Should I be extremely worried that my roommate is leaving for Singapore on Friday, coming back in mid February, and is going through Shanghai to get there and to get back?
Extremely worried? Eh, it's not that deadly. Will they necessarily make it through without those flights being interrupted? No....
Well...Vancouver B.C. has their first confirmed case. Dude infected regularly travels to China and was actually in Wuhan when it was first kicking off.
According to what I'm seeing, there were 66 cases, 1 death, and 4 recoveries in Shanghai. Singapore has a few cases. Nothing on the East Coast of the US.
My company sent out an email this morning to advise everyone who has visited China recently to work from home for a couple weeks
Same thing here. My company canceled all travel to and from China, and then instituted a two week "work from home" policy starting today for anyone who's traveled to China recently.
Feels a little like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, but I suppose only time will tell.
Not really I think. It can maybe help some. If your people can work from home, why not honestly? It's a low-cost precaution.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
My company also released an announcement this afternoon stating all non-vital travel to China has been suspended. I'm wondering if I won't end up on hiatus myself, seeing as I work out of Washington state to visit labs and hospitals throughout the Pacific Northwest. Here's hoping containment on the US end of things goes better than it has in China.
CNN now reporting about 6,000 confirmed cases, and 132 confirmed deaths.
I've seen it compared to the first wave of the Spanish Flu a few times now, in how contagious it is and how quickly it spreads, while being not alarmingly deadly. Which, is fine, the first wave of Spanish Flu wasn't concerning, it was the second wave 6-8 months later that was bad, after it had mutated. So, lets hope that doesn't happen.
Mutating to become more deadly is very much not the norm. From wiki on the Spanish Flu second wave:
This increased severity has been attributed to the circumstances of the First World War.[75] In civilian life, natural selection favors a mild strain. Those who get very ill stay home, and those mildly ill continue with their lives, preferentially spreading the mild strain. In the trenches, natural selection was reversed. Soldiers with a mild strain stayed where they were, while the severely ill were sent on crowded trains to crowded field hospitals, spreading the deadlier virus. The second wave began, and the flu quickly spread around the world again. Consequently, during modern pandemics, health officials pay attention when the virus reaches places with social upheaval (looking for deadlier strains of the virus).
Weird question, but has anyone seen anything about air quality indicators in China normally around this time and this year during the transportation lockdowns? With factories and transportation shut down, Wuhan might be seeing cleaner air, which I mention because I wonder if irritation from air pollution could have an effect with this virus just like smoking.
Going by flu, pre-existing lung damage from smoking etc is likely to not have much effect on your odds of getting the virus, but does increase your odds of the viral damage leading to a secondary bacterial pneumonia which is what actually kills you.
The UK Foreign Office has put out a warning against all but essential travel to mainland China. And BA has suspended all flights to and from there too.
‘Recreate’ is a bizarre choice of words. They just isolated it from a patient. I thought from the headline that they’d created it with reverse genetics from the genome sequence or something.
CNN now reporting about 6,000 confirmed cases, and 132 confirmed deaths.
I've seen it compared to the first wave of the Spanish Flu a few times now, in how contagious it is and how quickly it spreads, while being not alarmingly deadly. Which, is fine, the first wave of Spanish Flu wasn't concerning, it was the second wave 6-8 months later that was bad, after it had mutated. So, lets hope that doesn't happen.
Mutating to become more deadly is very much not the norm. From wiki on the Spanish Flu second wave:
This increased severity has been attributed to the circumstances of the First World War.[75] In civilian life, natural selection favors a mild strain. Those who get very ill stay home, and those mildly ill continue with their lives, preferentially spreading the mild strain. In the trenches, natural selection was reversed. Soldiers with a mild strain stayed where they were, while the severely ill were sent on crowded trains to crowded field hospitals, spreading the deadlier virus. The second wave began, and the flu quickly spread around the world again. Consequently, during modern pandemics, health officials pay attention when the virus reaches places with social upheaval (looking for deadlier strains of the virus).
