outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

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.

what was her response?

Thanks for the link, aps.

xpost She didn't have a good response, honestly. She's deathly afraid of needles and is the only one in the family that didn't get the flu shot. But she at least seemed to recognize the contradiction.

Dude who had a coronavirus freakout on me while I vainly attempted to urinate yesterday also asked if I'd gotten my flu shot (which I monosyllabically responded that I had) and proudly asserted in turn that he doesn't do that. And what good would it even have done now that we're in the midst of a whole other epidemic? He seems like a rational actor, for sure.

the degree to which people rationalize not getting the flu shot fuckin blows my mind

There is an old timer blowhard who is in a lot of my yoga classes, and I almost lost my shit when he started lecturing everyone about how flu shots cause dementia.

the flu shot gives u autism iirc, the only sure way to avoid the flu is to cover yourself head-to-toe every morning in hand sanitiser before squeezing into a protective full-body condom

Yeah, dementia isn't autism, dummy. You can tell him I said that.

There is an old timer blowhard who is in a lot of my yoga classes, and I almost lost my shit when he started lecturing everyone about how flu shots cause dementia.

― Mario Meatwagon (Moodles), Tuesday, January 28, 2020 9:33 AM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

Did u ask him how many flu shots it took for him to come by this opinion

I did not want to engage at all because I knew I would get extremely angry very quickly, and also didn't want to learn about the rest of the class's insights on vaccines, I'm sure it would be a very depressing and futile conversation.

Acupuncture needles work just as well as inoculation needles against the flu, afaict, and with 100% less autism and chakra contamination.

i've heard that a knitting needle delivered directely into the brain through the eyeball immediately drops the risk of infection to zero

A 2100-year old Chinese mummy told me the trick is to draw blood, otherwise you get the coronavirus, or worse.

ehhhh

I'd like to thank the scientific community for teaching me her language or I wouldn't have been able to share this ageless insight with you.

ehhhh

My favorite sad lol flu shot story came from several years ago. I popped in to a drug store to get it, put my name on a list, and then waited a couple of minutes. There was a mother and her teen son sitting in the waiting area, too, and after I put in my info the mother declares derisively "I hear the flu shot *makes* you get sick." And then her son, lost in his phone, sort of mutters an affirmation, "uh-huh." And I turn to her and ask, why would they design a shot that purposely makes you sick? And she basically muttered some version of "well, I dunno about that ..." (Echoed years later when I was stuck next to a crazy old Trump supporter on a plane, and when we landed he started ranting about Obama - this was during the election - blah blah blah. And then he starts complaining that Obama is anti-military, and that Trump is more respectful of the troops. And I finally turn to him and say, you know Trump is a draft dodger who made up medical conditions to get his deferment, right? And he called avoiding VD his own version of Vietnam, right? And the guy just mutters "well, I dunno about that ...")

Over the Christmas holidays back in Montreal a cashier at the supermarket told me her mother fell prey to Alzheimer's after getting the flu shot and she looked at me pleadingly, saying 'that's got to be it, right?', and I had absolutely no idea how to respond save via a half-mumbled and utterly inadequate 'it must be hard, I lost my grandmother to it as well'.

Lol!

via a half-mumbled and utterly inadequate

This came out as 'ehhhh' didn't it?

lol it certainly did, although I had yet to learn the tongue of the Ancients at that point.