
Coronavirus Death Toll Rises to 805, Passing SARS - minkeymaniac
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-08/coronavirus-death-toll-rises-to-805-passing-sars-virus-update
======
datashow
I have serious doubt on the death count.

According to the numbers I got from
[https://news.qq.com/zt2020/page/feiyan.htm](https://news.qq.com/zt2020/page/feiyan.htm)
now:

Death rate in Hubei province is 780/27100 = 2.88%

Death rate in all the other provinces combined is 32/10127 = 0.32%

So the death rate in Hubei is 9 times of other provinces. Is this really
possible? ZheJiang province has 1075 confirmed cases now, but still 0 death
count. Seriously? Hong Kong only has 26 confirmed cases, but already has 1
death count.

For SARS, China has a 6.6%, much lower than other countries. For example, Hong
Kong has a death rate of 17%. (See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome)
)

Do international researchers use China's officially reported count in their
modeling?

~~~
duxup
China has had a long history of local government, or local organizations
hiding bad news from the central government. I'm not sure things have changed.

~~~
lazylizard
Maybe its cultural. Until all the old people with the old baggage die the
population's behaviour doesn't change. I'm in singapore and last night i went
to a few supermarkets. Toilet paper, instant noodles, bread, thermometers..are
some of the things that are sold out. Singapore has 40 cases and people are
reacting like its the zombie apocalypse despite the government saying there
will be no "lock down" and supplies will be sufficient.. As many here have
pointed out. Singapore is a police state. This is where contact tracing is
going to work if ever. And singapore was the first country to deny entry to
travellers from china, despite the economy's dependency on china. I mean. Why
toilet paper? It comes from Indonesia right?

~~~
lazylizard
There's adverts on tv every couple of hours and posters everywhere telling
people not to wear face masks if they're not feeling unwell. Government and
employers are handing out face masks. Yet theyre all sold out everywhere.

Government has to slow down if not stop that kind of over reaction. Or worse.
Sinophobia?

------
coldcode
People are modeling the disease and thinking it will peak in a few weeks. I
wonder how accurate such a model is if you have no idea how many people
actually have the disease but have not been counted. The number of clusters of
people with the virus are expanding (like the ski chalet in France). Could
they create new expansions we aren't able to know yet?

------
vikramkr
It looks like the course of disease progression could be unpredictable, with
patients who intially seemed to not have too harsh a case of the disease
taking sudden turns for the worse after days or even a week of mild symptoms.
10% of patients having abnormal initial symptoms would also make control of
the disease a lot harder if 10% of people escape your screens.

Source: [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/health/coronavirus-
patien...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/health/coronavirus-
patients.html)

~~~
mrb
Honestly, given the precedent—China lied to the WHO about SARS
([https://www.theguardian.com/society/2003/apr/21/china.sars](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2003/apr/21/china.sars)
)—I am baffled the WHO isn't sending a commission to monitor deaths at
hospitals or how many bodies they burn at crematoriums.

There are unverified anonymous reports that 2 crematoriums alone are burning
2-4x more deaths than officially reported in the whole country, and a lab
technician at a hospital guesstimating 200-400 deaths daily at his hospital.

Unless you have a commission with feet on the ground, you can't verify or
trust what China is reporting.

~~~
Renaud
>a lab technician at a hospital guesstimating 200-400 deaths daily at his
hospital.

I believe you mean this:

[https://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/242834342](https://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/242834342)

Discussion:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/f0miwj/a_hospital_wo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/f0miwj/a_hospital_worker_from_wuhan_is_posting/)

I would take it with a grain of salt but I agree that we should have little
trust into the official reports from China, their track record is pretty bad
and the government control over all news and discussions end up generating
wild theories that basically can't be entirely proven or disproven.

The death of Li Wenliang, the whistle-blower doctor and subsequent censoring
of online discussions about the way he was treated by the authorities are also
not helping:

[https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3049634/li-...](https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3049634/li-
wenliang-chinese-academics-call-justice-coronavirus-whistle)

------
camillomiller
I’m still wondering if the Mobile World Congress will get canceled because of
this. 5 companies pulled out already. Gsma minimizes the impact and
consequences, but think about this: what if one single person is found
positive? How would they manage the quarantine of the tens of thousand of
attendees? If you were Barcelona’s mayor what would you do? Prioritize public
safety and risking the bankruptcy of the event organizers, or let everything
happen risking a health crisis? Hard decisions...

~~~
totalZero
In my view there's little upside to attending MWC this year for most large
companies. They can publicize their new products just about as well by sending
devices to reviewers and making cool videos, so there's very limited upside.
And the downside is immense.

Travel does a number on the immune system. Plus, if they're anything like me,
people who travel to MWC for work will tend to get short-changed on sleep.

