Anyone in the thread have masks yet?

Every idiot from Wuhan is a global traveler apparently. These people are trying to start a ****ing global plague.

Super ignorant statement. 11 million officially documented residents. Likely as high as 20 million including suburbs and undocumented residents of Wuhan.

Outbreak happened right before the entire country gets 1-3 weeks of vacation.

This would still be 100 times worse if it happened in much smaller Western city.

I think it's hard to grasp the number of ppl being "quarantined"-45 million is s**t load of ppl. As much as I trust the Chinese and their fun loving government I highly doubt their numbers of infected/dead are accurate or truthful. This post adds nothing of value to this thread but just wanted to get that off my chest

It's definitely underdiagnosed. Death toll is probably underreported too. But since they've been prioritizing (according to reports anyway) people who are severely sick to give tests to, I'd guess "diagnosed", proportionally speaking, is much more underreported.

Deaths/diagnosed(reported/confirmed) in headlines:
January 27: 82/2835=2.89% https://www.livemint.com/news/world/...124072028.html
January 28: 106/4545=2.35% https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/c...break-n1123561
January 29: 132/6078=2.17% https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...617_story.html

I don't think the virus is less deadly. I think the tests are starting to filter down to people less sick. It's also worth noting it's very unlikely they are only testing like 1500 kits per day. That diagnosed/confirmed/reported is going up much slowly than number of kits tested suggests most of people tested had negative results.

For some perspective, since they are prioritizing testing people who are severely sick, the number of cases "diagnosed/confirmed/reported" is probably something akin to (should be higher) to "hospitalized" in CDC numbers. 8-10% of people hospitalized for the flu end up dead in the US.

Another way to look at this is comparing the stats known so far to deaths caused by influenza and pneumonia: https://www.kff.org/other/state-indi...2:%22asc%22%7D

At the US average of 14.3 per 100,000, just under 1600 people out of Wuhan's 11 million per year, on average, die to the flu and pneumonia. The same stats applied to China's 1.4 billion population: right about 200,000 a year to the flu+penumonia. About 47k for US's 327 million people in case you're wondering.

There is a Bayesian analysis final exam question for a stats class in here somewhere. Something like blah blah blah, given these stats, if a patient dies of pneumonia, what's the probability his/her death is attributable to coronavirus?

So let's postulate two things:
1. The spread is not contained and realistically cannot be contained. (almost certain)
2. The virus will not burn itself out due to low death rates. (probably true at this point)

How does China climb down from this debacle? They can't just quarantine Wuhan/Hubei forever.

Quality posting

I too am interested in how this goes down. Soon people will be returning from their villages in the countryside and going back to their city lives. Some companies have extended the holiday an extra week or so as a precaution but this week here is peak migration time

If you check Amazon, people are already making small fortunes on this, at THIS stage.

My wife (Chinese) put some surgical face masks into Amazon cart (all sold out btw).

I put some 3M (seemingly brand of choice) full face mask suitable for hazmat suits into the cart. I'll report back if she bites.

Realize that by now, this is way off topic, but just because I resent being called a liar and a “sick liberal” (LOL???) by a random idiot troll :
https://theintercept.com/2020/01/28/...-war-on-press/

Literally and factually a massacre carried out by an army unit created, trained, and armed by the US.

Sorry for the detail, and suck it , carlo.

https://youtu.be/hSIt496d82s
Not sure what people think of this guy but as for youtubers covering China, he's a little more thoughtful than his buddy serpenteza and I found this was informative and it doesn't paint too good a picture.

I don't disagree with what he's saying necessarily but he draws a lot sketchy conclusions based solely on guesswork. For example the hospital, for him that can't possibly be a "better safe than sorry" initiative or to have a specialized treatment center away from other highly vulnerable sick people but for arbitrary reasons founded in his ignorance of medicine he concludes that means there's already too many infected people for hospitals to handle.

If you view the rest of his channel, it's all super negative, his next most popular video is "how China stole my dream" I think he came in with a conclusion already

But mostly his entire thing is because they are passing the buck and making a scapegoat out of a mayor them they are ill equipped to handle this and complaining that they didn't quarantine tens of millions fast enough

Zero chance the US could have done this nearly as effectively. Just recall the controversy over quarantining a handful of Ebola patients in NYC a few years back. How some escaped to go bowling or did Instagram protests that got a lot of support. We couldn't even quarantine a dozen people. Just imagine trying to quarantine all of southern California...

Video is a joke in my opinion

Yeah I just skimmed rest of his videos, can't believe he's now trying to tackle Coronavirus lol

He also is happy lying to get headlines like his Pokemon Go banned in China video. I'm an app developer, I can speak with absolute authority on this. It's not banned in China at all. The developer stupidly used a mapping framework that didn't work there. They made a decision not to bother making it compatible. In fact within days off the game being released a bunch of Chinese people published apps to fix the issue and make it playable in China.

Dude is a clown.

As far as what he presents as factual informatiom in the video though. He claims that the first cases go back to early December and that the government knew about it, did nothing, arrested people for talking about it, had huge banquets, and basically waited until the virus was already out of control before they then stepped in. That's the "not good picture" that I was referring to. Is there an issue there or does that check out?

The earliest cases wouldn't be alarming. The number of diagnosed is admittedly too low but that's due to a severe shortage of testing kits. There is still no hard evidence asymptomatic people are contagious. (I linked earlier to a CDC official saying so and like I said, if asymptomatic people are contagious, we'd be looking at a LOT more cases out of Wuhan.)

