outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne-UnC2QpsU

I'm not worried, but that's still the *reported* number of cases. The question is how fast it can spread. Certainly the Chinese government is taking it seriously enough to more or less lock down Wuhan, which is nothing to sniff at for a population of 11 million. 26 dead so far, a couple of cases in the US, a couple in Europe. Those numbers are tiny, but if I've learned anything from movies and books it's that we're all going to die and/or turn into zombies.

26 million people are on quarantine. This is serious. Cases are spreading woeldwide and i wouldn't believe the chinese numbers

We all gonna die and no one gives a fuck?

― nostormo, Friday, January 24, 2020 1:32 PM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

go to hell imo

Not worried too, but this looks like SARS part 2, numners will rise probably

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlxmKsTvcLg

the people will survive imo

We all gonna die and no one gives a fuck?

Everything is grist if all you want to do is amuse yourself, but if you're going to make fun of it, at least say something witty.

I got a couple of disposable face masks yesterday.

My shoulder hurts, is it coronavirus

is it your dominant arm?

Xi Jinping just called it a 'grave situation' and 30 Chinese provinces are now on high alert.

48 million people on lockdown, 42 deaths, that discrepancy shows that the Chinese government must know even more than it is saying out loud.

I've been writing about this on the China thread, but to sum up.

My wife is from Hubei, her sister is in Wuhan and parents in Ezhou, both on lockdown now. Actually sister and her son were due to fly over to the UK on Wednesday, obviously that has been cancelled. Everyone is just staying home, which works for a while but not forever of course. Also the summer school I run brings about 200 students from Wuhan to the UK every summer, this is also a concern, school will be out of business if they cancel.

The word is that this isn't as serious as SARS but is spreading more rapidly.

Holy shit Camaraderie! Best wishes for your fam.

so far all is fine! just a bit of a stress, of course, and my wife is pretty worried of course.

it's really odd to see Wuhan and especially Ezhou on the news

obv I don’t know how this will all shake out but the level of hysteria in some corners of the internet borders on imo wishful fantasies that it’s a worse case scenario and level of subconscious craving for this sort of apocalypse is it’s own sort of frightening

Nothing new under the sun, etc. Eschatological yearnings are here to stay.

a lot of people subconsciously prefer the apocalypse over their status quo; nb i think this is to some extent misguided but it isn't new

only to some extent misguided to prefer apocalypse to their status quo?

Depends on your status quo, no?

part deliberate understatement as a joke, part i am sympathetic to thinking that a radical upheaval of everything feels preferable to just trudging along sometimes

e.g. the very real pain of having your head sawn off still works as a joke preference after you've had toothache for long enough

They were semi-careful on the radio this morning to be alarming but ... cautiously alarming. The guy who briefed the WHO said, if it's not contained, worst case he expects this to peak late April or early May, with 150,000 cases *per day.* That's what his model showed, at least, and only the worst case scenario. But that's a pretty bad scenario!

there's probably a whole discussion about who's entitled to feel un-Panglossian and who isn't but it shd probably go on another thread. disaster has always been an appealing spectacle to many people for good, bad and indifferent reasons. personally i hope the people of Wuhan and environs can get back to their preferred daily routine asap

I suspect it’s more about the spectacle than the despair but I don’t have evidence or anything

I had to take my daughter to the doctor for something unrelated yesterday and most people were wearing facemasks. TBF, large Chinese population in my neighborhood so maybe people are assuming that there's a decent risk someone here has traveled to Wuhan. Also I think facemasks are just more of a thing in China itself after SARS etc so people from there are probably more accustomed to breaking them out.

So far from what I can glean, it's not so much how deadly this is as how fast it can spread and how new it is (i.e. no one has built up immunity) -- in other words so far it doesn't look likely to kill a large percentage of its victims, but it may just have so many victims that it will cause a significant number of deaths, particularly among more vulnerable populations?

Or I guess 80 deaths / 2700 cases maybe is particularly deadly?

SARS apparently had a 10% death rate and a 50% death rate for patients over 65 years, by comparison. Avian flu was much higher -- 60%, but much less transmissible.

IANAV but my sense is that the fear depends on believing that China is lying about the numbers but aiui WHO has been on the ground and would know if a massive coverup was underway?

