Official death toll up to 80 now.
Gonna watch “The Flu” on Amazon Prime now, because that’s definitely going to keep me from getting overly spooked by world events.
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I was the canary in the coal mine for the trump election night thread too. You all are massively underestimating how big of a deal this is.
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Also, and to be clear, I think people aren’t realizing the scope of what is happening right now in China. Here are known facts:
- China is a famously tightlipped authoritarian state with a history of downplaying the severity of outbreaks;
- China is reporting a mortality rate of 3 percent. But again, they have a history of downplaying this.
- China’s hospitals are overwhelmed with people waiting in the streets and bodies in the hallways. Their doctors are passing out in the hallways and becoming sick themselves.
- China has effectively shut down a gigantic province and metropolitan area. For reference, China has shut down a population that is the equivalent in the US of us shutting down and quarantining, from North to South, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Washington D.C., and Virginia combined.
I continue my assertion that this is a huge fucking deal and this is not something that any of us have seen in our lifetimes.
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Anyone know any kind of blog or something that would focus on and curate news and give analysis of this story? Like I want the weather channel hurricane blog for bat AIDS or whatever.
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The guardian has live updates and good coverage.
Sure, but I’m more after something written by a genuine expert. Like if there were an epidemiologist or infectious disease physician who has a blog. I’m sure lots of papers have good reporting but ultimately it’s written by someone roughly as dumb as me who doesn’t have any deep understanding of the technical situation. Which is what makes something like a meteorologist’s hurricane blog so good when there is a hurricane bearing down.
Anyway if that blog exists dude needs to upgrade his blog stuff because he’s about to get a yuge increase in traffic.
There are currently 2,806 confirmed cases worldwide, including 80 fatalities.
So China’s totals continue to indicate a 3 percent fatality rate.
In DON’T PANIC news, a few experts are putting the brakes on this idea that asymptomatic transmission is common:
Professor Paul Hunter, at The Norwich Medical School, University of East Anglia said: 'If person to person spread from people without symptoms became common then this would be extremely worrying. It would also be very surprising.
'The consensus from the SARS outbreak was that only patients with symptoms spread the infection.
'Patients with influenza can transmit the infection before becoming ill but only for a day at most before symptoms develop.
‘The primary way that coronaviruses are spread is by aerosols generated by coughs and sneezes.’
'By definition once a patient is coughing and sneezing they have already developed symptoms.
On Sunday, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said the risk to the American public for contracting this virus continues to be low.
“We at CDC don’t have clear evidence that patients are infectious before symptom onset, but we are actively investigating that possibility,” Messonnier said.
“We need to be preparing as if this is a pandemic, but I continue to hope that it is not,” she added.
The incubation period could be as long as two weeks. If people really are infectious in that time, this will be bad, but we’ll see.
In PANIC news, someone claiming to be a nurse in Wuhan has posted a video online asserting that 90,000 people are infected with the virus in Wuhan alone, much higher than official totals. However it’s not clear how she would know such a thing. Only tabloid sources are running with this story right now, so make of it what you will.
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It seems based on the number of reported cases, if those numbers are accurate, that it’s roughly doubling every day. Anyone know how this compares to some of the historically bad pandemics?
I work at a university where a good chunk of the student body are Chinese nationals. I wonder what they’ll do if we get a case. I’m not on campus but people in my building go back and forth.
jman’s aidsnalysis not enough?
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In other news, Michael Moore killed it earlier, introducing Bernie at a rally
find it
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Doubling every day all of earth’s population will be infected before march 1
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Regarding asymptomatic transmission, it seems like if people were wandering around infectious for two weeks, the R0 would be a lot higher than 2.5-3 or whatever the current estimates are. Perhaps asymptomatic transmission is possible but unlikely.
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It’s good, but again it’s ultimately just a guy roughly as dumb as me writing stuff. It would be nice to have the insight of an expert, but I don’t expect the CDC to start a trustworthy expert blog anytime soon. They’re not going to tell us what they really think, they’re going to tell us what they think is the best information to get out in the public. Which could be true information but certainly not the inside scoop.
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I guess what I’m curious about is how this compares to other pandemics at this stage.
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After talking a bit with my mom, who knows a whole lot about this king of shit, I am decidedly much less shook. She thinks this corona virus is going to be more like MERS/SARS and not like the 1918 influenza outbreak due to transmission and antigen drift. She does think airport screenings based on temperature are hot garbage, so the jmans out there can have that to worry about.
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DOW futures down ~ 300 points (1%) now. Not nothing, but certainly not indicating a panic crash of any sort is in the cards in the immediate future.