Those are US numbers only. The CDC estimates that 291,000 to 646,000 people die worldwide every year. You cannot take the US mortality rate and assume it would apply to any other country and especially not China.
The scary part is that of the official 8,200 or so people that have been confirmed to have the virus there's been 171 deaths, and 143 recoveries. So more people dead than recovered, does make one wonder about the 8,200.
Seems few believe the official numbers, people visit numerous hospitals without being able to seen, and even those that get seen have problems getting tested, and people who posts about the situation get the post pulled or pressured to pulled themselves.
Here's an article describing the censorship (pulled posts), arrests for "rumor mongering", difficulty in getting tested, etc:
Well there is something to be said for both potential biases in those counts. First of all, those being hospitalized are obviously among the most severe cases. And presumably people with the mildest cases will potentially not even be diagnosed, so the mortality rates would be skewed higher.
And secondly, that more people have died than have recovered doesn't say much other than that it takes longer to recover than to die. If you are going to die, it would appear that it would happen sooner rather than later. Whereas if you aren't going to die, you may take awhile before you've been officially cured.
That isn't to say that is absolutely what is happening here. But both scenarios are fairly likely, and therefore should mediate some of the bleakness of those numbers for the time being.
It's like a worse version of the flu. The way that you'll die from the flu is getting a secondary pneumonia infection from Staph aureus or Steptococcus pneumonia, the virus just makes you more susceptible and weaker.
The major lethal consequence for this virus in the Coronavirus family is Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS). A strong outcome for this is we knock you out, put a tube down your throat, and have you breath via mechanical ventilator. It's intense to say the least.
People mistakenly calculate %2 and %50 simultaneously because they assume that when a case is confirmed the death or cured status is also determined at that moment.
In reality, though, people who are going to die don't die at the moment of infection confirmation and people who are going to live do lag in the log because it takes time to confirm if someone has recovered and virus-free.
Some will suggest to simply compare the deaths to the confirmed case from a week? ago but this assumes that the patients are admitted at the same stage of their infection and all cases at the time are accounted for(deaths are probably much better tracked than the infection and the publicity has a huge impact on the reporting). It would be a guesstimate at best.
I would say, let's stick to official numbers since the calculation requires each patients timeline. Surely an educated guess can be constructed by modelling the patient prognosis and virus behaviour but that also requires much more data than what the public has.
The official figures in China are 8,163 cases 171 deaths which is 2% right now, but take these with a big grain of salt. They could go up (some of those confirmed cases will be very recent and may get worse) or down (more cases might have happened but be unreported). Its really hard to tell what it will look like in a month or two.
It's currently 171 deaths, 8,288 confirmed infected, which is 2% dead. However, what needs to be taken into consideration is that infected individuals don't die the day they are confirmed infected, there is a lag of several days.
Assuming the average time from symptom onset and diagnosis to death is 7 days, we're looking at at 20% death rate (830 confirmed infected 1 week ago). Even a 5 day lag between symptom onset to death is a ~9% death rate (1,975 confirmed infected 5 days ago).
This is exactly how the fatality rate of SARS played out.
We don't know how many people are infected. We only have numbers of confirmed cases and those numbers are heavily skewed because 1) people don't know they are sick 2) stay at home or 3) are not diagnosed properly. Those diagnosed in China are probably severe cases with a multiple not being diagnosed. Also, it is unclear how good the reporting is.
We don't know how many of those who are infected will die and how many will recover. We only know of deaths of confirmed patients in the hospital. Of roughly 10000 confirmed cases 200 are dead, 200 are recovered and 9600 are yet to be determined. From that you could deduce 2% or 50%, less than 2% or more than 50% or anything else. Right now we don't have good data. Also we don't know how long it takes to die or to recover and on most patients we will probably lose track.
Since the infection takes about 2 weeks, we have to wait a few weeks until the smoke starts clearing.
It seems to be too early to tell. There are most likely a lot of undocumented infected cases as well as the incubation period for the virus might be different than the flu. Which can move mortality rate both ways.