Yeah, most of the time viruses mutate to be less pathogeneic over time, because dead people are generally worse disease vectors than infected but living people. Not accidently reversing this trend is a big part of modern disease control.
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TetraNitroCubaneThe DjinneratorAt the bottom of a bottleRegistered Userregular
My company sent out an email this morning to advise everyone who has visited China recently to work from home for a couple weeks
Same thing here. My company canceled all travel to and from China, and then instituted a two week "work from home" policy starting today for anyone who's traveled to China recently.
Feels a little like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, but I suppose only time will tell.
Not really I think. It can maybe help some. If your people can work from home, why not honestly? It's a low-cost precaution.
Oh certainly, it's a low-cost measure that could do some good. I just think that we've already had a number of people return from China already, so there's a chance the infection's begun spreading through our workplace in advance of the precaution. We get international visitors constantly. (Also, working from home isn't a possibility for a lot of us, sadly. I know a few people who would try to break this policy, because they can't work from home.)
The numbers I've seen put the virus on the same transmission and lethality levels as whooping cough. One of the guys in Germany got bronchitis-like symptoms on Friday but was feeling OK enough to go to work on Monday.
And yet there are tens of millions of people in quarantine and half of China is shut down.
It seems out of proportion. But maybe I'm missing somethin here?
The numbers I've seen put the virus on the same transmission and lethality levels as whooping cough. One of the guys in Germany got bronchitis-like symptoms on Friday but was feeling OK enough to go to work on Monday.
And yet there are tens of millions of people in quarantine and half of China is shut down.
It seems out of proportion. But maybe I'm missing somethin here?
Its because it's new and poorly understood. Imagine for example that this virus kills 1/1000 of those exposed to it in China. That's 1.5 million deaths in China. If it hospitalized 1/100 for 5 days, that's 75 million days spent in hospital. This is an expensive and honestly dangerous virus even if it isn't more dangerous than say, 5 years of flu seasons or something.
The numbers I've seen put the virus on the same transmission and lethality levels as whooping cough. One of the guys in Germany got bronchitis-like symptoms on Friday but was feeling OK enough to go to work on Monday.
And yet there are tens of millions of people in quarantine and half of China is shut down.
It seems out of proportion. But maybe I'm missing somethin here?
It is completely out of proportion and has taken on a panicked life of its own.
The numbers I've seen put the virus on the same transmission and lethality levels as whooping cough. One of the guys in Germany got bronchitis-like symptoms on Friday but was feeling OK enough to go to work on Monday.
And yet there are tens of millions of people in quarantine and half of China is shut down.
It seems out of proportion. But maybe I'm missing somethin here?
Because it's a brand new virus to the human race there is zero pre-existing immunity, and if it spreads rapidly unchecked then the whole world gets sick at once. That many people being ill has serious impacts on the functioning of society even with a 'low' mortality rate.
And as the Spanish flu example above shows, things can change and a mis-managed situation can rapidly get worse. When the impacts are global you minimise the risks however you can.
The numbers I've seen put the virus on the same transmission and lethality levels as whooping cough. One of the guys in Germany got bronchitis-like symptoms on Friday but was feeling OK enough to go to work on Monday.
And yet there are tens of millions of people in quarantine and half of China is shut down.
It seems out of proportion. But maybe I'm missing somethin here?
I keep going back and forth.
China we know has a bad habit of under reporting. And everything in China is always much larger than the West. If we combined Europe and North America's population we are still not near China. They have locked down enough cities that the population of a medium sized country are under quarantine and over all that is a drop in the bucket.
Things we are getting to know is:
1)Human to human transmission probably was occurring much early than the actual announcement of January 20th.
2)Possible cases going even farther back
3)Over 5 million people had left Wuhan before the quarantine for the Lunar New Year to much worse provisioned and equipped rural areas, so a lot of not tested cases.
4)There is a chance of a long incubation period that has little to no symptoms and the person is infectious.
