counterintuitively - helped to contain it, as well as the fact that it was only spread by people showing symptoms.

Not implying anything: But this tracks with my understanding of how USSR and USA wanted to select bacterial/virologic bioweapons [1]:

An agent that killed very quickly e.g. Ebola is actually not a very good bioweapon. You want something with a long incubation period that is infectious before people are symptomatic.

Things that incubate in short order + kill hosts quickly "burn the epidemic out" before it can spread.

Ideally it also can survive outside of a host for some period of time as well.

1 - Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston

That is naive. Yes the virus has hit some places and we know a little about it, but pandemic means something different. Look what is happening in China, this can happen in any open borders country. Cases keep growing in Europe. If the virus hits more strongly in some country due to higher vulnerability of the population, or if it mutates into something nastier, we can have big disruption of daily life for millions of people, supply chains may get broken, empty shelves, curfew, etc.

WHO tainted its image by being too slow/cautious to react.

The ilness may have great survival rate, but nobody knows what percentage of survivors will have nasty long-term health condition. The virus can smoke your heart, or other organs. It is new, Chinese are falling like flies, that's why alarm is in place.

>The virus has an overall 98% survival rate

You say this as if 2% of people dying is somehow nothing. Think about everybody in your life that you care deeply about. Relatives, friends, mentors, etc. If this goes pandemic, at least one person in that category will likely die.

People should not just focus on the mortality rate of the virus itself, as people can also die:

- if the health care system is overwhelmed and they can't get treatment for other life-threatening illnesses

- if there are medicine shortages (because a lot of medicines are made in China, and it has shut down a lot of its manufacturing)

- if people lack necessities like food as panic sets in people start hoarding

- if people start refusing to help each other out of fear they'll get infected

In addition, something like 20% of the people who do survive can suffer lung damage that can seriously impact their life.

This is not something to be complacent about. Prepare and take care.

Indeed. If you have 20 to 30 people that you love or care about a 2% mortality rate means that there is about a 50% chance at least one of them will die.

How is a virus, more contagious and more lethal than flu/MERS/SARS, a smaller problem?

> more lethal than flu/MERS/SARS

WHO reports a 34% fatality rate for MERS, while at present it is around 2.4% for COVID-19 [2]. So it would be helpful if you provide sources when throwing down comments like this. I'll admit it's more contagious, as they state below, but again, most US cases are asymptomatic.

1 - https://www.who.int/emergencies/mers-cov/en/

2 - http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/02/study-720...

The mortality rate is likely to increase of health services get overwhelmed.

This happened in China, hopefully current measures can prevent breakout infections.

I worry what will happen if the outbreak reaches densely populated areas in India.

This is spot on. As long as ICU capacity is not overwhelmed this can be dealt with.

Speaking of overwhelmed health systems, here's a comment from Dr. Bruce Aylward (renowned expert who led the team of experts on the ground in China)[1][2]:

"The bottom line is this virus kills people... it kills our elderly and vulnerable... but this is not always the case - young people do die of this disease even in industrialized countries.

People are looking at this saying that but in China they don't have this, they don't have that, etc. If I had COVID-19, I'd want to be treated in China.

We'd go into these hospitals, how many ventilators do you have? 50-60. A scale we aren't used to seeing. How many ECMO systems do you have? 5. We don't have that in Europe.

When we look at how dangerous this disease is, we have to be careful looking at the China data. China know how to keep people alive from COVID - they are super committed to it and they are making a massive investment in it. That is not going to be the case everywhere in the world....

It is a serious disease and I worry that people are going to look at the China numbers and get a false sense of security."

[1] - https://old.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/f9mxwn/for_tho...

[2] - https://youtu.be/-o0q1XMRKYM?t=3058

The 2003 SARS outbreak resulted in under 8500 confirmed cases and the 2012 MERS outbreak in around 2500. Confirmed COVID-19 cases are currently over 80000. Only considering fatality rate paints a flawed picture.

> it would be helpful if you provide sources

Actually, to be honest, it would be helpful if everyone refrained from cherry picking information to support their current emotional state.

Please, please, please, let's rely on experts who specialize infectious diseases to do the communicating and go back to our code.

>>> Please, please, please, let's rely on experts who specialize infectious diseases to do the communicating and go back to our code.

Thank you.

From the CDC

> However, it is important to note that current global circumstances suggest it is likely that this virus will cause a pandemic.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/summary.html#risk-...

>most diagnosed cases in the US, are not actually showing any symptoms

Where did you hear this? Why would these people even be tested, much less diagnosed, if they are not showing symptoms?

See 1.

It's Because they were evacuated e.g. from Cruise ships with other symptomatic patients, and were quarantined + tested, it's a CDC standard protocol [2]. They even put one of them down the street from me as we speak [3]

1 - https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/quality/15th-us-corona...

2 - https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/yellowbook/2020/posttravel-eval...

3 - https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/10751105-181/sonoma-count...

There have been reported problems with the CDC tests.

Those problems would cause false negatives, not false positives.

But that story (1) says they had sore throats. They do not consider a sore throat a symptom? So this is the new CDC? Ignorance is strength? War is peace?

> the virus has already hit.

It's now an epidemic, not at pandemic level.

Not true. In the colloquial sense, and actually every sense of the word, this is a pandemic. At the point it became undeniably a pandemic per the WHO definition, the WHO announced they were "no longer going to use the category pandemic." The coronavirus is on every continent but one now.

the virus itself is not the biggest threat. It's the sideeffects of everyone's fear. Once fear starts to take hold, anything can happen.

Also, the steps that authorities might take in response to that fear...

Thanks for editing your post, but given the nature of the subject matter, I would urge you to just take it down. It contains misinformation which can be dangerous.

This is serious. You don't have to panic, but this is serious.

Nah I think it generated some good discussion, if nothing else. If you are coming to HN for emergency preparedness and health advice, I’d say you are screwed already. This site is for entertainment and discourse right? Relax.

And If the WHO and the CDC are “misinformation”- so be it.

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