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Comment by tjt | Hacker News Reader

This is super scary. Before I read this I was happily thinking hey it's no worse than flu. Now... I'm wishing I didn't live in a huge city riding the subway daily.

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Learning about the mechanism by which it kills shouldn't change our estimates of the lethality of the disease. We already knew that for most people it was just a bad flue but a noticeable fraction of those infected needed to get to an ICU. Now we just have a better idea of why.

we actually have no idea what the long term effects are.

Some people seem to be bothered by it for months after.

I keep trying to not look up Coronavirus news online, but I can't help it... and after reading this I'm genuinely terrified. The word "potential" on the title is entirely invisible to me.

Oddly enough, I was on the "pandemic" bandwagon early enough that my period of anxiety and insomnia has now passed already. People get used to new states of affair pretty quickly.

I hardly ever have to deal with anxiety, but now I have a headcold and my coworker sitting 6-feet to my right has a mask on...

You should be the one wearing the mall though no?

Still waiting for mine to be delivered... They're hard to come by!

But I'm sure my coworker is wearing a mask for their own set of reasons...

If you have a cold or anything else infectious, please work from home if at all possible.

When I lived in Chicago I used to practice riding the L without touching anything with my hands. In the Bay I kept up the habit.

This is never not a good idea, so no time like the present to get into it.

Or you could just wear cycling gloves.

Then you have to handle the gloves.

Are you able to ride a bike to work?

In many cities/countries that's more dangerous than just getting the corona.

I'm pretty lucky that I can ride a bike or work remote. My partner doesn't have either option.

I don't understand the worry.

As of yesterday, China, a country of 1.4B, had 80,000 cases and 3,000 dead.

Last year, the US had 36M infected with the flu and 34,000 died.[1]

Are you panicking about the flu?

[1]https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html

The rates in China are dropping because they have some form of travel restrictions for 780m people. If those restrictions would be removed, the rates would go up immediately as seen before and now in other countries.

Edit: source added

https://inews.co.uk/news/world/china-coronavirus-covid-19-de...

Is there any reason to believe other countries won’t institute travel restrictions if they get a ton of cases?

My point is that based on how many die from the flu each year, you’d have to see 130,000 deaths in China for the impact to be the same as the flu.

Have you considered the fatality rate and what would happen if it reaches the same percentage of population as seasonal flu?

Check out Spanish Flu for worst case scenario.

China restrictions have been much more stringent than what you imply. People in Wuhan were prevented from leaving their apartments at all and needed to wait for food from the government.

The jury is still out whether softer forms of restrictions can work once the disease is widespread. We will see about that by watching South Korea and Italy. (We know it works if there are not too many cases around, like in Singapore.)

Have you considered the fatality rate and what would happen if it reaches the same percentage of population as seasonal flu?

Yeah, that would be bad, but there is no data to suggest it would get that bad.

This makes zero sense. We know the fatality rate. We know the R0. We know how many people have it currently and how fast it’s spreading. It’s simple math.

You can't compare absolute deaths between the flu and WCV.

The flu infects nearly 20% of the world's population each year. Estimates by the NIH are 10-20% annually in the US, and those numbers are probably similar in other countries. China has a billion people, so that means the flu infects probably 200 million people each year but only 130,000 die. The death rate is below 0.2%.

In contrast, only about 90,000 people have been infected with WCV so far. Thousands have died. The death rate is at 3.8%, or roughly 19-20x higher than the flu.

Mortality rate of covid19 for people with cancer is estimated at over 6%. My mom has cancer. Every person who gets covid19 but thinks "oh it wasn't that bad" makes it just a little more likely that people like my mom will contract it.

The reason to not panic but be prepared is that humanity has zero immunity to this virus, whereas there's lots of group immunity to influenza. I'm not sure why it's so hard for people to see the issue here.

It's significantly more deadly than the flu. But also, people should probably take influenza more seriously anyways.

That’s no different than the flu. Older people and people with compromised health make up most of the fatalities each year.

Mortality for covid19 is much higher than for the flu.

3,000 / 80,000 = 0.0375

34,000 / 36,000,000 = ~0.00094

36,000,000 * 0.0375 = 1,350,000

That's the concern.

China also had some pretty extreme measures to get their low number of cases, measures I don't think will play out too well in the US. And probably won't have a full count yet.

We can hope for the best, we can wash hands etc., but it's not unrealistic to say this can get bad.

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