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Comment by allovernow | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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...

”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

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