outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

Usually French doctors load you up with three prescriptions for various things just to be safe!

xxp I might not be paying enough attention here but isn’t it less deadly than both SARS and MERS? There’s nothing besides trying to stop the spread that can really be done, just try to take normal precautions. Obviously shit for anyone immunocompromised, but so is flu season.

If I understand correctly, it's less lethal than SARS but more so than the regular flu.

There is no regular flu. Some variants are worse than others and they can generally only vaccinate for a few strains anyway.

Sorry, I worded it wrong: more like 'average'.

I was flummoxed when the WHO called this an 'internal Chinese affair' just ten days ago. Anyone could see this would spread, and fast, in today's world. Not sure what to think of the French and Dutch sending planes to "bring back" citizens though.

Canada hesitated at first and will now be doing the same. On a purely emotional level, I'm glad they made this call as one of my ex-colleagues who married a guy from Wuhan is currently stuck there with their two children. None of them are exhibiting any symptoms (so far) but no matter what happens they're better off in a Canadian quarantine for the next few weeks than smack dab in the infection's middle, so to speak.

The shoddy handling of repatriations, the ridiculous assurances from the WHO, both bad, but the real trouble is from the Chinese government keeping it secret for weeks.

If anyone feels like watching it, here is a scary real-time map https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

Not clicking on that lol.

Pom, I'm glad your ex-colleague is ok and will have the chance to return. Can she bring her husband and kids though? (there was a story about a Dutch man who had to choose between staying or going back but having to leave his wife there...)

Her husband and the kids are all Canadian citizens, so it thankfully won't be an issue. I did come across that story you mention – just awful.

As an aside, the Sinophobia that has predictably erupted to the surface in the West (and elsewhere) as a result of this ordeal is just as depressing.

…with France unsurprisingly at the forefront:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-51294305

It's as predictable as it is ugly, indeed, but I've not seen it as awful as that. Ugh.

I tried to take my collleagues to a (very good) Hunan restaurant in Sydney and was overruled. Chinese restaurants appear very empty here and normally this would be a very busy time just after lunar new year. A mixture of a massive drop in incoming Chinese tourists and people being stupid and racist it seems.

bloke on the tv just now saying that we should be better at this and spend the time between outbreaks preparing antidotes for the next virus. isn't the point of these outbreaks that they are new and can't be predicted / prepared for? there's no universal antivirus that'll work against everything, is there?

(the guy was some american politician, responsible for some kinds of chemical attack preparedness)

(joe lieberman. from the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense)

FYI we hate him, he is the worst

My friend in singapore just canceled his short trip to HK. I thought that was a bit much but I guess if you wouldn't feel comfortable moving about freely in HK then I guess? The price gouging of face masks online right now is ridiculous.

Officially a WHO global health emergency (well, yeah).

xp: Lieberman's an idiot. There is constant monitoring of emergent flu strains in order to identify which may pose the greatest risk in the following year, but creating, testing, and distributing each year's flu vaccine still takes the better part of a year.

For novel zoonotic diseases, there are no shortcuts. It still generally takes over six months to identify the pathogen, culture it in animals or cell lines, devise a way of attenuating it's virulence while maintaining its ability to provoke immunity, testing, upscaling production, and distributing a new vaccine.

I think a lot of countries are going to look at China's lockdown of Hubei, which went far beyond the WHO's recommendations, for insights on how to slow emergent epidemics. I suspect when this is over it will have saved thousands of lives. You can bet the US CDC, FEMA and military will be talking.

To prevent this in the first place, we'd need to convince entire nations to not fux with wild animals, which are the reservoirs for novel epidemic strains. Hemorrhagic fever outbreaks in Africa generally stem from the bushmeat trade. China shut down wet markets like the one in Wuhan for several years after the 2003 SARS outbreak. The WHO could push nations to inspect their CAFOs to ensure they're not being used by wild bats (source of both SARS and 2019 nCoV) as shelters, etc.

they sell bush meat all over the place in London. Brixton market definitely. i have to say i'm amazed something like this hasn't happened in London.

yeah I live a short walk away from the main bushmeat market in Paris (the marché Dejean)

I think the difference is in China the animals are often live. It’s the mixing of live animals that presents the biggest risk. Flu viruses tend to originate in southern China due to the close proximity of pigs, poultry and humans in a hot and humid climate.

I went to costco today to pick up contacts and I saw a white woman with a facemask on trying on multiple pairs of glasses. I was irritated but also couldn't settle on what part of it I was most irritated by.

Don't worry. Fashion will endure the apocalypse.

http://313ct818yszd3xd6xa2z47nm-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Vogmask-Faceslap-HKFW14-Show-026-1.jpg

First 2019-nCoV death outside of China (in the Phillipines), global toll hits 304. Only 328 recovered.
14,380 cases, with 19,544 suspected (there's a shortage of diagnostic kit and hence significant lag).