Not being flippant, as you've had good answers already, I can tell you the rate of fear of this novel coronavirus:
100%
Streets are deserted. The few that go out all wear a mask. Restaurants, museums, cafes, bars have been demanded shut across the country, ostensibly until the end of the weekend but I can see this being extended. The first working day after the Chinese New Year was supposed to be February 3rd, but the city I'm in have extended this to February 9th - offices have been told not to open. Shops are open, there is food, and new fresh vegetables, fruits, meats are being stocked.
Ignore the people telling you it's 2-3%. The case fatality ratio is between 9 and 56% according to proper epidemiological methods, such as using the formula "deaths / (deaths + recoveries)": https://mobile.twitter.com/zorinaq/status/122242770872387993...
e₂(s)=D(s)/{D(s)+R(s)} which is: deaths / (deaths + recoveries)
The paper concludes: "The second simple estimate based on the ratio of deaths of those for whom the outcome is known, e₂, is reasonable at most points in the epidemic" ie. produces a good estimate of the eventual observed case fatality rate (in fact in their example it slightly underestimates the actual case fatality rate)
Which describes both the CORE and DAILY forms for an electronic database.
Some selected sentences from the pdf:
===
* The CRF is designed to collect data obtained through examination, interview and review of hospital notes. Data
may be collected retrospectively if the patient is enrolled after the admission date.
* DO NOT INPUT ANY PATIENT IDENTIFIERS: THIS INCLUDES NAMES, ADDRESSES, DATE OF BIRTH OR PLACE OF BIRTH.
* Step 1: Contact EDCARN@who.int to become a contributor to the nCoV global platform.
* Step 2: You will be contacted by ISARIC, platform manager, for assignment informational pack and instructions on
how to use the REDCap nCoV platform.
[...]
* If your site would like to collect data independently, establishment of locally hosted database is possible.
* Standard reports will be provided on regular basis to all contributors. Additional analysis for operational public
health purposes will be determined by an independent WHO clinical advisory group.
===
As you can see, the only way to get this anonymized data, is to be a contributor, and to be a contributor, you'd have to be a hospital, or somehow be granted access by WHO.
Remember the live outbreak map by John Hopkins? It also displays the number of people that recovered, the dates and definition of recovery duration are helpful in estimating mortality. Note that the other maps and graphs online only publish contaminations and deaths, which is not useful for calculating mortality. Why does John Hopkins deserve access, and why can I not get access, if I wish to fit a statistical model to the epidemic observations?
Use their API or the web search, however you like.
If you're going to complain about not having up to the minute data available for 2019-nCov, keep in mind that they're not getting the data submitted regularly from China, it's all in daily reports rather than from hospitals.
It's too early for data on this coronavirus. There isn't enough organizational capacity in Wuhan to properly capture the numbers; to start with it's difficult for people to get to the hospitals because transit is shutdown, and if they get there it's often pointless because there are very few test kits and no free beds. How many have been infected is impossible to determine.
This is (imo) the right course of action to (at minimum) alert countries wrt the gravity of this outbreak; however, I was disappointed to see the tiptoeing around potentially offending China. From the press conference, it seemed that Dr. Tedros made it painfully (maybe even unnecessarily) clear that this action wasn't faulting China for their handling of this situation. It's just weird to see that global politics is creeping into these public health decisions.
It's not just politics. This is matter of trying to placate China so that they don't hide numbers from international/outside health organizations to save face.
My understanding is that China was less than forthcoming about actual infection/death rates when SARS was making it's rounds.
Disclaimer: I do not have a source for this. This is heresay from the hubub around the current crisis so take it with a grain of salt.
I was surprised by an NPR blurb yesterday talking about how China may have to put off its annual Communist party planning meeting, and how that would be an embarrassing concession by the Chinese.
I was so disappointed in them. How should it be embarrassing to take a deadly and contagious pneumonia outbreak seriously? Do you want them to feel they should hide it?
(You being NPR). I know you don't mean anything bad by it.
Or they are just concentrating on stopping the diseas and don't really care about the politics. If sucking up to China will help then why not? Less serious people (like Trump) can bluster about after lives have been saved.
Health care is rife with problems of shame, and how it prevents people from getting treatment, from STDs to drug dependency to psychological conditions.
The WHO is simply simply scaling up some tactics used in routine care to the nation-state level. Which, incidentally, is pretty close to their original charter.