That said, I don't think it really hurts the industry as a whole if MWC is
cancelled, in the long term. But it may hurt MWC.

~~~
camillomiller
Last year at MWC I slept 8 full hours. Over 5 days. It’s the forced networking
after running around all day that really gets you... I hardly remember a year
that I didn’t get back with a cold, a hurt back, a sore throat and so on. Why
do we still do this to ourselves? I will absolutely cheer the first company
that organizes the first streaming only event. Just get the products in the
hand of reviewers a day or two before... What we don’t consider though is that
mwc is also basically a place where salespersons and clients sit down to sign
contracts. Not sure what it means for them if it gets canceled

------
post_break
Official death toll. Part of me, and a growing number of people online, bet
it's in the thousands, and it's being swept under the rug.

~~~
postalrat
Or you are simply fantasizing about it being true.

~~~
nexuist
It's not a fantasy, but it's also not entirely malicious here.

I can't find a source off the top of my head but the way China issues death
reports is substantially different than how doctors do it in the West. In
China if you die of heart failure while having nCoV-2019, your death
certificate reports heart failure instead of the coronavirus. In the West, it
would list both reasons as the cause of death.

It is theorized that many doctors are listing the cause of death as pneumonia
and not coronavirus because of this. It is similarly possible that some people
die faster than they are able to be tested (the current test takes about 9
hours to complete).

Regardless, it would be foolish to believe this as the golden "actual" number,
even ignoring the CCP's (and frankly, other countries') vested interest in
fudging these numbers. It would be unlikely that it counts deaths from before
the medical community recognized this virus, deaths that have occurred before
test results have been returned, and deaths that have occurred outside of the
healthcare system (i.e. in quarantined apartments, households, remote
villages, or secretive military bases).

~~~
AlbertoGP
_I can 't find a source off the top of my head but the way China issues death
reports is substantially different than how doctors do it in the West. In
China if you die of heart failure while having nCoV-2019, your death
certificate reports heart failure instead of the coronavirus. In the West, it
would list both reasons as the cause of death._

This is one source of that being standard procedure for the flu, from an
individual which has been reporting about China in his YouTube channel for
years, having lived there:

“ _... but I asked my wife, because she’s a Chinese doctor, I asked her, why
is it that China only reports [say] 43 or 53 deaths a year from flu, but in
the rest of the world we see these massive numbers, like in America 50K-80K a
year? And well, she explained to me very simply: when somebody goes to the
hospital in China with a complication, let’s say heart disease, or pneumonia,
or you know, any other ailment, and then contracts the flu which then
exacerbates that ailment and eventually leads to death, on the death
certificate they’ll write down the cause of death as: heart disease, or
pneumonia, or whatever that preexisting condition was, not as death from the
flu. However in countries like America, if somebody goes and they have a
preexisting condition but they die due to complications brought on by the flu,
on their death certificate would be written «death due to complications
brought on due to influenza», and so it’s marked down as a death caused by
flu._ ”
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HE7Iz7HLpYg&t=4m12s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HE7Iz7HLpYg&t=4m12s)

BTW, that’s the same video I mentioned in another discussion three days ago:
“China Sacrifices a Province to Save the World From Coronavirus”
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22254414](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22254414)

~~~
nexuist
This has also led to the in-joke, "it's impossible to die of the flu in
China."

------
volgo
Just curious, how does it compare to H1N1 currently? Think it will be more or
less contained?

~~~
guramarx11
short answer is we have to wait for "28 days later", the long answer is...
complicated, please take this with a grain of salt

the first tide of WARS(nCoV) "Contagion" have either become ill(hospitalized
and quarantined) or dead, so now we're waiting to see if the number of cases
outside of China still climbs as a local transmission epidemic

If this tide continues, international country like eg Singapore can super-
spread this into global pandemic like H1N1 unless we close off borders and ban
all flights/shippings economics/travels...

How viable is such containment actually remains to be seen, lets pray for the
best

------
henryw
New cases seem to be going down
[https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-
cases/](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-cases/)

~~~
empath75
There is some speculation that that is because they are at their limit for how
many tests they can do per day.

~~~
scoot
It would be flat in that case.

~~~
scotth
That's assuming supply of testing kits is constant.

~~~
scoot
Which is a different constraint to the one in the message I was replying to.

------
neonate
[https://archive.md/7Ca9m](https://archive.md/7Ca9m)

------
clSTophEjUdRanu
What's the R0 value?

~~~
guramarx11
somewhere between 2.2~(3 | 4 ?), one thing though, unlike SARS, WARS(nCoV) is
already contagious during incubation period(14 days) and even before any
symptoms cough/fever shows up, this SUPER complicates any measure to
quarantine it

~~~
totalZero
Just a heads-up, the WHO discourages geographic labels for diseases. Those
labels may be totally orthogonal to the disease itself (as is the case with
Spanish Flu), they punish localities for outbreak of (or association with)
disease, and the fear of stigma could impact local officials' decisions about
reporting outbreaks and seeking help from disease experts.

