Coronavirus

[Chinahand]

Your options are:

• We are all going to die.
• Storm in a teacup.
• Worth monitoring. 

Data can be found here:

https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019

 

[Lxxx]

File it under SARS, Swine Flu, Avian Flu, Zika....

Expect an experimental vaccine to be rushed out soon and a lot of zombie's to rush off and get it.

Wait for the next one…..

[manxy]

 

32 minutes ago, Lxxx said:

File it under SARS, Swine Flu, Avian Flu, Zika....

Expect an experimental vaccine to be rushed out soon and a lot of zombie's to rush off and get it.

Wait for the next one…..

File it under CI A?

I'm not sure who will be less untroubled - Trump or Xi Jinping? Trumps biggest market threat is China and China is overpopulated and having issues with those protesting against their social behaviour system.

Some info from WHO HERE

[thesultanofsheight]

53 minutes ago, manxy said:

File it under CI A?

I'm not sure who will be less untroubled - Trump or Xi Jinping? Trumps biggest market threat is China and China is overpopulated and having issues with those protesting against their social behaviour system.

Some info from WHO HERE

   

[WTF]

just another escaped bio-weapon, nothing to see hear ,  move along.

[Chinahand]

Sigh ... this forum is in decline ... what a lot of paranoia and conspiracist thinking.

23 hours ago, Lxxx said:

File it under SARS, Swine Flu, Avian Flu, Zika....

Expect an experimental vaccine to be rushed out soon and a lot of zombie's to rush off and get it.

Wait for the next one…..

SARS:

During the period of infection, there were 8,098 reported cases of SARS and 774 deaths. This means the virus killed about 1 in 10 people who were infected. People over the age of 65 were particularly at risk, with over half of those who died from the infection being in this age group.

Swine Flu:

From April 12, 2009 to April 10, 2010, CDC estimated there were 60.8 million cases (range: 43.3-89.3 million), 274,304 hospitalizations (range: 195,086-402,719), and 12,469 deaths (range: 8,868-18,306) in the United States due to the (H1N1)pdm09 virus.  Additionally, CDC estimated that 151,700-575,400 people worldwide died from (H1N1)pdm09 virus infection during the first year the virus circulated.

Avian Flu:

As of January 2020 there have been 861 cases and of those 455 people died (52.8%).

Zika:

Just in the US, 1,450 mothers have been diagnosed as suffering from Zika, of those something like 220 (15%) gave birth to children with microcephaly or other neurological conditions.

 

Emergent infectious diseases have the capacity to injure and worse in very large numbers.  It is easy to dismiss the many thousands of women in Brazil burdened with microcephalic children, or the 1,000s of people who have died of SARS or avain flu, or the 100s of thousands who have died of Swine Flu.  It's a big world and sure these deaths are just statistical blips where it is a wonder of modern disease surveillance that we can even know about them, but their impact is very real for those on ventilators or nursing brain damaged children.

The propensity of infectious disease to spread, and spread very rapidly, especially when they are newly mutated and so have no immune defences to overcome, make them a genuine danger to our crowded, interconnected lifestyles.  It also makes for perfect headlines in this 24 hour news culture with daily death reports and footage from crowded hospitals.

It is well and good that organisations like the WHO, CDC and NHS invest in tracing and understanding emergent infectious diseases; and that they coordinate responses to them; and yes, vaccination is a vital weapon in the medical armoury, as are anti-virals etc etc developed and tested at great expense.

Flu kills. See Table 7 page 51.  When vaccines match the variant strain excess deaths basically don't occur - like in 2018-19 when less than 2,000 excess deaths were projected to have occurred.  When the vaccines don't match because of mutation and/or incorrect prediction (just imagine the responsibility the scientist who selects the next flu season's strain) there can easily be over 25,000 excess deaths - see 2014-15 or 2017-18 ... just in the UK.

It is so easy to scoff ... but the people who monitor and put their own lives at risk, like Liang Wudong, to understand emergent infections are some of the best examples of humanity and of what a scientific understanding of the world can give us.

To dismiss it as conspiracies and manias is frankly sad, but that is the level this forum is at.  Sad, truly sad.

Touchwood, good old quarantine and medical science will keep the deaths this coronovirus will cause to below the 1000s ... it's going to be a close run thing.

 

 

[Chinahand]

Click through and read the rest!

[RIchard Britten]

Anti-vaxxer wet dream time.

[Albert Tatlock]

Biological warfare on the Hong Kong demonstrations.