It is not a real-time map, I find it bizarre that people believe that we can track the population's wellbeing in real-time. Are you ready to be hooked up to such a system?
About the update rate: It's updated regularly. If you want to go down this rabbit hole, is 1m update real-time? Is 1s update realtime? Where do you draw the line? For most people, anything less than 12h, in the case of tracking confirmed cases, is perfectly fine described as "real-time"
About the data: Obviously it's showing confirmed cases and not actual health of people. The UI makes that pretty clear, it says "Confirmed cases" in big font. No one expects the latter...
This comment and the replies to it really give a glimpse into the psyche of the more pedantry-prone members of HN.
For me, if someone says X, and a literal interpretation of X would be impossible/ridiculous, I naturally assume the more generous interpretation Y. I would find it bizarre to believe that X was intended.
Some people however cannot escape the interpretation X, and find the statement bizarre fullstop.
Although not on topic, I think you point highlights a rather unaddressed issue with data and systems relevance. As you imply, not only is it inherently not possible to track a whole population's "wellbeing", doing so in "real-time" is even more ludicrous. So many measures and metrics are really nothing more than utter fabrications that are totally incompatible in spite of being named similarly, and no, that hardly ever seems to dissuade anyone from hooking up to anything but the most obviously egregious offending systems and their garbage data/information.
Just a single aspect of this issue is, what does real-time mean for aggregate, global measures? Days? Hours? Is it somehow more useful to have 100% accuracy at either interval? And what are the criteria that even determine accuracy at all, let alone precision. This is all a kabuki dance with approaching no relevance, especially in the case of the pandemic when there is also approaching zero confidence in the Chinese numbers at all, and it does not matter how many fancy dashboards are put together by "hooking up to such a system", when the numbers could be 2x as high, 5x, 100x, or who knows because they very system of governance and ideology actively evades honesty and responsibility.
ALL of these numbers should be fundamentally caveated every single time any of them are provided with "that they are Chinese data and the Chinese lie about lying, while lying about the fact that they lied. At the very least currently, trusting any Chinese person is an act of insanity, regardless of whether any given individual Chinese person is honest 100% of the time. How much more do people have to be lied to, deceived, cheated, stolen from, plundered, spied on, and infected with communicable diseases that could crash all of civilization by killing millions before we realize there is a mentally ill manic insanity going around that starts with the insanity of not having a common framework for data and information collection, processing, and conveyance.
another one here: intraday real-time coronavirus infected count predictor with log scale. If I am right it goes up every minute or so https://www.coronaviruschart.com/
It seemed during the conference that they were trying their best to not step on Beijing's toes. I wonder if they think China would stop cooperating if they called them out on their poor containment procedures.
> How is locking down an entire city "poor containment".
Because it followed a week of ignoring the issue and then another week of arresting people who were reporting on the issue. This has been an issue since December 28th, but China and the WHO are pretending it began just recently.
It's "containment" in much the same way that the Soviet Union just couldn't stop lying about Chernobyl because people miles away were melting from the inside, so they took drastic actions to pretend they were on top of things.
Those "hospitals" they are building (and selectively live streaming parts with glorious Party tunes on the background)? Those were resorts that were almost complete, but since tourism in the area is going to be dead for a decade, they're turning them into hospitals and claiming they're brand new buildings.
What is staggering to me is not that China finally moved when it realized the problem could not be swept under the rug, it's that the WHO is going along with the doublespeak of saying "all is well" but then also declaring an emergency, but don't cancel your trips to China!
Corona virus was first detected in mid December. Things got pretty serious over the next 4 weeks, 5M people left the city before any containment happened.
So of course now everywhere in China has it, not exactly a good containment. The Wuhan mayor said he'd been talking to the China administration for 4 weeks before being allowed to talk about it to the public.
On timeline of events, there was a week or so of delay between first death + ICL paper and the city lockdown. It can be argued the lockdown was very late.
The OP might also mean poor containment within China - which is only relying on other countries right now.
apparently science is not working as "how things feel/look like", but about evidence and proof. Same thing applies to gov or org, it's not guided by message on social media, but according to the guidance and standard procedure. This kind of practice are very normal cross every industry, from construction safety guide to medicine testing.
