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WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

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Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any idea what the rates are for the corona virus?

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…

The number of deaths is likely to be much more accurate than the number of infections, which are likely much more than 8,288, leading to a much lower fatality rate.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#392
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NCOV (new corona) 2%, SARS (2012) around 10%, yearly normal flu around 0.01%-0.05% and Ebola 50-90%

During the SARS outbreak in April 2003 the reported rate was around 3.5% (58 deaths on 1622 "probable cases"). Source: https://www.who.int/csr/sars/press2003_04_01/en/

What's your point? I don't think it obviously follows that the NCOV fatality rate is under-reported just because the SARS fatality rate was.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#393
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking only at hospitalized populations creates severe selection bias when applied to the question people want answered here, namely "If I get nCOV, what's my chance of dying?" Only the most severe cases a physician sees end up hospitalized, and only the most severe cases within the general population end up being seen by a physician and confirmed as nCOV. You've already got two levels of selection bias (with an unk…

Correct there is a bias. However even when comparing the coronavirus to the seasonal flu (hospitalized patients only), the coronavirus still looks much more severe: Only 7% of hospitalized flu cases died in 2018-2019 (34 157 out of 490,561): https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html The coronavirus would thus appear to be 4 times more deadly (26%.)

Or the hospitals are more overwhelmed now, so only the sickest patients are being admitted.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#394
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is locking down an entire city "poor containment". Find it staggering to insinuate that were it originating in Western countries we'd do the same?

Corona virus was first detected in mid December. Things got pretty serious over the next 4 weeks, 5M people left the city before any containment happened. So of course now everywhere in China has it, not exactly a good containment. The Wuhan mayor said he'd been talking to the China administration for 4 weeks before being allowed to talk about it to the public.

[deleted]

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the mortality rate in the US. Worldwide it's much higher and goes up to 600,000 deaths annually.

Yes, and for Cononavirus, it will be even more.

[citation needed]

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and for Cononavirus, it will be even more.

I would love nothing more than to wager on that claim with anyone keen. This thread is full of cringeworthy doomsdayers and armchair epidemiologists throwing around unsubstantiated nonsense. When your only knowledge of this comes from the media people should be a bit more selfaware. The fact that qAnon folks are all over this and one day old accounts turning up saying millions will die speaks volumes for the level of…

Is there any platform where this could be done, or any proxy that one could trade in order to place this bet? I would also gladly put US$1000 on this.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#397

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 averag…

This 2% number that keeps being thrown around is based on dividing the number of confirmed deaths (which is likely to be relatively accurate) by the number of confirmed infections (which is almost certainly a massive underestimation). It's basically meaningless.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#398

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

Because it has a higher lethal rate than Influenza and it has the potential to evolve and become much more infectious than it is currently.

"it has a higher lethal rate than Influenza"

That is not known at this point.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is locking down an entire city "poor containment". Find it staggering to insinuate that were it originating in Western countries we'd do the same?

> How is locking down an entire city "poor containment". Because it followed a week of ignoring the issue and then another week of arresting people who were reporting on the issue. This has been an issue since December 28th, but China and the WHO are pretending it began just recently. It's "containment" in much the same way that the Soviet Union just couldn't stop lying about Chernobyl because people miles away were…

You got any sources for that b/s?

Like the hospitals being almost finished resorts? They are building these things from the ground up, there was nothing there, you could even see this in those live streams, from multiple camera angles.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The numbers we're getting out of China are a mess and almost entirely useless. There are reports of hospitals turning people away unless they a very sick, and also not testing every ill patient because they're overwhelmed. I've see death certificates posted online with "viral pneumonia" because they aren't able to test everyone - and certainly don't bother testing those who have already died. The errors are both ways…

There was one interesting number though. The Japanese had been evacuating 200 people from Wuhan and found 3 cases. Assume that a plane of evacuees like that is somewhat random sampling. And that evacuees have similar or better hygiene. This puts infection rate at 1% of the population. Official population of Wuhan is 11 million, it is possible that it is larger. This puts the number to 100k cases.

Isn't taking the population of Wuhan as 11 million cherry picking? You could choose the population of central Wuhan and get a higher estimate or the population of Hubei province and get a lower estimate. Presumably the distribution of Japanese people evacuated does not match the distribution of people in Hubei province, since many will be tourists (more likely to be in the city centre). Moreover their chance of being infected will depend on where they were staying: there is an epicenter.

But yes it does indicate that the real number is much higher than the confirmed cases. It's really hard to track an outbreak of this magnitude especially when many people are carriers showing mild symptoms. It's actually a good thing if cases are being severely underestimated as it implies a lower death rate (deaths are harder to fudge).

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