So the good news is the mortality rate is only 2%. The bad news is you could catch it 50 times.
82,164 confirmed infections
2,801 dead
32,872 recovered
There are currently at least 60 confirmed infections in the US; today’s new US patients also brought this news:
[Trump put Pence in charge of the US effort against the virus](South Korea reported 334 more cases, bringing its total to 1,595. Most of the new cases were in the country’s fourth-biggest city, Daegu, where the outbreak has hit hardest and the national government has mobilized public health tools to assist the region’s overwhelmed medical system.
But there are signs the virus is spreading further in South Korea with 55 cases reported so far in the capital, Seoul, and 58 in the second-largest city, Busan. The country also confirmed its 13th death Thursday, with most still in and near Daegu.
China reported 433 new cases along with 29 additional deaths. Thursday’s updates bring mainland China’s totals to 78,497 cases, and 2,744 deaths.
Of the new cases, 383 were in the epicenter of the city of Wuhan, where the virus first emerged in December. Wuhan also accounted for 19 of the new deaths.[url=Trump urges calm even as US reports worrisome new virus case | AP News).
A judge in California had issued an injunction against quarantine.
FWIW, Wuhan’s new target date for starting the quarantine process to reopen factories is 10 March. In other words, on 10 March, a small select group will be able to go into quarantine outside the factory, in order to start working on 24 March. The 10 March date is the current plan of record, and subject to change…
COVID-19 is starting to affect religious worship.
Ash Wednesday sprinkles not smudges in the Philippines.
Saudi Arabia halts travel to Islam’s holiest site over virus.
I got to work this morning and read in the news that the first known case in my city (Vienna) has just been confirmed. The patient is being isolated in a hospital a few kilometres from my office.
On top of this I’m scheduled to attend two conferences in northern Italy, one in March and one in June. I’m the keynote speaker at one of them, and a co-organizer of a track at the second, so I can’t really pull out unless it’s absolutely necessary. Fortunately, neither event is taking place in one of the affected areas, though who knows whether the disease will spread to them soon (or whether Vienna itself will go into lockdown). I guess I’ll just have to monitor the situation and the Italian and Austrian governments’ travel advisories.
Getting re-infected with a modified strain of can make you very sick indeed. You get an immune reaction, but it doesn’t kill the virus, so you get a massive self-destructive non-limiting immune reaction to go along with the viral effects.
I’ve been wondering if that was already happening (given the 50% mortality rate for those patients who have already progressed to critical care), but it appears that (so far) I was wrong. It’s just a very destructive virus.
Update: I’ve just learned that the conference I was due to speak at in March has been postponed indefinitely. The website explains that many attendees and keynote speakers have already had to cancel due to their companies’ policies about travel to northern Italy, and that the organizers have decided to delay the entire conference out of concern for the health of attendees. They’re aiming to reschedule for June or July, though they might not make any firm decision about this until May.
Meanwhile, the organizers of the other conference I am due to attend in June are downplaying the risk. They’ve extended the registration and submission deadlines, and have posted the following banner on their social media feed (all formatting and typos reproduced as-is):
Several people have said that here, but as far as I can tell the only injunction has been against transferring patients or quarantined people from a federal facility to a specific state owed facility in California, because the city is too frightened to have them there.
The new US case is very concerning as the patient’s exposure to the virus is unknown and this strongly suggests this was down to community spread. It also took the hospital a number of days to diagnose the patient and it appears that was only at the repeated insistence of the doctors. Testing on any sort of scale has been almost non-existent in the US so once it picks up we should not be surprised if it’s discovered that the US is already in the middle of an outbreak.
This makes no sense to me and is nothing I’ve ever heard about. Maybe you are confused about cytokine storm? A different thing.
In general re-infection due to waning immunity or variant strain leads to milder infections than the primary infections.
As I understand it … in a very small percentage people, their immune systems don’t quite “remember” the viral infection it just fought off. And so, some tiny number of people can get any given viral infection two or more times – same strain of flu, mononucleosis, etc. It doesn’t necessarily follow that failure to pick up lifetime immunity after exposure to, say, H1N1 means that you’ll fail to get immunity after mono, COVID-19, etc.
In short – human immune systems, as a collective, are very effective. On the individual level … they can be imperfect to varying degrees.
North Korea has reportedly executed an official who broke quarantine.
How disruptive will this be?
Interesting to compare the numbers tested and the numbers of cases found by some of the leading countries…
UK: 7,132 concluded tests, of which 13 positive (0.2% positivity rate). Source
Italy: 9,462 tests, of which 470 positive (5.0% positivity rate), awaiting results: unknown. Source
France: 762 tests, of which 17 positive (2.2% positivity rate), 179 awaiting results. Source
Austria: 321 tests, of which 2 positive (0.6% positivity rate), awaiting results: unknown. Source
United States: 445 concluded tests, of which 14 positive (3.1% positivity rate). Source
Of course some countries are testing more randomly than others so the positivity rate should not be used as a measure of infected people.
Japan is closing its schools, elementary through high school, until the end of March. Their school year starts on April 1st.
I ha e friends who are scrambling to figure out what to do with their young kids.
My employer has said, “no big deal, our employees can work from home”. But my boss has little kids. If the schools are closed, there’s no way he’s working effectively at home.
83,387 confirmed infections
2,858 dead
36,557 recovered
It looks like the schools open April 8, spots a long time. My friends are scrambling to find daughter care and there aren’t any good options
It’s a characteristic of Dengue, which is a highly variable virus with 4 common serotypes, each of multiple genotypes.
My ignorance of this area is why I’ve been asking questions related to that.