According to [1], WHO or CDC will only report phase 2 and take actions when there is no evidence of human-to-human infection, and declare phase 5 or 6 base on the information unveiled. And from [2], declare PHEIC when there is human-to-human infection cross border.
> A PHEIC is defined in the IHR (2005) as, “an extraordinary event which is determined to constitute a public health risk to other States through the international spread of disease and to potentially require a coordinated international response”. This definition implies a situation that is:
* serious, sudden, unusual or unexpected;
* carries implications for public health beyond the affected State’s national border; and
Without delving into any of the numbers here since they're still mostly speculation (we don't know how many people are really infected / dead), I think it's safe to say that two deadly seasonal illnesses is worse than one and is an outcome worth trying to prevent.
The issue isn't absolute numbers. We don't know the deadliness of the current outbreak. Lets take the flu for example. According to CDC https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e.... The death rate is around 0.09% at the worst according the numbers on the cdc estimates (Which is a very pessimistic estimate). If the coronavirus has a mortality rate of 1/100 it would make 10x more deadly than the flu.
More importantly, the flu has a vaccine. New versions of it are released each year according to what health organizations think will be the dominant variants.
* Coronavirus infected can be contagious for longer than flu patients
* The longer incubation period means more chances for people to get sick, especially since the disease comes on gradually. People will think they have an ordinary cold, go to work, and infect people.
* We understand the progression of the flu in most variants. We don't know all the effects of the Coronavirus, we just have descriptions of the symptoms.
* Flu is basically everywhere already, Coronavirus is not. It's not a choice between one or the other, it's a choice between one or both. If we could declare an emergency and have some chance of stopping flu from getting to some part of the population, we would.
* People with compromised immune systems like the elderly, or babies, or people with existing illnesses or lung problems know to avoid people infected with influenza. Since it's possible for people capable of infecting others with Coronavirus to not even know they carry it, it's harder to avoid for those vulnerable to it.
It's much cheaper to respond to a virus like this in early stages than it is to wait until we see "how serious" it is. All in all, getting things moving now is a good idea.
You mixed up your numbers. 3-5 Mio SEVERE CASES, not overall infections.
> Worldwide, these annual epidemics are estimated to result in about 3 to 5 million cases of severe illness, and about 290 000 to 650 000 respiratory deaths.
> The flu has resulted in 9.3 million to 49 million illnesses each year in the United States since 2010. Each year, on average, five to 20 percent of the United States population gets the flu.
Let's assume 10 mil Corona cases in US (like flu lower bound), with 2% mortality. That's 200k deaths. If we assume 49 mil cases (flu higher bound), it's 1 mil deaths just in US.
This 2% number that keeps being thrown around is based on dividing the number of confirmed deaths (which is likely to be relatively accurate) by the number of confirmed infections (which is almost certainly a massive underestimation). It's basically meaningless.
Simply because it has a mortality rate a couple of orders of magnitude greater than the flu's. Something like 8 percent of the world gets the flu in a given year. Millions will die if that happens for this one.
Assuming the CFR remains stable. Most new infectious diseases rapidly drop in mortality because of natural selection: those variants of the virus that make people sickest result in their hosts not surviving or not coming into contact with other people to spread the virus, so the strain that becomes endemic tends to become less virulent and more adapted to its host. This has happened with leprosy, syphilis, HIV, and Ebola, and there's no reason to believe it wouldn't happen with nCOV (if the outbreak isn't contained entirely, as SARS was).
While infected to mortality is 3% according to official numbers, which is bad, recovered:dead is less than 50% by the same numbers. Ok have trouble with these reported numbers however, and believe recovered higher. We just don't know. Cross species infection vectors are never good.
Maybe the emergency is less about severity and more about the urgency of attempting containment.
The possibility has been raised that if this goes global, it could become an illness that, like the flu, just sort of continually floats around and we're stuck dealing with it. We don't really want another such illness. If freaking out about it right now can even move the needle on the odds of avoiding that scenario, it might be a good plan.
If nothing else, it's worse in that there's zero vaccination mitigation available. If the flu vaccine was 0% effective this year, that would also be a health emergency.
On top of that, it seems to have worse mortality rate, transmissibility rate, and asymptomatic contagion -- so a little worse in every way, probably.
