Here is a small part of an interesting post in Reddit:
A couple more cases in the US bringing the total to 11.
Sorry to be so parochial.
Our school also has a kindergarten and for some reason private kindergartens were not subject to being closed. That makes little sense to me because kindergartens are much more likely to spread germs than older students.
Plots comparing Coronvirus with SARS and swine flu:
These plots are updated regularly as new information becomes available.
Here’s where I was going with that:
- In a sense, to the layman, these numbers are super-preliminary. It’s not like the count of infected persons is petering out soon – indeed, the daily increases are completely expected. To me, from my Alfred-Newmanesque perspective a huge ocean + half a continent away … it makes no difference what the count is day-to-day. Hmmm … it was 7,000, then 11,000, then 13,000. It’ll be 20,000 in a day or two. It’ll probably pass 100,000 before too long.
And through all that breathless counting (in the media, not in this thread) … the coronavirus gets no closer to my doorstep. In my own naive, but comfortable, reckoning … the coronavirus is no closer to affecting me and mine at a million infected as it was when it was 10 infected. Therefore …
- … media: Stop trying to manipulate my emotions.
The coronavirus is not going to affect me or anyone I know. Even if someone in my orbit DOES catch it … it seems to be eminently treatable with ordinary Western medicine right now. I assume it’ll be even easier to treat in the months or more (?) it would take for that virus to achieve numbers in my community (IOW, not merely one or three infected travelers who happen to live locally).
…
Still remember my son being diagnosed with the dread H1N1. It killed some people in a remote village somewhere. My toddler-age son went to the pediatrician and was largely OK even before that. A fever and a snotty nose. Didn’t live up to the initial news coverage, suffice it to say.
…
Yeah, yeah … I know. I’m academically wrong, and some damn thing is going to be the Unbeatable Virus and we’re all going to die. I guess for those on the front lines of fighting these things, communication with the public is a double-edged sword. Too much fervent warning, and you start getting accused of crying wolf all the time. Too little warning, and something preventable might get a foothold.
I *know *I’m wrong. But I *feel *I’m right. To pretty much ignore the Wuhan coronavirus, that is. At least for the foreseeable future.
No need to apologize … this is an eminently human frame of mind, IMHO.
There does seem to be aleveling off in the number of confirmed cases, both inside and outside of China. It may be that the preventative measures that are being used to control the disease are working, but my feeling is that it is more do to the confirmed diagnosis rate has more to do with test availability than with infection rate. So that the rapid increase in number of cases over the last couple of weeks was just the working through the backlog of tests. It may be that the lower rates we are seeing now are actually more representative of the actual infection rates for the past few weeks.
I’m not sure one datapoint is evidence that the number of incidences is leveling off. It might just as well represent the shortage of test kits.
An epidemiologist quoted in the Times today thought that there might be 100,000 cases.
There are already more cases than there were of SARS. The question is, what is the death rate? That’s not established yet.
Honestly, that’s how I’m treating it. I don’t worry horribly about the flu when that comes around, either. I get my shot, and otherwise make no changes to my routine. I’m fairly young and in pretty good health, so yeah. IF I were to get this, chances are I’d be fine. I know other people have a lot more to worry about, whether they are actually in China, or immunocompromised, or elderly or have absolutely no insurance or healthcare options.
It’ll no-doubt gets worse before it gets better, but I think we’ll have a vaccine on the market before it gets to truly extreme levels.
Thanks for the link - interesting.
As expected, treatment was mostly symptomatic. Medications to bring down his fever and stop his non-productive cough. I kept looking for “chicken soup administered per ora” - but apparently they saved the big guns for later 
I note that they gave the patient supplemental oxygen. Doctors of the Dope - is that common in, for instance, cases of influenza in hospitalized patients, or an abundance of caution because they don’t/didn’t know much about the progress of the disease? It didn’t sound like it was life-threatening, but IANAD. IOW would the outcome, apart from contagion, been different if he had just gone home, rested, drank lots of fluids and been miserable for a couple of weeks, as was the case the last time I got the flu?
Of course a 2-3% mortality rate is bad, but not significantly worse than other strains of the flu. Is this going to be like the flu, in that it is more dangerous in the elderly (I am 64), the very young, and those who are already immunocompromised and/or have respiratory issues?
Regards,
Shodan
Standard disclaimer that I am not a doctor.
It might have been based on blood oxygen levels, which are easily monitored these days. If the patient progressed to pneumonia that might have been the appropriate supportive treatment.
Actually… it’s an order of magnitude worse than regular flu. So more serious, but probably not something to panic over.
So far, yes, from what I’ve seen.
