outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

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?

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.

― Maresn3st,

This is insanely troublesome imo
What if, god forbid nephew is contagious? He leaves the room for housekeeping to be exposed and no chemical decon for the next guest? Isn't it possible to be a carrier and not have symptoms?

Mordy: I'm not making a moral judgement. I'm just saying mainland China is way more likely to contain a novel epidemic from the bushmeat trade than say D.R. Congo.

Nephew doing this at an airport hotel would be a pretty good plot point for a disaster thriller.

Useful chart for perspective:

https://i.imgur.com/czzQbWu.png

that is useful, and as usual i fear that not enough people will notice the logarithmic scale

I keep seeing numbers like this

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Which says, roughly, 500 dead, 900 "recovered", and it's easy to read that as a 30%+ mortality rate. I figure it's only because recovery takes longer than dying and there's just not been enough time yet.

The actual infected and recovered rates from Hubei are only indicative.

To move from "suspected case" to "confirmed case" requires a positive test for the virus, and to my knowledge they're still using PCR kits, which are presently limited to 2000/d for the province (and this despite the fact that China's national virus institute is 15 km from the Huanan wet market). Similarly, to move from "confirmed case" to "recovered" requires a negative result from the same test. As you might imagine, there's more demand for tests in the symptomatic than in the recovered.

If the testing kits / testing throughput were unlimited, were reported without several days lag, and everyone with symptoms was tested, we'd see more confirmed cases, and more recovered cases, as well a lot of people developing symptoms not severe enough to go to the hospitals for treatment. We'd perhaps also learn of some who got sick, stayed at home and died (and aren't currently counted). When this is all over in 6-12 months we'll get the retrospective statistics, which will infer a lot more cases and deaths that didn't match reporting criteria.

From here/now, it looks like a viral pneumonia with similar lethality to SARS (<10%, though higher in the elderly), but also somewhat more infectious than SARS.

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.

First British national to contract the virus confirmed. Seems likely they attended the conference at the Grand Hyatt in Singapore that's linked to a bunch of the cases.

I'm in Jakarta at the moment and have my temperature taken every time i enter my hotel.

XP to Outdoor Miner, we found out he's actually rented an AirBnb, so not very much better if he is contagious but at least no contact with anyone until the two weeks have elapsed.

This is mildly encouraging:

https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/coronavirus-chinese-data-of-82-cases-are-mild-says-who

Seems they're turning Milton Keynes, or at least a bit of it, into the UK's main quarantine facility. Best thing for the place tbh.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/feb/07/coronavirus-britons-evacuated-from-wuhan-to-be-quarantined-in-milton-keynes

Foxconn, the electronics company that supplies Apple, has begun manufacturing its own surgical masks, allowing Chinese workers to churn out iPhones uninterrupted as the coronavirus crisis continues.

*whistles cheerfully*

Five British nationals have been diagnosed with the coronavirus in France, after staying in the same ski chalet and coming into contact with a person who had been in Singapore, Health Minister Agnes Buzyn said on Saturday.

The total number of people infected with the virus in France has now reached 11.

Buzyn said the group of people newly infected with the virus were not in a serious condition.

They had formed "a cluster, a grouping around one original case" after staying in the same chalet, in the Contamine Monjoie resort in Savoie in eastern France.

"That original case was brought to our attention last night, it is a British national who had returned from Singapore where he had stayed between January 20 and 23, and he arrived in France on January 24 for four days," Buzyn said.

thanks Britain

classic brits-abroad behaviour

if brexit stops this coronimperialism then I'm team boris

this guy calmly saying some mildly discouraging things

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

Two bits that jumped out at me: 'we think that the epidemic is roughly doubling in size every five days' and 'we expect the infection levels to peak at the epicenter, Wuhan, in about a month's time'.

When I sneeze up in the place
You better wash yo self
Wuhan
got you all in check
I got that street fish steez
make you respect death
Wuhan
got you all in check
And you know we come through
to wreck the medical tech
Wuhan
got you all in check
Throw your hands up in the air
You better disinfect
Wuhan
got you all in check

is that from the Wu Han Clan?

We met up with a woman from Beijing yesterday, we are trying to do business with her. She said that she thought the Chinese government should seal off Hubei and let the disease run its course there. My wife is from Hubei and most of her family are still there, so this didn't go down well. The woman also said that she thought the people of Hubei must be genetically weak and this is the work of nature improving the species. She laughed at my wife for suggesting that if the current leadership cannot handle this they should be replaced, she said without the CCP there would be no new China. Look at the UK, she said, they used to have an empire, now they are weak, and we Chinese are strong. Look, they changed their leader and now they have a worse leader. My wife is sad to hear this, not really surprised, though. This woman is from the 1% in China, from our experience her views are not exactly unusual.

Not sure why I'm writing this here, except that I feel like writing it somewhere.

Christ :(

Ime it's not just the 1%ers who buy into that rot. Let it not be said that Chinese state propaganda is ineffective.

it's not just the 1%, it's true

On a somewhat related note, one of my friends, a Canadian of Chinese descent, just got back from Hong Kong and is reportedly sharing articles over Facebook about how the seasonal flu's mortality rate is supposedly higher in the US than the 2019-nCoV's in China. According to him, disregard for this 'alternative' narrative is yet another instance of Western imperialism.

He's also a Jordan Peterson stan and claims to have fully adopted his all-beef diet…