The thing with this stuff isn't that we are going to get a Black Plague like issue with millions of dead and bodies but you can have something like this if it does explode in basically temporarily crippling an economy and overwhelming a health system. Which has other negative effects.
Basically what I see China doing is trying to head off what they see is a possibly really bad thing across a lot of their population by trying to outpace it with new facilities and overwhelming numbers.
Though historically the CCP is playing catch up on this stuff so the actual level of infection is in question right now and maybe their overreaction isn't one but what they have said to the World is an under estimate.
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
Any new virus that's rapidly spreading is cause for concern.
Indeed.
This coronavirus is spreading exponentially. The doubling time for cases is currently under two days, and that's just the cases we know about. This is probably going to pass all the SARS cases officially by tomorrow and it won't be stopping there.
Don't panic, obviously, and the world is most likely not ending over this (unless some idiot, and the leadership of the world is full of them, decides to go nuclear for some reason), but it's worth keeping an eye on the news.
At the end of the (to)day, we just don't know how bad it's potentially going to get. Well, we know that the lethality appears to be in the low single digit percentage, which is much better than something like Ebola or SARS, but many times worse than the normal flu. So there's almost no conceivable situation where this turns into some post-apocalyptic scenario, but that's still serious enough to take steps to try to stop a global pandemic, even one "only" as widespread as the seasonal flu.
Of course, there's no way of knowing if it would become nearly that widespread - but by the time we would know if more mild containment and warning measures would work, it would obviously be too late to enact harsher ones. So I think governments and organizations are maybe taking the stance that it's better to err on the side of caution here (there's probably also elements of "it's better to be seen as doing something than seen as doing nothing").
The numbers I've seen put the virus on the same transmission and lethality levels as whooping cough. One of the guys in Germany got bronchitis-like symptoms on Friday but was feeling OK enough to go to work on Monday.
And yet there are tens of millions of people in quarantine and half of China is shut down.
It seems out of proportion. But maybe I'm missing somethin here?
The death numbers are not really indicative right now. There is serious lag time before this virus kills its host. Pneumonia is also not like the flu- you don't just walk away from it once you recover. It sometimes deals lasting lung damage.
The numbers I've seen put the virus on the same transmission and lethality levels as whooping cough. One of the guys in Germany got bronchitis-like symptoms on Friday but was feeling OK enough to go to work on Monday.
And yet there are tens of millions of people in quarantine and half of China is shut down.
It seems out of proportion. But maybe I'm missing somethin here?
The death numbers are not really indicative right now. There is serious lag time before this virus kills its host. Pneumonia is also not like the flu- you don't just walk away from it once you recover. It sometimes deals lasting lung damage.
Death numbers always going to be high compared to known cases at the start of an outbreak. They are going to almost solely reflect people who know that they were infected with something serious. The people who thought that they had the flu or a bad cold or who didn’t even show any symptoms? They were still infected, potentially still spreading the virus, but they’re a part of the denominator that we don’t know enough about to apply yet.
Shadowhope on
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
I am curious how badly the underreporting from china is. The fact they are crash building a hospital in wuhan when the amount of beds in the existing facilities would be more than sufficient to handle the level of infections we are seeing leads me to believe its a LOT worse than they are saying.
I am curious how badly the underreporting from china is. The fact they are crash building a hospital in wuhan when the amount of beds in the existing facilities would be more than sufficient to handle the level of infections we are seeing leads me to believe its a LOT worse than they are saying.
The combination of two weeks until symptoms and being infectious some point before symptoms is ridiculously scary when it comes to estimation. Right now, how many folks are at day 2 in the infection cycle and gonna need a hospital bed in two weeks? How many of those health care providers are at that point?
Just a looming nightmare with a two week timer on it. Doing everything you can now, while you have that workforce (apparently) healthy is pretty reasonable.
The numbers I've seen put the virus on the same transmission and lethality levels as whooping cough. One of the guys in Germany got bronchitis-like symptoms on Friday but was feeling OK enough to go to work on Monday.
