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

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#151

Post by ShorsHammer » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 6:14 AM UTC

torgian wrote: post #144

My wife is mainland Chinese, and she has been saying that it a worse than what the government is saying. Also, since Li Wenliang died, well, frankly a lot of people are pissed at the CCP. Anyway, I feel like it’ll be an epidemic ( it already is, I believe ) in China, and be much better controlled outside of China. Unfortunately my wife is also stuck in Chongqing; Taiwan is essentially closing up its borders and we do…

How would you say it is outside of China, are all those governments lying too? 2 deaths now, one of which is in HK. How terrifying.

> Anyway, I feel like it’ll be an epidemic

So worse than the flu which kills 650,000 people in a bad season? Worse than traffic accidents which kill 1.2 million each year? You should be utterly terrified of cars considering the fear surrounding this mediahype virus

Edit: Ahh yes that regular feeling of commenting about China on Hacker/Dunning Kruger News. Good luck folks, hope you all survive this flavour of the month apocalypse unscathed.

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#152

Post by tristanj » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 6:19 AM UTC

allovernow wrote: post #67

kccqzy wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't but if you do you have a huge opportunity here to spread critical information to the world, if you are willing and able to post translations.

I shared the story of a Wuhan coronavirus survivor here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22272264

It’s an account from a 23 year old healthy male who contracted the virus late December. He was hospitalized with fever and developed pneumonia. Within a week he was in critical condition with near fatally low blood oxygen (claimed 60%) and digestive issues. He would have died without medical treatment.

There are several stories like this shared on Chinese media but they’re not shared with the rest of the world.

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#153

Post by franknine » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 6:23 AM UTC

latch wrote: post #118

franknine wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a SARS outbreak in Taiwan since we trusted the statement from Chinese government back then. This time we assume coronavirus can do person to person transmission and blocked travel to WuHan back when CCP and WHO were downplaying its ability to spread. That's how we have less cases than Japan, Korea and Hong Kong now. Recently Taiwanese people in WuHan asked for evacuation. CCP denied our request at first, then…

> That's how we have less cases than Japan, Korea and Hong Kong now. There could be other reasons for this, no? I mean, specifically in Japan's case, a huge cluster of that is from cruise ships. That seems more like a [bad] luck thing rather than the result of proactive action. Also, I think we should make the distinction between "cases" and "confirmed cases". I'm in Singapore and one of the reasons given why Singapo…

Before the cruise ship, Japan already got domestic transmission case which is a bus driver driving tour groups from WuHan. It is confirmed on 1/28. (Later the Japanese local tour guide on that bus is also confirmed infected) They barred foreign nationals who visited China's Hubei Province on 2/1

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/01/28/national/japan-...

Taiwan blocked tour groups from Hubei on 1/24 and ordered to evict existing groups. There are two confirmed cases whom are WuHan tourists entered before 1/24. Fortunately they did not caused domestic transmission.

The case I referred on that evacuation plane is a confirmed case and there is still a chance there might be more cases from that plane since the on-plane protection is reported to be sloppy.

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#154

Post by zozbot234 » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 6:32 AM UTC

torgian wrote: post #144

My wife is mainland Chinese, and she has been saying that it a worse than what the government is saying. Also, since Li Wenliang died, well, frankly a lot of people are pissed at the CCP. Anyway, I feel like it’ll be an epidemic ( it already is, I believe ) in China, and be much better controlled outside of China. Unfortunately my wife is also stuck in Chongqing; Taiwan is essentially closing up its borders and we do…

> Also, since Li Wenliang died, well, frankly a lot of people are pissed at the CCP.

This is a pretty irrational reaction if you ask me, the CCP is actually the more open, quasi-democratic side of Chinese government and politics. There are loose 'factions' as part of the CCP that are cautiously pushing for more openness, and the Chinese should be aware of them and be supportive. Frustration and anger are not helpful.