As with the flu, you're very unlikely to be personally killed by it unless you're over 65, under 5, or in poor health.
Please don't post unsubstantive comments here. If you know more than others, share some of what you know so that we all can learn, or simply don't comment.
Could you add the timeframe of each pandemic? I believe the coronavirus is 1-2 months old, but how long was SARS to get to 774? I feel like the comparaison isn't great without timeline.
It's also worth noting that the ~8k confirmed cases are bottlenecked by how fast China can perform tests. Here's an article guesstimating that there were up to 100k infections a few days ago:
The number of cases reported has been going up by 30% to 70% every day. People in China are taking a number of measures to limit spread but given the potentially long contagious incubation period of the virus it might be a while for that to reduce the visible increase even if it has been relatively effective.
Virulence versus pathogenicity. Perhaps you contend that SARS' pathogenicity is greater than this coronavirus'? But virulence demands our attention, too. Why? Because public engagement can help prevent its spread.
When AIDS/HIV was near its peak, folks would often compare it in a similar fashion to cancer. If we ignore the fact that cancer is a big diverse bucket, most/many cancers really don't have any 'virulence' so getting public attention to drive best practices to mitigate spread just don't make any sense.
Running the official numbers, mortality rate is less than 3%. If we plug in estimative models claiming 25000+ unrecorded infections, mortality is less than 1%.
Unless you are in a sensitive age group or have other health problems, data suggests you're most likely to get over it as a regular flu.
It's not all perfect and is worse than a regular flu, but especially now after the announcement some people may way over-stress themselves which doesn't do good to your immune system.
You cannot calculate mortality rate as most people haven't recovered fully. We have 3% mortality rate at the moment, but we do not know how many of those infected are still in early stages and what will be the final number of deaths.
If we looked at deaths against reported recoveries than the rate is much higher (I am guessing a lot of recoveries are not reported).
These calculations assume that no one else infected dies. Seems overly optimistic, especially given that ~1200 patients are in serious or critical condition.
That's true. Still as someone with anxieties I find it a useful perspective to assess personal threat level.
First reaction is "I need to avoid becoming infected at all costs". However, the costs are steep. An extreme plan to “sit at home with a month’s worth of supplies” seems plausible, but it would not be healthy to reduce movement so much and if everyone suddenly starts doing that there will be issues with food availability in the area (I live in HK).
If I am statistically so unlikely to die from this infection, I am going to take measures that prevent me from spreading it to someone who isn’t, but I won’t e.g. panic and call police if someone without a mask is near me.
Readit News
* 15,000,000 – 21,000,000 who had the flu
* 8,200 – 20,000 deaths from the flu
The morality rate ranges from 0.03% to 0.09% or 3/10000 9/10000
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p1213-flu-death-esti...
Seems few believe the official numbers, people visit numerous hospitals without being able to seen, and even those that get seen have problems getting tested, and people who posts about the situation get the post pulled or pressured to pulled themselves.
Here's an article describing the censorship (pulled posts), arrests for "rumor mongering", difficulty in getting tested, etc:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-testing-insi...
This one documents 15% of 41 people getting hospitalized dying:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
And secondly, that more people have died than have recovered doesn't say much other than that it takes longer to recover than to die. If you are going to die, it would appear that it would happen sooner rather than later. Whereas if you aren't going to die, you may take awhile before you've been officially cured.
That isn't to say that is absolutely what is happening here. But both scenarios are fairly likely, and therefore should mediate some of the bleakness of those numbers for the time being.
It isn't that bad. It means that this virus won't kill more than 50% of population even if we were to shut down all research right now.
The major lethal consequence for this virus in the Coronavirus family is Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS). A strong outcome for this is we knock you out, put a tube down your throat, and have you breath via mechanical ventilator. It's intense to say the least.
Source: Medical student
There may be some slight differences, but even seasonal influenza and a cold frequently present differently.
In reality, though, people who are going to die don't die at the moment of infection confirmation and people who are going to live do lag in the log because it takes time to confirm if someone has recovered and virus-free.
Some will suggest to simply compare the deaths to the confirmed case from a week? ago but this assumes that the patients are admitted at the same stage of their infection and all cases at the time are accounted for(deaths are probably much better tracked than the infection and the publicity has a huge impact on the reporting). It would be a guesstimate at best.
