outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

So should everyone just stay home then, indefinitely?

I think if you're in a high risk group, or have people in your immediate life in a high risk group, you should be more cautious than most people. Who all may have it already!

Our neighbors up here in the country are in their mid-70s and she's got heart health issues and I just hugged her a few days ago. Back in Brooklyn, most people I'm around are young(er) and mostly healthy but a lot of us smoke and many of us are uninsured. I was going to visit my parents soon, but they're ALSO in their 70's and my dad has a history of heart trouble. So yeah if you have at-risk people in your life, it could be a lot worse than me personally just having a bad cold for a week.

wth

live your life until you get a diagnosis ffs

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Friday, March 6, 2020 4:22 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

protect mel brooks at all costs imo

The question I haven't really seen answered - and maybe there is no answer yet, which increases anxiety - is how this is significantly different from H1N1, or SARS, or the flu or any similar outbreak from the past couple of decades. I mean, yeah, the virus itself is different, but the world survived those without melting down. What is different this time?

Nope. Wash hands as if you found religion, find alternatives to handshakes, disinfect shared surfaces like doorknobs, avoid mass events, and advocate for/get tested as soon as you suspect contact. Take extra precautions if you regularly interact with the elderly.

South Korea shows the path: drive-thru free testing for everyone. It tells infected when they should self-quarantine, and relieves others from anxiety and permits them to function in the economy. Ideally, every healthcare worker interacting with patients would be tested weekly.

Asymptomatic transition is the key deifference. With sars and h1n1 you got a fever before you could transmit the disease. With this one you can walk around for two weeks or never even know you have it and still be spreading it around.

At this point, if there's one case in your region, there's many.

Don't visit Seattle if there's no cases in your region.

If there's cases in your region, working from home and avoiding large gatherings of people indefinitely will help slow the spread of disease, which improves the ability of the health system to respond to serious cases.

Basically, large events here are being canceled for good reason, it's not to keep us from bleeding from the eyes because we were all at a concert, it's to protect our community as a whole and the most vulnerable and susceptible people in it.

I live in a city with millions of people in it. There are like 10 known cases here. I’m not self-quarantining if I get a cough!

basically, stay home because of this graph:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESas8tHVAAAhr_I?format=jpg&name=4096x4096

There are like 10 known cases here. I’m not self-quarantining if I get a cough!

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Friday, March 6, 2020 1:33 PM (sixteen seconds ago)

stay home if you get a cough anyway ffs

srsly

Yeah, I don't go to the gym if I'm sick, even if it's just a cold, because no one wants me there and I don't want to get anyone sick.

xp Josh:

SARS had a basic reproduction number in the range of 2-4. H1N1, and the seasonal flu have basic reproduction numbers (R0) around 1.5. Estimates for Covid19 hover around 2.3. Some estimates are higher, up to 4.7-6.6 in populations taking no precautions. Covid19 is probably more infectious than SARS, H1N1, or seasonal flu, but not as bad as the 1918 influenza.

SARS had a case fatality rate around 10%, but many mild or nonsymptomatic cases were missed, so the real CFR could be much lower. H1N1 has a CFR around 0.1-0.9%. Seasonal flu is about 0.1%. The best lower bound I've seen for Covid19 is the 0.67% seen in South Korea, which has by far the best medical surveillance of any nation with a large outbreak. Actual CFR seen in Korea will be higher, as there are more critical and serious cases that haven't resolved (to death or recovery), and many cases that may enter those categories. All of these are lower than the 1918 influenza.

In all this, its worth considering that Covid19 has outpaced the related SARS in both cases and deaths, despite far more effective containment efforts. My belief is that when this epidemic is over and statistics are better, Covid19 will be viewed as significantly more infectious than SARS (R0 around 2.5) but with a similar real case fatality rate (CFR around 0.7-1%, much higher in nations with limited or overwhelmed healthcare resources).

