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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.
How much hotter do you think it would have to get to make that virus die out?
We were looking into Covid-19 at the office and after digging through the scariness we realized mortality rate for healthy 30-somethings is around 0.1%. Then we said screw it and stopped worrying. We’re most likely gonna be fine. Even if it becomes widespread the odds are ever in our favor. Plus there’s already a few confirmed cases in SFBA so ... Edit: for the downvoters, I’m not say spread disease with wonton aband…
It can be a major pandemic and still almost everyone will survive it. If it kills 1% that would be huge, but 99% of you will still be here.
In addition it appears that something like 20% of those infected suffer severe, crippling lung damage.
That's not to mention all the economic damage, which in turn will have more adverse health consequences.
We really should not be taking this lightly, even if a lot less people get infected and the mortality rate isn't quite that high it could still be devastating.
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…
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…
Every cloud has a silver lining :)
>Is blue cross going to have the resources to pay for all those extra hospital visits?
If the government ends up bailing them out this could be a step towards single payer health care in the US.
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[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…
In particular, chloroquine has been shown to be helpful in treatment and is readily available in developing countries since it's used as a malaria medicine (and there are replacements available in developed countries). in vitro: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41422-020-0282-0 practice: https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/bst/advpub/0/advpub_202...
>Chloroquine Phosphate, which has been used for more than 70 years, has been tested in 135 cases in Beijing and southern China's Guangdong Province. Among them, 130 patients have light and common symptoms, and five are severe patients.
>None of the patients with light and common symptoms have developed severe symptoms. Four severe patients have been discharged from hospital, and one has seen severe symptoms mitigated to normal, Xu said. http://www.china.org.cn/china/2020-02/22/content_75732846.ht...
Which seems quite promising. Also it could be used prophylactically.
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Summer = better air flow, both inside and because people spend more time outside.
Not an expert, but it's been stated by experts that coronoviruses, in general, spread slower during summer. This has not been proven for COVID-19, but presumably there will be some nontrivial affect on this virus as well.
Of course it is. The officials at WHO failed us because they are more worried about the politics than the truth. This type of behavior will make us not trust them in the future.
It's still actually quite limited according to official data. They have to consider the reactions of the public and also the potential effects of declaring pandemics too often if it is not necessary. I don't have many comparison points but a quick Google shows that we are still very far from the 2009 flu pandemic, for example. Of course that may change...
New tests can't just be created by hospitals and labs out of thin air, and they can't be used without undergoing a lengthy bureaucratic approval process.
For a novel pathogen like this the tests are still in the early phases of being manufactured and approved, so most people who go in with symptoms just aren't going to be tested.
There's also a manpower issue that has to be taken in to account: if everyone with flu-like symptoms came in to get tested the hospitals and labs would be overwhelmed even if they had enough tests available and those tests were already approved. Many labs and hospitals are already close to being overwhelmed from seasonal flu.
So I really wouldn't consider official data to be very reliable at this point. We really need to wait and see.
Meanwhile, though, it would be prudent to err on the side of caution.
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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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Yeah, I stopped worrying a few weeks back after I saw the mortality rate. It's basically a highly virulent flu with the same risk factors. Not on the same level as sars and the like.
That's a pretty cavalier attitude even if we take your assumptions to be true. If it's a virulent flu, the last time we had a pandemic with comparable stats was 1918, when we had much less global travel but much worse medical infrastructure. The 1918 Spanish flu infected potentially 1/4 of the world (500 million people at the time) and killed around 2% (variable depending on sources) of the global population - ~40 mi…
To be unemotionally pragmatic: the current World population could handle the death of 40 million, or even 400 million, without macro-disruption.
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> According to Wikipedia, Coronavirus has killed about 2000 people. It's mostly isolated to 1 province in China. If you extrapolate those deaths world wide, you're talking 10s of millions of people dead if it goes pandemic.
You can't really extrapolate things like that though. Try extrapolating west virginia diabetes related death to the world and we'd be fucked too.