Go check out the case fatality rate and estimated r0 for the Spanish Flu of 1918-the deadliest pandemic of the past several centuries. You'll note that its characteristics are fairly similar to what we know of Covid-19. The only break we get is that young adults don't seem nearly as susceptible to Covid-19 as they were to Spanish Flu. But everything else points to the possibility of a pandemic along the lines of Spanish Flu. That's why we are so concerned.
Media aside, the CDC isn't prime to exaggeration, and China isn't prone to completely shutting down the economy of entire provinces of millions of people without dire need.
And there's every reason to believe we will have a similar experience to China's.
Diamond Princess cruise ship shows that it’s not even close to Spanish flu in mortality. Because the symptoms are mild for 80% of people, the reported cases are severely underreported. Only when a whole populace is tested do we
see the true infection rate.
OK, you've mentioned two different measurements: infection rate (I'm guessing you're referring to R0) and mortality (do you mean mortality rate or case fatality rate, because I was referring to the latter one).
The cruise ship had a strict room-based quarantine, so that would not infect the R0 of a general community-based outbreak, unless we institute similar measures (confining people to their houses, which is likely not feasible).
If you're referring to case fatality rate, I'm really interested in that data. Do you have a link? The case fatality rate from the cruise ship is a very small sample, and a very specific population, so it's susceptible to all kinds of bias. It's unlikely to be an accurate reflection of case fatality rate in the general population. Still, I'm interested in those numbers. I've not been able to find them online. Did they test all the people on the cruise ship?
Diamond Princess cruise ship shows nothing yet. Most those who got sick are still sick. You cannot do the mortality math until people are either dead or cured.
>every reason to believe we will have a similar experience to China's.
With a bit of luck you may have an experience more like Singapore, the UK or Vietnam (30 active cases, 72 recovered, 15 active, 8 recovered, and 0 active, 16 recovered respectively)
China got off to a bad start due to the thing starting there and being unexpected.
More people died from the Spanish Flu than from combat in WW1 and WW2 combined. That was the first global pandemic due to soldiers traveling around the world. What's a modern version going to look like in an era of airplane travel?
People died from the Spanish flu because they were malnourished and because the general conditions were bad. The Spanish flu would be nothing like that if it happened today ... In Europe at least.
That article doesn't seem to support "because they were malnourished" at all... it correctly points out that the 1918 pandemic was unique in having high mortality among the young (under 30) due to "Lack of pre-existing virus-specific and/or cross-reactive antibodies and cellular immunity in children and young adults" which doesn't seem to be the case with the current virus which seems to affect mainly the elderly.
Famously, the disease hit soldiers in basic training hard before they were deployed. These were not malnourished people. It's entirely likely that malnourished populations suffered greatly under Spanish Flu, but it's clear that completely healthy young adults were highly vulnerable to dying from the disease.
Even this year… 16,000 people have died from the flu so far, and this is a particularly mild year, save for the high amount of childhood deaths.
COVID-19 seems to be almost completely manufactured hysteria based on fuzzy math which includes using very low estimates of the number of infected to artificially increase the fatality rate.
When all of the top epidemiologists, public health officials, and physicians from around the globe are sounding the alarm to take something seriously - it's probably a good idea to take it seriously. If it turns out that Covid-19 is a dud in terms of impact, it will be because of not in spite of the substantial steps people are taking to be prepared.
All the headlines seem menacing but then I look at the data and stand back and say WTF.
It already is a dud. Relatively speaking, very few people die from this. 80%+ of confirmed cases are so mild you have to wonder why they were even tested. It seems to not spread as fast as the flu. No children have died.
Basically, it’s been three month and 2,000 people over 70 have died globally.
More people died from the flu LAST WEEK IN THE US ALONE.
If I sold you a car for $1.00 the first day, $2.00 the first day, $4.00 the third day, ... It would look like a pretty good bargain the first few days compared to what people typically pay for cars. Eventually, on day 14, you start to reconsider how good the deal is when you make a $16,384 payment and face making a $32,768 one tomorrow.
If COVID-19 spreads exponentially, it will result in basically everyone getting it. Yes, it will take a little while (and maybe spring/summer will do enough to put on the brakes to let us have more treatment options). The fatality percentage, means if everyone gets it, it will be like several years of flu concentrated over a year or two.
Besides that, it's likely to overwhelm public health systems and have societal/economic consequences from the amount of sickness and attempts to contain the virus.
Eh, I've spent like 15 hours fitting various models to the different datasets of case counts and seeing quadratic growth under containment measures some places and what looks like exponential growth others... Maybe that's "parroting media FUD."
Yes more people have died from the flu so far, but Covid-19 was only officially identified last month and is growing exponentially. Based on the studies we have seen so far, it is more contagious than the flu (R0 of 2.2 vs 1.3), and significantly more deadly (fatality rate of 2.3% vs 0.1%). We're still in the early stages of this and it is continuing to spread.
Looking only at the total numbers paints a misleading picture.
It is no longer growing exponentially in China because they have quarantined millions of people. It was growing exponentially prior to the quarantine.