OK well I do stay home if I get a cough actually because I take any excuse to work from home that I can because working from home rules - but like - people can cough near me, I don't give a shit!

xp to my last post: that should read "more infectious than SARS (with Covid19's R0 being around 2.5, perhaps higher)"

On that graphic

1. A very short thread on the power of data graphics and scientific communication.

Roughly a week ago, some very smart person* sat down, drew this graph, and saved lives.

(*It's 2 AM. Without an economist subscription, I can't quickly discover whom. Maybe someone can help.) pic.twitter.com/eU71Eu60eS

— Carl T. Bergstrom (@CT_Bergstrom) March 6, 2020

xpost Interesting. Am I right then that even the mortality rate is pretty nebulous? Like SARS et al., obviously they are not testing and can't test everyone, so there is no way to know how many people have got it and were/are asymptomatic, or had very mild symptoms. They are only testing people suspected to be infected (another great album title!) or who were in contact with infected. So maybe the mortality rate is whatever it is *among those people* but it's unclear (right?) what it is or could be in the general population. My point being, whether this is better or worse than SARS, H1N1 et al. is moot, because SARS, H1N1 et al. were not good! And yet, they didn't cripple the world. As far as I remember.

And I still think the 1918 flu comparison is mostly academic, because of both 100 years of medical progress and the advent of antibiotics (which, yeah, won't do anything for this virus, but which are massively helpful in staving off ancillary, opportunistic illness which often does the actual killing).

austin declares emergency, sxsw cancelled

There it is!

13 cases in Portugal now, and flights being cancelled out of Lisbon (preumably due to reduced demand).

Are we being crippled? We’re just staying home.

https://img.taste.com.au/kwdDtrvw/w640-h640-cfill/taste/2020/03/fireshot-capture-1352-_il-grande-sconfitto-da-questo-virus-sono-le-penne-lisce_-lironia-_-www-huffingtonpost-it-159266-1.png
https://img.taste.com.au/CJTdso4y/w720-h480-cfill-q80/taste/2020/03/no-buying-pasta-159267-1.jpg

my Italian coworker told me about these pictures that are going around of the shelves in Italian supermarkets being completely bare except for many packs of penne lisce, the most bad and hated pasta lol

Berkeley has at least once potential case, someone who has self-quarantined (my wife saw her outside of whole foods last week in her mask, she realized later), and she lays out what it was like in South Korea vs what it's like in the US, and it's depressing:

https://www.berkeleyside.com/2020/03/05/opinion-after-seeing-what-south-korea-is-doing-to-stop-the-spread-of-covid-19-the-u-s-seems-unprepared-can-it-step-up

"The question I haven't really seen answered - and maybe there is no answer yet, which increases anxiety - is how this is significantly different from H1N1, or SARS, or the flu or any similar outbreak from the past couple of decades. I mean, yeah, the virus itself is different, but the world survived those without melting down. What is different this time?"

I went down some fucking FB tin hat rabbit hole that posited that this virus doesn't go away, like HIV; if you have it, you have it forever; and that it was likely an engineered virus. My gut reaction is "that's stupid" but you know, could be true.

That graphic was reproduced in reality in 1918, after Philadelphia held a Liberty Loan Drive parade on September 28.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/104/18/7582/F1.large.jpg

head of Philadelphia’s Naval Hospital told the Public Ledger in the days before the parade: “There is no cause for further alarm. We believe we have it well in hand.”

No that’s stupid

xp

Exposure means *immunity*

I'm hoping that no-one in this thread is taking advice from Josh (or Tracer, ffs Tracer!) but this is more than usually bad advice - there are multiple reports of people recovering and being re-infected.

I’m not handing out advice Andrew. I’m saying that I’m not worried if someone I work with or sit next to on the Tube has the sniffles.

“We should all run out and catch this ASAP cause then we’ll have immunity and stop it spreading” is galaxy brain stuff

xp runny nose isn't a symptom afaik, so "the sniffles" is nbd. the problem, as has been noted repeatedly itt, is that the person sitting next to you who seems fine could have it, and easily transmit it

i'm not worried for myself if i run across anyone who's sick, but more worried for others. my mom is coming to visit L.A. tomorrow for a couple weeks, just in time to be in possibly the next city on the west coast to get a marked increase in cases. while she's in "ok" health, she's also 72, and i'm likely going to try to do things with her that don't involve close quarters with others. just in case.

perhaps the people of LA could substitute the usual public transpo commute with single driver highway auto traffic to help prevent further spread

live your life until you get a diagnosis ffs definitely sounds like advice?

