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.
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.