Reported.
Yes I do.
Could you read this (with Google translate) and comment? Thanks.
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If you actually read what I said about China I gave them great credit in their efforts to shut it down. We don’t have the political power of a communist nation who can do whatever they want to their citizens. I did criticize their deliberate attempt to hush it up. This is something that doubles every 6 days so they essentially screwed the rest of the planet out of at least a month’s worth of prep. There are no off-the-shelf tests or cures for this. And since it’s a virus there will never be a cure for it, just a preventive shot and that takes times to develop.
As for the politics of it I responded to what you said. You’re well educated and should know when you’re being stroked by CNN during an election year. Their news consists of the following: Trump, something bad.
This is essentially another viral scenario and it’s GOING to spread. If it’s worse than current viruses then the results will be worse. We go through this every year and the end result is the same. A new strain of something comes out, a test and vaccine are developed and the chips fall where they may. There’s no guarantee a vaccine will be effective.
We aren’t going to be able to quarantine cities like China. Sports and entertainment venues might get shut down. That’s about it.
Shmendrik,
Not much to comment on: one person writing breathlessly.
What is seen in Italy from influenza?
So far under 400 have died from COVID-19 in Italy. That is bad and it will get worse. The writer’s portrayal of their system, able to handle a season of influenza illnesses that led to 25,000 deaths (and still with a public responding declining influenza vaccination more often than not), as being a war literally exploded? Seems a bit much.
All pubs are closed in Florence, italy:(.
The 400 deaths are concentrated in a region containing about a quarter of Italy’s population, at most. And I think most of them are concentrated among a significantly smaller population than that. Obviously the repurposing of other areas in the hospital as makeshift ICU beds shows that this is causing more critical illness per capita than the flu, even if only because it’s condensed into a shorter time frame than the flu season.
I’m not saying that the true denominator here is 6000 cases.
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Looking at the numbers, I don’t think it does. Estimates for the deaths from Spanish Flu are frankly all over the place - I’ve seen 17million, 50 million and 100 million put forward as possible numbers so there’s a high degree of guesswork there. But looking at some countries for which we have accurate data…
Wikipedia has a short list, so lets use that:
Canada, 50,000 (1919 pop 8.8 million, 0.6 percent dead)
Brazil, 300,000 (1919 pop ~18 million, 1.7 percent dead)
Britain, 250,000 (1919 pop 43 million, 0.6 percent dead)
France,400,000 (1919 pop 39 million, 1 percent dead)
Ghana, 100,000 (1919 pop probably around 7.5-15 million, 0.7 - 1.4 percent dead)
If you take a highish estimate of average per-country death numbers (say 1.5% which is pretty damn huge) and multiply it by the population at the time of 1.8 billion, you get 27 million deaths - which is a shit-ton of people, but nowhere near the top-end estimate of 100 million. If the number was anything like 100 million it must be from deaths in countries where statistics were not easily kept, and people must have been dropping like flies there. I myself am dubious, and think 100 million came out of someone’s ass
But I don’t think there’s anywhere today that’s less technologically developed, and has less medical infrastructure than developed countries like Britain and Canada in 1919. I think their death rates are a pretty good proxy for “what if a Spanish Flu equivalent came again right now?” in the developing world (and note that 0.6% total death rate with around 30% infection rates is equivalent to a case fatality rate of 2% which is a high-end estimate for covid-19 right now). Off a world population of 7.7 billion, that’s 46 million deaths - still an absolute shit-ton of people, but also still erring on the side of high numbers since it assumes that on the whole the world now wouldn’t do any better than the top nations of 1919.
Estimating from the other end … China’s had it for three months now, and had 3000 deaths, and it’s more or less under control - there are new cases, but not increasing exponentially. So if the epidemic lasted a year, that would be 12,000 deaths, in a country that’s 20% of the world population. If the world average was ten times higher than in China, that would be 600,000 people … no longer really a shit-ton in global terms. Even if the world in general did a HUNDRED times worse than China, still only 6 million. Nasty, but not world-shattering levels.
Because the president of my country is fucking moron who thinks he can solve this by simply not testing people to keep the numbers low so he can get re-elected. Said buffoon also can’t figure out why the stock market continues to sink.
He isn’t going to admit there’s a problem until he himself gets sick, and maybe not even then. Which is going to make mounting an effective response in the US difficult and is going to result in deaths that might have otherwise been prevented.
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The same region that has been hit hardest in influenza seasons there. But sure, divide the country’s influenza deaths by four. Each region’s hospitals can handle influenza illness equal to over 6000 deaths in a season, generally concentrated in a two to three month period.
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The problem they may be facing though is that this influenza season has been another fairly bad one there and is not far off its peak yet. It’s true that the glass may already have been near full. Adding even a mild influenza-level event to a moderately bad influenza season still in progress is challenging and, well, bad.
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Yes, I read like this below and understand how the virus is something special:
Of course that was all in the United States for the 2017-18 influenza season.
The above is why I very much want to emphasize that saying this may be an influenza-level event is NOT saying that it is “just” anything. If it is an influenza-level event overlapping an already fairly bad influenza season? Oh boy.
To my read one of the worst case scenarios would be that this abates over summer, spreading gradually but widely and sub-clinically, and then picked up steam with the same dynamics as influenza does, with a moderate influenza impact (let alone worse), in the Fall/early Winter. Better to have it continue into summer, hitting when systems have capacities to deal with the load. IF it abates over summer then preventing a bad flu season with a very effective vaccination program is ESSENTIAL.
One other item.
The population of Iran is over 81,000,000.
8% of their parliament has tested positive for it. 23 individuals.
8% of the population of Iran would be nearly 6.5 M cases. There are so far 6566 cases identified. Hmmm.
In the last few days, pretty much every private school has cancelled their admitted student weekends, annual events where they fly prospective students in from all over the world to see if they’d like to go. Did, do you think those cancellations are an over reaction? I wasn’t really THAT worried until they did that.
Sen. Ted Cruz shook hands with the guy at CPAC last week who was diagnosed with the virus. Cruz says he has no symptoms but is staying at home in TX for 2 weeks.
It’s been ten days already. He’s staying home for 4.
You’d think he’d just get tested. Or aren’t there enough test kits for that?
Manda JO’s post made me wonder what event or moment will indicate for me that “shit is getting real”.
I haven’t reached that moment yet. Everything seems pretty normal in my day-to-day life except for the emails at work telling us to get prepared for telecommuting.
So I guess if my employer actually commands us to work from home, that will be when it will hit home for me. I don’t think I will go into panic mode. But it will be unsettling. Apart from feeling anxious about getting sick, I know I am not going to be very productive working from home–having never done it before for long periods of time. And secondly, it will be very strange being cut-off from the people I see every day and not knowing what’s happening to them. If we’re talking about weeks in isolation, then it is possible one or two of my coworkers will become critically ill over that time. It’s hard to imagine this happening, and yet it very well could.
I think if Japan cancels the Olympics a lot of people will panic. Shit will have suddenly gotten real for them. So I’m waiting to see what happens with that.
Tests aren’t reliable during the incubation period.
Paul Gosar, too, apparently. I gotta say, anything that keeps them out of Congress for a week or two can’t be all bad.
This morning, on the Reuters US news headline lineup, the top 37 stories all had “virus” or “coronavirus” in the headline. Story #38 was about Weinstein. In the World summary, onlu two of the top eight stories were about the virus.
Ok, that makes sense.
I know some friends who went through the self-isolation-while-waiting-for-test-results last week (they didn’t have it). In their case they already had the sniffles (after being in Japan) so obviously that’s the distinction.