Well, I am not perfect. If I mis-attributed a quote then my apologies to all involved.
My company has a studio in China (as well as other places in the world), and sent out a notice today that all travel to and from China has been suspended.
The State Health Department has cleared me to return to work based on my history. No testing recommended at this time.
Wait, so Mongolia is trying to keep the Chinese from entering their country? This sounds like the setup for an episode of South Park or something.
Interesting comparison of the progression of SARS and Coronavirus. The latter seems to have spun up more slowly than SARS, but those charts paint a rather unsettling trajectory…
Story today at Raw Story (re-printed from Kaiser Health News but stupidly, as is common at Raw Story articles, doesn’t have a link to the source that I could find):
Something far deadlier than the Wuhan virus already lurks near you
TL;DR: Influenza is wide-spread. It’s here. It kills a lot more people.
Some excerpts:
ETA: Article also notes that less than half of Americans are getting their flu shots. :smack:
I think the fear with these new items is that they are less known and seem less “controlled.” Epidemic Hollywood movies probably don’t help.
In the average person’s mind, there is a chance that one of these new “exotic” flues will spread like wildfire across the world, kill like 5% of the population and no one is safe. More like the Spanish flu.
The regular Flu on the other hand is something we do every year and is the devil we know. I also have the impression (correct or not), that most flu deaths are really just older folks that were not doing so well to begin with and were finally “pushed over the edge.”
I don’t like the fact that there has been very little news and no real new numbers all day today. It’s nearly 24 hours since I’ve seen any real updated info on infections confirmed or how many have died.
Not only do I not think they’re acting too slowly I’m on record as saying the opposite. They (the Chinese government) are able to cut through any red tape or laws that get in their way.
Hell, it became a political freak-show when anyone suggested we quarantine medical people for a couple of weeks after returning from an Ebola epidemic mission.
We’re screwed if we need to shut down anything bigger than a hot dog stand.
The map posted by blue infinity has been updated per Snowboarder Bo’s request.
2997 cases. 82 deaths.
2927 cases.
:smack:
Snowboarder Bo, I don’t think most people realize that 1) it’s Chinese New Year and everyone takes this off, 2) up to 1/3 of the Chinese entire population typically travels out of their normal town during this period, 2) the city of Wuhan is locked down with zero public transit, roads essentially shut to private vehicles, 3) anyone with a fever or cough is scared to death they have nCOV and flooding the hospitals (there are very few private medical facilities in China), 4) government itself is trying to get a handle on a situation that is changing rapidly, 5) the number 2 political leader in China is in Wuhan now, 6) head of WHO is meeting in Beijing now, 7) military health personnel are going in to help, etc.
Think New Orleans in the Katrina aftermath or D-Day, it’s simply beyond real time monitoring that the interwebs kinda set the expectation for but doesn’t exist outside of Hollywood.
@machine elf, no idea where your graph came from but doesn’t pass the smell test to my experience with SARS. There is always more that could be done but to my rookie eyes, China is way ahead of where they were at this point during SARS. Probably a month if not months ahead in identifying and taking action that this is a serious health issue.
Think of it this way, China has effectively blockaded Hunan province (a “state” in the US) with a population of 58M vs most populous US state of California with ~40M.
BIG JUMP
4474 cases, 107 deaths
Still primarily confined to China.
The AP is reporting “at least” 106 dead. New cases raised the total diagnosed infections to 4,515.
That’s almost double the infections in the last 24 hours.
Snowboarder Bo, please note this from the AP report: So far, the new coronavirus doesn’t seem to spread as easily among people as SARS or influenza. Most of the cases so far that spread between people were of family members and health workers who had contact with patients. That suggests the new virus isn’t well adapted to infect people.
I had some issues with that because many of the proposed measures were, in my opinion, over-reactions to the situation. Ebola is not airborne and the majority of new infections come from direct contact with dead, the rest from close contact with the ill and/or their bodily fluids. This is a problem in rural Africa where protective equipment may be difficult to obtain, less so in the west. The medical people did not need to be locked into isolation wards, staying at home for a time period and being observed would be entirely adequate.
This is in contrast to the Wuhan virus, or SARS, or MERS, or flu or measles or the common cold which all can spread via the air. People who might be contagious need to be kept much more apart from others until cleared as safe for an effective quarantine.
There is now a case in Germany and the way it came about is kind of worrying (if the radio news is to believed).
This guy in Bavaria caught it from a business contact from Shanghai (who only got symptoms on her way back to China). Thing is that this person hadn’t been to Wuhan, but a family member had been.
This way it seems it van spread fairly quickly before anyone notices.
On the good side, this German guy seems to be doing well and should be fine.
Verstuurd vanaf mijn moto g(6) met Tapatalk
Well, over the weekend my in-laws (who are from China but live here with us in the States) went into full-blown panic mode, fueled by stuff their friends are forwarding around on Weibo and WeChat. :rolleyes: Some of the highlights:
- People are dropping in the streets by the thousands. The real reason for closing all of the cities is to keep this news from leaking out.
- It is a biological weapon that was released from a lab, possibly on purpose.
- It’s not a single virus, but a combination of several viruses, so it can’t be vaccinated against.
- The infection is absorbed through the eyes.
They spent all day Sunday driving around and buying up boxes of dust masks and swimming goggles. The dust masks (which had to have some specific kind of rating) sound like they are getting hard to find even here in the US.
This last seems to be true. I think it was the Irish teacher that was interviewed by Channel 4 who said that he had swimming goggles because it can be communicated through the eyes. IIRC, there was a doctor who got infected while treating people and they determined that he contracted the infection through his eyes because they were the only thing not protected.