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Comment by m23khan | Hacker News Reader

I will counter: How can you not feel bit of panic when you see coronavirus cases being reported daily from all parts of the World where travel is common or where there is large population?

Then you have excellent leadership in Iran which knowingly hides their coronavirus situation and thus have exported the virus to poor and incapable places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq?

Heck, compared to Iran, even Pakistan is being much more stringent and transparent.

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Because the curve is almost not rising, even in linear form ( I thought it was logarithmic even before yesterday).

The amount of casualties seem to be in control.

Okay, Iran is acting stupid. But we don't even do business with them. Tourism is minimal.

Hell, I'd even prefer to get it, so I'm over it ( 32 years old)

The outbreak in China is indeed somewhat (maybe even largely) under control. But if you look at the trend in cases outside China, the growth is still clearly exponential [0].

[0]: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-cases/...

Are you sure you looked correctly?

Newly Infected vs. Newly Recovered is the one you want.

Ps. I'm using the same site, you should check how much influence Iran has in your quick-check. Also South Korea and I wouldn't be suprised with North-Korea to popup either.

It seems to be that the WHO had the correct actions for pandemics ( I was positively suprised when looking at the actual numbers). The cases in Europe are staying pretty low.

The "Newly Infected vs. Newly Recovered" chart on the site I linked above includes cases in China. The virus does in fact look to be somewhat under control in China, but not elsewhere.

Iran and South Korea like I mentioned ? ;)

This isn't like the common cold. There have been cases of reinfection reported already.

How many cases? Are you talking about the woman in Japan?

They are most likely not reinfections. You can still have the virus reproducing in your body, yet have recovered and are no longer spreading it. If you’re in this post-infection period, you’ll still intermittently test positive (especially when your stool is sampled). This is similar to EBV or HIV.

These tests (RT-PCR) also aren’t sensitive enough to test whether the virus is alive or dead, they test for the presence of genetic material.

Viruses are not living things.

Healthy doctors your age have already died from it.

At a 0.2% rate. Nothing to welcome, sure, but also not something worth defeatism.

From where are you drawing that rate? I was speaking of Dr. Li Wenliang, aged 33, who was one of the initial 8 doctors to raise the alarm and try to stop this epidemic in Wuhan months ago.

From everything I've read, both in Chinese and English, considerably more than 1% of the medical personnel at the front lines have perished.

I have read that the amount of exposure can be quantified, and it is possible to have a heavy dose of the virus -- which makes no sense to me -- and that healthcare workers are likely to receive these heavy doses due to frequent exposure.

I always thought that once a virus was present in your system, it was there, like a boolean, not like a degree of infection. But apparently that is not true.

That idea is not true and in fact is extremely dangerous thinking. One example is HIV. It isn't a matter of having it or not having it, the viral load makes a big difference as to what symptoms someone may exhibit as well as how likely they are to infect someone else. If your viral load is low enough then the chances of infecting other people can get low enough to be considered non-existant. On the other hand if you expose yourself to more sources of HIV, it could increase your viral load and increase symptoms and complications associated with the virus.

From what I can tell, this is largely because the testing is not in place in most parts of the world where this virus is likely spreading. Also, we largely do not have the capacity to test people, even if we had the infrastructure in place, because most people do not present with severe symptoms.

In the US, it is increasingly obvious that there are more cases than are being tested/reported. More and more healthcare professionals are reporting individuals with severe flu symptoms either not being tested for anything, or testing negative for Influenza. Proper quarantine is not being implemented to or from the US, so the subset of people who are infected but not confirmed can still travel and spread this disease.

One step further: hospitals are not prepared - at all - for this. Healthcare workers have been exposed within the last week at Harborview in Seattle, with a patient who later tested positive. Within the last week. This has been the global healthcare story for 2 months now, and major trauma centres are not treating all incoming respiratory patients as presumptive COVID-19.

Just insane.

Is your assumption that getting Sick now will make you immune to SARS-CoV-2 virus long term?

> Because the curve is almost not rising, even in linear form

That's the global numbers, which are still dominated by China. In China there may have been a real slowdown thanks to draconian measures.

But have a look at the WHO numbers excluding China. It's definitely still exponential. The doubling time has even been shrinking. My plot:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQTpoR9gmgei...

Source of the numbers: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

Plus, the Chinese are most likely lying to "save face"

Because generally, if a disease spreads rapidly it means that the fatality rate is low. Because if it wasn't, the disease wouldn't spread rapidly. I don't think there's anything to do about it. Sooner or later the virus will spread and infect all parts of the world just like the flu.

I think it's the point of OP. Because there are reports EVERY day, even every hours, it looks worse.

(I still haven't decided if this point is true or not)

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