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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

For anyone claiming that this is just a flu:

I've never heard of an entire country being shut down because of the flu.

I've never heard of 14 people dying in a 120-bed nursing home of the seasonal flu in a 3 week time span either, but the Coronavirus is making that happen in Kirkland, WA right now. Actually, about 30 people have died, but since they don't have enough tests, they can't say that it was Coronavirus.

My wife is an administrator at a Nursing facility that is much larger, and this many people DYING so quickly is terrifying.

Do you have any numbers or is it just anecdotal? Because when worked in a nursing home back the day, the seasonal flus was already bad enough, so...

I'm not OP, but it's a quick search. "Nineteen of those who died in King County were residents of Life Care Center, a nursing home in Kirkland, according to Public Health - Seattle & King County. Researchers say the virus may have been circulating undetected for weeks."[0]

[0] - https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/coronavirus-number-confirme...

Yeah, they are saying now that there's a 5 day incubation period for COVID19.

Without widespread testing, we are going to have no idea how bad this is and how seriously fast we need to lock down facilities, particularly nursing homes, and this particular nursing home has shown that in a lot of places, the disease is going to strike and kill FAST.

I was referring to the fact that nobody died fothe flu the last time it was around. usually, at least over here, you don't conduct that level of testing.

Which indicates one really big issue. People are, for a large degree, scared by numbers now. Not because the nmbers look black death level bad, but rather because there are no numbers on stuf like, say, the flu or some other disease out there to compare them against. Not blaming people for it, that's just how numbers work, not just for diseases.

bad thing is, nobody is addressing this, or anything else related to testing, numbers and so on, in the public. Which includes TV, internet, papers... Instead we have fake news spreading. This fake news is then erroding trust in official information. And as a reult you have to sides, one that believes the virus is at most a flu and the other one believing it will at least be the spanish flu if not the black death. Both are wrong, but the true facts are not getting through. Also the official information is badly presented.

My wife said they didn't lose a single resident to diagnosed flu last year.

26 people have died in a matter of weeks at that nursing home from Coronavirus.

If this thing gets into these other facilities, it's going to wipe them out.

Do people typically die of diagnosed flu? It's my understanding that most flu deaths are undiagnosed, which is why the CDC's ranges for flu deaths are always so broad; they're estimating how many pneumonia deaths they think were caused by the flu season.

That's why I said "diagnosed" because people die of pneumonia from time to time, and this can sometimes be a result of having the flu, but the pneumonia is apparent, but not necessarily that they previously had the flu.

So they didn't diagnose for flu. But they diagnosed for COVID-19. Got it.

It’s more like 18 or 19 confirmed now. 30 of 120 in the facility as of 19 Feb have died. Usually 3-7 per month die.

I was able to look at the press release from this nursing home this morning, and the numbers are far worse than this.

The number is much higher than that, as there are an additional 12 deaths that haven't been tested for coronavirus yet. 26 have died in the last three weeks as compared to 7 in a typical month.

Another 26 are in the hospital, with the rest being quarantined at the home. Over 1/3rd of the staff there is showing symptoms ~70/180 people.

Do you have a source for those numbers?

Not op, but this is from 2 days ago: https://imgur.com/ImZhrlj

I think this tweet contains some of those stats: https://twitter.com/dave_bomberg/status/1236521426259042310?...

"The deaths associated with the facility, according to Killian, amount to 26 between Feb. 19 and March 7. That includes 15 patients who have died in local hospitals. Of those 15, 13 have positively tested for coronavirus."

https://www.bellevuereporter.com/news/life-care-center-of-ki...

Please do not consider this comment to be commentary on the ongoing coronavirus outbreak, especially considering the situation at the nursing home in Washington state.

Out of curiosity, I tried to find examples where many people died of a flu outbreak in nursing homes. Here are some articles I found:

This article describes a nursing home in Sheffield where 9 of 60 residents died from the flu during the 1997--1998 season: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e54b/27d527dd0612d0899f22ea...

This article describes a nursing home in Honolulu where 6 of 37 residents died from the flu during the 1989--1990 season: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7657975

This article describes a nursing home in Los Angeles where 8 of 101 residents died from RSV in 1979: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6527041

This article describes a nursing home in Devon where 4 of 50 residents died from RSV within one week: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6736667

I guess one thing would be, this was likely the first acute care nursing home hit which may be closer to taking a random sample of what it would do to any given one (though community spread wasn't known about yet, and later ones may have rapid tests available to limit spread and enforce quarantine). Whereas those are probably the worst hit of many. This one seems to be possibly 20 or so of 140 as well (testing not done yet), but the 9/60 case would still be worse.

