Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why stop at 10x or 20x? Why not 1,000x? What's the science behind that?
Death rate of .1% for the flu and 1% for Corona.
2.5-3.5%? In China anyway.
Is It a Pandemic Yet?
141–150 of 289 posts
Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?
#142I will probably be downvoted for saying this, but... The seasonal flu alone kills half a million people every year. So any mild disease that is as contagious and barely twice as fatal will kill 1 million. And that's what's going to happen with COVID19. It is far more severe than the flu. We know COVID19 is as contagious, given how fast it's spreading and how unstoppable it is (R0>2, asymptomatic transmission, airborn…
Let’s say 40% of the people in the world get it and a 1% fatality rate:
That 30 million dead, and probably another 300 million hospitalized and maybe 50 million that need icu care.
Should probably go without saying that we don’t have the ICU beds to handle that in the western world, let alone in developing countries.
We also haven’t had anything like the Spanish flu in the US since we’ve had the modern health insurance system. Is blue cross going to have the resources to pay for all those extra hospital visits? What about all the long term side effects from the millions of people that had acute respiratory failure and survived.
edit:
Also something else to consider -- what if this goes epidemic in the US during the elections this year? They'll have to cancel rallies, campaign events, maybe even the party conventions.
Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?
#143So Italy having an arguably uncontained cluster is probably the most troubling part. The EU has extremely porous borders. The chances of this spreading to the other EU members (and the UK) got a lot higher. At least in the US you largely have to come in by air. Yes of course there are land borders. Canada is one but fits the same description of most cross-border travel (apart from to the US) is by air. The border wit…
Summer = fewer colds? It could be problematic, though, because lots of people travel during the summer. There are probably millions of people queued up to visit Italy, Spain, Britain, etc. The Europeans take long vacations, so populations will be particularly mobile in July and August. I wonder if the U.S. might be slightly less vulnerable to contagion, since Americans tend to visit beaches, national parks and other…
Summer = better air flow, both inside and because people spend more time outside.
Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?
#144Can someone ELI5?
Why is it so hard to produce a vaccination for this virus? We have vaccinations targeting viruses all the time, isn’t it?
Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?
#145I will probably be downvoted for saying this, but... The seasonal flu alone kills half a million people every year. So any mild disease that is as contagious and barely twice as fatal will kill 1 million. And that's what's going to happen with COVID19. It is far more severe than the flu. We know COVID19 is as contagious, given how fast it's spreading and how unstoppable it is (R0>2, asymptomatic transmission, airborn…
> The seasonal flu alone kills half a million people every year. So any mild disease that is as contagious and barely twice as fatal will kill 1 million
That’s assuming no containment effort, like with seasonal flu. Of course, it’s gonna happen if health authorities take the same defeatist attitude as you and do nothing.
Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't need to stock up if you can get food delivered. They can leave the delivery on the doorstep.
You’re not taking into account panic buying / ordering. If it gets bad where you are people are just going to order as much as they can and then there won’t be enough - this already happened with masks here in the UK and we only have a few cases. I had to send some to Hong Kong for a family member a few weeks back and paid £20 for packs of 20 for proper n95 respirators. They’re now sold out online and everywhere desp…
> Stock up now while no-one is panicking yet
That's what triggers panic buying... It's a snowball effect.
Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?
#147Can someone explain to me why coronavirus is getting so much coverage? According to Wikipedia, Coronavirus has killed about 2000 people. Each year smoking kills 480,000 people in the US. In two days smoking will have killed more people in the US than coronavirus has worldwide. Shouldn't we have headlines about this every day? Or any of the other far more deadly things (traffic accidents, heart disease, suicide, etc.)…
Exponential Growth
It's the same with terrorism - when random attacks seemed to be growing in frequency but were still not super common, it was the same question. They might not grow exponentially, but they appeared to be growing in some manner.
My answer now is the same as then: fear is about the future!
Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?
#148I will probably be downvoted for saying this, but... The seasonal flu alone kills half a million people every year. So any mild disease that is as contagious and barely twice as fatal will kill 1 million. And that's what's going to happen with COVID19. It is far more severe than the flu. We know COVID19 is as contagious, given how fast it's spreading and how unstoppable it is (R0>2, asymptomatic transmission, airborn…
[edited to change linked article] Fortunately we know a lot more about viruses today than we did in 1918. The virus has already been mapped genetically, and many labs around the world are hard at work on an anti-viral treatment. We shouldn't get complacent of course, but it's likely that this thing can be contained and treated eventually. I read today about a device[1] from Israel that helps the lungs quickly clear p…
That link has a really obnoxious popup banner for a political poll. Can you use one that is just the news, please?
e.g. https://www.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/New-Israeli-invention-u...
Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has the ability to affect the global economy in ways that the others dont. If people don't want to go to work due to an increased risk of mortality, business will shut down. If everyone is forced to go to work and they all get sick and are unable to work for several weeks, business shuts down. Finally if everyone gets sick and 3% of your workforce then dies, that again causes massive economic disruption. This is a…
But couldn't the same thing apply to traffic deaths? In 2018, in the US, over 36,000 people died in car accidents. That's higher than coronavirus deaths, so logically shouldn't we all stay off the roads and quit going to work? Wouldn't that have the same impact? Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-autos-traffic-deaths-...
Something like traffic deaths - which occur fairly routinely and regularly - are probably already factored in by large companies (i.e. companies expect N people to leave every year, of which M might be unexpected deaths).
The new coronavirus hasn't been accounted for yet by our society, and probably can't be accounted for given that we don't know how far it will spread and how many will die.
Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?
#150Can someone explain to me why coronavirus is getting so much coverage? According to Wikipedia, Coronavirus has killed about 2000 people. Each year smoking kills 480,000 people in the US. In two days smoking will have killed more people in the US than coronavirus has worldwide. Shouldn't we have headlines about this every day? Or any of the other far more deadly things (traffic accidents, heart disease, suicide, etc.)…
It has to do with catastrophic risk and the fact that pandemics follow a power law distribution instead of a normal one. The deaths from things like smoking or auto accidents are normally distributed with very very small deviations around a known mean. Smoking may kill 480,000 Americans per year, but there's never a year where it will kill 10X 100X or 1000X that number. Pandemics tend to follow a power-law distributi…
> Even people who don't have a statistical understanding of power law vs. normal distribution usually have a good intuition of it, which is why most people worry about terrorism more than one would if they were just looking at just the total number of deaths vs. something car accidents or smoking.
I think this is a poor example, by any measure terrorism is an irrational concern for Americans, it's nothing like a pandemic that could actually affect the whole country.