NON_POLITICAL China Coronavirus THREAD

[pmv]

Iran's figures are starting to level-off. That might make them the third country where the worst has passed, after China and South Korea. But how the heck can anyone judge whether those numbers can be trusted or not? I mean, it's Iran!

I'm still inclined to believe China and South Korea's general picture - both have clearly gotten this under control. But I wouldn't trust China to continue to be truthful if it all started flaring up again as soon as they tried to get Hubai's economy restarted. I could easily see them trying to cover things up all over again, just like the first time round.

The whole world desperately needs better governments. If we don't sort ourselves out something will eventually come along to finish us off.

 

[Kaido]

Virus has possibly mutated.

Mutation is actually a Good Thing - it's part of the virus' lifecycle with the goal of eventually mutating itself out of relevance & dying out out in terms of affecting people:

We shouldn’t worry when a virus mutates during disease outbreaks - Nature Microbiology

Mutation. The word naturally conjures fears of unexpected and freakish changes. Ill-informed discussions of mutations thrive during virus outbreaks, including the ongoing spread of SARS-CoV-2. In reality, mutations are a natural part of the virus life cycle and rarely impact outbreaks dramatically.

www.nature.com

They track mutations here:

Nextstrain

Real-time tracking of pathogen evolution

nextstrain.org

For COVID-19:

auspice

nextstrain.org

 

[CZroe]

OK, I was reading up on MERS here:

Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV)

www.who.int

...and I'm left with a few question.

If MERS, another coronavirus that is still circulating, has a fatality rate of 35% then why don't we have a vaccine for that yet? Does this bode poorly for SARS2 vaccine? Supposedly the only reason we didn't get a vaccine for the original SARS was because it burned out and funding dried up. Would've been great to have that work done as a base for the work needed on a SARS2 vaccine.

Wonder if the other SARS-CoV-2 strain is already a reassortment (antigenic shift) with MERS. Probably not though since I've seen it described as a less drastic change more in line with typical antigenic drift.

The potential for it getting a lot more deadly with the same novel properties is there. We merely need a person carrying MERS to also get infected with SARS2 for a new, much worse, strain to emerge. It's possible that this is what we are even more afraid of and why we have to do everything we can to slow this thing down and get a vaccine right now.

 

[CZroe]

Mutation is actually a Good Thing - it's part of the virus' lifecycle with the goal of eventually mutating itself out of relevance & dying out out in terms of affecting people

An opposing perspective:

Mutation is what keeps the flu from being eradicated by a vaccine and could make our SARS-CoV-2 vaccine unable to stop this.

Mutation is what allows zoonotic transmission to become human-to-human transmission.

Mutation could potentially make it more deadly, like the second wave of 1918 Spanish Flu.

In particular I'm concerned that this could mutate with MERS via reassortment and become MUCH worse. WHO says MERS has a 35% mortalilty rate and it's already an endemic coronavirus. It just doesn't spread as easily as the novel coronavirus we are looking at now, but that could easily change with an antigenic shift due to a reassortment event.

Though mutation often makes a virus more mild or less novel there is real reason to be concerned here.

 

[Denly]

A relative is a nurse in Delaware, she just sent a msg said if she go take care of her cat. She mention they're not allowed to wear mask because said it will cuz panic. Wtf is that.

 

[BUTCH1]

So instead of locking up the old, weak and infirm for their own sake, you prefer everyone be locked up like in China or Italy? Does that make sense to you? You must also be one of those who advocate that everyone be given equal time for questioning before boarding a plane instead of focusing on the usual suspects. What we need at a time like this is some common sense, not overreacting. The virus is culling the herd. It's nature doing its thing.

I see, so if your parents were afflicted and passed away due to 19 you'd be OK with that?.

 

[Caveman]

Last year was the worst year for flu deaths in the US at 80,000 which means there were on average 219 deaths per day each of 365 days. In Italy, yesterday's deaths indicate the issue is currently about 22X more threatening than last year's flu season in the US if we repeat Italy's recent history. Even so, that's still only translates to about 0.5% of the population in the US dying off from this disease. Of particular interest is that this disease favors people with underlying health conditions.

Elon Musk's assessment of C19

It begs the question: at what percentage of death of the population do we turn from "business as usual" just keep working to "stay at home and control this pandemic, even if that means tanking the economy?" If we add up other diseases (heart, cancer, etc...) it doesn't take long before these things exceed the death toll of C19, yet nobody seems to care that much. We don't all stay home to lower cancer heart disease and diabetes. Even at their worst case, the numbers just don't seem to pass the common sense test. The Chinese went crazy trying to contain this. What is it that we don't know?

