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

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

#371

Post by socialdemocrat »

I hope Americans will be fine but I fear it will get bad with the chaotic and ineffective leadership of Donald Trump combined with a privatized and highly individualized health care system.

The American idea that health care is a privilege you have to pay for will hit a brick wall when you deal with a pandemic which does not give a shit about how rich or poor you are.

With a minimalistic welfare state, lower class people will be forced to go to work and will not afford having health checkups. That will risk spreading the virus and cause more fatalities.

What happens when private hospitals have to take on lots of patients who cannot pay? Will there be a race to the bottom trying to push patients over to other hospitals, dump them off on a curb as soon as possible?

I cannot see how a relentlessly profit driven health care system can cope with a serious pandemic.

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

#372

Post by iso1210 »

baq wrote: post #262
shadowprofile77 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely speculating here but this specific case sounds like a bad luck situation in which the family in question had an extreme genetic susceptibility to suffering the virus at its worst. As other comments have pointed out (and the data so far seems to back) the vast majority 81%+ of cases are fairly mild or even asymptomatic and the elderly are those who suffer the higher 2%+ mortality rates (based on what I've r…

if you give a million monkeys a typewriter and wait a million years, you're bound to get all works of Shakespeare by chance alone. yes, bad luck, but the fact it happened illustrates the scale.

> if you give a million monkeys a typewriter and wait a million years

You'll have faeces and dead monkeys everywhere.

Lets assume you have a million monkeys pressing 10 keys per second for 1 million years.

You'd get somewhere in the region of 10^21 letters, or

Lets ignore punctuation, numbers, capitals etc, and assume there's just a choice of 26 letters

You'd be insanely lucky to find "all the world's a stage" somewhere in there.

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

#373

Post by syntheticcorp »

rogy wrote: post #277
dahdum wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m in Tokyo and having a very different experience than you, nearly everyone on the trains are wearing masks and all customer facing staff I see now. Someone hit the emergency button on the train a few days ago because someone was coughing without one (there was a PSA asking people not to do that). It’s mostly foreigners I see walking around without masks now, but I agree it’s still ramping up. I honestly don’t see…

on a side note, i have a week of PTO booked in tokyo then a week in kyoto/osaka, leaving friday. do you think its safe to travel?

Are you a member of a group with higher risk for this like the elderly or immunocompromised? If so I would avoid it.

On the other hand if you are young and fit and capable of following the standard precautions I don’t think you have too much to worry about.

I say this as I’m about to depart from Thailand for Taiwan

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

#374

Post by xbmcuser »

rococode wrote: post #46

I've been checking for updates on the virus several times a day since it first started being reported in Western media around Jan 20 (in part because it's been a fun distraction, in part because I have friends in Wuhan). I like to think I'm generally an optimist, but I think it's been clear for several weeks now that this is going to have a significant worldwide impact. There are just too many factors in favor of unc…

I doubt infection numbers of India Pakistan Bangladesh Indonesia countries with huge populations not enough health care facilities neighbors to China. Especially after how fast it spread in South Korea and Italy.

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

#375

Post by lazylizard »

johnchristopher wrote: post #348
Cookingboy wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well from what we've seen in Japan and South Korea, that seems to be far from guaranteed. Those countries had all the warnings they needed, and knew much more about the virus than the earlier days, yet they still failed to contain the initially small outbreaks.

How can they have all the warnings they needed if China didn't give them the right info from the start ? That 27 days incubation period got a lot of people infected and becoming carriers. It's like, China had a relatively well defined outbreak center while other countries started with a wide spread invisible web of carriers.

maybe not all. but from the moment china admitted they had an outbreak. maybe a more wary country would...ban all non-local travelers from china , quarantine all locals travelling from china, stop all flights to-and-from china, revoke all visas of chinese people...etc

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

#376

Post by celticninja »

Cookingboy wrote: post #312
simonh wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that if doctors had been free to investigate and alert the existence of the disease very early on, it might have been contained to a small number of cases right from the start, and never gained any traction in the population in the first place. The first few weeks of an outbreak are absolutely crucial, and the Chinese authorities actively obstructed efforts to address the issue in that period precisely b…

Well from what we've seen in Japan and South Korea, that seems to be far from guaranteed. Those countries had all the warnings they needed, and knew much more about the virus than the earlier days, yet they still failed to contain the initially small outbreaks.

