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Comment by zaroth | Hacker News Reader

There are only 4 countries outside of China which have at least 100 confirmed COVID cases.

There are only 3 countries outside of China which have had at least 10 COVID deaths.

The story at this point has been blown massively out of proportion relative to a typical flu season. How many more people died last week from flu-related complications than died of COVID?

It’s wise to take precautions, but it should be done rationally. IMO, I think prophecies of WWIII level calamity should be flagged, as it’s not healthy discussion but more like gruesome fan fiction.

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The problem with R0=2 is that its exponential. Nor saying at all people should panic, Singapore shows it can be contained, but using 《100 as a yardstick for severity is not very useful. Germany will be 》100 in today and 》1000 a few days later, they already have up contact tracing on two clusters and it seems every local mayor gets to decide if schools stay open.

In other thread, people commented that "it's becoming real" because now we have TWO cases in US among the population over 300M. The current economic damage is at least $50M/death due to COVID-19 virus! I'm not sure if this is the most dangerous disease but its certainly most expensive diseases the world has seen so far. So yes, the hype is real.

how are you measuring economic damage?

Loss in the stock market, manufacturing, 10% of China population in lockdown. The number of deaths so far is under 2500.

The hype is hype. The reactions to the hype are certainly real, and obviously extremely overblown. It will be easier to see this by April 1 than it is to foresee it on March 1.

In the moment, when reactions are snowballing, it's hard to be the one who doesn't cancel an event. And then of course there will be the people who claim next month that all the economic fallout was worth it because a pandemic never materialized.

Personally, I think it's not terrible to have a good solid Stress Test for "Disease X", but it's also very much nothing to worry about. Hopefully the over-reaction this time doesn't lead to an under-reaction if it's ever truly needed.

https://www.businessinsider.com/nassim-taleb-heres-what-peop...

Ebola is a perfect example of an extremely hard to spread infection that stands zero chance of ever propagating in the US.

Only in areas where it’s common to have close contact with infected during their dying days while they are vomiting and hemorrhage blood can Ebola spread with an R0 approaching even 1.5.

Yeah, I think Ebola is a pretty strong argument against using R0 for public consumption. Ebola has never spread in the presence of a functioning health system, and even without a functioning health system outbreaks have been localized - a metric showing it's as contagious as the common cold is not measuring the common-sense definition of "contagious".

That's because the US CDC produced defective test kits and hasn't done enough testing. A tiny nation like SK has tested 30k people while the US has only tested 450+(and each kit costs a patient $3k while it's free or cheap in other countries).

The scientific facts are simple and clear. R0 is between 2 and 3, fatality rate is around 1%.

Even if it's not containable, actions should be taken to buy us more time before an effective vaccine is produced.

But from the numbers, coronavirus appears to be roughly 34 times more deadly then the flu?

You'll never convince these armchair epidemiologists that they're wrong and virtually all the public health and medical experts are right.

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