 

[Red Squirrel]

I keep hearing about how the flu kills so many people but why is it not causing medical supply shortages or bed shortages like covid-19 is? Are the flu numbers somehow inflated? It just does not make sense to me at this point that the flu is still considered more deadly when you barely hear a blip about it.

 

[Brainonska511]

I keep hearing about how the flu kills so many people but why is it not causing medical supply shortages or bed shortages like covid-19 is? Are the flu numbers somehow inflated? It just does not make sense to me at this point that the flu is still considered more deadly when you barely hear a blip about it.

People aren't getting the flu at the same time. The main issue here is overburdening the limited medical resources we have. If everyone got sick all at once, all resources quickly get expended and then you start to see people die from preventatable deaths, aka people dying because they couldn't access care for whatever potentially fatal emergency condition they had.

 

[Brainonska511]

Last year was the worst year for flue deaths in the US at 80,000 which means there were on average 219 deaths per day each of 365 days. In Italy, yesterday's deaths indicate the issue is currently about 22X more threatening than last year's flu season in the US if we repeat Italy's recent history. Even so, that's still only translates to about 0.5% of the population in the US dying off from this disease. Of particular interest is that this disease favors people with underlying health conditions.

Elon Musk's assessment of C19

It begs the question: at what percentage of death of the population do we turn from "business as usual" just keep working to "stay at home and control this pandemic, even if that means tanking the economy?" If we add up other diseases (heart, cancer, etc...) it doesn't take long before these things exceed the death toll of C19, yet nobody seems to care that much. We don't all stay home to lower cancer heart disease and diabetes. Even at their worst case, the numbers just don't seem to pass the common sense test. The Chinese went crazy trying to contain this. What is it that we don't know?

Apples and bananas. Cancer and heart disease are not communicable, and many of those causes of death are not clustering in a tight time span. The danger here is the communicability of this coronavirus coupled with limited healthcare resources. If you have all ICU beds filled with COVID19 patients, now you don't have a bed available for someone who just had a stroke, or got in a car collision, or had a heart attack. We currently have a communicable illness that appears to be at least 10x more lethal than the average influenza, and people are getting sick all at once. It simply makes no sense to make these apples and bananas comparisons.

 

[Red Squirrel]

People aren't getting the flu at the same time. The main issue here is overburdening the limited medical resources we have. If everyone got sick all at once, all resources quickly get expended and then you start to see people die from preventatable deaths, aka people dying because they couldn't access care for whatever potentially fatal emergency condition they had.

Yeah that makes sense, so really if you were to compare the same time span like say a week or a month, this is probably still killing more people right?

 

[Brainonska511]

Right, and I made that same point earlier. In the mean time it wouldn't make sense to assume that the majority of people vaping will have complications with COVID-19 when we only just started seeing inflammation in some of them. I didn't argue that it would have no effect. I argued that there was little reason to think it would "almost certainly" have the same dramatic effect on the severity of COVID-19 as smoking, like you and ultimatebob were originally saying.

And I'm not saying vaping is behind all or any young person being in the hospital with COVID19.

I'm just saying to use some common sense deductive reasoning about the effects of vaping. We know cigarettes and everyday pollution can cause lung problems, running the gamut from asthma to cancer; it's a reasonable hypothesis to suggest that vaping will have similar issues arise. If we know smoking is associated with poorer outcomes with COVID19, we could again hypothesize that vaping would also be associated with poorer outcomes.

It's pretty obvious that smoking damages your lungs every step of the way, lung cancer or not. The fact that lung cancer takes a long time to complicate things is just proving my point that smoking is in a different league. The tar and early lung damage seen in most all smokers are likely what complicate things for smokers with COVID-19.

Vaping is relatively new; it has not been around long enough to see what kind of lung cancers, if any, develop from a lifetime habit. But I'd bet good money in 20-40 years, we're going to start seeing a wave in lung cancer from the people that vaped long-term.

 

[pmv]

Last year was the worst year for flue deaths in the US at 80,000 which means there were on average 219 deaths per day each of 365 days. In Italy, yesterday's deaths indicate the issue is currently about 22X more threatening than last year's flu season in the US if we repeat Italy's recent history. Even so, that's still only translates to about 0.5% of the population in the US dying off from this disease. Of particular interest is that this disease favors people with underlying health conditions.