In part likely due to the fact that China misled everyone so significantly in the beginning other countries could not plan appropriately

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

#377

Post by sascha_sl »

djmips wrote: post #228
irq11 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

”COVID-19 is unlike anything before” It’s almost exactly like every other respiratory virus, except that the case fatality estimates for old and sick people are higher. There’s nothing mechanistically new about the infections we’re seeing. It’s a pretty bog-standard respiratory virus, in terms of its transmission and overall virulence. ”But if COVID-19 spreads to their country, people's daily lives will be significan…

How do you know that it's just fatalities in old and sick? If that's the case, I don't understand why many younger people in Wuhan are dying including the whistle blower doctor who was only 33 years old. We don't even know what the disease will do in terms of long term damage to survivors or the possibility of poor immunity and reinfection. I haven't seen any good statistics on the fatality rate vs age.

The doctor you mentioned was exposed to a lot of cases before proper quarantine, it's likely he was exposed to an immense viral load, which seems to be the reason healthcare workers are generally at risk even if they're young and healthy.

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

#378

Post by fiblye »

officialjunk wrote: post #247
fiblye wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're already at 10x the reported infections of SARS and countries aren't even really testing for the coronavirus. Most countries' policy seems to be asking if you think you're infected and willing to be quarantined for two weeks, and writing it down as a "not infected" if you decline. Or in Japan's case, quarantine people in a mismanaged way to maximize new infections, then let the infected people out to freely ming…

could you please elaborate on why you think it may be more mild?

People were dying pretty quickly from SARS. People of all age ranges.

Data from China is limited, but outside of China, it seems like only the elderly (as in around 80 and up) are dying. I've seen one report of a 40-something dying. While reports are easily well over a thousand outside of China, deaths are still quite low. Recovery numbers are still low, so it's too early to say for sure, but it seems like the biggest problem now is insufficient medical facilities and unprepared staff.

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

#379

Post by celticninja »

johnchristopher wrote: post #348
Cookingboy wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well from what we've seen in Japan and South Korea, that seems to be far from guaranteed. Those countries had all the warnings they needed, and knew much more about the virus than the earlier days, yet they still failed to contain the initially small outbreaks.

How can they have all the warnings they needed if China didn't give them the right info from the start ? That 27 days incubation period got a lot of people infected and becoming carriers. It's like, China had a relatively well defined outbreak center while other countries started with a wide spread invisible web of carriers.

Also China could have prevented people leaving, but by allowing infected people to leave they ensure that China does not need to fight it in isolation, and is not impacted more than other countries, ie. crab mentality

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

#380

Post by labster »

petersellers wrote: post #180
tdhoot wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The silver lining is by this time next year, we should have ~20% less throwaway accounts being created for comments like these. I'm trying to be charitable here...am I reading this correctly?

I think they mean that if a serious outbreak does occur, people will treat it more seriously next time (not that 20% of the population is going to die from Covid-19).

It's gallows humor. It is based on the latest mortality rate I saw, but made the assumption of 100% infection rate among trolls. This is likely not true as they are often found indoors on their computers.

With the 1918 influenza, 1.7% of the world population died, many of them young people. This was still very traumatic to society, despite the fact that Europe had done its level best to kill young men for the previous four years in the trenches.

Right now, influenza has killed more than COVID-19, but people tend not to worry about that. Not new enough. About 300000 people a year die from influenza in a quiet year. Take your flu shots every year, people.

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