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SXSW Cancelled Due to Coronavirus

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Re: SXSW Cancelled Due to Coronavirus

#51

Post by inferiorhuman »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #31
positr0n wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about summmer? Honest question that I haven't seen discussed enough to form an opinion on. Flu and the common cold are drastically curtailed by late spring and it seems reasonable that coronavirus spread could also dramatically slow until the season starts again this fall.

There are cases in warm places like Singapore and Thailand. Yes, they think transmission could be slowed in warm humid weather, but most warm places in the world have air conditioning.

A friend of mine recently went Guangdong -> HK -> Thailand -> US. Their logic was along the lines of: Thailand has fewer cases than Singapore because Thailand has minimal air conditioning compared to places like Singapore or the US.

We'll see.

Re: SXSW Cancelled Due to Coronavirus

#52

Post by nostrademons »

tapatio wrote: post #40

The average American will die of cardiovascular disease, not the coronavirus. Rather than stock up on rice and masks and cancel events, people should address what’s most likely to kill them.

Over a lifetime perhaps, but COVID-19 has the potential to kill about a million Americans within the next year, which would make it the leading cause of death by a large margin (surpassing heart disease by 50%). That's assuming a conservative death rate of 1% more inline with South Korea or Diamond Princess rather than the 3.4% the WHO currently estimates or the 5% seen in Wuhan, and assuming a 33% infection rate rather than the upper bounds of 60-80% some experts are predicting. If you have a chance to save a million lives it's probably worth taking some precautions.

Re: SXSW Cancelled Due to Coronavirus

#53

Post by ajross »

tomerico wrote: post #19
xwdv wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing will happen in 2 months that suddenly makes it safe to hold an event of that size attended by developers from all across the world. It’s over.

That’s a very speculative statement. It’s quite possible that the Virus spread will stop as the weather warms up.

Viruses don't care about the weather. The reason we catch more diseases in the winter is just that we spend more time indoors, physically nearer to other people. That will probably be true of COVID19 too, but the existing transmission numbers (which, to be fair, are still noisy and hard to say anything definitive about) are like an order of magnitude higher than you get for flu transmission. Summer isn't going to do squat, basically.

When "most" people have had some variant of a virus in the past and have working antibodies, it's harder for diseases to spread. When everyone is vulnerable, you need far (!) fewer transmission events to double the number of infections, and things explode.

This kind of misunderstanding is a big part of why so many people (including those at the top, sigh) aren't taking this seriously.

Re: SXSW Cancelled Due to Coronavirus

#55

Post by TrueDuality »

excerionsforte wrote: post #28

SXSW was really bent on going through with this massive event even though smaller events were being cancelled. The spread would likely happen through multiple contacts in airports and since there is a delay in symptoms if any, SXSW woould, in the worst case, been a super spreader event. You could bet lawsuits would have rained on them and likely the City of Austin. Sometimes, you just got to say no, we will not contr…

I suspect they waited too long to do it. I suspect a very large percentage of the people that were going to attend have non-refundable plane tickets, have already arranged time off from their jobs, etc and will still be coming to Austin... I guess time will tell.

Re: SXSW Cancelled Due to Coronavirus

#57

Post by zzzzzzzza »

tapatio wrote: post #40

The average American will die of cardiovascular disease, not the coronavirus. Rather than stock up on rice and masks and cancel events, people should address what’s most likely to kill them.

heart disease is actually one of (if not the) top comorbidites of covid19. So maybe covid will get you before your heart can.

Re: SXSW Cancelled Due to Coronavirus

#58

Post by adamiscool8 »

pcurve wrote: post #49
lbj wrote: post #30

Much ado over an uncommon flu

That's pretty disrespectful considering its much higher mortality rate. People aren't panicking for fun. https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-compared-to-flu-...

But many countries have stopped counting mild cases, and how many asymptomatic cases are out there already? I don't know if any modelling has been done, but the true mortality rate could be much, much lower -- perhaps even lower than a pandemic flu. [0]

[0] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387?query=rec...

Re: SXSW Cancelled Due to Coronavirus

#59

Post by DaveEM »

davidw wrote: post #26
bcrosby95 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only answer you're going to get out of someone that isn't talking out their ass is: hopefully it will be curtailed by summer, but we don't really know. And keep in mind that summer in some places is winter in others.

Relevant: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/06/its-a-false-hope-coronavirus... No one knows.

There is data on the flu and COVID-19 from parts of the world that are in summer vs. winter. As the situation evolves further this data should enable making a better educated guess:

Influenza: https://www.who.int/influenza/surveillance_monitoring/update...

COVID-19: https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/685d0ace521648f8a5b... (linked from https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...)

Re: SXSW Cancelled Due to Coronavirus

#60

Post by zaroth »

I think it's very interesting the disproportionate reaction that a virus or disease gets versus any other number of things that people risk their lives doing on a daily basis. Particularly for lesser known viruses or diseases which our brains haven't acclimated to.

The CDC estimates that 31 million Americans caught the flu this year, resulting in about 200,000 hospitalizations, and between 12,000 - 30,000 people have died this season from flu-related complications. So as a rule of thumb you could say 10% of America infected, ~1% of those people are hospitalized, and 10% of those people die. Every year.

Do we close events during the winter because of the flu? Of course not. We would never be able to have a winter-season event ever again. The flu vaccine is not particularly effective, some years it's even almost entirely ineffective, although most years about 50/50...

I'm still of the (clearly unpopular) opinion that the response to COVID is 1 part science, and 3 parts hysteria.

At the gym today I heard a great saying. Almost 3 million people die every year from obesity. Maybe instead of yelling at everyone to wash their hands, we should be yelling at everyone to eat a damn salad. SXSW is substantially less hazardous to the public health than McDonalds.

Why is the response to this coronavirus so hysterical? You could come up with any number of fatality stats that have taken more lives since January than COVID-19. Lower respiratory infections (not COVID related) kill approximately 200,000 people a month. Malaria kills 50,000 a month. Even just driving kills 100,000 people a month.

Rather than thinking SXSW organizers are unbelievable for not canceling, I think that the Mayor/City of Austin is unbelievable for canceling. Anyway, I just got back from a trip to Orlando, and Disney World and Universal, while not packed, certainly seemed busy.

The CDC should do what they are setup to do; ensure that testing is both cheap, accurate, and readily available, that people are educated about how to reasonably decrease their chances of catching a virus, teach how to manage a mild infection and self-quarantine, and when to seek medical attention. IMO, we don't need to tank the world economy in order to do this.

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