2-3% is order of 100 times higher rate than typical seasonal flu. A hugely greater number of people get some form of flu every year though, so something like a 1,000 times as many people die of flu each year globally than 2019-nCoV so far and 2019-nCoV might never reach that number (several 100k deaths). But, the 2-3% is very preliminary. See linked early study finding 3%: it seems to be just dividing 25 deaths by 835 confirmed cases as of Jan 23. It obviously doesn’t allow for mild cases that weren’t reported (which could conceivably make the ratio as low as typical flu), but OTOH also doesn’t seem to even try to correct for people among the confirmed cases who were seriously ill and might still die from it. Presumably some of the deaths reported since Jan 23 were among the 814 confirmed cases still alive on that date.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30185-9/fulltext#tbl1
It also gives the age range of confirmed cases as 21-76. Even in the likely case there are actually children afflicted, it seems it might not be especially dangerous to them.
That could be true, basically the same problem with the data that I suggested, but in the opposite direction. Since the further googling does suggest that test kits for the virus are hard to come by, your interpretation is probably the correct one.
On media treatment of this and ostensibly similar past outbreaks, I don’t think the distortions are all in one direction. Obviously commercial media has a vested interest in compelling stories. A possible threat to the viewer’s health or life is reliably compelling in a way a given political story say might not be beyond a pretty small audience highly focused on that.
OTOH I think there’s plenty of pressure on media to give reassurance. They can definitely piss off important people (corporate owners, commercial sponsors) if viewed as ‘fear mongering’ too much. Which I think sometimes results in some happy talk by media. For example in this case it might not be likely that a large % of the world’s population is exposed before a vaccine is developed (might be 6 months to a year I’ve read, no gtees), and might well not mutate rapidly to become more deadly or evade a vaccine. But either could happen. Again 3% is not a reliable number, could be more like 10% in the end (SARS I think was reported in low single digits, final finding was around 10%) or a lot less than 3% with better handle on the number of so far unreported mild cases. Anyway 10% was within the range of the 1918 flu pandemic and that was a BFD globally. Not an extinction event nor even anything remotely like the Black Death in Europe but it wasn’t something that just faded from the headlines like SARS/MERS. This might not be either. I don’t think anyone can say, but media IMO has a tendency to feel the duty to tell people it will be OK after getting them worked up enough to closely follow the coverage and view the ads. 
It’s a mixed bag IMO, media’s presentation v ‘absolute down the middle objective reality’ (whatever that would look like).
It should also be noted that in this preliminary data there is a huge discrepancy between the mortality rate within Hubei province and those outside it. Hubei has 350 deaths out of 11,171 cases (about 3%), while outside of Hubei there are only 11 deaths out of 6,319 cases for a mortality of less than 0.2%.
This may represent a difference in population, with infected travelers being younger and healthier than those infected locally. It may reflect the overwhelmed Hubei medical system producing worse outcomes, or it may be that the number of infections in Hubei is being heavily under estimated so the 350 deaths represent a much lower mortality rate of a disease with much higher incidence than reported.
It may also be that their are lots of old cases in Hubei (since that is where the problem started), but almost none outside it (the vast majority of the cases came after Hubei people spread across the country for the Chinese New Year celebrations)–and it takes several days to kill you.
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.
Shanghaiese, who are the biggest snobs in China, are totally dissin’ the country bumpkins in Wuhan (epicenter with 10M population) for eating that nasty ass wildlife dish consisting of bat, deer and some other wild meat.
I have not lived in China for a decade, nor have I visited a Shanghai live market. BUT China wife says that in Shanghai you can’t buy a live chicken in the wet market and have it killed, defeathered and butchered for you for the past few years.
It sure appears that Xi Jinping and the Chinese government is willing to keep all the cities on lock down until the coronavirus burns out.
Key milestones to watch:
- When are the factories allowed to reopen (outside of the epicenter)? Current plan of record is 10 Feb
- When will k-12 schools reopen? Current plan of record is “indefinite”. Most folks in China have day care consisting of grand parents or nannies from the country side.
A NYT bit expressed it well in the Sunday paper:
Yes, it is very likely as it is with influenza: kids don’t tend to get as sick very often but they spray it around. (One of the most important reasons to make sure your kids are vaccinated for flu every year!)
Children have been infected and were part of the family studied that showed asymptomatic infection.
The data is completely inconsistent with that. It takes much longer to be considered totally recovered.
Deaths/totally recovered in Hubei: 414/396 = 1.05
Everywhere else in China together: 12/248 = 0.05
Percent total identified cases considered totally recovered in Hubei is 2.9%.
Everywhere else in China all together it’s 3.5%.
Buck Godot’s enumerated possible hypotheses are all reasonable ones. Selection bias to diagnosing and confirming the sickest only in Hubei, missing those with mild illness, or selection bias to only the healthiest being able to get out of Dodge, or overwhelmed systems unable to provide any reasonable supportive care within Hubei.
Thanks for the update** China Guy**. Glad your wife made it back.