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So reading or watching the news makes all this sound very worrying, but if you look up the amount of deaths from influenza every year, "Up to 650,000 respirator

So reading or watching the news makes all this sound very worrying, but if you look up the amount of deaths from influenza every year, "Up to 650,000 respiratory deaths per year"[0] then this will just become a run-of-the-mill thing, or am I missing something here? 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza

officialjunk 7y ago
it might be less, the same or more. we don't know yet. it has potential to be more deadly than the flu because of the unknowns, including prevention and treatment.
inferiorhuman 7y ago
Yes. The normal flu is very widespread and has a mortality rate of around 0.1%. The official figures out of Hubei are down to about 3.6% (closer to 5% yesterday). There are too few deaths outside of Hubei to draw any meaningful conclusion. To make an apples to oranges comparison you'd be looking on the order of tens of millions of deaths annually if we don't get the mortality and/or infection rate down.
- kenneth 7y ago
  The Spanish flu has a similar mortality rate as this and managed to kill 5% of the world's entire population.
  - NhanHo 7y ago
    I've been trying to understand the number from the Spanish flu and it seems utterly confusing for some reasons. The consensus seems to be 30% population of the world was infected, with a case-fatality rate of 2.5% (which is another commonly quoted number), it doesn't add up to 5% of the world's population. The case-fatality rate will have to be around 20% for it to kill that many people. This happens even in the same academic paper (for example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3291398/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3291398/ ) > An estimated one third of the world's population (or ≈500 million persons) were infected and had clinically apparent illnesses (1,2) during the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic. The disease was exceptionally severe. Case-fatality rates were >2.5%, compared to <0.1% in other influenza pandemics (3,4). Total deaths were estimated at ≈50 million (5–7) and were arguably as high as 100 million (7). ?! Can anyone more knowledgable explain what is going on with all those numbers?
    - yread 7y ago
      I think Spanish flu doesn't tell us much about how this will play out - different virus, different connectedness of the world, no air travel, lots of the dead were from secondary bacterial infections and there were no antibiotics back then. Too many things are different
    - dharma1 7y ago
      I think majority of the deaths relating to Spanish flu were actually from secondary infections (bacterial pneumonia) rather than the virus itself
    - russholmes 7y ago
      They seem to be confusing mortality rate (MR) with case fatality rate (CFR). Mortality rate is deaths per thousand per year applied to the whole population. Despite its name, CFR is the proportion of actual cases who die, and is a probability rather than a rate. The CFR is estimated at between 10 - 20 %, i.e. a symptomatic member of the population (a case) has a 10 - 20 % chance of dying. 30 % of the global population of 1.8 billion were infected over the several year course of the epidemic, which equates to 600 million cases leading to 60 - 120 million deaths. MR was >2.5 %, so more than 2.5 % of the global population died per year during the epidemic. With a population of 1.8 billion, this equates to >45 million deaths per year over several years.
- alperakgun 7y ago
  China infection rates could be as high as 100K, as the 5% number is based on tested cases.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    Right, and that could reduce the mortality rate. But then, perhaps the influenza mortality rate is also an overestimate, in that people who aren't severely affected won't get diagnosed.
Jamwinner 7y ago
The differince I imagine is how it has 'fresh' hosts, and can spread quickly, possibly overwhelming care, or complicating other medical issues. The flu seems throttled by varied, but somewhat common, resistance in humans, where this has little or none. Otherwise, no, it seems to me, a layman, as being about as intense as the flu from a purely individual, symptomatic perspective.
hliyan 7y ago
I too, wonder about this. The article starts with: > Some infectious disease experts But only two experts quoted in the article predict a potential pandemic. The main worry, though is that it's infectious while asymptomatic, which apparently was not the case with SARS: > Tools like quarantine and isolation—which were key to controlling SARS—are unlikely stop spread of a virus that can transmit during the period from infection to symptoms, experts say. Also, of those who died, how many were weak/immunocompromised to begin with, and how many were healthy adults?
- internet_user 7y ago
  Everyone is so fixiates on deaths. 25% of SARS survivors have lungs mangled so badly they cannot exercise or walk very much. Does that count as healthy adults not dying?
eecc 7y ago
Might be that the demographies matter. Influenza kills economically unproductive members of society while Corona (not sure, I’m speculating here) Is more severe in the productive groups. Or more simply, the mortality might be higher
- drKarl 7y ago
  So you're proposing that influenza has a net positive effect on society as a cleanser of the unproductive or unfit? I don't know if I should consider that thinking closer to Darwinian or to Nazi theories...
  - Scarblac 7y ago
    I don't see that as Darwinian. Darwin just describes what happens and how that led to differences in species, he doesn't give it value judgments like "net positive" afaik.
    - eecc 7y ago
      And neither do I give a value judgment on the difference in alert level between the yearly Influenza and this Corona outbreak: I’m just - speculatively - attempting an explanation, without necessarily endorsing it. It’s the same reasoning behind the alarm behind HIV in Africa: not only it kills, it removes the economically active demographic from the economy while tying up even more in their assistance... Everyone please take time to read and make sure you properly understand what you have just read before reacting.
themgt 7y ago
Two points against this general "but the flu" argument: An October 2019 novel Coronavirus simulation by Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, World Economic Forum, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation [1][2], projected 65 million dead and widespread knock-on economic and societal problems during 18 months of pandemic. Not that this is a likely outcome for nCoV-2019 (which is likely less lethal than the imaginary virus), but it's worth understanding SARS-like viruses can be significantly more serious than the flu. Secondly, the flu is "baked in the cake" in our general medical and societal infrastructure. A novel virus will be additive to flu infections and even at similar rates of infection/death could cause a noticeable impact. As an analogy, 1.25 million people die in road crashes each year, but if some catastrophic, widespread automotive software bug/malware caused an additional 1.25 million road deaths in 2020, it would rightfully be a massive story, could potentially overwhelm emergency and medical services, and would be something to be concerned about mitigating as much as possible. [1] http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/scenario.html http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/scenario.htm... [2] https://youtu.be/AoLw-Q8X174 https://youtu.be/AoLw-Q8X174
- internet_user 7y ago
  There is a table circulating the internet that’s been eerily accurate for the last week or so. In both cases and deaths. I will try to find it and link to it ina follow up comment. It predicts a million deaths in a month from now, based on the observed R0 of this coronavirus.
- yread 7y ago
  This is one scary graph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Log-linear_plot_of_coronovirus_cases_with_linear_regressions.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Log-linear_plot_of_corono...
  - mirimir 7y ago
    Yeah, and if you project to Feb 28, you get ~100 million deaths. Deaths have plateaued somewhat over the past few days, but even then we're looking at a million or so.
  - 7y ago
gexla 7y ago
> because the true severity of the outbreak isn’t yet known, it’s impossible to predict what the impact of that spread would be This seems to be a key quote. When you're making a bet, you should know the odds. Influenza is a known thing. I'm not going to think about that facemask knowing that influenza is going around, etc.
- internet_user 7y ago
  According to Dr Charles Leung from HK (some high ranking public health official? Didn’t get his job title) - early numbers in pandemics are usually underestimated. He called on preparing for a global outbreak, calling odds not insignificant. His live interview is on YouTube. He estimates 44k already infected globally.
  - benji_is_me 7y ago
    I can't find the interview. Could you link it?
    - gexla 7y ago
      Here's another source which mentions the 44K number. The previous comment might have got the name wrong. http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/01/experts-ncov-spread-chinas-cities-could-trigger-global-epidemic http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/01/experts-n...
      - internet_user 7y ago
        Yes, Gabriel Leung is the correct name. Thank you.
    - internet_user 7y ago
      His name is Gabriel Leung, dean of hong kong's school of medicine. https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3047813/china-coronavirus-hong-kong-medical-experts-call https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/artic... his live interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYyH4N8VXvA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYyH4N8VXvA https://www.tellerreport.com/news/2020-01-27---viruses--hong-kong-experts--44-thousand-cases-already-.rkH-oLRh-U.html https://www.tellerreport.com/news/2020-01-27---viruses--hong... He expects 150k infections daily at some point: https://www.ccn.com/dramatic-hong-kong-data-predicts-coronavirus-outbreak-infecting-150000-every-day/ https://www.ccn.com/dramatic-hong-kong-data-predicts-coronav...
bouncycastle 7y ago
> am I missing something here? There are vaccines and antiviral meds available for flu though.
hadlock 7y ago
The problem is that you don't know if the virus is going to mutate to become more lethal/virulent or less as time goes on. Each identified outbreak that passes a certain threshold needs to be treated as a potential pandemic. The risks of letting another Spanish Influenza or Ebola go global are not worth it. There is also some unsubstantiated talk (CDC has come out and said it's not evidence supported yet) that this virus can spread before the host shows symptoms which is unusual. Your healthy coworker could come into the office and infect everyone, then come down three days later with the symptoms, and a week later the whole office is out sick. Or school.
robjan 7y ago
Flu is an example of a virus that we cannot control and now comes back every year, kills hundreds of thousands and puts huge strain on global healthcare systems. One thing we are desperately trying to prevent is the Coronavirus becoming another seasonal virus on top of the flu. There are also additional risks like a higher fatality rate in otherwise healthy people and the likelihood of the virus mutating into something that can spread like wildfire.
- bouncycastle 7y ago
  If you happen to be lucky and live in a country with a functioning health care system, the flu is easily managed. There are vaccines, test kits and antiviral medications. An anecdote: my daughter had some fever in Japan, so we took her to the doctor. No other symptoms. The doctor did a swab test which tested positive for flu. Next, a nurse came in and administered a drug that is breathed in by taking deep breaths. Next day, my daughter was all fine like nothing happened. No sign of flu. (And I didn't have to pay a single yen. I looked up the price of the of the flu test kits and they will set you back at least $200 a piece in the US)

