How concerned are you about this Coronavirus?

[puzzlegal]

@China_Guy

China Wife left Shanghai yesterday and is now in Seattle. Since the US airlines stopped direct flights, she used her ticket on Korean Air to Korea, then switched to a Delta flight to SF, then to SEA. Took 24 hours vs a 12 hour direct flight. From our flat in Shanghai to the boarding the plane, she had her temperature checked a half dozen times. In the airport in Korea as well. Upon landing in the US at a designated coronavirus airport (7 in the US), she simply filled out a form.

In Shanghai, at least, no one goes out without wearing a mask. If one person in your housing complex, which can be at least thousands of people, has a fever/suspected case, the entire complex goes into actual quarantine with every person having 2x per day temperature checks. Groceries are delivered.

China Wife is highly unlikely to be carrying any virus. That said, kids are barred from using the master bathroom, and I have a huge bottle of hand sanitizer sitting on the kitchen counter. If any of us run a fever in the next few days, then defcon 3.

Good luck. And hell, I read your later post. Good luck with all that, too.

@Chronos

No, how dangerous it is is the one question we do know the answer to. Either it spreads easily (in which case, the number of cases is much higher than the number reported, and hence the likelihood of dying once you catch it is very low), or it has a high mortality once caught (and hence, there aren’t many more cases than the ones reported, and hence it must not spread very easily): We don’t know which of those two scenarios is the case. But what we do know is that the number of deaths, as a proportion of the exposed population, is extremely low.

You are reading the numbers wrong. This is still in the “exponential growth” stage. So most of the infected haven’t had it long enough to either die OR recover. And the numbers coming out of China are out-dated, both because China is not a reliable provider of information in general, and also because there’s a long backlog to get tested in China. From his obit in the WSJ: The “whistle blower”, a 33 year old opthamologist who observed that one of his patients caught it from another person (her sister, I think?) just died of it. He wasn’t officially diagnosed with it until 2 weeks after he developed symptoms, although he thought he had it, and immediately moved to a hotel room to try to avoid infecting his pregnant wife and child.

So we don’t know any of the numbers, but we do know that all of them are growing fast, and that there’s a lot of panic in the midst of the epidemic, where people have first-hand information.

I think this is pretty bad. I’m still hopeful we will contain it, as SARS and MERS have been contained. But I don’t think worry is silly.