Coincidental that UK evacuees are travelling in four Horsemen buses.
https://i.imgur.com/K0afFK5.jpg

This is nuts

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/coronavirus-and-travel-to-china-foreign-secretarys-statement-4-february-2020

In light of the ongoing coronavirus outbreak, the Foreign & Commonwealth Office advises against ‘all but essential’ travel to mainland China and now recommends that British Nationals who are able to leave China do so.

On the one hand, I appreciate them taking this so seriously. On the other hand, they are taking this even more seriously than many of the news reports have indicated it merits, which makes me think that it's worse than they're letting on.

There has been some talk about why Xi has not appeared in public for over a week now, lots of different theories, all of them worrying in different ways.

First confirmed cases of local transmission in Singapore today - though affecting people who had direct contact with Chinese tourists.

There's a lot of stupid conspiracy theory crap going around, as usual, but this feels like it's kinda based on science, dunno?
The theory is: the virus was developed for developing vaccines but got out of a lab:

https://jameslyonsweiler.com/2020/01/30/on-the-origins-of-the-2019-ncov-virus-wuhan-china/

and a follow-up a couple of days later:
https://jameslyonsweiler.com/2020/02/02/moderately-strong-confirmation-of-a-laboratory-origin-of-2019-ncov/

Isn't this just a basically nasty cold virus that gives you pneumonia? Which kills approx 2.5m people a year anyway? 305 people seems like... not that many relatively?

Trying to figure out where I should stand on the 'freaking-out-ometer' basically

That's the cognitive dissonance. The flu kills millions, pneumonia kills millions. This virus has killed 300, mostly in a country of over a billion, and governments are restricting travel and evacuating citizens.

It’s at minimum 20x more likely to be fatal that common flu aiui and there is scope for it to get worse.

i suspect it has to do with comments like this: "First 2019-nCoV death outside of China (in the Phillipines), global toll hits 304. Only 328 recovered. 14,380 cases, with 19,544 suspected (there's a shortage of diagnostic kit and hence significant lag)." which makes it seem like maybe there's a 50% fatality rate but i'm pretty sure even tho i'm not an epidemiologist that this is a confused representative of the numbers.

if you're not in china, no, you don't need to be worrying. i think the fears are highly related to the fact that it's transmitted by human-to-human contact, and there isn't a vaccine right (expected sometime in summer). so if it isn't contained, and the epidemic became a pandemic, your city might become a version of wuhan. it's one of those things where you should be very glad that the pros are freaking out, because their containment measures are what's keeping it from spreading more rapidly.

yes i agree with that. let the professionals freak out.

As I mentioned up-thread, my nephew who lives in Shanghai has booked a flight to the UK, instead of coming straight home to his folk's house he's booking into a hotel for two weeks to quarantine himself (of sorts) which we wondered might be a bit over the top but he works in pharma and seems a little spooked, so maybe things over there are more intense than is being reported.

I'm just repeating the numbers. BTW, death toll as of 4 February 2020 was 427.

From all appearances this 2003 SARS redux, just with a third higher R0 (reproduction number, "infectivity"), about the same lethality, and a Chinese government that's taking it seriously (and which will save thousands of lives, How I wish I had similarly competent governance).

4000 people in China die prematurely from air pollution every day. We're still in the 70-100 range for 2019-nCoV daily deaths. It's barely significant, yet. I would watch the secondary outbreaks in Thailand and Kerala/India, as while they benefit from milder climates they don't have the benefit of an autocratic government with ample resources.

it is so weird when you say things like “they don't have the benefit of an autocratic government with ample resources”

or "How I wish I had similarly competent governance"

They might be harvesting organs from minority groups but they sure make the trains run on time!

also this highly effective resourced competent government allowed the conditions that lead to the outbreak and acc to WHO are much more poorly prepared than the US for contagion so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Hubei is 4% of the Chinese population. If you think the U.S. could have cordoned off Illinois or Pennsylvania (and shut down automotive traffic) in a day you haven't spent much time around Americans or its government. We don't have nearly the authoritarian mindset (even in our authoritarian party)(cf: see any hurricane evacuation), and our government doesn't have the resources on command. Should the U.S. face a similar epidemic, we won't be able to slow its spread (for the months until a vaccine is possible) nearly as well.

Best case for US is we slow it enough that it doesn’t start breaking out until the end of flu season. It’s likely to go into hibernation then until next winter, giving more time for preparation.

xp: And yeah, its pretty dumb that the Chinese people continue to fux around with eating chrysanthemum bats after SARS. They've also decimated sharks worldwide for fin soup and African elephants for powdered ivory aphrodesiacs. I'm mainly speaking of the ability of the government to essentially imprison 4% of their population in a day, to build infectious disease hospitals in 9 days, etc.

what i wouldn't give to live in a country that can imprison 4% on their population in a day

if only the leaders of the united states just had a more, i don't know, authoritarian mindset

I mean, how else are you supposed to get shit done?