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#155

Post by bulutsuzku » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 6:35 AM UTC

samstave wrote: post #109

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…

https://i.redd.it/88osl54prjf41.png What are your thoughts on this?

Is that "easy" to hide such big number of deaths in China?

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#156

Post by Danieru » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 6:35 AM UTC

oxymoran wrote: post #147

baxtr wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why are they building 12 hospitals at breakneck speed for a severe cold? Do you honestly believe that?

Wuhan's Healthcare system could not handle a widespread cold break out either.

Much of the rest of the world has sufficient capacity to hospitalize patients to prevent an outbreak. China being China is behind both due to recent industrialization and also an authoritarian state which lied about the dangers.

Take it how you want, but this is a severe flu which would not have survived in more industrialized nations.

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#157

Post by tristanj » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 6:40 AM UTC

allovernow wrote: post #68

user5994461 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The WHO also announced 5-6 days average incubation with a mortality rate around 3%.

The WHO has been reporting numbers almost identical to those out of China, which are unquestionably and severely underreported and can only represent a distant lower bound. I don't think anything coming from the WHO can be trusted. I honestly think it hugely irresponsible for the WHO to report these numbers without clear disclaimers. In fact, there are clear politics at play here, as the WHO has only come out with ma…

I believe it goes further than this. WHO and China are both trying to downplay the severity of the pandemic because they know if they publish more accurate estimates, it will cause mass panic. Panic is not helpful in any situation, and leads to an unstable society, hoarding, and destructive behaviors.

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#158

Post by bulutsuzku » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 6:41 AM UTC

eindiran wrote: post #56

thedudeabides5 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok and what does this mean? “ nCoV2019 has a furin-sensitive motif at the traditional S1/S2 border fo the spike protein, i.e. RRAR, that was lacking in SARS (which depends on cathepsin cleavage a few amino acids downstream). nCoV2019 lacks the secondary minimal furin cleavage site, i.e. RNTR, that is found in SARS. Therefore, the endoproteolytic cleavage pattern is expected to be different between nCoV2019 and SARS.…

Furin --> A protein. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furin Spike protein --> the proteins on the surface of a virus used to attach onto or enter a host cell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peplomer RRAR --> This is a group of amino acids: Arginine Arginine Alanine Arginine. Here is the list of abbreviations: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Class/MLACourse/Modules/MolBioR... For a discussion of cleavage --> https://en.wikti…

Thank you for the clarifications!

Is there a "list" of to-do's for helping nCoV-2019 researchers?

Many of us cannot follow the biochemistry but we can code/run bioinformatics pipelines faster.

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#159

Post by IAmGraydon » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 6:44 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…

> We're at 2^15 and doubling every 5 days. If that keeps up for a month we'll be at 1M infected and 16K dead. From there it's another 50 days to 1B infected and 1-2M dead.

You may be a programmer, but certainly not a virologist. That’s not how that works.

Re: Life and Death in a Wuhan Coronavirus ICU

#160

Post by blackrock » Sat, Feb 08, 2020, 6:47 AM UTC

mantap wrote: post #78

istorical wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beyond the actual mortality rate or possible sequelae (which seemed to occur in post-SARS survivors), the real danger lies in what the actual percentage of cases requiring hospitalization due to severity of pneumonia is (serious + critical condition). Some believe it to be a much higher percentage of the total # of cases than something like the flu, meaning if the infection spreads as much as the normal flu, we may s…

The corollary of this is that you don't even have to be infected with the coronavirus to die because of it. This coronavirus acts as figurative denial of service attack against hospitals. Anybody with a medical emergency is going to have an incresed risk of mortality if hospitals are swamped with an epidemic.

This is actually a fitting description.

It’s effectively a distributed denial of service attack (DDOS) on the medical system.

There are a lot of old people in Wuhan and the province, that those that gets a heart attack or an old age ailment, where they normally would have been saved, will now die. This is a terribly tragic secondary effect.