Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

cbc.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 465 posts

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#111

Post by crysin »

reaperducer wrote: post #37
Velofellow wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go for it. See if your action pulls us towards collective action. Do you chastise every person you see breaking this social norm?

Do you chastise every person you see breaking this social norm? It's not a "social norm." It's a public health issue. When I see a little kid in a public bathroom go straight from stall to door without looking at the sink, I'll shout at them. 100% of the time they turn around and do the right thing.

I hope you do the same to the adults, cause there's no shortage of adult (men) that do the exact same. It's honestly distressing.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#113

Post by btilly »

jcfrei wrote: post #101
2019-nCoV wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's currently 171 deaths, 8,288 confirmed infected, which is 2% dead. However, what needs to be taken into consideration is that infected individuals don't die the day they are confirmed infected, there is a lag of several days. Assuming the average time from symptom onset and diagnosis to death is 7 days, we're looking at at 20% death rate (830 confirmed infected 1 week ago). Even a 5 day lag between symptom onset…

I'm not an expert on viruses by any means but that seems unnecessarily pessimistic. The number of infections is likely much much higher than the confirmed cases (laboratories have only so many test kits available per day) but most people stay asymptomatic. This would reduce the actual mortality rate, not increase it.

The number of infections is likely much much higher than the confirmed cases (laboratories have only so many test kits available per day) but most people stay asymptomatic.

Do you have evidence of that in this case?

Viruses vary widely on how many are asymptomatic. My understanding is that having people be infectious and asymptomatic only happens with diseases that are well-adapted to their hosts. Which this one, having recently crossed a species barrier, isn't. (Its fatality rate is also high for the same reason.)

However that is a general understanding and I don't have data to base it on on this case. Do you?

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#114

Post by goblin89 »

andrewflnr wrote: post #53
goblin89 wrote: post #24

Running the official numbers, mortality rate is less than 3%. If we plug in estimative models claiming 25000+ unrecorded infections, mortality is less than 1%. Unless you are in a sensitive age group or have other health problems, data suggests you're most likely to get over it as a regular flu. It's not all perfect and is worse than a regular flu, but especially now after the announcement some people may way over-st…

1% mortality would still be pretty substantial as these things go.

That's true. Still as someone with anxieties I find it a useful perspective to assess personal threat level.

First reaction is "I need to avoid becoming infected at all costs". However, the costs are steep. An extreme plan to “sit at home with a month’s worth of supplies” seems plausible, but it would not be healthy to reduce movement so much and if everyone suddenly starts doing that there will be issues with food availability in the area (I live in HK).

If I am statistically so unlikely to die from this infection, I am going to take measures that prevent me from spreading it to someone who isn’t, but I won’t e.g. panic and call police if someone without a mask is near me.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#115

Post by corporate_shi11 »

renton wrote: post #51
reaperducer wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keeps saying things like, "Yeah, well last year way more people died of the flu!" Yeah, well that was an entire year . This is a few weeks. The goal is to get ahead of things, not to wait until it's too late.

I'm still not sure I understand this. If US alone has ~60k deaths from the flu a year, that still works out to be much more (1153 deaths per week).

It's actually very simple. The Flu has a stable amount of people it kills per year and is already quite established in the human population so it infects a very large number of people per year. nCov on the other hand is a new and poorly understood virus and has only just been introduced to humanity. Extrapolating the number of people it's killed out a few weeks or months, the death rate would be much higher than the flu. The mortality rate is also not firmly understood, with estimates ranging between 2% and 20%.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#116

Post by vonmoltke »

renton wrote: post #51
reaperducer wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keeps saying things like, "Yeah, well last year way more people died of the flu!" Yeah, well that was an entire year . This is a few weeks. The goal is to get ahead of things, not to wait until it's too late.

I'm still not sure I understand this. If US alone has ~60k deaths from the flu a year, that still works out to be much more (1153 deaths per week).

> If US alone has ~60k deaths from the flu a year

That was one particularly bad season. It's usually in the 30k - 40k range.

> that still works out to be much more (1153 deaths per week)

That particularly bad season had ~45MM cases, so that was an average of 865k infections per week. 2019-nCoV is that 1% of that infection rate.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#117

Post by vackosar »

michalu wrote: post #79

Also good real-time chart: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h... tracks confirmed cases and recoveries too.

another one here: intraday real-time coronavirus infected count predictor with log scale. If I am right it goes up every minute or so https://www.coronaviruschart.com/

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#118

Post by mrb »

hanniabu wrote: post #59
cheeseblubber wrote: post #43

For those who are referencing the flu and it's mortality rate here are estimates from the CDC for 2019 * 15,000,000 – 21,000,000 who had the flu * 8,200 – 20,000 deaths from the flu The morality rate ranges from 0.03% to 0.09% or 3/10000 9/10000 https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...

Any idea what the rates are for the corona virus?

Ignore the people telling you it's 2-3%. The case fatality ratio is between 9 and 56% according to proper epidemiological methods, such as using the formula "deaths / (deaths + recoveries)": https://mobile.twitter.com/zorinaq/status/122242770872387993...

Disclosure: no I'm not an epidemiologist. But for a reference to a paper by actual epidemiologists see https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ebf2/48c9fc0a1a23d1778b9408... section Simple Estimators, specifically this formula:

e₂(s)=D(s)/{D(s)+R(s)} which is: deaths / (deaths + recoveries)

The paper concludes: "The second simple estimate based on the ratio of deaths of those for whom the outcome is known, e₂, is reasonable at most points in the epidemic" ie. produces a good estimate of the eventual observed case fatality rate (in fact in their example it slightly underestimates the actual case fatality rate)

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#119

Post by klhjweoiru »

splittingTimes wrote: post #13

How is this worse than your normal influenza cycle with 3-5Mio infections and 290k-650k death to warrant such an emergency?

You mixed up your numbers. 3-5 Mio SEVERE CASES, not overall infections.

> Worldwide, these annual epidemics are estimated to result in about 3 to 5 million cases of severe illness, and about 290 000 to 650 000 respiratory deaths.

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/influenza-(...

> The flu has resulted in 9.3 million to 49 million illnesses each year in the United States since 2010. Each year, on average, five to 20 percent of the United States population gets the flu.

https://www.healthline.com/health/influenza/facts-and-statis...

Let's assume 10 mil Corona cases in US (like flu lower bound), with 2% mortality. That's 200k deaths. If we assume 49 mil cases (flu higher bound), it's 1 mil deaths just in US.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#120

Post by Roritharr »

twelvechairs wrote: post #70
hanniabu wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any idea what the rates are for the corona virus?

The official figures in China are 8,163 cases 171 deaths which is 2% right now, but take these with a big grain of salt. They could go up (some of those confirmed cases will be very recent and may get worse) or down (more cases might have happened but be unreported). Its really hard to tell what it will look like in a month or two.

I recommend everyone to watch this on-site commentary from the chinese human rights lawyer Chen Qiushi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AI3R41dGnU

Any numbers we've seen so far seem very tame to me, compared to the pictures out of Wuhan.

Post reply on HN