First case just confirmed in Canada.
ALL BORDER PATROL AGENTS TO CANADIAN BORDER
(inappropriately making light of a very scary situation)
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the good news is authorities are on this and moved fast.
the bad news is I’ve already read spanish flu comparisons. May have an extremely rapid spreading ability, may be impossible to contain, doesn’t show symptoms for a while after you get it, etc.
Fortunately, the kill rate is relatively low it seems.
Welcome to our live coverage of the coronavirus outbreak in China and around the world. These are the main developments today:
Officials in China said on Sunday that the death toll has risen to 54 and the number of people infected is more than 1,600.
Chinese president Xi Jinping says the country faces a “grave situation” as it battle to contain the fast-spreading contagion.
Lunar new year celebrations were subdued across China on Saturday with an estimated 50 million people subject to travel restrictions in the epicentre Wuhan and the rest of Hubei province.
The outbreak has spread to many other Asian countries and three other continets with cases confirmed in Australia, France and the United States.
A man in his 50s was confirmed as the first case in Canada on Saturday night. He had recently flown from Wuhan to Guangzhou in southern China and then on to Toronto on 23 January.
The British Foreign office has advised citizens against all travel to Hubei province.
French carmaker PSA, which makes brands including Peugeot and Citroen, on Saturday said it would repatriate expat staff from the Wuhan region where it has 38.
Researchers are racing to work out if infections have been caused by animal to human contact, which would limit the spread, or whether the majority are being caused by human to human transmission.
Li Bin, vice minister at the national health commission, will hold a media conference in Beijing about the outbreak at 3pm local time today.
The R0 (infectivity level) of Wuhan coronavirus is thought to be between 1.4 and 2.5. For comparison, the R0 of seasonal flu is around 1.3. The mortality rate of Wuhan Coronavirus is possibly 2.5-5 percent. The mortality rate of seasonal flu is .01 percent. This thing is potentially twice as infectious as the seasonal flu (which is already really infectious), and 250 to 500 times more deadly. It is not an exaggeration that if this gets out of control it could kill tens of millions or more and could potentially be the deadliest plague (in terms of raw fatality numbers) in history.
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Is it just me, or do all these virus scares all seem to originate from China (aside from Ebola)? Why is that?
I also call bullshit on China’s death reports so far. There are videos coming out of hospitals with bodies stacked in hallways. There is no fucking way that China is shutting down entire cities without it being far more than 40 deaths.
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Parody account but I read that they did close their border completely with China. Given that, in 3 months DPRK may be the only country in the world that actually is free of this virus.
The rate at which infections/deaths occur and how this is spreading is disturbingly similar to a okay game of Plague, Inc. I guess that shouldn’t surprise me, since the game was based off of epidemiology modeling, but still.
The big mistake the disease is making here is killing people way too soon and getting the attention of the scientific community. Everyone knows you wait until it’s spread worldwide before you drop the hammer and evolve lethal symptoms.
Dense population centers, lots of human/livestock interactions. Great stuff for diseases. Also it’s like 1/10 of the world’s population so just by random chance you expect lots of diseases to start there.
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They certainly don’t have the resources (nobody does in instances like this) to make sure all those people have that virus first before making it all official.
Because 1.4 billion people live there, a significant amount of whom live in urban environments.
Yeah, you are never winning Plague Inc. when you’re at a 4 percent mortality rate with just 1600 people infected.
well we’re already over 2500, it’s moving fast (sorry googling quickly got me 2k for an “official” number, but that was morning I guess)
worse news, it’s already killed in shanghai.
I mean the R0 of SARS was between 2 and 4 and the mortality rate was around 10%, but after control measures were introduced, the R0 was reduced to 0.4. R0 without any context is a little meaningless because it depends how easily control measures can be introduced. For example:
If that’s true, then it’s a massively bigger problem.
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We should be adding America to the list of countries with inadequate medical care to help contain this.
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This isn’t a once every year or two scare. This is way worse than the Ebola scare. Ebola’s extremely high fatality rate is actually helpful, it kills too fast and tends to burn out. This thing’s mortality rate is much more dangerous and can lead to far greater raw numbers of deaths.
In my case, CNY wasn’t that bad for me in Wuhan. I was invited into festivities with a local family as the token foreigner (I taught their daughter English privately for a year up to that point). I think they just wanted to stare at me and be amused by my whiteness. Of course, if I was alone or just with foreigners then it would suck a lot no matter where I was.
That said, it’d suck a lot less in Beijing or Shanghai.
It’s pretty amazing how quickly Wuhan has developed since I left there in 2012. The street outside where I lived was muddy and filled with trash. The street was lined with a bunch of people selling knockoff clothes and street food. Based on pictures, it looks as though it’s part of the city and not some rural area the government claimed as Wuhan just to bump up its population. The metro even reaches out there now.
Also ridiculous to me that we continue to have a travel ban against Muslim countries because they might have terrorists when this thing could kill more in America then 10,000 Osama bin Laden’s. I’m not saying we’re at travel ban from China territory yet, but it would make a lot more sense than a travel ban from Libya.
From the other forum I post on (Disboards): Shanghai Disneyland shut down indefinitely 2 days ago. Hong Kong Disneyland shut down indefinitely today. There are rumors amongst Disney cast members that they are going to shut down face character meet and greet at parks worldwide.