This cruise ship is parked right across the channel from my terminal. They are participating in “elevated screening”.
Oh joy.
When other countries managed to get their nationals out of Wuhan, it took forever for Taiwan to be able to get its citizens out because of the lack of cooperation between the countries. China finally let Taiwan send a charter flight and had a list of 244 people.
Then problems developed.
According to my wife, the guy is Chinese, not Taiwanese, so it’s not known why he was allowed onboard. Money speaks.
Apparently, the people are being quarantined in modest facilities, but many of them are well-to-do and are angry that they aren’t in five star facilities with fancy good. There is a backlash against them.
Unless I’m being lied to (not outside the realm of possibility), the transmission of this virus can be easily stymied by universal precautions, such as hand-washing.
Plus, I spend little time in hospitals, international airports, and Asian cities, so my odds of exposure are pretty slim, I’d say.
I’m going to say that on a scale from one to ten, I’m at a hard zero.
Good luck. And hell, I read your later post. Good luck with all that, too.
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.
Well, I regularly catch colds, despite washing my hands. I fly regularly, and my favorite hobby involves holding hands with lots of people, many of whom also travel. And I get my routine medical care in a hospital in the midst of my city’s Chinatown.
But really, either we’ll have widespread infection in the US or we won’t. I’ll just be at risk a month or two before you will be.
Talked to the school this morning. They are appalled that my kids were named on the wechat parent group. Are being extra viligent that there will be no bullying, especially toward my youngest.
No tiger mom dared to meet me this morning even outside at 20 paces because they were afeard of getting the virus.
Most of the internet hero Tiger Moms confessed Tiger Mom genes were stronger than the fear of coronavirus and sent their kids to school today.
They are so irrational. One posted the CDC card that people returning from China get. It says clearly on the card (my paraphrase since I don’t want to type it out fully)
- If coming from Hubei province, you are restricted at home for 14 days (my wife did not come from Hubei)
- If coming from elsewhere in China, you need to self monitor for 14 days, and avoid crowded areas, limit public activities, etc
After posting the above notice, one of the Tiger Moms wrote “it is very clear that the Mom has to quarantine at home for 14 days!!!”
I might wade back in tonight, but can’t be bothered to try fact check the hundreds of posts these idiots are making. And they are all assuming I am a total anti-vaxxer that doesn’t know shit about China, despite the fact my posting has been in Chinese. I lived in China during SARS, I have more relatives in the epicenter province of Hubei than probably the entire group combined, and I work for a Chinese company that has multiple factories throughout China, and I’ve been to the epicenter Wuhan multiple times (but not for 18 months) and know dozens of people there.
The stupidity - it burns. And none of these idiots can be bothered to check WHO, CDC, epidemiologists, etc.
I live in shanghai. As I posted in the other forum, I started out concerned about this but I think the way this is being spun internationally is out of all proportion.
10,000 Americans have died of flu this winter season. All indications are that this new coronavirus has a similar level of risk to a strain of flu – that’s not a good thing, and so China is doing broadly the right thing on pulling out all the stops to nip it in the bud.
But the way this is being covered on international media while ignoring current deadly infections, and the harsh treatment of Chinese, is not justified.
On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is “the risk that my dryer lint will coalesce into a giant bunny that overthrows the U.S. government” and 10 is “the risk that my ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend, who has just set fire to the office I’m occupying with a flamethrower and shot my co-worker, will now try to shoot me with the gun in his hand,” my worry level is about a 2. Sure, this could turn out to be very contagious, very deadly, and infect lots of people but public health officials are paying attention to it and trying to minimize the dangers of a contagious outbreak. It is very unlikely to affect me personally. I’m much more worried about getting run over by a car when I walk to the train.
I’d ask for a quote from Dr. Li Wenliang who brought it to the world’s attention but… he died from it.
What’s your theory behind China shutting cities down and building hospitals in a week to handle the situation? Seems foolish to do this if it’s just the flu. Is China trying to spread false rumors?
Help us out here.
I’m just going by the numbers. Outside of hubei it looks like a pretty normal, even mild, strain of the flu virus. Within hubei there’s more uncertainty and it seems the numbers could be very high, but this is still not unusual for a new outbreak.
Regarding your question, let me be clear, coronavirus is serious, I’m talking about having some proportionality in how it’s covered.
China is pulling out all the stops to extinguish this virus. They don’t want what happened with SARS to happen again, and they should be commended on that. The more extreme measures does not mean the virus is as bad as SARS though.
It’s interesting that no one is able to just concede the obvious point that theres a lot of scaremongering here when you look at the data for this versus 2009 H1N1, and the level of criticism the US gets for that. Everyone just wants to pivot to something else.