It is growing exponentially in other countries with recent outbreaks. Look at the growth charts for South Korea, Italy, and Iran.
While it is good news that the growth can be contained via quarantine, it is incredibly misleading to claim "this is just like the flu". The flu doesn't require the government to force people to stay locked up in their homes in order to prevent outbreaks.
You seem really hung up on the fact that the flu has killed more people. But based on all the studies we've seen so far, this virus is more contagious than the flu, and more deadly as well. If it infects the same number of people as the flu does every year, a lot more people will die.
Look at the ex-China infected graph here, and click the "logarithmic scale" toggle. Looks pretty close to a straight line to me. https://www.coronaviruschart.com/
China's growth in case count has slowed down. Whether that's because of massive control efforts (literally welding people in homes, etc), or because of inaccurate reporting / missed cases, or both-- is unknown.
If major world governments started saying they were about to nuke one another it would not be valid to say "Why are you so worried about nukes? Car accidents killed a million people last year and nobody died due to nuclear weapons."
A pandemic from a novel virus is a black swan event that is not well represented by looking at recent statistics. The risk is not the recent past, but the possible future where this infects a significant percentage of the world's population, overwhelms our healthcare system, and kills millions if not more.
Everything else doesn’t point to that. Media FUD points to that.
If we have a similar experience to that of China it seems like it won’t be a big deal.
In 2018-2019 80,000 people died from the flu in the United States. 80,000. No one really cared.
The death rate for the current coronavirus seems to be about 2%, but it’s likely even lower than that since so many cases are going unreported since the symptoms are so mild in most people.
I see this whole thing as some kind of bizarre media externality. The disease here is a social one. It’s like the media has evolved in such a way that FUD has manifested into something that is almost tangible.
It’s not the coronavirus you need be worried about, but the meta-coronavirus. It’s making people crazy.
> The death rate for the current coronavirus seems to be about 2%
The United States has about 2.7 hospital beds per thousand people. Hospitalization and attentive care is the biggest contributor to survival rates for COVID-19 patients.
This is why medical professionals are concerned that is spreads effectively without presenting symptoms. One day you are going to wake up and every primary care facility will be overwhelmed.
I’ll start to worry after the first 80,000 people die.
The US has shit medical care for most people. People will get sick and die before thinking about going to the hospital. I wouldn’t worry about them being overwhelmed.
Agree with you 100%. I have a family member that specializes in communicable disease - she's got 25+ years of experience working on the front lines specializing in responding to disease outbreaks like this. She literally writes the policies and training material for professionals in this area. She's absolutely livid at the way the media and politicians are dealing with this. The CDC and WHO are being forced to respond the way they are because of the political and social pressure. They're trying to keep people from panicking but they just get accused of trying to cover up 'the truth' if they try to downplay the media driven frenzy.
I've never really been worried about disease outbreaks in the past but this is different.
> she's got 25+ years of experience working on the front lines specializing in responding to disease outbreaks like this. She literally writes the policies and training material for professionals in this area.
This isn't the right set of qualifications when it comes to understanding the total impact. Aside from the front line staff often not having a high-level understanding of epidemiology, I also don't think she understands the economic costs of containment.
Early on, there was a huge amount of complacency because we've been successful in the past and nothing like this ever came to pass. Expertise in some narrow field can only go so far - unless they are familiar with this particular case, how different it is from other pathogens they have experience and sufficiently mathematically inclined to be able to extrapolate beyond the existing data. We have a once-in-a-life type of pathogen IMO and 25-years of experience may not matter much if they are merely looking back in their experience to find similar situations.
> She's absolutely livid at the way the media and politicians are dealing with this. The CDC and WHO are being forced to respond the way they are because of the political and social pressure. They're trying to keep people from panicking but they just get accused of trying to cover up 'the truth' if they try to downplay the media driven frenzy.
How people tend to respond to events like this is part of the reality of the situation. You can't simply hand-wave away the social, political and economic consequences of the expected responses and how that affects the disease-fighting efforts.
This reminds me of the financial crisis - if you did a top-down analysis, it pointed to an unprecedented situation and it was easy to see how the market actors would response in a way that would compound the crisis but but most experts had never seen something like this, didn't have a comprehensive understanding of how things work, had never seen true panic and had some flawed models telling them that in some perfect world, things are fine and some of the earlier market movements were irrational overreactions.
I have to confess that im not following the entire situation but your statement brings me some hope so I'm asking- can one get affected and still not get sick at all?
I'm also hearing that people can get and ARE getting reinfected.
The majority of cases are mild or don’t have any symptoms. It’s 10 times deadlier than the flu, but that just means 4 out of 1000 40 year olds will die from it compared to 4 out of 10,000 for the flu. 95% of people under 18 have no symptoms. There are no reported deaths of children.
But if you have heart disease or diabetes or other health issues, or are over 70, you’ve got a 1 in ten chance of dying or worse.
Media aside, the CDC isn't prime to exaggeration, and China isn't prone to completely shutting down the economy of entire provinces of millions of people without dire need.
And there's every reason to believe we will have a similar experience to China's.