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.
I watched the whole thing. It was riveting. Don't forget to turn on CC if you need translation. It is a volunteer transalation.
The reporter, Chen Qiushi, describes his observations in Wuhan, a city of more than 10 million.
His preamble:
"My name has been flagged in China."
"If the content contains 'Chenqiushi' or 'CQS', or my face, it will not be sent on Wechat.
... if you [share on wechat], your wechat account will be deleted, like mine.""
He describes visits he made to hospitals in Wuhan and the general state in the city.
It is well worth listening to / reading.
Some points that stuck with me:
People cannot get to hospital because there is a critical lack of transportation.
There is a critical lack of test kits, so residents do not believe they will be diagnosed, so they stay home.
It goes far enough that your concern is valid. Since HN is not exactly mainstream and many Chinese people are posting similar kinds of videos, you're probably okay in this case. However, if you want to make honest comments about China online and still want to travel there, I highly recommend that you post anonymously.
TL;DW/DR the subtitles: he saw a lot of chaos in Wuhan's hospitals. Not enough testing kits, not enough government-requisitioned emergency taxis. Taxi drivers were already talking to each other in December saying "avoid the market".
If you don't want to read subtitles for 26 minutes here's all the subtitles copy-pasted from the video: https://pastebin.com/6hJ4h4rm
(You can hit the "..." above the red subscribe button and select "open transcript", but it shows up in a tiny window).
I suppose the WHO saying they're very impressed with how China is handling the situation is because they felt the pressure to save China's face.
2 - There's not enough transportation, test kits, masks, and hospital beds, or volunteers
3 - Many sick people are not even bothering to go to the hospital
4 - There's poor communication and rumors flying around
5 - People are frightened, panicking, and suspecting the worst
This tells me that:
A - there are likely way more people infected than there are confirmed cases, but possibly more deaths too of those who never made it in to hospitals
B - Many wouldn't have died had they had more adequate health care, better transportation and more test kits
So, for the rest of us who are sitting on our hands now, glued to social media or the television waiting to see how this will unfold, our time would be much more productively spent planning for when the outbreak hits our local area.
Volunteer. Get connected with volunteer organizations. Donate. See what you can do to ensure there's adequate transportation, communication and resources when the outbreak hits your area.
One thing I'm really curious about that I haven't heard covered yet is if people who get sick and recover become immune. If so, they should feel safe in volunteering to come in contact with the sick and help them directly after they've recovered themselves.
Cooperation, preparation, organization, and mutual aid are crucial.
The way the central government is handling this is impressive, quarantining a city of that size is unprecedented and has bought the world extra time to prepare.
Yes the WHO are playing politics when they focus on the good things China is doing and ignore the bad. But personally I think they are closer to the truth than those who present an entirely negative version of events. China's response has been 70% good :)
> The way the central government is handling this is impressive
Not really, they jailed the experts who told them that they needed to act quickly, sat on it for a month, and finally did something about it when it was already out of hand.
Huh, I would say you're in the wrong thread to claim it's "impressive", if this guy's video is to be believed, it's a whole lot of chaos and lack of supplies...
We have gone from the first confirmed human-to-human transmission to tens of thousands of cases in something like two weeks. No amount of preparation will prevent chaos and shortages in a situation like this.
I watched the CDC press conference today and saw nothing but fear written on their faces. And that is with far more advanced notice than the Chinese had.
Totally off topic but... Chinese seems like a very efficient language. The guy doesn't seem to be speaking so fast but the subtitles are conveying a lot of information really fast.
Here's [1] a paper on information density vs speed of speech, done by the University of Lyon. I am not sure how accurate their methods are, but they seem to believe that some languages convey more information per syllable and for 5 out of 7 languages, that ones with lower information density are spoken faster. Note that the sample size was only 59 and only compared how fast 20 different texts were read out, all silences that lasted longer than 150 ms were edited out as well.
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.
I wouldn't even go that far. I've been using this as an excuse to figure out the D3 v5 API using the Johns Hopkins data. Most provinces outside of Hubei are not reporting deaths yet. It's possible nobody's died outside of Hubei, but that seems suspect to me. There is almost certainly strong federal and local pressure to under report deaths, but this sort of thing is much harder to hide in Hubei because it's the epicenter.
I don't believe for a moment that China would've attempted to quarantine 60 million people so quickly if the case fatality rate were only 2%. 2% is bad but SARS saw around 15% in many countries and things weren't locked down this tightly.
More to the point, Hubei is reporting 204 deaths and 5,806 confirmed cases which works out to about 3.5%. This is compared to 76 deaths and 1,423 confirmed three days ago (or 5%). If you'd like to look at death compared to known outcomes you're looking at about 64% of the outcomes being death (204 deaths, 116 recoveries). It's not clear which part of the equation is lagging more in Hubei.
> I don't believe for a moment that China would've attempted to quarantine 60 million people so quickly if the case fatality rate were only 2%. 2% is bad but SARS saw around 15% in many countries and things weren't locked down this tightly.
presumably fatality is only one of many factors here. 15% of 100 infections is a different beast than 2% of 1M. And if it takes up to 14 days to see symptoms...
That 2% is only among those confirmed. When most people get sick they just stay home, then get better and never visit hospital or get into confirmed cases. Those who die usually have some other disease as well.
On April 1st 2003, when SARS was in full swing, the WHO reported 1622 cases and 58 deaths. That is a rate of 3.5%. In June 2003 (at the end of the SARS outbreak) the official figure was almost ten percent. From this comparison you can expect the mortality rate of the new corona virus to be at around 6 to 8%.
It is dangerous to extrapolate like this because the big differences are in incubation time and the fact that the novel coronavirus is likely spreadable before the carrier has a fever or other detectable sign. If that's the case, tracking the spread might as well be impossible because multiple people could be the potential source without a clear way to trace it, especially in a hospital setting.
On the flip side, the R0 (rate of transmission) and death rate might be a good clip lower than currently estimated. On the other hand, China walled off a city but part of their motivation might have been the flack they got for moving slowly with SARS.
I saw an interview with a German virologist. Her estimate was to have fatality rate of around 2%. Also stated the issues of calculating these number during the outbreak as not all cases are known, not everyone is either cured or dead. She also hinted at a bias towards the severe cases as most minor ones, symptoms like a cold, aren't reported yet and most likely not admitted to a hospital.
As she said, we will only know once the thing is over.
