Is it still correct that the coronavirus is still only as problematic as the flu, with the majority of eradication effort going into it with the idea that having two flus going around is still worse than one around? If so I don't really anticipate any real long-term effects at all, it'll just be another seasonal batch of sickness and death for society to deal with.
It's both more infectious and more deadly than the flu, but less deadly than, say, SARS. There is also some evidence that it can cause tissue damage. Should also mention that it causes pneumonia, which the flu typically doesn't, and pneumonia is no joke.
China wouldn't shutdown their economy and quarantine tens of millions of people over the flu.
Yo, the mortality rate is first) not calculable in any kind of real way right now (go check out what they thought the rate for SARS was a month into that battle) and second) not at all what the real is here.
The first to fall ill will have five doctors in plastic suits surrounding them, fancy beeping machines, low light. When they fully recover in a few days, media celebrations will be high-gloss and cheerful.
Then as the exponential growth bowls over the healthcare system like a meteor smashing into ten little pins, deaths from all causes will skyrocket.
This is what we’re seeing in wuhan. Certainly, the numbers don’t add up much (509 dead total as of today? Drop in an ocean for China, why the freak out?) But of the 25k confirmed cases check out the share that are in critical condition.
Those folks need ventilators and staff and food and beds and all sorts of stuff.
I’m not sure where I read it, some kind of military or intelligence book, but the idea was that by the time your healthcare system needs to help about 3% of the population it serves at once, it totally collapses.
It doesn’t just GET SLOWER (but it does that), but it just collapses, and huge numbers of avoidable deaths pile up real quick. That nasty knife wound from dinner really should get stitches but you know it’s hopeless so you do your best with a bandaid and risk infection. A car accident that would otherwise be a shock and a shake up and a day at the hospital getting your leg encased and your head checked out turns into a fatality.
That's why China slapped together two hospitals in a few days: to cope with demand.
It wasn't just 'face', it's trying to stay ahead of that capacity and deal with the influx of new cases.
Ukraine is also kind of interesting right now, I'm reading that they have a lot of suspected cases of 2019-nCoV, but no means to send samples for testing to are unable to confirm any cases. That may be the same case in some African nations right now as well.
> However, both of these estimates should be treated with great caution because not all patients have concluded their illness (ie, recovered or died) and the true number of infections and full disease spectrum are unknown.
Mathematically, the lethality of the virus is about 33% (565 died and 1163 recovered as of Feb 6th). Other 28,000+ cases are still in progress and they will resolve by recovery or death.
Yes, trick is that the tests are in short supply, paperwork load is high (reporting to city, state, and country authorities), and you need two positives tests to be considered definitely sick with corona virus.
The result is that there's many 100k that are sick, but only 25k are "official". China is actively deleting photos, videos, and posts on social media trying to keep a lid on it.
Right. They have also just admitted to BBC that they will not use the test kits on dead people, and their deaths are not counted towards the nCov count.
That being said, I think speculating about "the real number" is quite useless at the moment, as China is still being actively quarantined (i.e. Hangzhou which is a "Tier-1.5 city" and home to Alibaba and is kind of a China's SV has closed down yesterday).
From what I understand the virus is treatable though highly contagious. China is having a tough time providing care for all those infected specially at the epicenter. If the virus starts spreading in poorer countries of Asia and Africa then mortality rate will go higher as I don't see them being able to control something that even China is facing hard time doing.
> From what I understand the virus is treatable though highly contagious.
As of now, there's no treatment for it. At best you treat the symptoms and hope the patient's immune system does its job.
Some antivirals might have helped in some cases. But they also might have had no effect at all and the people treated with them recovered on their own. It's way too early to tell one way or another.
More common is the daily ritual of getting in line at the crack of dawn, hoping to get medical care and getting at best some IV fluids then kicked out each evening because you don't officially have the virus. Of course if you ask, there's no tests available.
There's numerous videos of people passing out in public, which could be just a non-representative sample. What makes it scary to me, is that everyone around just looks and seems to think it's normal/expected.
But if you look at twitter, WSJ, NYT, Washington Post, Aljazeera, Lancet, and the BBC you start to see a picture not really consistent with "only" 30k people sick.
After all CDC reported on a fairly normal flu season in 2018-2019 (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/mm6824a3.htm?s_cid=mm...), not as bad as the previous year. 43M sick, 647,000 hospitalized, 61,200 dead. The world didn't notice, no factory closing, no global supply chains halted, no stumbling economies, no rush to build hospitals, no halt of airlines, and no $174B injected (like last Monday) into the economy to stabilize things.
Somehow under 30k infected and 565 dead is a big deal? Should we ignore every crematorium in Wuhan running 24x7?
China is keeping a pretty impressive lid on it, but the cracks are starting to showing. The official numbers are a joke.
If it was spreading and killing as fast as you are thinking we would be reading a lot more about it from other countries. As much as chinese media is not to be trusted the western media and people are also not to be trusted to talk about china as they are biased the other way.
Spreading fast, sure. Killing fast, no. That's in many ways the issue - If this thing spreads strongly and asymptomatically, and eventually develops into conditions with high mortality, that's a really bad situation to be in.
Folks keeling over before they can spread it is one thing, but appearing fine until long after spreading it to other people means it's spread isn't known until the symptoms start showing up all over the show.
Not sure I can agree that western media is biased towards not hyping these kinds of events.
Plus, there might be a more efficient way to deal with it discovered soon. We are only in opening stages.
Plus, it's not a sure thing that it will mutate like flu does every year. It might be that it's going to disappear once enough people get over it and become immune
Don't rest your argument on official data coming out of China. There is evidence they are even burning bodies now (SO2 levels) to get rid of the evidence.