I would say, let's stick to official numbers since the calculation requires each patients timeline. Surely an educated guess can be constructed by modelling the patient prognosis and virus behaviour but that also requires much more data than what the public has.
Assuming the average time from symptom onset and diagnosis to death is 7 days, we're looking at at 20% death rate (830 confirmed infected 1 week ago). Even a 5 day lag between symptom onset to death is a ~9% death rate (1,975 confirmed infected 5 days ago).
This is exactly how the fatality rate of SARS played out.
We don't know how many people are infected. We only have numbers of confirmed cases and those numbers are heavily skewed because 1) people don't know they are sick 2) stay at home or 3) are not diagnosed properly. Those diagnosed in China are probably severe cases with a multiple not being diagnosed. Also, it is unclear how good the reporting is.
We don't know how many of those who are infected will die and how many will recover. We only know of deaths of confirmed patients in the hospital. Of roughly 10000 confirmed cases 200 are dead, 200 are recovered and 9600 are yet to be determined. From that you could deduce 2% or 50%, less than 2% or more than 50% or anything else. Right now we don't have good data. Also we don't know how long it takes to die or to recover and on most patients we will probably lose track.
Since the infection takes about 2 weeks, we have to wait a few weeks until the smoke starts clearing.
100%
Streets are deserted. The few that go out all wear a mask. Restaurants, museums, cafes, bars have been demanded shut across the country, ostensibly until the end of the weekend but I can see this being extended. The first working day after the Chinese New Year was supposed to be February 3rd, but the city I'm in have extended this to February 9th - offices have been told not to open. Shops are open, there is food, and new fresh vegetables, fruits, meats are being stocked.
Long answer: wait a week or two.
Disclosure: no I'm not an epidemiologist. But for a reference to a paper by actual epidemiologists see https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ebf2/48c9fc0a1a23d1778b9408... section Simple Estimators, specifically this formula:
e₂(s)=D(s)/{D(s)+R(s)} which is: deaths / (deaths + recoveries)
The paper concludes: "The second simple estimate based on the ratio of deaths of those for whom the outcome is known, e₂, is reasonable at most points in the epidemic" ie. produces a good estimate of the eventual observed case fatality rate (in fact in their example it slightly underestimates the actual case fatality rate)
Deleted Comment
See: http://www.nhc.gov.cn/jkj/s3578/201904/050427ff32704a5db64f4...
At
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...
, you can see the standardized protocols for the hospitals dealing with 2019-nCov, such as the anonymizing CRF (Case Record Form):
https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-nco...
Which describes both the CORE and DAILY forms for an electronic database.
Some selected sentences from the pdf:
===
* The CRF is designed to collect data obtained through examination, interview and review of hospital notes. Data may be collected retrospectively if the patient is enrolled after the admission date.
* DO NOT INPUT ANY PATIENT IDENTIFIERS: THIS INCLUDES NAMES, ADDRESSES, DATE OF BIRTH OR PLACE OF BIRTH.
* Step 1: Contact EDCARN@who.int to become a contributor to the nCoV global platform.
* Step 2: You will be contacted by ISARIC, platform manager, for assignment informational pack and instructions on how to use the REDCap nCoV platform.
[...]
* If your site would like to collect data independently, establishment of locally hosted database is possible.
* Standard reports will be provided on regular basis to all contributors. Additional analysis for operational public health purposes will be determined by an independent WHO clinical advisory group.
===
As you can see, the only way to get this anonymized data, is to be a contributor, and to be a contributor, you'd have to be a hospital, or somehow be granted access by WHO.
Remember the live outbreak map by John Hopkins? It also displays the number of people that recovered, the dates and definition of recovery duration are helpful in estimating mortality. Note that the other maps and graphs online only publish contaminations and deaths, which is not useful for calculating mortality. Why does John Hopkins deserve access, and why can I not get access, if I wish to fit a statistical model to the epidemic observations?
https://www.who.int/healthinfo/statistics/en/
Use their API or the web search, however you like.
