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Is It a Pandemic Yet?

nytimes.com

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Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#211

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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…

Right, supposedly Denmark has no cases for example. I find that hard to believe, it seems more likely to me, given the average Danes dislike of going to the Doctor , and the average Doctor response of "you have some sort of virus come back in a couple weeks if it doesn't get better" that it is here, there are probably a few hundred walking around with it, and the first one to go to the hospital just hasn't happened yet.

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#212

Post by LyndsySimon »

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'm not aware of HN itself actively "censoring" anything, as long as I've been here. If articles are disappearing from the front page, then it's likely due to them being flagged by users.

I'll also note that I use an alternate front-end for HN - hckrnews - which by default sorts by time, so the only way I'm ever aware of this sort of complaint is when someone brings it up in the comments.

As for this topic in particular, there has been a lot of coverage about COVID-19/2019-nCoV recently, but there hasn't been a lot of new information. I suspect people are flagging the topic because they're getting their regular updates on it from other communities and want HN to remain a place where topics that are of particular and specific interest are posted. Once I realized that's how the majority of the community sees it, I stopped thinking of the rise and fall of topics here as being based on whether or not they are "newsworthy" and it started making a lot more sense.

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#213

Post by pmoriarty »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #49
TomMarius wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They won't once the quarantine is in effect

A quarantine that tries to prevent people getting food is a quick way to get riots. No government would be stupid like that.

If it gets bad enough, it's quite likely that there'll be martial law, and possibly food rationing enforced.

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#215

Post by topkai22 »

WaltPurvis wrote: post #197
topkai22 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are right, except on exceptional bad years. Apologize, had the higher number in my head.

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#216

Post by hhjinks »

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…

> Covid froze the second largest economy and did it in the span of a month. What chance does the rest of the world stand at stopping it? None.

This doesn't follow. It doesn't matter how large an economy is affected. The primary factor is contact between infected and healthy people. Areas with less population density might have a good shot at keeping infections down, like a lot of areas in Europe.

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#217

Post by bryanrasmussen »

theseadroid wrote: post #183
burtonator wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

As other people said, most viral diseases have a asymptomatic period. What's unique about Coronavirus is that the patient can be infectious during the asymptomatic period. This makes coronavirus so hard to be controlled.

My understanding is that most viruses have some short period of infectiousness before symptoms develop, like the flu https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/disease/spread.htm https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/infections/how-lo...

Coronavirus however has a really long infectious period before symptoms can appear. Which I guess is to its evolutionary advantage and thus unlikely to disappear (just guessing on this part)

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#218

Post by oefrha »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #207
oefrha wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The Northern Hemisphere account for ~90% of the world's population; the percentage living beyond 23.5°S is very small. It is entirely conceivable that the epidemic is put under control before it gets too cold for those people.

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#219

Post by oefrha »

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.

At 141 points and 215 comments, it might have triggered the flamewar detector.

Re: Is It a Pandemic Yet?

#220

Post by JoeAltmaier »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #210
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This one is air-borne with many days of no initial symptoms. That's the whole deal right there, why this is especially problematic.
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