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

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

axios.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 840 posts

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

#391

Post by rogy »

syntheticcorp wrote: post #373
rogy wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

young, fit, have global travel, health and emergency insurance and enough savings to immediately head to the airport if we needed too..

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

#392

Post by cm2187 »

wisty wrote: post #390
cm2187 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that’s what the numbers published say: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas... Look at the mortality by age table. Also note the mortality rate outside of Wuhan seems to be 0.7%, a bit more than the common flu which I think is around 0.1% but not really a massive deal. I don’t know where these numbers will land ultimately but I can think of many reasons why people with mild symptoms th…

7 times is quite a lot more. That's like saying a Porsche is a bit more than a Toyota.

7 times a minuscule number may still be a minuscule number.

A 30yo male has a 0.18% probability to die that year. It's a small enough number that it is irrational to worry about it [1].

[1] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

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

#393

Post by coldtea »

bitreality wrote: post #345
woopdidoop wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you really think it will be any different in the USA or Europe? Will the governments ban conventions? Close restaurants and bars? Shut down shopping malls? You are poorly informed. The Italian government did precisely that this weekend.

Just wait until it happens on a massive scale, and does not appear to be stopping the spread of the virus. People in the West are going to be tough to keep on lockdown. The entire purpose of lockdowns and quarantines at this point seem to be delaying until a vaccine is ready. This will be hard for the average person to understand, and people think much more critically in the West.

>People in the West are going to be tough to keep on lockdown

Historically they haven't been proven particularly tough to lock down, stir up by authoritarians (Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, etc), be surveilled, sold lies, and so on...

As for those "obedient" Chinese, they got this authoritarian party they have today by doing a whole revolution thing first...

>people think much more critically in the West.

That's what uncritical westerners are told...

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

#394

Post by _ph_ »

iso1210 wrote: post #362
djmips wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people do you know with malaria? It's a tropical region disease. In a pandemic of Covid-19, it is going to affect people all over the world in every region.

> It's a tropical region disease Europe and the U.S. used to have Malaria. The name -- bad air -- is Latin, the Romans thought it originated from bad swamp air. Shakespeare mentioned it time and time again in his plays.

Yes, but malaria isn't transmitted between humans but requires a certain mosquito to spread. So unless that mosquito reappears (which is an actual threat due to climate change), the malaria isn't randomly spreading to other countries. But the corona virus doesn't have these bariers as it spreads from humans to humans.

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

#395

Post by littlestymaar »

bitreality wrote: post #332
littlestymaar wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you really think it will be any different in the USA or Europe? Will the governments ban conventions? Close restaurants and bars? Shut down shopping malls? Look at Italy right now. > Or will instead, in the interest of "the economy" (ie, money) keep too light a hand on things. Sure, but this has nothing to do with authoritarian states vs democracy. You'll find a ton of authoritarian states doing exactly the same…

Here's the thing with Italy. They're the first Western country to get a major outbreak. They're being told to do things and assuming that it will stop the virus. But the truth is, containment does not actually stop the virus. It simply slows it. When or if this hits the US or elsewhere in Europe, and it becomes obvious that despite the quarantine in Italy, the virus still continued to spread, they will question the m…

> In China when the government tells its citizens to do something, they just do it. They don't ask why. They don't deliberate on whether it's the correct choice. They simply follow the directions. In the West, everything is up for debate. People don't like to be told what to do.

Sigh, this is so cliché… I don't know where you're from, but the “west” as the unified entity you describe doesn't exist. When it comes to authority and how people comply with the rules, France and Germany are more different than China and the US.

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

#396

Post by retsibsi »

copperx wrote: post #163
thwer234324 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a good time to flag HNs self-conceited hive-mind ? Two days ago, HN was full of - 'LOL this is some Alex Jones level conspiracy'. Warnings by Harvard epidemiologists ? No. Virologists ? No. China quarantining half the population ? No. Only the tech 'wizards' from SV, have a monopoly on truth don't you know. The Orwellian censorship that has been unleashed by these idiots will do the world much more harm in th…

> Warnings by Harvard epidemiologists ? No. Actually .... https://twitter.com/mlipsitch

I don't think they mean there were no such warnings, but that those warnings were ignored here.

