WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency • Hacker News Board

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#441

Post by bosie » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 4:20 PM UTC

inferiorhuman wrote: post #271

twelvechairs wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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. I wouldn't even go that far. I've been using this as an excuse to figure out the D3 v5 API using the Johns Hopkins data. Most provinces outside of Hubei are not reporting deaths yet. It's possible nobody's died outside of Hubei, but that seems suspect to me. There is almost certainly strong federal…

> I don't believe for a moment that China would've attempted to quarantine 60 million people so quickly if the case fatality rate were only 2%. 2% is bad but SARS saw around 15% in many countries and things weren't locked down this tightly.

presumably fatality is only one of many factors here. 15% of 100 infections is a different beast than 2% of 1M. And if it takes up to 14 days to see symptoms...

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

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Post by parliament32 » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 5:37 PM UTC

kevinstubbs wrote: post #196

parliament32 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between latency and delay. If I "touch a.txt" then run "ls", and see "a.txt", I'd consider my filesystem realtime. There's no point in being pedantic about "but there's a 50ms delay when I hit enter after typing ls so it's not realtime!!!". "Realtime virus outbreak" implies that the site is somehow automatically identifying where the virus is and updating it's stats, rather than waiting for a hum…

Since "implies that the site is somehow automatically identifying where the virus is" is obviously impossible with current tech & infrastructure, the next most "real-time" interpretation is that it has the most up-to-date data as it becomes available... which it basically does AFAIK, assuming it automatically pulls from its data sources, such as the WHO situation report feed. What would you recommend calling it inste…

It's not impossible, most countries have digitized medical records. It wouldn't be technically difficult to automatically send out a ping to a centralized location when a new patient is diagnosed with novel coronovirus. Politically, on the other hand, it's not going to happen.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

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Post by cannedslime » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 5:56 PM UTC

mantap wrote: post #400

dchichkov wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> deaths are harder to fudge

Are you sure about this? AFAIK, the Chinese government does not disclose someone as dead by this virus unless they tested the person positive. That means that if someone dies from respiratory complications on the street or in their home, they will write it off as pneumonia. Right now Wuhan city only has the capacity to screen roughly 6000 samples everyday. Add to this that many sick people are basically just told to go home. Not many cars are driving, city is shutdown so god knows how many are sitting lifeless in their livingroom. I have also seen much evidence that communities are barring the doors of infected households so they can't leave their apartments.

The death count can only be expected considerably higher than reported.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#444

Post by DoctorOetker » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 7:10 PM UTC

Accujack wrote: post #428

DoctorOetker wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like the WHO to be as transparent as we demand China to be (and perhaps they are): At https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2... , you can see the standardized protocols for the hospitals dealing with 2019-nCov, such as the anonymizing CRF (Case Record Form): https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-nco... Which describes both the CORE and DAILY forms for an electronic dat…

You can. See this page: https://www.who.int/healthinfo/statistics/en/ Use their API or the web search, however you like. If you're going to complain about not having up to the minute data available for 2019-nCov, keep in mind that they're not getting the data submitted regularly from China, it's all in daily reports rather than from hospitals.

would you mind sharing a more precise link to the actual 2019-nCoV CRF database? I want to independently recalculate mortalities

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#445

Post by adrianmonk » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 9:03 PM UTC

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?

Maybe the emergency is less about severity and more about the urgency of attempting containment.

The possibility has been raised that if this goes global, it could become an illness that, like the flu, just sort of continually floats around and we're stuck dealing with it. We don't really want another such illness. If freaking out about it right now can even move the needle on the odds of avoiding that scenario, it might be a good plan.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

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Post by Fomite » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 9:59 PM UTC

potatoFam wrote: post #352

Fomite wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Eric Ding has been tweeting pretty terrible misinformation, and is being rightly dragged for it by pretty much every epidemiologist I know on Twitter, including myself. His takes are bad . He's called this virus's R0 the worst he's seen in his career, which is absurd. He's conflated R0 and attack rate. Familiar errors because no one pays attention to ID epidemiology until there's an outbreak, and then suddenly de…

Could you let us know what ID epidemiologists are? I'm not familiar with the field and am wondering what the ID stands for.

Infectious Disease epidemiologists.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#447

Post by whylie » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 10:13 PM UTC

DarthGhandi wrote: post #319

tenpies wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Can you find me what the 8 people arrested for actually wrote? 5 have been arrested in Malaysia and 2 in Thailand also, have read the viral fake news they wrote and have no problems with their arrest at all. In the shadier parts of the internet I'm already seeing services for ruining your competitors with viral social media fear campaigns. r/Australia has a big sticky of all the nonsense being peddled in the country…

You speak of quarantining huge cities like it's some sort of accomplishment worthy of praise and not a brute force response to the effects of their own negligence.

Being critical != bashing, why are you being so defensive about the situation? Why are you trying to drag other countries down saying they wouldn't do any better? What is your goal?

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

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Post by mirimir » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 11:03 PM UTC

_-___________-_ wrote: post #388

mirimir wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd expect that death certificates would specify the specific cause, if it's known. But I don't know if that's true. Either way, it makes the data far less useful.

How is "viral pneumonia" not the specific cause of death?

Doesn't say which virus.

If they don't know, fine. Albeit sloppy, given the context.

If they do know, and don't say, it's deceptive.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

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Post by mirimir » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 11:11 PM UTC

fctorial wrote: post #431

mirimir wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sarcasm doesn't do well on HN. Maybe for good reason.

There was no sarcasm here. The comment just states that the virus' 0 day fatality rate is at most 50%. Why are you offended by this fact? Obviously we might see some twists like the virus becoming more resiliant, and obviously we won't shut down all research. The actual death count of this disease will be much lower. Trust me, I know what I'm talking about. I've played plague inc.

I didn't mean that your comment is factually incorrect.

It's just that neutrally observing that 50% of a population would die is at least off-putting.

Given your explanation, maybe you were mocking the credulous. Mocking doesn't work well on HN either.

I've looked at comment histories for many shadowbanned users, and I'm just echoing commentary.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#450

Post by bouncycastle » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 11:22 PM UTC

bra4you wrote: post #349

bouncycastle wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flu can be managed with vaccine, on-the-spot test kits and antiviral drugs.

AFAIK the flu vaccine is terrible ineffective. I would have to google numbers but the reliability is low.

Although it's not perfect (you're not totally immune), it's still effective at significantly bringing down hospital visits & mortality rates.

This is especially true for those with weak immune systems. As for a source, see the "Effectiveness" section https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/Infectious/Influenza/Pages/you...

Quote "One European study in 2008 found a 66% vaccine efficacy (VE) against confirmed influenza for children aged 9 months to 3 years, while a Japanese study of children aged 6 months to 6 years found VE against influenza A ranged from 42% to 69% depending on the vaccine match"

Another source with an effectiveness section has similar numbers: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/misconceptions.htm

That's very far away from your "flu vaccine is terrible ineffective" statement.