Elon Musk's assessment of C19

It begs the question: at what percentage of death of the population do we turn from "business as usual" just keep working to "stay at home and control this pandemic, even if that means blowing up the economy?"

It appears to me to be much worse than flu, at least much worse than the outbreaks of flu that have occurred in this country during my lifetime. Though clearly not all waves of flu are the same (which itself is something I don't fully understand - why, for example, was 1918 so appalling? The state of the world with a war going on, or the nature of the virus itself?).

And the Italian health care system has not (yet) been completely overwhelmed, so even those figures are much lower than they could potentially be.

When I read that my local hospitals ICU units are full to capacity, I wonder - has that happened before with flu outbreaks? Was it just not reported as much with flu? Or is this a real sign that this is something very new and worse than anything we've seen recently, and not just an artefact of testing and greater awareness?

I find this confusing. On here I encounter hilarious machoman ubermensch who try and insist it's all fine and no worse than a cold (why, that one time they caught the black death and just took an aspirin for it and went back to work, and then there was that time their arm got torn off by a bear and they just beat the bear unconscious with it then stuck it back on with superglue and walked it off) , but in real life I feel like I encounter more of the opposite extreme - people completely clearing out the supermarkets in a crazed panic, a friend disinfecting every letter or package that comes in the post, family members telling me not to go food shopping at all because it's too dangerous (not that I could find anything on the shelves when I did, and I've entirely given up my habit of munching sandwiches or fruit before I get home and can wash my hands - probably a change of habits I should stick to, really, I realise).

Although the elderly and sick are the the vast majority of deaths, I don't know that they are the entirety of those hospitalised. Other groups are still getting very sick, but they don't die. The figures I've seen say it takes typically 30 days to either die of, or recover from, this. That seems worse than most flu bouts I've seen, and would surely cause economic problems regardless?

 

[Brainonska511]

Yeah that makes sense, so really if you were to compare the same time span like say a week or a month, this is probably still killing more people right?

I don't think its that simple to make such a direct comparison - there are too many confounding variables, including comorbidities, populations at risk, and other temporal factors. And then you have to throw in the pitfall of trying to do retrospective reviews with incomplete medical records.

I think the main factors to consider right now are the overall mortality rate (which is ~10x higher than influenza,) the rate at which it is spreading, and the rate of hospitalization. I might be taking a bit of a shortcut with the CDC data (hospitalizations as a % of symptomatic illness), but looking at influenza hospitalization rates, on a yearly level, only ~1-2% of influenzas result in hospitalization, whereas data on COVID19 is showing 10-20% requiring hospitalization rates - obviously a substantial burden if a lot of people get sick, especially if they get sick in an extremely short time span.

 

[Brainonska511]

nm

 

[CZroe]

Last year was the worst year for flue deaths in the US at 80,000 which means there were on average 219 deaths per day each of 365 days. In Italy, yesterday's deaths indicate the issue is currently about 22X more threatening than last year's flu season in the US if we repeat Italy's recent history. Even so, that's still only translates to about 0.5% of the population in the US dying off from this disease. Of particular interest is that this disease favors people with underlying health conditions.

Elon Musk's assessment of C19

It begs the question: at what percentage of death of the population do we turn from "business as usual" just keep working to "stay at home and control this pandemic, even if that means tanking the economy?" If we add up other diseases (heart, cancer, etc...) it doesn't take long before these things exceed the death toll of C19, yet nobody seems to care that much. We don't all stay home to lower cancer heart disease and diabetes. Even at their worst case, the numbers just don't seem to pass the common sense test. The Chinese went crazy trying to contain this. What is it that we don't know?

It isn't what we don't know in light of those numbers... We do know. Morons like Musk keep making apples and oranges comparisons, like 36 COVID-19 deaths are all there ever will be for making a risk assessment versus driving your car home.

Absolutely moronic. The virus is just getting started and the other preventable deaths will be HUGE if we don't take the extreme measures we are taking.

I keep hearing about how the flu kills so many people but why is it not causing medical supply shortages or bed shortages like covid-19 is? Are the flu numbers somehow inflated? It just does not make sense to me at this point that the flu is still considered more deadly when you barely hear a blip about it.

It's because this virus is just getting started where flu ran rampant for the entire season. It's unbelievable that people are still asking this question.