And yet there are tens of millions of people in quarantine and half of China is shut down.
It seems out of proportion. But maybe I'm missing somethin here?
Because it's a brand new virus to the human race there is zero pre-existing immunity, and if it spreads rapidly unchecked then the whole world gets sick at once. That many people being ill has serious impacts on the functioning of society even with a 'low' mortality rate.
And as the Spanish flu example above shows, things can change and a mis-managed situation can rapidly get worse. When the impacts are global you minimise the risks however you can.
Sorry, baby happened. But I guess this sums up the sentiment of many of the posts.
And sure, it makes sense. I'm still surprised by the enormous amount of resources that goes in to this. But I guess it's just to minimize the risks then.
I am curious how badly the underreporting from china is. The fact they are crash building a hospital in wuhan when the amount of beds in the existing facilities would be more than sufficient to handle the level of infections we are seeing leads me to believe its a LOT worse than they are saying.
The combination of two weeks until symptoms and being infectious some point before symptoms is ridiculously scary when it comes to estimation. Right now, how many folks are at day 2 in the infection cycle and gonna need a hospital bed in two weeks? How many of those health care providers are at that point?
Just a looming nightmare with a two week timer on it. Doing everything you can now, while you have that workforce (apparently) healthy is pretty reasonable.
I mean, when talking about disease, you can either over prepare or under prepare. There is no real middle ground.
I am curious how badly the underreporting from china is. The fact they are crash building a hospital in wuhan when the amount of beds in the existing facilities would be more than sufficient to handle the level of infections we are seeing leads me to believe its a LOT worse than they are saying.
It absolutely doesn't and thinking like that is just uninformed fear-mongering.
You've got a nasty, exceptionally contagious flu-like virus going around. You can either get ahead of it and over-prepare, especially with the thorough news penetration meaning a lot of people are going to be showing up when they feel sick with anything. If you overestimate, well that's just time and money.
Or you underprepare and even if things aren't worst case scenario, the fans are still under constant bombardment of shit.
I am curious how badly the underreporting from china is. The fact they are crash building a hospital in wuhan when the amount of beds in the existing facilities would be more than sufficient to handle the level of infections we are seeing leads me to believe its a LOT worse than they are saying.
Don't be, The Chinese health care system is notoriously overworked. A doctor sees on average 200 patients a day and its not unknown for patients to actually camp out to make an appointment.
China has a Universal health care system, but it hasn't been expanded since the 70s and its funding is crap compared to its demand. Its part of the reason such pandemics are allowed to spread so far and wide. Its also why China tries to undereport shit, they don't want people to know that they don't have a lid on the situation.
Like people shouldn't be bringing up Venezuela, when they have China right there.
In other words it a bad sign, but really its more of a sign of how overdue China is to update most of its health infrastructure.
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
One thing that occurs to me about why it's important not to take chances: we don't have any real idea yet what the long term effects of the virus are.
Consider measles, which basically wipes the immune system. Or chicken pox, which hides in the body long after you've recovered and emerges again years or decades later. Other infections can cause long term effects on people's health. Or it could cause the victims to rise from the grave and seek the blood of the living. OK, probably not that last one. And it'll probably be that once you've recovered, you're fine. But you get the idea: we have a lot to learn about this virus and what it does to a person in the long term.
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
Yeah, slowing the spread of a new virus isn't just about trying to ensure that your medical infrastructure doesn't get swamp. Though that is a pretty big deal because if it gets swamped, that ups the risk of more people dying to shit that could have been preventable deaths, but with the system being swamped they could get treatment in time (both for the new virus and all the issues already floating around). The other issue is if the virus spreads really fast, you might get a panic and then idiots decide to do really stupid shit that could further compound issues.
I am curious how badly the underreporting from china is. The fact they are crash building a hospital in wuhan when the amount of beds in the existing facilities would be more than sufficient to handle the level of infections we are seeing leads me to believe its a LOT worse than they are saying.