Like I was saying before, a lot of the panic is self-inflicted. A whole lot of the sick people are just... sick people, you know, like people who'd be sick with or without the coronavirus.

I do think the Chinese handling of the situation reeks of utter incompetence but some of the stuff in the video is pretty ignorant of how disease control works and even some known facts.

I'm not disputing his facts, I just disagree with his conclusions

Cancelling Chinese new year celebrations on a hunch is like cancelling the Superbowl. It's that big a deal. I can't possibly imagine if a couple hundred people in Miami had a new strain of flu they'd immediately cancel the Superbowl, shut down the airport and prevent anyone from leaving Florida.

For reference, 20,000 people died of the flu in NYC alone this current flu season.

Obviously this is worse than the flu but it's nowhere near being a serious problem.

I can't emphasize enough that everything being done right now is being done not because of what we believe the Coronavirus to be, but based on the very remote chance it's far more serious or mutates into something far more serious. As it stands now, this won't even kill off 0.1% of the lives the flu will claim this year.

CNN pointing out the obvious that something we live with, the flu, is a much bigger deal:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/30/healt...rnd/index.html

Former Obama health advisor going basically: it's 2% death rate. Cut it out with "histrionics."
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/30/ezek...panicking.html

WHO declares coronavirus to be global health emergency.

I am guessing the recommendations will be, in essence, good hygiene, please, the same recommendations people routinely make during the height of flu season.

But of course, quarantines and travel warnings are still gonna come.

The 73yo lady they was diagnosed with it here in Thailand seems to be on the road to recovery. So if it's not killing her off, doesn't seem super deadly.

An article someone in a WeChat group linked last night talking about how masks don't actually block the virus now show up a Chinese error message that basically says the contents violate the rules and I can't view it. Censors are working overtime... but they seem to lack direction.

Meanwhile, Chinese authorities seem to be slowly coming to the realization they might have caused too much of a panic.

"Nations should avoid overreacting on coronavirus says China."
https://www.indiatoday.in/world/stor...986-2020-01-31

What a cluster****.

As an aside, I actually think this panic is going to end up being a good thing for the world as a whole. It's basically an unplanned fire drill exposing weaknesses in the global disease control system. Hopefully this leads to broader testing so we can sequence/discover new viruses sooner (therefore detecting contagions way earlier) and develop vaccines/therapies faster. Sooner or later, a virus with the deadliness of Ebola and the contagiousness of the flu will emerge. This coronavirus will help us prepare for that eventuality.

Agreed, every time something like this happens that isn't like Spanish Flu it helps the system improve. SARs has actually made Asia much healthier in many ways because it forced a lot of changes in the healthcare and sanitation infrastructure. It also completely wiped out the Chinese habit of spitting, which is nice. A few times while whipping down narrow alleys on my bike I narrowly dodged random loogies. People on the street and even those in their homes would literally just pop open a door or window and let them. Always suspected a few Matt have been intentional but made to look like they didn't see me.

Vox article on how this novel-Coronavirus could end:

https://www.vox.com/science-and-heal...ars-comparison

Notice the lack of a doomsday scenario. This virus really just isn't that vicious.

The article is wrong about needing years to develop a vaccine. We update flu shots annually for new strands so the technology is pretty well developed.

Guardian article that says they are hopeful a vaccine will be developed within 16 weeks. Testing, approval, and production will take more time but if the virus keeps spreading I am sure they'll accelerate the process and the vaccine will definitely be ready for 2020 flu shots.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...avirus-vaccine

While we're on the topic of flu shots... frigging get it. The common strands of flu (A, B, H1N1) infect/kill way more people annually than this novel-Coronavirus so if you're panicked about this novel-Coronavirus, you really should get the flu shot, for your loved ones and family if not for yourself.

PS: I've made it a hobby to click/screenshot articles people link in WeChat and clicking the next day to see what gets censored. Last night, a story of an official carrying an entire box of 3M masks for his "leader" was photographed with the license plate in full view. A couple of those posts got censored but the same story is still making rounds... some with screenshots of the early reposts.

PS2: I find the censorship situation fascinating because it tells me 2 things:
1. CCP is censoring some dumb ****
2. Their vaunted AI isn't fully operational yet. A lot of the posts that got through should be trivially easy to find with AI since some are literal screenshots of old posts that god censored.

Conspiracy sites using this to argue it's a bio weapon https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...01.30.927871v1

Counter argument
https://theprepared.com/blog/no-the-...ered-from-hiv/

Either way, there's a lot of media out there claiming it's a bio weapon developed by America, mostly coming from Russia. This is not good for the future of US China relations if even a small portion of the population believes the US tried to kill them

China is going to have a really hard time climbing down from this. People are not receptive at all to appeals to numbers showing the virus just isn’t that deadly (at least for now). This reeks of mass hysteria and there is so much distrust of CCP information people won’t believe what CCP has to say.

While China is in panic mode, rest of the world will feel compelled to overreact, just in case. And we’re locked into a de facto quarantine of China for the next 1-3 months.

Train wreck in slow motion. Not enough popcorn at Whole Foods for me to get through this.

same post I said almost a week ago. I have no idea how dangerous the virus is, how sever can it be?

i know someone who told me its "just the common flu" then another person saying that was a stupid comment and its far more dangerous than that.

CDC came out with their statement.


so yea, im unsure HOW dangerous this virus truly is and and im sure there are tons of miss info out there about the gist of it all