Think about it this way:
A new virus emerges that WILL kill everyone on the planet in a week. Exterminate the human race.
The first person dies.
"Yeah, but the flu killed more people in the US."
The second person dies.
"Yeah, but the flu killed more people."
The third person dies.
"Yeah, but the flu killed more people."
...
The hundredth person dies.
"Yeah, but the flu killed more people."
...
The thousandth person dies.
"Yeah, but the flu killed more people."
...
The ten-thousandth person dies.
"Yeah, but the flu killed more people."
...
The 79,999th American dies.
"Yeah, but the flu killed more people."
The 80,000th American dies.
"Yeah, but it's no worse than the flu."
The 80,001st person dies.
"Yeah, but it's barely worse than the flu."
...
The 100,000th American dies.
"Yeah, but it's just a particularly bad flu."
...
The millionth person dies
"Yeah, but the 1918 Spanish Flu killed millions more people."
...
The billionth person dies.
"OK, I admit we have a problem more serious than the flu. Now what can we do?"
...
The last person dies.
"*CRICKETS*"

Apples and oranges. You don't wait until it's killed more people than the flu to put on the brakes. Total deaths are not the right comparison until it's all over. Right now you look at mortality rate, how fast it's spreading, healthcare capacity, and how much of the population you expect to contract it.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Virus has possibly mutated.

Chinese scientists identify two strains of the coronavirus, indicating it's already mutated at least once

Researchers in China have found that two different types of the new coronavirus could be causing infections worldwide.

www.cnbc.com

FUCK Please be fake news...

Two strains were mentioned last week?

But how the heck can anyone judge whether those numbers can be trusted or not? I mean, it's Iran!

. . . yeah, about that.

But I wouldn't trust China to continue to be truthful if it all started flaring up again as soon as they tried to get Hubai's economy restarted.

I wouldn't trust them either. At all.

 

[jpiniero]

When I read that my local hospitals ICU units are full to capacity, I wonder - has that happened before with flu outbreaks? Was it just not reported as much with flu? Or is this a real sign that this is something very new and worse than anything we've seen recently, and not just an artefact of testing and greater awareness?

Saw one account that a big problem is that people who probally have the virus but only mild or moderate symptoms are clogging up the ER. And there's nothing an ER doctor can do for them really.

 

[njdevilsfan87]

It begs the question: at what percentage of death of the population do we turn from "business as usual" just keep working to "stay at home and control this pandemic, even if that means tanking the economy?" If we add up other diseases (heart, cancer, etc...) it doesn't take long before these things exceed the death toll of C19, yet nobody seems to care that much. We don't all stay home to lower cancer heart disease and diabetes. Even at their worst case, the numbers just don't seem to pass the common sense test. The Chinese went crazy trying to contain this. What is it that we don't know?

In our (capitalist) society, greed and profits matter more than lives so we are unprepared to handle this. I know it's not the average person responsible but those at the top with all of the power. They don't tell people to stay home with * because those are treatable and profitable. Much of these conditions are self-inflicted as well.

I think the better question is, what needs to be changed so this doesn't happen again. I think a lot of us know, but unfortunately those in power won't agree because of greed and reduced profits.

 

[TheVrolok]

Mutation is actually a Good Thing - it's part of the virus' lifecycle with the goal of eventually mutating itself out of relevance & dying out out in terms of affecting people:

We shouldn’t worry when a virus mutates during disease outbreaks - Nature Microbiology

Mutation. The word naturally conjures fears of unexpected and freakish changes. Ill-informed discussions of mutations thrive during virus outbreaks, including the ongoing spread of SARS-CoV-2. In reality, mutations are a natural part of the virus life cycle and rarely impact outbreaks dramatically.

www.nature.com

They track mutations here:

Nextstrain

Real-time tracking of pathogen evolution

nextstrain.org

For COVID-19:

auspice

nextstrain.org

I'm not sure "Good Thing" is what the takeaway should be. The author is rightfully trying to combat the sci-fi/horror movie allusions of the word "mutate" and suggesting that it's far more complex and mutation can be a good thing, but not making a definitive statement either way.

An opposing perspective:

Mutation is what keeps the flu from being eradicated by a vaccine and could make our SARS-CoV-2 vaccine unable to stop this.

Mutation is what allows zoonotic transmission to become human-to-human transmission.

Mutation could potentially make it more deadly, like the second wave of 1918 Spanish Flu.

In particular I'm concerned that this could mutate with MERS via reassortment and become MUCH worse. WHO says MERS has a 35% mortalilty rate and it's already an endemic coronavirus. It just doesn't spread as easily as the novel coronavirus we are looking at now, but that could easily change with an antigenic shift due to a reassortment event.