[https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/notes/2015/naming-
new-d...](https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/notes/2015/naming-new-
diseases/en/)

~~~
uranusjr
I’ll stop calling this WARS when they stop saying MERS.

------
falcolas
Not to downplay the impact of the Coronavirus or it’s victims, but here is a
bit of context:

In roughly the same timeframe in the US, influenza and pneumonia has killed
roughly 10,000 people, and has a mortality rate of 7.1%. The epidemic level
starts at 7.2%

[https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm)

[https://abcnews.go.com/Health/1300-people-died-flu-
year/stor...](https://abcnews.go.com/Health/1300-people-died-flu-
year/story?id=67754182)

~~~
econcon
Influenza isn't killing healthy people. It mostly kills old or new horns.

~~~
falcolas
So is the Coronavirus.

~~~
igivanov
no. for this one, no reported infections in children 15yo or younger.

~~~
bart_spoon
It absolutely has infected children, as young as 36 hours old. There hasn't,
however, been any reports of children dying.

~~~
igivanov
technically you are probably correct though I was more replying to the
parent's statement that it kills newborns

>The outbreak was first reported on December 31, but no children younger than
15 years old had been diagnosed as of January 22. A study in the New England
Journal of Medicine said at the time that "children might be less likely to
become infected or, if infected, may show milder symptoms" than adults.

>Since then, doctors have recorded a few one-off cases among children: a
9-month-old girl in Beijing, a child in Germany whose father was diagnosed
with the virus first, and a child in Shenzhen, China, who was infected but
displayed no symptoms.

>On Wednesday, Chinese authorities confirmed that an infant in Wuhan, China,
had tested positive for the virus 30 hours after being born; the baby's mother
is a coronavirus patient.

[https://www.sciencealert.com/experts-are-puzzled-over-why-
so...](https://www.sciencealert.com/experts-are-puzzled-over-why-so-few-
children-have-caught-coronavirus-so-far)

------
empath75
From what I have seen, the daily death toll is doubling every 5 days or so.

[https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-
death-...](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-toll/)

I don’t know how long that can continue but at that rate it won’t be more than
a couple of months before thousands are dying per day...

Edit: since it takes 2 to 3 weeks to die from it, we really should be
comparing the deaths now to the cases two weeks ago, which gives a much much
higher mortality rate than is currently reported — maybe as high as 20%

Based on how fast it spread, I definitely expect there to be ~300 people dying
per day by next week, so you’re taking a SARS equivalent every 2 or 3 days.

~~~
chmod775
> Based on how fast it spread, I definitely expect there to be ~300 people
> dying per day by next week, so you’re taking a SARS equivalent every 2 or 3
> days.

To put that into perspective: About 700 people die in traffic accidents in
China every single day.

So that'd be a point where it would (slowly) become a factor in mortality
rates if it wasn't checked within 2020.

~~~
eru
Wikipedia says about a few hundred thousand people globally die in a typical
flu season that barely gets a mention in the news. That's perhaps the more
topical comparison?

Oh, and that doesn't include the people who die of the common cold--which is
caused by a variety of viruses, the only common thing about them being our
immune system's similar reaction. Rhinovirus are the most common, but also
coronavirus.

~~~
inferiorhuman
_Wikipedia says about a few hundred thousand people globally die in a typical
flu season that barely gets a mention in the news. That 's perhaps the more
topical comparison? _

Significantly more people catch a flu virus than this coronavirus. So far this
flu season the CDC is reporting a CFR of about 0.5% in the US (19 million
cases, 10,000 deaths). If the Wuhan coronavirus were equally fatal that would
equate to roughly 190 deaths worldwide so far. If the flu were as lethal as
the conservative estimates for the Wuhan coronavirus we'd have on the order of
400,000 deaths in the United States alone. That's why people are talking about
this coronavirus and largely blasé about the flu.

Additionally the flu _typically_ only kills older or immunocompromised folks.
When the flu starts killing healthy adults like H1N1 did in 2009 that tends to
get a lot more attention.

~~~
dingaling
> That's why people are talking about this coronavirus and largely blasé about
> the flu

I disagree. People are talking about coronavirus because the media is talking
about it, because it makes great headlines out of context.

In January 2018, influenza and pneumonia in the USA had a CFR of 10.8%. That's
horrific, but didn't earn media attention. Over 500,000 people die globally
from influenza-related respiratory problems _every year_.

Break out of the 24/7 news cycle.

~~~
inferiorhuman
_Over 500,000 people die globally from influenza-related respiratory problems
every year._

And how many people need to be infected to achieve that result? More people
than the Wuhan coronavirus would need. Try an order of magnitude more. That's
why the flu typically doesn't make the news and this coronavirus does.

I don't know where you are, but in California the 2017-18 flu season was
indeed heavily covered.