Tracer the containment efforts are trying to curb the spread so at risk and immunocompromised patients don't get it and curb preventable deaths. It's not to prevent all regular citizens from getting sick.

Nobody is saying lock yourself in the bunker for a month, but (and this isn't directed at you, but people I know IRL) people who are all like "fuck this cowardice, let's stop quarantining and cancelling major events, just live your lives, we'll get it and recover in a week" are basically flipping the bird to the people most at risk from dying from this.

I mean we do want to prevent regular folk from getting sick too but the reason more aggressive measures are being taken here are to contain the mass spreading which will reduce the number of deaths

Not saying this is what's happening itt but there is a select category of human beings endowed with unusually potent immune systems who are empirically incapable of grasping the meaning of illness and who speak of it in insufferably flippant tones as a result.

Nobody is saying lock yourself in the bunker for a month, but (and this isn't directed at you, but people I know IRL) people who are all like "fuck this cowardice, let's stop quarantining and cancelling major events, just live your lives, we'll get it and recover in a week" are basically flipping the bird to the people most at risk from dying from this.

otm

if you know anyone with cancer or recovering from cancer (and everyone does) - keep them and other people with weakened immune systems in mind.

xpost That's not really what I said or meant re: going out to become immune. What I've said repeatedly is that there are high risk people and low risk people, and most people by far are low risk and therefore outright quarantine is an extreme position to take. You should go about your business unless you really feel like you can't or shouldn't. Obviously that is up to you, but unless you ("you") are advocating/advising/suggesting that literally everybody shuts themselves in for two weeks, then there's at least some chance you're going to be exposed. And if you are exposed, most likely you will then become immune. Speaking of spreading possible bullshit:

there are multiple reports of people recovering and being re-infected.

Here's an article I just found about why you may be seeing those scattered reports: https://fortune.com/2020/03/06/coronavirus-recover-test-positive-twice/

Being reinfected with COVID-19 is possible, said Sharon Lewin, director of the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity in Melbourne, but such an instance would be "surprising." It's possible that patients are not actually being reinfected, but that other factors—misdiagnosis, human error, or faulty tests—are giving that appearance.

Testing done with animal models for SARS, a similar coronavirus, indicates that patients who recover from the disease will have immunity from it. "From what we know of other coronaviruses, you recover, you make an antibody response, and you clear the virus, and then if you rechallenge the animal with the same virus they're protected," Lewin said.

Lewin put stocks in explanations other than reinfection, but she emphasized that the virus still has too many unknowns and there are too few reported twice-positive cases to conduct a study or draw a definitive conclusion.

Regardless, for those locking themselves away, which is your prerogative, that's a surefire way to limit your exposure, to this and all sorts of other stuff, but it will still likely be out there should you ever decide to emerge.

I’m not trying to limit my exposure for myself I’m trying to limit it for public health while my city is on the upward trajectory of an epidemic outbreak. And that means I’m working from home for at least three weeks and so are tens of thousands of other people.

And you should, or it's not a bad idea, because as you said, your city is on the upward trajectory of an epidemic outbreak.

And I would do the same here if and when it happens here.

...but other cities are also likely on the same trajectory. remember that thing where the US is completely failing to provide testing kits?

xp

it's amazing that you can know so much about this whole coronavirus thing and not think that it's already here, in chicago

basically this, 100x over and over again, for a total of 100,000 times

I’m not trying to limit my exposure for myself I’m trying to limit it for public health while my city is on the upward trajectory of an epidemic outbreak. And that means I’m working from home for at least three weeks and so are tens of thousands of other people.

― college bong rip guy (silby),

There have been five cases (so far) in the state of IL.

I mean, I'm just reading up on this the same way other people are, in real time.

nice. how many tests have there been in IL?

i mean, you got tested, right?