Don't be, The Chinese health care system is notoriously overworked. A doctor sees on average 200 patients a day and its not unknown for patients to actually camp out to make an appointment.
China has a Universal health care system, but it hasn't been expanded since the 70s and its funding is crap compared to its demand. Its part of the reason such pandemics are allowed to spread so far and wide. Its also why China tries to undereport shit, they don't want people to know that they don't have a lid on the situation.
Like people shouldn't be bringing up Venezuela, when they have China right there.
In other words it a bad sign, but really its more of a sign of how overdue China is to update most of its health infrastructure.
It could be seen as one of the causes of the epidemic in another way: since people can't always get western medicine they turn to Traditional Chinese Medicine, which (as well as various herbs and techniques that may or may not work) sometimes uses the body parts of wild animals as medicines. Not all of these animals are harmless to eat.
My company sent out an email this morning to advise everyone who has visited China recently to work from home for a couple weeks
Same thing here. My company canceled all travel to and from China, and then instituted a two week "work from home" policy starting today for anyone who's traveled to China recently.
Feels a little like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, but I suppose only time will tell.
Not really I think. It can maybe help some. If your people can work from home, why not honestly? It's a low-cost precaution.
Oh certainly, it's a low-cost measure that could do some good. I just think that we've already had a number of people return from China already, so there's a chance the infection's begun spreading through our workplace in advance of the precaution. We get international visitors constantly. (Also, working from home isn't a possibility for a lot of us, sadly. I know a few people who would try to break this policy, because they can't work from home.)
3 more infections in Germany. All within the same company in Bavaria as the first case.
Are these in addition to the previous three, bringing the total to seven in Germany?
I think it was 3 in France? Anyway. Official number in Germany is now 4. None of them are showing symptons but are currently in isolation to see how long they are infectious. 90 people are getting tested.
honovere on
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
Finally updated the OP with the links from @boogedyboo. Thanks for those and sorry for being slow.
In other news, there's now a confirmed case from India, which is something I have been worrying about. For all we've been talking about China's medical infrastructure being poor, India's would make China's look like Sweden. In lieu of sanitation, neonatal wards will just give all newborns a shot of antibiotic cocktail. "But what about antibiotic resistance? And what about all the other things that antibiotics won't affect, like viruses and fungi and parasites and-" Yes, I know. Exponential spread through India would be a nightmare.
There's a suspected case on a italian cruise ship, so now about 6000 people can't get off the boat. English sources are all from tabloid papers right now, so no link.
There's a suspected case on a italian cruise ship, so now about 6000 people can't get off the boat. English sources are all from tabloid papers right now, so no link.
CBS is reporting it right now. Apparently there is a Chinese couple on board that is suspected of having the virus.
Another jump in infected and a rather large number in isolation this morning.
● The death toll has risen to 170 in China, with more than 7,700 confirmed cases of infection as of Thursday morning local time — an increase of more than 1,500 from the previous day.
● About 100 cases have been recorded outside mainland China, and four other countries have reported person-to-person transmission of the virus.
● Roughly 200 Americans evacuated from Wuhan landed in California on Wednesday. After evacuating 206 people from the virus epicenter Wednesday morning, Japan has sent a second charter flight to bring home more of its citizens. Three Japanese evacuees were confirmed to be infected with the coronavirus, the Health Ministry said Thursday.
● India and the Philippines reported their first cases Thursday. South Korea has also reported two new cases, bringing its total to six, while Australia announced two new ones, bringing the cases there to nine.
● Infections also have been confirmed in France, Hong Kong, Japan, Nepal, Cambodia, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, Taiwan, Canada and Sri Lanka. We’re mapping the spread here.
From the WashPo above.
I think I heard they have 82,000 people under watch for possible infection at the moment.
But again overall it has been contained in China not moving outside at a high rate yet.
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Well...Vancouver B.C. has their first confirmed case. Dude infected regularly travels to China and was actually in Wuhan when it was first kicking off.