[Chinahand]

William M. Briggs is a reactionary right wing Catholic, intensely dogmatic against homosexuality and with a fixation about anal sex ... oh the things people blog about and what it tells us about their inner lives!  He's also a very interesting mathematical mind and has a broad scepticism about over-confidence in science and its corruption by ideology.  He writes something interesting about once a week ... but posts daily.  This week's interesting post would seem to be this:

Some blue check journalist named Ferris Jabr, in a raw display of sobriety for a member of the Indigo Cheka, said

Quote

 

None of this is to belittle what is happening. The outbreak in China is a genuine public health emergency.

But the essential data are still being collected and assessed. Sweeping and alarmist claims about unprecedented global threat are neither warranted nor helpful.

 

That strikes me as the exact right note, given the information we have so far.

... [But Nassim NicholasTaleb author of the Black Swan disagrees, because of the Precautionary Principle (PP)] The PP says that if a devastating thing could happen, then that thing ought to be protected against, and that the level of protection should be proportional to the potential devastation.

Now here’s the coronavirus, which is a mutated version of the common cold. At least, that’s what we’re told. As of this writing (Sunday night), and quoting on the most reliable sources (Zero Hedge), the stats are “Coronavirus mortality rises above 5% with 76 dead on 1,423 confirmed Hubei cases.”

Given these numbers, and since the virus is a cold virus many cases will go unrecorded, since symptoms for most will be an ordinary cold, and most or many don’t go to the doctor to record their common cold. This would tend to inflate the mortality rate, perhaps by a lot.

What’s killing people, as I understand it, is that some frail people who catch this new coronavirus are developing pneumonia, and the pneumonia does them in. Most who get the virus recover fine.

Well, maybe that’s all wrong. I’m not a virus specialist, and I’m relying on published reports, which as we all know are not to be taken as oracular. I also don’t have infection rates of ordinary common colds at my fingertips and can’t say anything about the unusualness of this new virus. Seems at least similar to the spread of many colds. About videos of people dropping dead in the streets of China I am skeptical—but willing to be corrected.

In other words, I’m on the side of the journalist who urges cautious reporting. After all, every would-be media-hyped plague of the last half century has turned out to be a dud, globally speaking, which is evidence in favor of calmness.

[Now ... ]Taleb makes this good point: “Historically based estimates of spreading rates for pandemics in general, and for the current one in particular, underestimate the rate of spread because of the rapid increases in transportation connectivity over recent years.” We are one big unhappy family now.

[He also says] ... "Properties of the virus that are uncertain will have substantial impact on whether policies implemented are effective. For instance, whether contagious asymptomatic carriers exist. These uncertainties make it unclear whether measures such as temperature screening at major ports will have the desired impact. Practically all the uncertainty tends to make the problem potentially worse, not better, as these processes are convex to uncertainty."

That we don’t know what we don’t know is known, or should be, and is thus a given. But because we don’t know what we don’t know does not make what we don’t know bad. It could also be good, or benign. 

...

I predict that if this thing does become seriously serious, and not just the usual panic and instead sci-fi come to life, we’d see the connectivity and mobility hard stopped. No flights to or from China and the like.

We’re not at that point, though. Maybe.

[thommo2010]

My opinion is if it comes here it comes if it doesn't it doesn't. No point wasting energy worrying about something that may not happen

[RIchard Britten]

Multiple countries reporting cases as of last night.

From what I have read (pinch of salt time) people can be infected, but not be symptomatic for up to 14 days after infection.

132 deaths, 5,900 (approx) confirmed cases, 9,000 (approx) suspected cases.

BA suspending flights to and from mainland China.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51292590

 

Its like watching a real life game of Pandemic or Plague Inc. unfold.

[Manxberry]

Mainland Chinese aren't the smartest ants in the hive. 

[RIchard Britten]

6 minutes ago, Manxberry said:

Mainland Chinese aren't the smartest ants in the hive. 

Scared people will do what ever they think will work to protect their families in times of crisis.

[Sheldon]

On 1/27/2020 at 7:41 PM, Chinahand said:

Sigh ... this forum is in decline ... what a lot of paranoia and conspiracist thinking.

To dismiss it as conspiracies and manias is frankly sad, but that is the level this forum is at.  Sad, truly sad.

Oooh, get her! 

Slightly more seriously, as I have no doubt you know more than me about most things, and this thing in particular: what makes this any more of an issue than a new influenza variant, say, the likes of which emerges naturally on a regular basis? According to WHO, in 2018 “these (influenza) annual epidemics are estimated to result in about 3 to 5 million cases of severe illness, and about 290 000 to 650 000 respiratory deaths.”

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/influenza-(seasonal)