If you're going to complain about not having up to the minute data available for 2019-nCov, keep in mind that they're not getting the data submitted regularly from China, it's all in daily reports rather than from hospitals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpIKipSkkV8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AI3R41dGnU
Edit: removed remark
My understanding is that China was less than forthcoming about actual infection/death rates when SARS was making it's rounds.
Disclaimer: I do not have a source for this. This is heresay from the hubub around the current crisis so take it with a grain of salt.
I was so disappointed in them. How should it be embarrassing to take a deadly and contagious pneumonia outbreak seriously? Do you want them to feel they should hide it?
(You being NPR). I know you don't mean anything bad by it.
Imo it may cause china to become hostile and turn off cooperation.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
The WHO is simply simply scaling up some tactics used in routine care to the nation-state level. Which, incidentally, is pretty close to their original charter.
tracks confirmed cases and recoveries too.
https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/01/the-latest-coronavirus...
It is not a real-time map, I find it bizarre that people believe that we can track the population's wellbeing in real-time. Are you ready to be hooked up to such a system?
About the update rate: It's updated regularly. If you want to go down this rabbit hole, is 1m update real-time? Is 1s update realtime? Where do you draw the line? For most people, anything less than 12h, in the case of tracking confirmed cases, is perfectly fine described as "real-time"
About the data: Obviously it's showing confirmed cases and not actual health of people. The UI makes that pretty clear, it says "Confirmed cases" in big font. No one expects the latter...
For me, if someone says X, and a literal interpretation of X would be impossible/ridiculous, I naturally assume the more generous interpretation Y. I would find it bizarre to believe that X was intended.
Some people however cannot escape the interpretation X, and find the statement bizarre fullstop.
Just a single aspect of this issue is, what does real-time mean for aggregate, global measures? Days? Hours? Is it somehow more useful to have 100% accuracy at either interval? And what are the criteria that even determine accuracy at all, let alone precision. This is all a kabuki dance with approaching no relevance, especially in the case of the pandemic when there is also approaching zero confidence in the Chinese numbers at all, and it does not matter how many fancy dashboards are put together by "hooking up to such a system", when the numbers could be 2x as high, 5x, 100x, or who knows because they very system of governance and ideology actively evades honesty and responsibility.
ALL of these numbers should be fundamentally caveated every single time any of them are provided with "that they are Chinese data and the Chinese lie about lying, while lying about the fact that they lied. At the very least currently, trusting any Chinese person is an act of insanity, regardless of whether any given individual Chinese person is honest 100% of the time. How much more do people have to be lied to, deceived, cheated, stolen from, plundered, spied on, and infected with communicable diseases that could crash all of civilization by killing millions before we realize there is a mentally ill manic insanity going around that starts with the insanity of not having a common framework for data and information collection, processing, and conveyance.
Find it staggering to insinuate that were it originating in Western countries we'd do the same?
Because it followed a week of ignoring the issue and then another week of arresting people who were reporting on the issue. This has been an issue since December 28th, but China and the WHO are pretending it began just recently.
It's "containment" in much the same way that the Soviet Union just couldn't stop lying about Chernobyl because people miles away were melting from the inside, so they took drastic actions to pretend they were on top of things.
Those "hospitals" they are building (and selectively live streaming parts with glorious Party tunes on the background)? Those were resorts that were almost complete, but since tourism in the area is going to be dead for a decade, they're turning them into hospitals and claiming they're brand new buildings.
What is staggering to me is not that China finally moved when it realized the problem could not be swept under the rug, it's that the WHO is going along with the doublespeak of saying "all is well" but then also declaring an emergency, but don't cancel your trips to China!
So of course now everywhere in China has it, not exactly a good containment. The Wuhan mayor said he'd been talking to the China administration for 4 weeks before being allowed to talk about it to the public.
The OP might also mean poor containment within China - which is only relying on other countries right now.
> A PHEIC is defined in the IHR (2005) as, “an extraordinary event which is determined to constitute a public health risk to other States through the international spread of disease and to potentially require a coordinated international response”. This definition implies a situation that is:
* serious, sudden, unusual or unexpected;
* carries implications for public health beyond the affected State’s national border; and
* may require immediate international action.
[1]: https://www.who.int/influenza/resources/documents/pandemic_p...
[2]: https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/what-are-the-intern...