(FWIW, based on the threads I saw and participated in I don't think that's really accurate; there seemed to be a range of opinions, with plenty of people playing it down but also plenty taking it seriously.)

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

#397

Post by lotsofpulp »

tanilama wrote: post #323
nostromo wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth reflecting on how many novel pandemics a 40 year old person has experienced in their lifetime. HIV, SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika, COVID-19... For some reason it feels like a "only in the history books" event -- and yet it's actually quite common. The average-aged American (38) has lived through multiple epidemics -- including one that has killed 30 million people (HIV) -- and yet we barely talk about it.

COVID-19 is much more powerful than any of these you mentioned before. It is SARS+, less fatal but much more infectious. In a way, it is a very successful virus (in a nightmare scenario), that aspiring to become the next flu. The Chinese scientists had admitted that, we might have to live with this virus from this time forward. It won't go away like SARS-v1. Also to note, fatality rate might seem low, but 20% of ALL…

>Also to note, fatality rate might seem low, but 20% of ALL patients will develop severe lung issue, that is what makes this virus pretty damn dangerous to us.

Source?

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

#398

Post by avian »

allovernow wrote: post #265
_-___________-_ wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> boarding the subway, eating in a restaurant, or running a marathon There's no evidence that you are remotely likely to catch COVID-19 by doing any of those things either.

You really need to keep up with the literature. A paper recently came out which says it can survive ten days at ambient temperature a on most plastic and steel surfaces. And others have reported it is aerosolized. It spreads through cough, sneeze, and breath. This one is different.

Do you have a link to the paper?

Edit: I found this literature review [1] that sounds similar to what you're referring to. Note that this is only a summary of previously published results on similar viruses. If you check the source data in Table I the persistence times are from hours to days, and the author's conclusion is "up to 9 days" (emphasis mine). In my opinion this is very weak evidence to say that it can survive 10 days "on most surfaces".

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019567012...

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

#399

Post by saiya-jin »

hawkice wrote: post #327
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 would take the other side of the bet about how well China is handling this. They are doing... intensely poorly. The rapid spread is in part due to the fact the Chinese government doesn't care at all about central China, and Wuhan only had(/has?) One critical care bed per one hundred thousand people.

How many of these critical beds do you think average african or other south asian countries have?

I checked with my wife who is doctor at biggest Swiss hospital - currently they could host around 30 people who need respiratory assistance. Surrounding area contains 1.5-2 millions of people.

I used to be critical of China in this, and still hate how they handled the start. But to be honest, unless tremendous luck would be involved, I don't think most western countries wouldn't be able to contain the epidemics neither, it would just be a bit slower. Its too sneaky and effective.

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

#400

Post by Mvandenbergh »

toshk wrote: post #328

A friend of mine who worked for defense creating viruses is convinced it's man made because of the way the virus is structured. Whether it's true or not. It's an interesting case, and I wonder why no one is writing about this possibilty in the media. Those ideas are quickly dismissed as crazy conspiracy theory. Where every big government is actively working on creating viruses for both defense and offense. Especially…

I don't know if it's really worth engaging with this nonsense.

It looks just like other coronaviruses, there is nothing about it that looks man-made.

If it was man-made, don't you think the Chinese government would have locked things down more aggressively as soon as they realised it was out? After all, in this scenario they would know exactly how dangerous it is.

>Where every big government is actively working on creating viruses for both defense and offense.

How many of those have been respiratory viruses with long incubation times, low fatality rates in military age people, and no vaccines or other treatments?

This is basically the worst candidate for a bio-weapon ever!

The ideal bio-weapon: -Is something you can protect your own troops and people against -Can be treated but only with high expenditure of resources -Incapacitates the people it infects as soon as possible -Has no or moderate spread person-person

Otherwise you are just releasing a pathogen that will come back and infect you as well. This is why Anthrax was such a popular bio weapon, person-person infection is extremely rare and it forms spores so can be spread over an area where it will linger but has little chance of causing an out-of-control epidemic. Smallpox was weaponised by the Soviet Union and that is very contagious but can be vaccinated against.

Post reply on HN