Though mutation often makes a virus more mild or less novel there is real reason to be concerned here.

Moreso this. Many many many more mutations will be disadvantageous, and the odds of the right (or wrong depending on perspective) combination of mutations occurring simultaneously is quite low, however, rare things happen and these types of rare things can be very bad.

 

[pmv]

Saw one account that a big problem is that people who probally have the virus but only mild or moderate symptoms are clogging up the ER. And there's nothing an ER doctor can do for them really.

There's a difference between ER (aka A&E) and ICU, though.

Doctors warn coronavirus could overwhelm NHS ‘within weeks’

Intensive care audit shows sharp rise in admissions to critical care as London hospitals struggle to cope

www.theguardian.com

London hospitals struggle to cope with coronavirus surge

NHS running short of critical care beds after thirteenfold ‘explosion’ in patients

www.theguardian.com

 

[Dari]

Yeah, the current situation is not so good:

Just-in-Time Inventories Make U.S. Vulnerable in a Pandemic - WSJ

Low Stockpiles at Hospitals

www.wsj.com

We sold our safety net for profits. We should have raised the price of offshoring to impossible levels a long time ago to keep manufacturing in-country. We should have stockpiled supplies as a country all along the way. We'll get through this, a little worse for the wear, but my guess is that we won't learn & it will be back to business as usual in a year or two. I'll definitely be increasing the size of my home inventory, for sure. Probably not to prepper levels, but I don't want to be stuck high & dry the next time the next global or local issue (insert war/pandemic/natural disaster/etc.) comes around.

This is how business work. They'll do anything for a profit. Before the onslaught, you had American and even Jewish business men in cahoots with the Nazis and Fascists. During the cold war, there were Japanese and some American firms that traded with the communists. It'll take policy changes to forces these businesses to come home.

I prefer people to behave in a responsible way with some sort of human feeling for other people. Not like a a ridiculous macho man who thinks their cold means they've shrugged off Corvid19.

And yes, a fascist, as I supsected.

Well, 'human feeling' is exactly the outcome you're getting in Italy right now. There are countless stories of Italians breaking quarantine, lockdowns, etc... to see friends and family members, thereby passing on the virus to the most vulnerable. It was also 'human feeling' that led moronic family members to hug and kiss dead ebola victims, contracting the virus themselves and spreading it to the rest of the community. It's time like this when you need to take an ascetic, clinical look at everything and make an informed decision. Anything less than that and it'll lead to an increase in body count.

 

[Red Squirrel]

This whole thing shows how vulnerable our whole system and way of doing things is. The fact that we rely so much on China and other countries to make goods instead of making them here, and the fact that there is no spare inventory of anything... like masks and ventilators. Nobody wants to spend the money, it's all about doing stuff the cheapest possible so the execs can get more profit.

Will there be lessons learned from this and will things change? Sadly, probably not.

 

[CZroe]

This whole thing shows how vulnerable our whole system and way of doing things is. The fact that we rely so much on China and other countries to make goods instead of making them here, and the fact that there is no spare inventory of anything... like masks and ventilators. Nobody wants to spend the money, it's all about doing stuff the cheapest possible so the execs can get more profit.

Will there be lessons learned from this and will things change? Sadly, probably not.

For the US, I propose that any new FDA approved drug should maintain at least 10% manufacturing capability in the USA for domestic supplies at least until their patent expires and generics appear.

This should keep some functional manufacturing capability and supply lines open here which could be ramped up in times when China threatens to cut us off like they have recently. It wouldn't be such a burden since they can still get the bulk made where it's most cost-effective.

 

[pmv]

This is how business work. They'll do anything for a profit. Before the onslaught, you had American and even Jewish business men in cahoots with the Nazis and Fascists. During the cold war, there were Japanese and some American firms that traded with the communists. It'll take policy changes to forces these businesses to come home.

Well, 'human feeling' is exactly the outcome you're getting in Italy right now. There are countless stories of Italians breaking quarantine, lockdowns, etc... to see friends and family members, thereby passing on the virus to the most vulnerable. It was also 'human feeling' that led moronic family members to hug and kiss dead ebola victims, contracting the virus themselves and spreading it to the rest of the community. It's time like this when you need to take an ascetic, clinical look at everything and make an informed decision. Anything less than that and it'll lead to an increase in body count.

Anyone who talks in terms of 'culling the herd' is a fascist. You've made it clear what you are.