Source: https://komonews.com/news/local/british-columbia-confirms-1st-case-of-china-coronavirus
According to what I'm seeing, there were 66 cases, 1 death, and 4 recoveries in Shanghai. Singapore has a few cases. Nothing on the East Coast of the US.
Not really I think. It can maybe help some. If your people can work from home, why not honestly? It's a low-cost precaution.
Mutating to become more deadly is very much not the norm. From wiki on the Spanish Flu second wave:
Going by flu, pre-existing lung damage from smoking etc is likely to not have much effect on your odds of getting the virus, but does increase your odds of the viral damage leading to a secondary bacterial pneumonia which is what actually kills you.
Also: BBC News - Coronavirus: Australian scientists first to recreate virus outside China
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-51289897
Steam | XBL
Steam | XBL
Yeah, most of the time viruses mutate to be less pathogeneic over time, because dead people are generally worse disease vectors than infected but living people. Not accidently reversing this trend is a big part of modern disease control.
Oh certainly, it's a low-cost measure that could do some good. I just think that we've already had a number of people return from China already, so there's a chance the infection's begun spreading through our workplace in advance of the precaution. We get international visitors constantly. (Also, working from home isn't a possibility for a lot of us, sadly. I know a few people who would try to break this policy, because they can't work from home.)
Are these in addition to the previous three, bringing the total to seven in Germany?
And yet there are tens of millions of people in quarantine and half of China is shut down.
It seems out of proportion. But maybe I'm missing somethin here?
Its because it's new and poorly understood. Imagine for example that this virus kills 1/1000 of those exposed to it in China. That's 1.5 million deaths in China. If it hospitalized 1/100 for 5 days, that's 75 million days spent in hospital. This is an expensive and honestly dangerous virus even if it isn't more dangerous than say, 5 years of flu seasons or something.
It is completely out of proportion and has taken on a panicked life of its own.
Because it's a brand new virus to the human race there is zero pre-existing immunity, and if it spreads rapidly unchecked then the whole world gets sick at once. That many people being ill has serious impacts on the functioning of society even with a 'low' mortality rate.
And as the Spanish flu example above shows, things can change and a mis-managed situation can rapidly get worse. When the impacts are global you minimise the risks however you can.
I keep going back and forth.
China we know has a bad habit of under reporting. And everything in China is always much larger than the West. If we combined Europe and North America's population we are still not near China. They have locked down enough cities that the population of a medium sized country are under quarantine and over all that is a drop in the bucket.
Things we are getting to know is:
1)Human to human transmission probably was occurring much early than the actual announcement of January 20th.
2)Possible cases going even farther back
3)Over 5 million people had left Wuhan before the quarantine for the Lunar New Year to much worse provisioned and equipped rural areas, so a lot of not tested cases.
4)There is a chance of a long incubation period that has little to no symptoms and the person is infectious.
The thing with this stuff isn't that we are going to get a Black Plague like issue with millions of dead and bodies but you can have something like this if it does explode in basically temporarily crippling an economy and overwhelming a health system. Which has other negative effects.
Basically what I see China doing is trying to head off what they see is a possibly really bad thing across a lot of their population by trying to outpace it with new facilities and overwhelming numbers.
Though historically the CCP is playing catch up on this stuff so the actual level of infection is in question right now and maybe their overreaction isn't one but what they have said to the World is an under estimate.
Indeed.
This coronavirus is spreading exponentially. The doubling time for cases is currently under two days, and that's just the cases we know about. This is probably going to pass all the SARS cases officially by tomorrow and it won't be stopping there.
Don't panic, obviously, and the world is most likely not ending over this (unless some idiot, and the leadership of the world is full of them, decides to go nuclear for some reason), but it's worth keeping an eye on the news.
Of course, there's no way of knowing if it would become nearly that widespread - but by the time we would know if more mild containment and warning measures would work, it would obviously be too late to enact harsher ones. So I think governments and organizations are maybe taking the stance that it's better to err on the side of caution here (there's probably also elements of "it's better to be seen as doing something than seen as doing nothing").
