Live data from Hacker News

Tokyo Olympics “looking at a cancellation” if coronavirus not contained

axios.com

31–40 of 840 posts

Re: Tokyo Olympics “looking at a cancellation” if coronavirus not contained

#31

This may seem silly but this is one of my first confirmations about how serious this is.

Does anyone know if ya can catch this thing twice? Or are we expecting it to mutate similar to cold n flu viruse?

AFAIK that's still to be determined due to the number of false positives/true negatives with the testing. Same with the incubation period.

Edit - on the more worrying side of things this article (https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/14-of-recovered-...) was released today saying 14% of recovered patients Guangdong tested positive for the the virus. One of the more annoying things during this is that I have no idea which sources are awful tabloids and which are trustworthy like I do in the anglosphere.

Re: Tokyo Olympics “looking at a cancellation” if coronavirus not contained

#32
post #23

I wonder how long until other international events start to be closed? I live almost trackside at a formula 1 event in a few weeks and I'm not exactly enthusiastic about people coming in from all over the world and cramming onto the public transport while they're drunk and sweaty. It probably can't be contained anyway but large international events could cause some huge spikes in transmission.

Mobile World Congress was cancelled two weeks ago. 100,000 people. $500 million in economic activity in Barcelona. Many exhibitors from China.

It's already happening.

Re: Tokyo Olympics “looking at a cancellation” if coronavirus not contained

#33

This may seem silly but this is one of my first confirmations about how serious this is.

Does anyone know if ya can catch this thing twice? Or are we expecting it to mutate similar to cold n flu viruse?

Seems like yes, but not because it mutates, it's just that the immune response can be weak. Probably more of a risk for people with weak immune systems to start with.

Everything I've read suggests that Coronaviruses are more stable, genetically speaking, than the flu.

https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/its-possible-...

Re: Tokyo Olympics “looking at a cancellation” if coronavirus not contained

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are orders of magnitudes larger than the SARS outbreak at this point.

> We are orders of magnitudes larger than the SARS outbreak at this point an order* SARS had ~8500 cases, ~800 deaths [1]. COVID-19 is currently ~81000 cases and ~2700 deaths.[2] It will be orders, plural, at some point, but remains to be seen how big (and I won't speculate on that). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2003_Probable_cases_of_SA... [2] https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...

In my mind at least, all of these numbers are applesauce. Our ability to trust these numbers hinges on our ability to trust information reported by China's government and other authoritarian regimes (eg Iran and North Korea).

Re: Tokyo Olympics “looking at a cancellation” if coronavirus not contained

#35
It will be cancelled.

Mathematic models made by epidemiologist experts from Harvard and prediction from John Hopkins guys are giving huge numbers

between 40 and 70% world adult population will be infected in one year and numbers of deaths will be between 30 and 150 million if their predictions are correct and china didn't lie with the 2% death rate

Read the threads from their twitters, the situation is much much worse than the media is telling constantly with the influenza comparison, and this guys are not nuts, they are top minds of epidemic control.

A brief from their conversations and information would be:

- It is absolutely impossible to stop covid and will be a pandemic

- The death rate could hit 10% in some countries

- Expect between 30 and 70% of the world to be infected

- millions of deaths

- Governments duty now is not to stop the disease as they can't, but try to slow it until we understand it better, have real numbers (chinese ones cannot to be trusted), and we develop a vaccine so the R0 can be - Governments are likely going to adopt the hardest restrictions they can get away, expect quarantines on every country

- Health services on third world countries will collapse, first world will have problems as we are not prepared

- CDC is already saying the virus will be with us more than one season

- hope we can avoid more deadly mutations

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1228373884027592704.html?...

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1231425805898657795.html

https://ccdd.hsph.harvard.edu/research/ncov-making-sense-of-...

https://twitter.com/T_Inglesby

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing

https://twitter.com/mlipsitch

Re: Tokyo Olympics “looking at a cancellation” if coronavirus not contained

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC the SARS outbreak in 2003 was "contained" within that year.

We were able to essentially starve SARS out of new people to infect. It had a 2-7 day incubation period, was not contagious before symptomatic, and spread by bodily fluid (coughing up water droplets, spread by touch to another). COVID-19 has a 21+ day incubation period, is contagious before you're symptomatic, and is possibly airborne (I haven't heard strong confirmation of that yet, but it's definitely more virulent…

I didn’t think it was airborne, but also transferred via droplets

Re: Tokyo Olympics “looking at a cancellation” if coronavirus not contained

#39
post #24
post #23

I wonder how long until other international events start to be closed? I live almost trackside at a formula 1 event in a few weeks and I'm not exactly enthusiastic about people coming in from all over the world and cramming onto the public transport while they're drunk and sweaty. It probably can't be contained anyway but large international events could cause some huge spikes in transmission.

China GP is cancelled, and they are thinking about cancelling the Italian GP. More will certainly follow.

What is GP?

Re: Tokyo Olympics “looking at a cancellation” if coronavirus not contained

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC the SARS outbreak in 2003 was "contained" within that year.

We were able to essentially starve SARS out of new people to infect. It had a 2-7 day incubation period, was not contagious before symptomatic, and spread by bodily fluid (coughing up water droplets, spread by touch to another). COVID-19 has a 21+ day incubation period, is contagious before you're symptomatic, and is possibly airborne (I haven't heard strong confirmation of that yet, but it's definitely more virulent…

And apparently it can survive on a stainless steel surface for 36 hours. [0]

Also from [0] however:

"Sunlight will cut the virus ability to grow in half so the half-life will be 2.5 minutes and in the dark it’s about 13m to 20m. Sunlight is really good at killing viruses. That’s why I believe that Australia and the southern hemisphere will not see any great infections rates because they have lots of sunlight and they are in the middle of summer. And Wuhan and Beijing is still cold which is why there’s high infection rates.

In regards to temperature, the virus can remain intact at 4 degrees or 10 degrees for a longer period of time. But at 30 degrees then you get inactivation. And High humidity the virus doesn’t like it either. That’s why I think Sars stopped around May and June in 2003 – that’s when there’s more sunlight and more humidity. The environment is a crucial factor. The environment will be unfavourable for growth around May. The evidence is to look at the common cold – it’s always during winter. So the natural environment will not be favourable in Asia in about May."

I believe this is the main reason May is the deadline for containment.

[0] https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/puzmZFQGRTiiquwLa6tT-g/confere...

Post reply on HN