Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU • Hacker News Board

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#121

Post by perlwle » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 4:43 AM UTC

kccqzy wrote: post #63

allovernow wrote: post #39

Honestly if there is truth to this article it is reassuring. I've been scouring the darker corners of the internet obsessively for every seemingly reputable bit of data under the assumption that virtually anything official out of China could not be trusted. This doctor is working on the absolute worst of cases and even they, it seems, have a high overall probability of survival. Also good to see some figures on the p…

> I've been scouring the darker corners of the internet obsessively for every seemingly reputable bit of data under the assumption that virtually anything official out of China could not be trusted. I do the same. If you can read Chinese, I strongly recommend you read Sina Weibo, a micro-blogging social media in China, or Toutiao. Read them quickly before posts are inevitably deleted by the censors. There are some tr…

Try Caixin https://www.caixinglobal.com/news/ the english version.

I have closed friend work there and speak highly about the integrtity of their reporting and the content I am reading seems aligned to that.

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#122

Post by 9nGQluzmnq3M » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 4:46 AM UTC

0x8BADF00D wrote: post #117

nabla9 wrote: post #90

If they screw up other measures, like hygiene for the sick and food delivery to 50 million people they can multiply the death rate. Modern theory of Spanish flu[1] is that the flu itself was not that deadly. Combination of influenza with bacteria in the lungs caused most of the deaths. It was the World War I with lots of wounded in the same place, bad hygiene conditions, many with scarred lungs from poison gas and ci…

There are very little details on how the bodies are being disposed of. Does the virus become dormant at a certain temperature ranges? How does it fare with irradiation? These are the kinds of experiments that need to be run.

The bodies are all being incinerated.

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/chi...

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#123

Post by toss1 » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 4:49 AM UTC

baxtr wrote: post #47

eloff wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's the expert, and I'm not. But I can do math. Influenza this year in the US: 19M infected and 10K fatalities. If you posit 1% mortality rate for coronavirus like he argues, that's 20 times more deadly. And it's twice that in China, it's unclear if that's a statistical anomaly or a structural feature of some difference in how things are tested/reported in China. So I'm not going to just shrug and say it's no big de…

You can only do the math right if you get counter and denominator right. The number of unreported cases is probably very high. I found this in the article posted above: ”So the 20,000 cases in China is probably only the severe cases; the folks that actually went to the hospital and got tested. The Chinese healthcare system is very overwhelmed with all the tests going through. So my thinking is this is actually not as…

I also assumed that the death rate was lower due to under-diagnosis of mild cases -- until a few hours ago when I asked a few questions to someone with connections to Wuhan.

The response indicated that the deaths were likely significantly under-reported, as in: not counting the people dying while waiting to get into the hospital, or who never make it there. Plausible since there is both no incentive to report higher rates than confirmed, and not a lot of spare bandwidth to test cases already lost.

The real question now is which is more under-reported, cases or deaths. Either way, reading here details of the mechanism of death, it is far too virulent and deadly for complacency.

Looks like the prevailing approach is a very healthy Normalcy Bias.

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#124

Post by mattrp » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 4:53 AM UTC

eloff wrote: post #41

Alex3917 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I submitted this already, but this is worth reading also: https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/puzmZFQGRTiiquwLa6tT-g/confere...

He's the expert, and I'm not. But I can do math. Influenza this year in the US: 19M infected and 10K fatalities. If you posit 1% mortality rate for coronavirus like he argues, that's 20 times more deadly. And it's twice that in China, it's unclear if that's a statistical anomaly or a structural feature of some difference in how things are tested/reported in China. So I'm not going to just shrug and say it's no big de…

How are you solving the travel problem in the 1m scenario? I’m assuming airports are the last place you want to be.

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#125

Post by ekianjo » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 4:58 AM UTC

cycrutchfield wrote: post #111

ekianjo wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No hospital has been overrun by patients outside of China yet despite high awareness of symptoms.

Yet.

Several weeks already. How long does this super highly infectious disease take to spread outside of China? You have to wonder the claims made on transmission at this stage.