> I've never heard of an entire country being shut down because of the flu.

H1N1 in Mexico [1], I was a Biology major during this time at a University in San Diego less than an hour away from the border. I recall this vividly and it still stands out in my mind just how corrupt Big Pharma is [2] and what control it wields, but Corona seems to be having a more political and economic destablizing effect than H1N! did, then again H1N1 was happening in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Still, given the wide-spread nature of this I can't help but draw parallels.

1: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103502...

2: https://web.archive.org/web/20150710024016/https://www.marke...

Don't jinx it. Bird flu (H5N1) is like that, 50% mortality, luckily it failed to gain human to human transmission.

But the flu does kill a lot of people yearly. I tried to look up the mortality rate for Italy. The best I found is estimated 68000 attributed to flu over period from 2013-2017. And you will find similar high numbers in many other countries. Perhaps we are expecting it to be worse that this?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197121...

Yes we are.

Think about 10x

That's a bit of circular argument. You can't claim people aren't overreacting based on their reaction.

It's very much not just a flu though, that much is pretty clear at this point.

A political overreaction does not make the severity of a disease.

I am mostly following the french news on this and the doctors interviewed (some of whom seem to have impecable credentials) are calling this an irrational panic. It is a serious disease, one of many viruses around, not a particular dangerous one either. But mostly not something that calls for these drastic measures.

Fortunately, the universe will be able to resolve our dispute rather convincingly, and rather soon, even.

I predict that:

1. France will have an exponential explosion of cases.

2. France, after dragging its heels, will eventually undertake similar quarantine measures.

3. Whatever economic damage that early mitigation would have caused will be inflicted multi-fold, as the country reacts too late.

4. Those same doctors will be shrugging their shoulders, and crying: "How could anyone have foreseen this?"

5. People in the next country over will be busy arguing that the virus is causing irrational panic, and that all these measures are an overreaction.

1. Agree

2. Possibly, I don't think Macron is immune to over-reaction

3. The economic damage is the damage caused by the reaction, not by the virus itself

4. I am not talking about some rural generalist. These are infectious diseases specialists, who from what I can tell publish in the likes of the New England, I give them more credit on that topic than the average TV anchor or newspaper editor

>The economic damage is the damage caused by the reaction, not by the virus itself

Exactly. I wonder what would have happened if this entire virus was treated similarly to the seasonal flu.

Then you'd get Wuhan, all over the world. A swamped medical system, 3+% death rates, infected population growing exponentially, thanks to nobody having an immunity.

This experiment has already been run.

Where? Or how?

1918

Take a look at the calendar. It is 2020.

In the beginning, in Wuhan.

I rather consider Wuhan to be the textbook case of a mass-panic in the face of an unknown virus. What I am primarily concerned about is the people's reaction and the economic effects which seem unprecedented (at least in recent decades). This has a much larger impact than the virus itself. Why is the effect so big compared to other pandemics? Is it because of the way infections and deaths are tracked (which might have some influence on the initial perception)? Is it social media and its newly-gained influence on policy? Or because it primarily affects aged population, which makes up a large share of the influential electorate and policy makers?

We will see how this entire issue will be treated in a year. I presume that even if it still prevalent, it will normalize in the eyes of the public and everyone will move on with their lives. And that point we will also have corrected and more accurate numbers and statistics, just like with every other outbreak.

>This has a much larger impact than the virus itself.

That's only because we're considering one branch in the multiverse though, right? If we get in our time machine and imagine that we didn't have the "mass-panic", then presumably the impact of the virus would therefore be much worse.

>Why is the effect so big compared to other pandemics?

Compared to the 1918 flu you mean? I guess I'm not sure what other pandemic we have had recently to compare with.

There aren't enough hospital beds available to treat everyone at the same time. There will be far far more deaths if you just let it run wild instead of slowing the spread.

If overreaction is the problem, do you not think that letting the pandemic get worse, before we act, will trigger an even bigger overreaction?

I call it an overreaction precisely because I see no evidence of a really grave pandemic.

seems pretty grave to me:

"From a well respected friend and intensivist/A&E consultant who is currently in northern Italy:"

"Patients above 65 or younger with comorbidities are not even assessed by ITU, I am not saying not tubed, I’m saying not assessed and no ITU staff attends when they arrest. Staff are working as much as they can but they are starting to get sick and are emotionally overwhelmed."

https://twitter.com/jasonvanschoor/status/123714408985596313...

Individual risk is low, systemic risk is high. With the current the current numbers, the hospitalization rate is over 5% (critical cases). If the infection reaches 10% of the US population, it will require 1.5M hospital beds. Currently there are around 1M, at +60% occupancy.

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