Just acknowledge what I thought was a pretty self evident point, then you can go back to bashing China.
BTW I’m aware that some might accuse me of pivoting on to h1n1.
But the difference here though is proportionality in media coverage is the point I’ve joined the thread to make. I’m not using it as an ad hoc “Look, squirrel!” to avoid conceding some other point.
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If you’ve read my previous posts I haven’t bashed China’s response. I’ve given the country much credit for reacting to the irisis. China can do things most Western countries can’t. And by most I mean all.
With that said, what you’re responding to is a post regarding the death of a doctor who was sanctioned (politically) for raising the alarm. The government of China tried to suppress the seriousness of it.
Any statistics from the Chinese government are at their discretion. That is the reason I posted a response involving the death of a whistle blower.
We really don’t know what the real death toll is. All we know is China is shutting down entire cities to stop the spread.
So… do we look at government statics or do we look at the actions of the government?
As a general rule, actions speak louder than words. If that rule applies then China is telegraphing a serious problem.
Sorry if already covered upthread, but how exactly does this coronavirus kill? By sepsis + organ failure + organ shutdown? By causing fluid buildup edema in the lungs that drowns?
I’m not entirely clear on it - the mainstream media doesn’t seem to have much on that sort of detail and I didn’t think to ask last night when my Dr. Sister and I were discussing this (she has access to more factual medical information than I do). However, what I have gleaned is that it can kill by causing widespread pneumonia/inflammation in the lungs which suffocates you one way or another, or perhaps alternatively by a more widespread inflammatory response where your immune system over-reacts and winds up causing so much damage it kills you.
Neither effect is unique to this virus - that sort of thing can be seen in a lot of illnesses. And, of course, a secondary infection in a weakened body can also carry you off. Likewise, having something else amiss like heart disease, diabetes, or the like can also make it more likely this viral infection can kill you, but that’s not uncommon with other diseases, either.
One thing about this illness is that many patients seem to be coping with the infection for 5-6 days, then take a severe turn for the worse. So, there may be nearly a week where the person doesn’t feel that sick (and might continue going to work and so forth, thereby spreading the virus) THEN they get really, really ill. Also, some show atypical symptoms at first so while they may be sick they aren’t obviously ill with a respiratory virus, then around day 5 or 6 they can symptoms that are more closely associated with severe “novel coronavirus”. The New York Times reported one patient initially put in a surgical ward with significant abdominal pain rather than respiratory symptoms who would up infecting over a dozen other people, as an example of this.
One reason I think that the death rate is higher in Wuhan and its province is that the medical system there is overwhelmed. Sure, you can build another building and equip it as a hospital, but you need trained medical people to staff it and you only have so many, they take longer to generate than a new pre-fab building. What that means, in my view, is that the death/complication rate will continue to remain low anywhere that there are few affected people (such as is the case outside of China) but if any of those other spot cases blooms into a local epidemic you’re going to see higher rates of problems once the local medical system starts to come under stress from number of cases. Which is why it’s important to try to contain these outbreaks as much as possible.
I’m also concerned about the cruise ships under quarantine - it’s not a simple “two weeks and you can go home”, I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a quarantine of “two weeks past the last infection”, which can turn into quite a lengthy period of time. And infection control in a densely populated closed system like a cruise ship. Add in problems of re-supply of everything needed and a topping of folks who came onto the cruise with medical problems that need daily medication and the normal rate of people getting sick/injured/heart attacks/etc. in such settings and… well, I’m really glad I’m not on a cruise ship under quarantine.
I’m also glad not to be on a quarantined cruise ship. But so long as the world economy/transportation system doesn’t collapse or something, and so long as there are able-bodied people on the ship, I don’t think it will be a problem to keep those ships supplied. One guy in a disposable hazmat suit could ferry supplies over and crew/passengers of the cruise ship could load them on-board. Spray the supply boat and the guy in the suit with bleach when they return to the supplying ship.
There are now 40 cases in Singapore. I’m starting to get definite pressure from family members to cancel my trip there in April.
Not much. Seems to be a pretty nasty version of the flu.
Our kids had their monthly environmental group activity today. They had let people know that it was OK to skip it and there were less than half of the people there, despite the fact that no one has been in China recently.
My friend in China has several tea stores in shopping malls and figures she may not survive.
Other friends here in Taiwan are running into supply problems from China.
Yeah, the economic consequences of this are going to be HUGE, even if it’s successfully contained next week.
I’m just waiting for the next zoo gorilla to be shot, or the next mass murder spree to happen, and then we’ll all forget about the tequila virus. Americans are overgrown babies. Look over here, look over here! Hey, now look over here! Lol.