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#126

Post by in_cahoots » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 4:59 AM UTC

plg wrote: post #30

taneq wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a something like 20% hospitalisation rate. That seems kind of scary compared to the flu which is "you have a sniffle, get over it."

"the flu", i.e. influenza, is definitely not "you have a sniffle, get over it" more like feeling like you've been hit by a truck for 2 weeks while you shiver in bed with a fever, coughing your lungs out, unable to function

That was always my impression of the flu, until this year. My husband, infant daughter, and myself all came down with the flu within 3 days of each other. The infant had been vaccinated, while my husband and I were not. The infant and husband were confirmed via a nose swab to have the flu, while we just inferred that I got it since we all had classic flu symptoms.

Despite not being vaccinated, my husband was feeling 80% better within three days and fully recovered within four days. He was miserable for the first two days, but still not the level of ‘got hit by a truck’ that I remember from previous cases. I took five days to recover and also had relatively mild symptoms - it was undeniably different from a common cold (muscle soreness, chills and night sweats, fatigue) but I wouldn’t have thought it was the flu if the rest of my family wasn’t infected. My daughter seemed to be recovered within 48 hours, though she later contracted pneumonia. Even that was managed within 24 hours of starting amoxicillin and a nebulizer.

This post has gotten pretty long, but my point is that, for whatever reason, we came down with a flu that wasn’t nearly as bad as the norm. Even the doctors were skeptical until the test results came back.

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#127

Post by ekianjo » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 5:00 AM UTC

cycrutchfield wrote: post #106

ekianjo wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If other countries start to look like China in a month or two, we will be in pandemic conditions throughout the world. Your "if" is completely unfounded. Outside of China infections are not following any exponential trend at all.

You sound a lot like the Wuhan government circa late December/early January. I'm not sure what to tell you. Unless you think that this virus somehow only targets people living in China, it's only a matter of time before it takes hold in other countries. This is not one that you can simply quarantine and isolate away like SARS. This one seems to be communicable at the earliest onset of symptoms, or even perhaps before…

Its been several weeks already people are infected in several countries. Yet no sign of pandemic outside of China. I dont know what other facts you need.

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#128

Post by oxymoran » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 5:08 AM UTC

Even in Communist China, people are turned away from hospitals due to inability to pay for treatment...that’s the worst irony I have ever heard.

This disease is virulent and unpredictable. A 34 year old doctor died. 12 hospitals are being built at breakneck speed. This will become endemic at this rate. Either we create a vaccine or we each roll the dice on acquired immunity and too many people die in the process. It is time to be concerned.

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#129

Post by rajup » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 5:14 AM UTC

oxymoran wrote: post #128

Even in Communist China, people are turned away from hospitals due to inability to pay for treatment...that’s the worst irony I have ever heard. This disease is virulent and unpredictable. A 34 year old doctor died. 12 hospitals are being built at breakneck speed. This will become endemic at this rate. Either we create a vaccine or we each roll the dice on acquired immunity and too many people die in the process. It…

> Even in Communist China, people are turned away from hospitals due to inability to pay for treatment...that’s the worst irony I have ever heard.

If you had read the whole article you would have learnt that treatment is free for those affected.

> It is time to be concerned.

Concerned sure, alarmed no, like your post seems to tend towards.

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#130

Post by not_a_moth » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 5:15 AM UTC

forgingahead wrote: post #119

Great article all around, worth reading as it's one of the only I've seen that are actually talking about disease progression and timeline. Some key info from the article: ---- Caixin: Based on your clinical experience, what's the disease progression of the new coronavirus? Peng: Lately I've been spending the daytime seeing patients in the ICU, then doing some research in the evenings. I just wrote a thesis. I drew o…

Should add their discussion of cytokine storms in healthy people, which appears to have a more rapid timeline

> Some experts argue that the virus triggers a cytokine storm, which ravages the stronger immune system of young adults

> Based on my observations, a third of patients exhibited inflammation in their whole body. It was not necessarily limited to young adults. The mechanism of a cytokine storm is about whole-body inflammation, which leads to a failure of multiple organs and quickly evolves into the terminal stage. In some fast-progressing cases, it took two to three days to progress from whole-body inflammation to the life-threatening stage.