SARS: It Gets Worse (or Fuckin' Fuckity Fuck)

Thanks, Clay.

China said on Saturday that it would suspend all tour groups and the sale of flight and hotel packages for its citizens headed overseas, starting on Monday.

The association for China’s travel agencies said tour groups that were in the middle of their trips could proceed with their itineraries but should closely monitor the health of their travelers.

This measure may come as welcome news to countries that have been gearing up to screen travelers from China for fevers and other signs of infection.

The Beijing city government also announced on Saturday that it would suspend all inter-province buses from Sunday, effectively limiting road travel into the capital.

Pretty cool tech being used to limit exposure.

All true, but @KevinC original Q was on flu deaths and they are pretty staggering numbers that can put some of this into perspective: Short answer is annual deaths just in United States for the past 5 years has ranged from 23,000 to 61,000!

But those numbers are a meaningless comparison without a denominator that equals the number of people who were infected.

The Flu sure does kill quite a few people every year, but I hope nobody tries to use that to downplay something like Coronavirus, or any of the other outbreaks we’ve had from much less understood, deadly pathogens. I always see that on various forums whenever something like this happens and it irritates me.

Staying aware and taking proper precautions is not something you only need to do once a disease has reached pandemic levels. That’s how diseases reach pandemic levels. Outbreaks of pathogens like Coronavirus are much more worrisome than the seasonal Flu, even if they don’t end up killing as many people, because we pretty much know what the seasonal Flu is going to do. If we get another 1918 mutation, then yeah that could certainly be devastating, and if that were to happen it would be worldwide news as well.

I’ll be honest and say I’m just not seeing the doomsday scenario here. Yes, SARS was bad and it killed 1/10 people infected, but after everything, the death # was minuscule. From UK/NHS:

During the period of infection, there were 8,098 reported cases of SARS and 774 deaths. This means the virus killed about 1 in 10 people who were infected. People over the age of 65 were particularly at risk, with over half of those who died from the infection being in this age group.

And this was with China not really taking it serious and probably under-reporting. This time around, they and all countries are taking it very seriously - quarantining millions of people, and local jurisdictions aren’t fucking around here in the states either.

So it feels like everyone is doing their job? And that is a good thing! Treat it serious, be aware of it, track the infections and deaths.

But the news cycle shit of just completely overblowing every single little thing has the potential of just reinforcing stereotypes and making humanity stupider. Eg, see the picture of the girl eating bat soup and how it’s people like her that started this!!! That is just racial stereotyping.

What’s the time until you develop symptoms? I thought it was 2 weeks.

I’m kinda hoping @Tman is right, but when you are dealing with Chinese Communist Party as well, it becomes muddled.

Basically CCP is the most bureaucratic organisation you can think of. If you do anything that shows up the boss, then you are fucked. So the local health officials tend not to improvise or use their own initiatives. Everything is either covered up to make themselves look good in front of the boss, or everything is reported to the boss while they are sitting on their hands doing nothing (lest the boss doesn’t like it and punish them).

So it is not clear what the true extent of the coronavirus really is, how virulent it really is, what mortality rate we are looking etc. Every statistics coming out of China should be taken with a pinch of salt.

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I’m not sure, to be honest. I’d have to read up on it. With some viruses, people are contagious and begin shedding virus before they are symptomatic. I’m not sure if that is the case here.

My understanding, and I may be wrong, is two to five days for symptoms. I’m not sure about being an infectious carrier.

Be careful all you SoCal folks. Might be time to use that Work From Home policy.

Here it is… ugh.

The director of China’s national health commission said on Sunday that the new coronavirus’s incubation period was about one to 14 days, and that the period is contagious, said the director, Ma Xiaowei.

“There have been mild cases where observation has shown that the patients were contagious during the incubation period. The incubation period is around 10 days,” he said. “The shortest time before the disease’s onset was one day. The longest was 14 days. This is very different from SARS.”

The rate of the current epidemic is accelerating, he added, and is “likely to continue for some time.”

A study by the medical journal The Lancet, published on Friday, had raised concerns that people infected with the coronavirus might be able to spread it even if they do not have flulike symptoms.

But a longtime adviser to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called Dr. Ma’s remarks a “game changer” and said the information called into question the United States’ strategy for containing the virus. Officials are set to repatriate Americans from the center of the outbreak.

Our government will ban people from Muslim countries for no good reason, but when a critical outbreak like this happens, they had allowed people with direct contact with sick in Wuhan to come here, and furthermore not be quarantined. Our country is so messed up. God knows how many thousands of people those 3 individuals from Wuhan may have infected before they sought medical attention for themselves.

A SARS-like viral outbreak should never default to " only spread while symptomatic". That’s just asking for a pandemic.

Let’s not panic just yet. We have gone through something like this several, several times before, and not just SARs or Ebola or coronavirus. People doing stupid things always make these things worse than they should be, but we’re a long ways from any need to just shut our borders down.

I wasn’t referring to borders, just people flying in from highly infected zones like Wuhan.

On the contrary, panicking early is the safest way to handle these outbreaks until it is exactly known what’s going on. That’s why you have leading epidemiologists calling on the WHO to declare an international pandemic emergency.

It’s really hard to measure deaths averted, however, so when panicking early is the right call, hindsight may never make it seem that way. Panicking is what kept SARS contained in the end.