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Is It a Pandemic Yet?

nytimes.com

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Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#201

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

adventured wrote: post #182
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…

And the West is very old, I would expect that to offset the highly developed healthcare systems and resources there. Median ages: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/resources/the-world... Countries in the West over 40 at the median: Germany, Italy, Greece, Slovenia, Portugal, Austria, Lithuania, Latvia, Croatia, Spain, Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Serbia, Bosnia, Czech, Finland, Netherlands, Switzerland, Romania…

there is a graph here. don't know how accurate that is though (sample sizes and the fact that the way it is counted has been revised a couple of times already):

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#202

Post by ardy42 »

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 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 of Asia and then imported in stealth mode by travelers from those regions that are unaware they're infected.

If we had a government that wasn't starved, it might also be preparing sufficient resources for if/when the virus does reach epidemic proportions here.

Also, Americans have been trained to avoid the medical system and tough it out for cost-saving reasons, that training is going to be counterproductive here.

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#203

Post by collinmanderson »

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.)…

It kills 2-3% of the people it infects (within days, not years) and it's very contagious. If it spreads throughout the US, that's 6-9 million deaths in the US alone.

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#204

Post by mrb »

dom96 wrote: post #169
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…

> And keep in mind the IFR, unlike the CFR, is the metric that takes into account undetected mild cases. Interesting, this is always my argument against these fatality ratio estimates, can you explain how the IFR can take undetected mild cases into account? Does it just assume at random how many of those cases exist?

Most look at infection rates among Wuhan evacuees. Since almost all evacuees were tested, it's a good proxy to estimate the city-wide infection rate. See the 4-5 papers linked in my blog post's last section: https://blog.zorinaq.com/case-fatality-ratio-ncov/#updates--...

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#205

Post by pmoriarty »

paganel wrote: post #93
asiachick wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dumb question but what intensive care? Do people need to be on respirators? Need access to drugs only available at ICU? Just curious if any of the things done at an ICU to prevent death really need to be only at the ICU.

As far as I could see in some Twitter videos coming out of China some people need to be on respirators and in a horizontal position. At the limit you can also do that in sports- and concert-halls, which is what the authorities seemed to have done in Wuhan.

From what I understand, there just aren't that many artificial respirators/ventilators.

Worse, a lot of medical equipment (though not sure about artificial respirators/ventilator) is made in China, whose manufacturing capacity has been drastically affected by this epidemic.

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#206

Post by antisthenes »

NY Times would do well to let people read at least this article for free.

It potentially concerns the health of every person on the planet, so sticking it behind a paywall/accountwall seems like particularly...poor taste?

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#207

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

oefrha wrote: post #190
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what would change things is a vaccine, guess time alone won't do it.

Air temperature could possibly do it or at least contribute, as was the case with SARS in 2003.

wouldn't that be only a local effect though, e.g. Southern vs Northern Hemispheres?

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#208

Post by topkai22 »

pstadler wrote: post #77

A couple of excellent sources for COVID19: https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/02/the-latest-coronavirus... (most up-to-date counter and news aggregator which includes a source for each reported number) https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/ (strictly moderated, lots of links to scientific reports and papers, no hoaxes and fake news) https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Z7VQ5xlf3BaTx_LBBbls... (spreadsheets with interes…

I’ll through out the daily who situation reports:

https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#209

Post by jerf »

joobus wrote: post #174

Why is hacker news censoring covid-19 articles? This article just disappeared from the front page despite having more upvotes than most articles on the first page after being submitted an hour ago. Another covid-19 article over the weekend disappeared from the front page also.

I don't know exactly, but IMHO this weekend it has raised itself up to the point that the tech industry really needs to start paying attention to it on a number of levels. The company I work for has a number of significant international offices, and I think the odds of at least one of them being significantly impacted at some point in the next 2-3 months has to be at least 25%. It isn't just the virus itself, or even necessarily primarily the virus, but also the measures the local government enforces. A lot of us engineers have a relatively easy "work from home" option, but not everyone is a programmer.

You also have localized concerns, like, at what point are all the people ordering from Amazon going to stop because they're afraid of getting the virus shipped to them? What is Amazon doing about their worker's health, especially in light of the rather persistent rumors this can spread while asymptomatic? On the one hand, I see people claiming that the virus can't survive being shipped very well and on the other hand we have Amazon striving to ship faster and faster, to say nothing of the actual delivery person.

Whether we like it or not, this is rapidly becoming "tech industry" news too. Unless we are very lucky, by the end of this week, I suspect that's going to be obvious to everyone.

As I've said a few times about prep, even if you don't get the virus or your area never has to be locked down, you ought to be doing prep work anyhow. If it isn't COVID-19, it'll be a quake, or a really bad normal flu season, or any number of other things. You make society more resilient and better able to deal with "true" emergencies when you've prepped enough to take care of yourself and not drain vital social resources at the worst time. You don't usually get lucky and have this kind of warning about oncoming issues. Prepping for a pandemic isn't identical to all the other things you may actually experience, but there's a lot of overlap.

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#210

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #184
WillPostForFood wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buy extra food so if you get sick you don't have to go out and infect other people, or if you are in an area with a lot of sick people you don't have to go out to bu food and get infected.

That's a socially-conscious act and I applaud it. But in truth, before this is over every person on earth will have experienced the virus. The reason to control the spread and delay infection (not avoid it; that's probably impossible) is to allow the health-care infrastructure critical time to manage the flow of sick. If we all got sick at once, there'd be no capacity to treat 99.9% of us. If we spread it out over a…

That's not typically how it works. Historical pandemics have only infected about 30% of the population.
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