So far I actually get a sense of China really trying to get out ahead of this in comparison to past outbreaks, but who knows.

That's what his model showed, at least

Seems like it would be hard to build a reasonable model for that when you haven't discovered the method of transmission, yet.

I’ve started seeing people - mostly Chinese I think - wearing facemasks in the UK and California. On the street, in meetings,...

I was going to buy a box of disposable facemasks on amazon but they seem to be mostly sold out/on backorder. Might pop out today to try to get more from a local store. Even if I don't use them for this I want to start wearing them on planes.

xp I always see Chinese tourists wearing masks out and about in London, haven’t noticed an uptick. I remember being impressed when I was in HK (I think?) that the escalators were disinfected on their handrails, but ofc it makes a huge amount of sense considering.

I went to my local asian grocery store on saturday and every one of the dozen or so people working there was wearing a mask and latex gloves which has never been the case before

apparently masks being worn in NYC

what exactly is wrong with people

I am so into the masks. I wish it became common in nyc especially in winter. (keeps your face warmer, provided humidity, makes people leave you alone).

that's true, could add a cane for the last

Some work rando accosted me in the restroom like Kevin McCarthy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Okay, dude I've never talked to before, congratulations on working from home for the foreseeable future, I hope your incipient prepperdom serves you well.

Oh ok, so there has been totally a run on masks. https://www.bbc.com/news/51245373

My nephew who has been living n Shanghai for 12 years, is married to a Chinese girl and is moving back to the UK, his wife and kid are flying out this week - 3 months early - because of the situation, he's saying most everyone there is staying home, minimising interactions and so on.

2018 nCoV death toll to 108 as of last hour.
R0 (how many newly infected when an infected enters) estimates I've seen are 2.8 and 3.8.
In hospitalized, 15% mortality. Total mortality in infected likely lower (3-4%).
Fairly infectious during the asymptomatic incubation period.

Science-wise, 79% sequence similarity to SARS, 98.5% sequence similarity to other bat corona viri. So its bats, again.

I have a case of N95 masks and plenty gloves, but stocked up on hand sanitizer and instant potato flakes today.

sanpaku u may live to 120 but can u answer why it is that a virus that doesn't kill bats* does kill humans

*maybe it does?

That should be: 2019 nCoV (2019 novel Coronavirus) above.

Imago: Parasites coevolve with their normal hosts. Lethality is selected against, not just in the hosts but in the parasites.

It's when zoonotic diseases jump to new hosts that regulation goes awry. And of course, unexposed populations have no adaptive immunity.

What's the seasonal flu's current mortality rate in China?

ty for your answer. guess i'd been thrown by thudding explanations of tuberculosis killing humans because 'this virus is meant to only give a huge animal like a cow a mild fever but look at what it does to us' but obv it's more complex than that

Germany confirms first European human-to-human transmission

https://www.theguardian.com/science/live/2020/jan/28/coronavirus-first-death-in-beijing-as-us-issues-new-china-travel-warning-live-updates

I'm not sure if other countries are getting the same "What measures are being taken to return our sovereign citizens to the UK?" - it seems to me a mixture of "obviously they won't have caught this foreign disease" with "but theoretically if 100 people sneeze on them, that might be a problem"

xpost

R0 (how many newly infected when an infected enters) estimates I've seen are 2.8 and 3.8.

I saw this useful point of comparison:

The so-called R naught, a mathematical equation that shows how many people will get an illness from each infected person, is somewhere around 1.5 to 3, she said. Measles, which is one of the most contagious infections in the world, has an R naught of around 12 to 18, by comparison, she said.

What's the seasonal flu's current mortality rate in China?

I don't know but I saw this article this morning which highlights a question mark about the official figures (there are also some numbers quoted but I don't see winter 2019/20 figures for China):

"The US flu mortality rate includes cases where flu causes other illnesses to worsen and lead to death, while China only counts people who die directly from flu," an observer who prefers to be anonymous told the Global Times

https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1177725.shtml

btw best wishes to Camaraderie's family and sorry for the worry and disruption to their plans

My daughter was mildly fretting about this yesterday, and I reminded her that she was too afraid to get the flu shot this year (apparently not that effective, but still), even though the flu killed something like an estimated 8-20,000 in the US last year, with millions more infected.