As others have noted, there are reports of healthy young people dying of this. So no, not almost certainly. SARS killed healthy people and didn’t cause this sort of response early on by Asian governments. It’s irresponsible to scaremonger but you shouldn’t say that it almost certainly won’t be a threat to healthy people either. A healthy person almost certainly won’t die if he catches the common flu. It’s simply not reasonable or responsible to say the same of this new disease.
Attend a Trump rally?
Kidding of course
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Healthy people die from influenza every year. I stand by my statement. Obviously things could change
ETA they typically die from pneumonia or secondary infection
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The podcast I recommended earlier in the thread is good, and they recommend the following:
Books
Pale Rider by Laura Spinney
The Great Influenza by John M. Barry
Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter
Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It by Gina Kolata
Fatal Strain: On the Trail of Avian Flu and the Coming Pandemic by Alan Sipress
Last one is supposed to be very alarming and it’s on my reading list
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Like, there’s a point at which my wife takes an extended leave of absence from work and pulls our four year old and 10 month old out of day care. That would be a huge financial hit for me that would be difficult to weather for too long. I don’t know what that point is.
The 1918 strain atypically killed mostly healthy young people in their 20s-30s, for reasons that still aren’t fully understood.
The 1918 flu caused a cytokine storm that paradoxically hurt people with better immune systems more because their immune systems essentially over-fought it.
I read something where they think people of certain ages were affected more than others in 1918 because other flu outbreaks like 30 years earlier may have given older people some immunity to it. Like there are two distinct classes of flu and 1918 was more novel for younger people.
Sigh going thru 2 airports tomorrow
That’s not bad advice actually, My mother retired a few months ago. I’m going to see where this goes in the next week or so. This thing has a 2-14 day incubation period. We’ll know in about a week If there’s local transmission. I live in a non-urban enough area that I don’t think we’ll have any cases up here for at least a few weeks if there is.
Also, the one time that Trump would actually be justified in a travel ban and he’s doing nothing.
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Where a face mask. Keep hand sanitizer on you and use it frequently. Don’t touch your face.
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The fifth case is a University Student at Arizona State. That is not ideal.
Can somebody give jman a “dr doom” badge?
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I think the big question is going to be how infectious this turns out to be from person to person. Seems like cases they’ve identified so far in the US were from people who brought it from Wuhan. If it needs a certain density to spread we might get lucky, although it’s likely to be bad at the epicenter no matter what.
The ASU case sounds like it was identified quickly, the patient is isolated and doesn’t live in student housing.
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Can you explain in more detail what this means?
buy a bunch of frozen meals and bottled water and don’t leave your house?
way ahead of you
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In a good contemporary plague movie, an infected Deliveroo driver would be the perfect Patient Zero.
I’ve done the same thing except just to be safe the bottled water I’ve stockpiled has a minimum of 5% ethanol to make sure it kills any contaminating virus or bacteria.
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When thinking about what to do, i am assuming that this will be bad, but not, hide in your house until everybody dies bad. I’m not talking about stockpiling food and buying a shotgun.
For example.
I’ve decided that I will make hiring and staffing decisions at work on the assumption that I sick leave will go up.
Im going to make plans with my 80 year old father for what and when to do this
My partner is not going to fly home for a few months in case she gets stuck overseas.
Is there anything we can assume from a political or economic viewpoint? I assume stocks will go down? Fortunately I dont have any.
Housing markets?
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Basically wondering if a few isolated cases are going to be enough to get it to spread human to human in other areas or if transmission is only likely if a critical mass of people are already carrying the virus.