I think China recently break-even on virus testing last week, they now distribute 1.5m new test/week
That goes faster than how a flu would spread even in its worst case scenarios on 80k cases
But until one knows how much cases are today (3m?) it is hard to know
If the whole earth get infected in this age, it is madness that will kill people not the virus 
The virus is out. If there are no known cases in Africa or Indonesia or many other places this is likely to be because they are not testing, rather than because there is no outbreak there. We are now in the business of slowing the spread rather than trying to put it back in its’ box as we did with SARS.
Slowing the spread will reduce peak loads on emergency departments and ICU resources. It may also select for less aggressive strains of the disease and allow time for testing treatments (not vaccines, at least in the short term). Even if the whole world behaved like China I don’t think we would be likely to contain the virus at this stage.
I’m taking next week off to have a bit of a rest before it hits. I hope they don’t close schools because children don’t often seem to become badly infected and I think they suffer long term harm when isolated from other children.
Kids may not catch it in terms of getting ill but they are probably spreading it, and kids are very effective at that because of poor hygiene. IIRC a lot of hospitals ban kids from visiting patients in hospitals.
The UK is still doing very well, with only about 5 known cases who got it locally. That is under 0.1ppm of the population.
If it gets to say 5% of the population then you have a real problem because e.g. every delivery man will likely be spreading it, so even if you are staying at home special precautions will be needed for opening letters and packages. We will stay at home long before it gets to that stage. I don’t want to catch it because of the risk of permanent lung damage, never mind death. I got an office phone at home now; not difficult with VOIP and in fact it was easy even with good old ISDN.
Capitaine wrote:
We learned about the great plague at school (age 10), and to avoid infection simply lock yourself in your castle with water, food, a bow, and lots of arrows, then shoot anyone who comes close
The plague village of Chellington, near here, was never rebuilt and today consists of an isolated church surrounded by earthern mounds, all that’s left of a once prosperous community. Local lore has it that at the time of the plague, the village was fortified with barricades – not to keep people out, but to keep the inhabitants in!
dublinpilot wrote:
The Chinese seem to be getting on top of it
I see this mentioned a few times, but it means having faith that the numbers being reported from China are truthful and accurate. Given that most people think they have been significantly inflating their growth figures recently I see no reason to think they would not be willing to either not report or just outright ignore figures to shore up the regime.
As I understand it the low number of flu deaths in China tends to be because they just have the cause of death as something else.
Historically, communist / socialist States with total control of the media tend to say whatever suits their narrative rather than the truth if it doesn’t fit.
dublinpilot wrote:
The whole question of is this worse than the flu or not as bad as the flu is misplaced.
It’s almost exactly like the flu, except the death rate is a couple of orders of magnitude higher. Lets look at the numbers:
Exponential growth outside China now:
No problem for children, only those 50 and older… If you are 80+ you chances are like a like a Russian roulette.
And it may come back. You may get it again the same day you got well again. Not to mention what all the hysteria causes, as well as the not so hysteric measures being taken. In essence, this is nothing like the flu.
LeSving wrote:
the death rate is a couple of orders of magnitude higher
meaning 100-1000 times higher. Really?
Airborne_Again wrote:
meaning 100-1000 times higher. Really?
I’ve seen flu mortality rates put at 0.1 or 0.01% Again I guess it depends what numbers you want to choose.
Isn’t flu about 0.01-0.02 % ?
From everything I’ve read (not on FB, I hasten to add) the big problem with estimating the fatality rate is that many people who carry the virus either don’t develop symptoms at all or symptoms that are so mild that they don’t see a doctor or get tested. The infection rate in the general population is therefore probably much, much higher than estimated. Case in point is the outbreak in Washington State, where it is estimated that the virus was circulating for about four weeks in the community before he first person got ill.