The death numbers are not really indicative right now. There is serious lag time before this virus kills its host. Pneumonia is also not like the flu- you don't just walk away from it once you recover. It sometimes deals lasting lung damage.
Death numbers always going to be high compared to known cases at the start of an outbreak. They are going to almost solely reflect people who know that they were infected with something serious. The people who thought that they had the flu or a bad cold or who didn’t even show any symptoms? They were still infected, potentially still spreading the virus, but they’re a part of the denominator that we don’t know enough about to apply yet.
This popped up on my youtube. Well shot and worth a watch.
I like it, but the desaturation filter.....
No new cases though still a big chunk pending.
The combination of two weeks until symptoms and being infectious some point before symptoms is ridiculously scary when it comes to estimation. Right now, how many folks are at day 2 in the infection cycle and gonna need a hospital bed in two weeks? How many of those health care providers are at that point?
Just a looming nightmare with a two week timer on it. Doing everything you can now, while you have that workforce (apparently) healthy is pretty reasonable.
Sorry, baby happened. But I guess this sums up the sentiment of many of the posts.
And sure, it makes sense. I'm still surprised by the enormous amount of resources that goes in to this. But I guess it's just to minimize the risks then.
I mean, when talking about disease, you can either over prepare or under prepare. There is no real middle ground.
And you don't want to be under prepared.
It absolutely doesn't and thinking like that is just uninformed fear-mongering.
You've got a nasty, exceptionally contagious flu-like virus going around. You can either get ahead of it and over-prepare, especially with the thorough news penetration meaning a lot of people are going to be showing up when they feel sick with anything. If you overestimate, well that's just time and money.
Or you underprepare and even if things aren't worst case scenario, the fans are still under constant bombardment of shit.
Don't be, The Chinese health care system is notoriously overworked. A doctor sees on average 200 patients a day and its not unknown for patients to actually camp out to make an appointment.
China has a Universal health care system, but it hasn't been expanded since the 70s and its funding is crap compared to its demand. Its part of the reason such pandemics are allowed to spread so far and wide. Its also why China tries to undereport shit, they don't want people to know that they don't have a lid on the situation.
Like people shouldn't be bringing up Venezuela, when they have China right there.
In other words it a bad sign, but really its more of a sign of how overdue China is to update most of its health infrastructure.
One thing that occurs to me about why it's important not to take chances: we don't have any real idea yet what the long term effects of the virus are.
Consider measles, which basically wipes the immune system. Or chicken pox, which hides in the body long after you've recovered and emerges again years or decades later. Other infections can cause long term effects on people's health. Or it could cause the victims to rise from the grave and seek the blood of the living. OK, probably not that last one. And it'll probably be that once you've recovered, you're fine. But you get the idea: we have a lot to learn about this virus and what it does to a person in the long term.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
It could be seen as one of the causes of the epidemic in another way: since people can't always get western medicine they turn to Traditional Chinese Medicine, which (as well as various herbs and techniques that may or may not work) sometimes uses the body parts of wild animals as medicines. Not all of these animals are harmless to eat.
I think it was 3 in France? Anyway. Official number in Germany is now 4. None of them are showing symptons but are currently in isolation to see how long they are infectious. 90 people are getting tested.
In other news, there's now a confirmed case from India, which is something I have been worrying about. For all we've been talking about China's medical infrastructure being poor, India's would make China's look like Sweden. In lieu of sanitation, neonatal wards will just give all newborns a shot of antibiotic cocktail. "But what about antibiotic resistance? And what about all the other things that antibiotics won't affect, like viruses and fungi and parasites and-" Yes, I know. Exponential spread through India would be a nightmare.
CBS is reporting it right now. Apparently there is a Chinese couple on board that is suspected of having the virus.
From the WashPo above.
I think I heard they have 82,000 people under watch for possible infection at the moment.
But again overall it has been contained in China not moving outside at a high rate yet.