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Is It a Pandemic Yet?

nytimes.com

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Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#191

Post by topkai22 »

irq11 wrote: post #15

Thankfully, this is a relatively mild virus. Part of what makes it hard to detect is that most cases (>80%) are mild, and many are actually asymptomatic: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-asia... The vast majority of people who have died have been elderly and/or infirm. The death rate under 60 is well under 1%. If you’re young and healthy, this is a chest cold. The biggest thing the media needs…

Influenza is the single most deadly pathogens currently circulating and we could end up with an entirely separate pathogen circulating annually with similar or worse fatality statistics? Yes that is terrifying, even if I personally have a low likelihood of dying.

Btw, influenza is also very lethal to infants. I have those in my family.

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#192

Post by tharne »

helen___keller wrote: post #150
tharne wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pand…

Not irrational, since, like pandemics, terrorism involves a lot of "unknown unknowns". You're thinking past terrorism attacks == future terrorism attacks, which is the wrong way to look at it. It's not a linear concept like auto accidents. Deaths from terrorism can jump around wildly from year to year. You can have zero deaths from terrorism one year and one million the next. That's how certain phenomena work. Others are linear and it's important not to confuse the two.

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#193

Post by jerf »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #146
jonplackett wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Call it tragedy of the commons, call it whatever you like; your not buying stuff now isn't going to prevent a run later.

Socially, you're probably still better off buying sooner rather than later, because that means the system has more time to restock and ship things around for people later. If you're part of the end pile up, you're another stresser at the worst time.

As evidence of this... the ideal time to stock up with emergency supplies was months or even a couple of years ago, when it would bother nobody. I've buffed up some supplies a bit, but I wasn't starting from scratch because I've been keeping stuff on hand for a while now. Giving the system months or years of headstart is better than weeks, but weeks or even a single week is better than nothing.

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#194

Post by jsjw7sbw »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #171
jsjw7sbw wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0.8% of the people you know die every year anyway. If all of the people you know get infected it might bump it to 3%. Not that radical in my opinion.

That 0.8% includes 'old age'. In fact, its mostly old age. The corona virus increases the death rate from influenza 10,000X. By communicable disease, 100X?

>mostly old age

Same as corona, no?

Edit: I'm not arguing it's less deadly than something else but in perspective I think 'mild' is an accurate description.

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#195

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

adventured wrote: post #151
mrb wrote: post #95

I 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…

> COVID19 is the most severe (ie. contagious + fatal) airborne disease since the Spanish Flu. It very clearly is and it's out of the box, they can't stop it now. The US should be shutting down all travel into and out of the country, full quarantine from the rest of the world. We'd have a chance at stopping it from doing to the US what it has done to China, if we acted immediately, before it's across Europe and more o…

It's too late for this approach. The only reason that could explain why the US still does not have many cases is lack of testing and the fact that it goes undetected for a long time.

As you said:

> It very clearly is and it's out of the box

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#196

Post by usrusr »

burtonator wrote: post #105
est31 wrote: post #9

> Some 152 cases (and at least three deaths) were confirmed in Italy on Sunday, up from three cases on Thursday. The number of infected people in South Korea jumped to 763 (and six deaths) in just days. To add an important point: In both countries, they have detected covid-19 only well after it has spread inside the country. E.g. in Italy it started with one severely ill patient who went to the hospital and got teste…

If this is asymptomatic do they eventually get sick or do they just harbor the virus? I don't understand how the virus can be asymptomatic? How does it reproduce and what triggers it to become symptomatic?

I think of asymptomatic infectivity as a sitting war between the virus and the host immune system. The virus has taken hold in a region where it a) does not grow at a rate harmful to the host and b) already has access to a spreading mechanism, while the immune system succeeds in keeping the infection away from organs where (either) c) the virus would grow at an unsustainable rate, eventually taking down it's host and/or d) the immune system's counter reaction would be so severe that it would endanger the host. Avoiding c) and d) are in the best interest of both virus and immune system (even though both are obviously not aware of any of that), so both are effectively happy. Sooner or later the immune system will develop a countermeasure nonetheless, but until then the virus will have spread to other hosts generously. Reliably reaching a state like that would be the second best evolutionary outcome of a virus, only topped by permanently resisting the immune system's removal attempts.

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#197

Post by WaltPurvis »

topkai22 wrote: post #163
ducttape12 wrote: post #76

Can 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.)…

For why we are collectively concerned about a good comparison is influenza (flu), which kills millions worldwide each year and has a case fatality rate of around 0.1%. I believe flu is the single deadliest pathogen worldwide currently. Covid-19 appears to be extremely virulent and at least as lethal if not several orders of magnitude more so than influenza. The immediate reason why is Covid-19 is getting so much atte…

> a good comparison is influenza (flu), which kills millions worldwide each year

That's a slight exaggeration. The number is in the hundreds of thousands, not millions.

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#198

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

mywacaday wrote: post #118
SiempreViernes wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things are developing very fast, expect that distortions from the chinese wispers games that is modern media to be worse than ever. I've seen report that the first case was in contact with a person that had been in China but showed not symptoms and even might have tested negative at some point. If they get re-tested and show positive now, or some of their possessions do, that solves the mystery.

Didn't China changed how they were confirming cases to an MRI scan as people were still testing negative on tests 2-5 before testing positive.

Yes, but the problem with using that in this context is that an MRI scan can't fully distinguish COVID from other severe respiratory infections. It definitely won't work on someone who's asymptomatic.

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#199

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

wonderwonder wrote: post #172
empath75 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 insuran…

Building on this, what happens if grocery stores shut down as the Just in Time stocking infrastructure breaks down as truckers / workers stop going to work?

the army will need to step in to keep peace. you are probably looking at a curfews to prevent looting.

edit: probably also rationing: Canned goods are starting to look a bit bare at our local supermarket in Florence, about 200km from Italy's COVID19 cases. https://twitter.com/JacekWork/status/1231900845802954757

edit-2: Residents in Milan, Italy have raided the grocery stores as panic about COVID19 and city lockdowns sets in. https://twitter.com/RuralCdn/status/1231969752890957824

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#200

Post by jerf »

tharne wrote: post #192
helen___keller wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pand…

Not irrational, since, like pandemics, terrorism involves a lot of "unknown unknowns". You're thinking past terrorism attacks == future terrorism attacks, which is the wrong way to look at it. It's not a linear concept like auto accidents. Deaths from terrorism can jump around wildly from year to year. You can have zero deaths from terrorism one year and one million the next. That's how certain phenomena work. Others…

Indeed, while I haven't seen anyone even theorize that COVID-19 is a terrorist attack in the darkest rumors I've seen, it's the sort of thing you need to worry about if you let a terrorist organization ever got far enough to produce one of these things, which is a completely realistic concern.

To my eyes, COVID-19 looks like a single source that is spreading like wildfire, but, imagine this was a deliberate attack. Things spread fast enough on their own; consider how fast this would be spread if there was an organization doing it on purpose. What if this basically appeared in every major US city simultaneously?

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