Yeah, well that was an entire year. This is a few weeks. The goal is to get ahead of things, not to wait until it's too late.
The new virus has no vaccine.
* Coronavirus has no vaccine
* Coronavirus infected can be contagious for longer than flu patients
* The longer incubation period means more chances for people to get sick, especially since the disease comes on gradually. People will think they have an ordinary cold, go to work, and infect people.
* We understand the progression of the flu in most variants. We don't know all the effects of the Coronavirus, we just have descriptions of the symptoms.
* Flu is basically everywhere already, Coronavirus is not. It's not a choice between one or the other, it's a choice between one or both. If we could declare an emergency and have some chance of stopping flu from getting to some part of the population, we would.
* People with compromised immune systems like the elderly, or babies, or people with existing illnesses or lung problems know to avoid people infected with influenza. Since it's possible for people capable of infecting others with Coronavirus to not even know they carry it, it's harder to avoid for those vulnerable to it.
It's much cheaper to respond to a virus like this in early stages than it is to wait until we see "how serious" it is. All in all, getting things moving now is a good idea.
> Worldwide, these annual epidemics are estimated to result in about 3 to 5 million cases of severe illness, and about 290 000 to 650 000 respiratory deaths.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/influenza-(...
> The flu has resulted in 9.3 million to 49 million illnesses each year in the United States since 2010. Each year, on average, five to 20 percent of the United States population gets the flu.
https://www.healthline.com/health/influenza/facts-and-statis...
Let's assume 10 mil Corona cases in US (like flu lower bound), with 2% mortality. That's 200k deaths. If we assume 49 mil cases (flu higher bound), it's 1 mil deaths just in US.
The Spanish flu killed 50-100 million people. Worth reading about it.
The possibility has been raised that if this goes global, it could become an illness that, like the flu, just sort of continually floats around and we're stuck dealing with it. We don't really want another such illness. If freaking out about it right now can even move the needle on the odds of avoiding that scenario, it might be a good plan.
Where are you getting that number? It a magnitude of 10 off
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p1213-flu-death-esti....
That is not known at this point.
On top of that, it seems to have worse mortality rate, transmissibility rate, and asymptomatic contagion -- so a little worse in every way, probably.
As with the flu, you're very unlikely to be personally killed by it unless you're over 65, under 5, or in poor health.
Dead Comment
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
-5,974 confirmed cases
-170 deaths
[1]For comparisons the SARS outbreak of 2003:
-8,098 people worldwide became sick
-774 died
[1]https://www.cdc.gov/sars/about/fs-sars.html
https://ncov.r6.no/
It's also worth noting that the ~8k confirmed cases are bottlenecked by how fast China can perform tests. Here's an article guesstimating that there were up to 100k infections a few days ago:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jan/26/coronavirus-...
https://thewuhanvirus.com/
Currently the number of fully recovered people is lower than the number of deaths.
Coronavirus:
-5,974 confirmed cases
-170 deaths
-143 recoveries
-5,661 still sick
SARS:
-8,098 cases
-774 deaths
-7,324 recoveries
When AIDS/HIV was near its peak, folks would often compare it in a similar fashion to cancer. If we ignore the fact that cancer is a big diverse bucket, most/many cancers really don't have any 'virulence' so getting public attention to drive best practices to mitigate spread just don't make any sense.
Unless you are in a sensitive age group or have other health problems, data suggests you're most likely to get over it as a regular flu.
It's not all perfect and is worse than a regular flu, but especially now after the announcement some people may way over-stress themselves which doesn't do good to your immune system.
If we looked at deaths against reported recoveries than the rate is much higher (I am guessing a lot of recoveries are not reported).
First reaction is "I need to avoid becoming infected at all costs". However, the costs are steep. An extreme plan to “sit at home with a month’s worth of supplies” seems plausible, but it would not be healthy to reduce movement so much and if everyone suddenly starts doing that there will be issues with food availability in the area (I live in HK).
If I am statistically so unlikely to die from this infection, I am going to take measures that prevent me from spreading it to someone who isn’t, but I won’t e.g. panic and call police if someone without a mask is near me.
Shouldn't you also plug in estimated unreported fatalities too?
Death is more difficult to hide than fever.