officialjunk 7y ago

it might be less, the same or more. we don't know yet. it has potential to be more deadly than the flu because of the unknowns, including prevention and treatment.

inferiorhuman 7y ago

Yes. The normal flu is very widespread and has a mortality rate of around 0.1%. The official figures out of Hubei are down to about 3.6% (closer to 5% yesterday). There are too few deaths outside of Hubei to draw any meaningful conclusion. To make an apples to oranges comparison you'd be looking on the order of tens of millions of deaths annually if we don't get the mortality and/or infection rate down.

kenneth 7y ago
The Spanish flu has a similar mortality rate as this and managed to kill 5% of the world's entire population.
- NhanHo 7y ago
  I've been trying to understand the number from the Spanish flu and it seems utterly confusing for some reasons. The consensus seems to be 30% population of the world was infected, with a case-fatality rate of 2.5% (which is another commonly quoted number), it doesn't add up to 5% of the world's population. The case-fatality rate will have to be around 20% for it to kill that many people. This happens even in the same academic paper (for example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3291398/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3291398/ ) > An estimated one third of the world's population (or ≈500 million persons) were infected and had clinically apparent illnesses (1,2) during the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic. The disease was exceptionally severe. Case-fatality rates were >2.5%, compared to <0.1% in other influenza pandemics (3,4). Total deaths were estimated at ≈50 million (5–7) and were arguably as high as 100 million (7). ?! Can anyone more knowledgable explain what is going on with all those numbers?
  - yread 7y ago
    I think Spanish flu doesn't tell us much about how this will play out - different virus, different connectedness of the world, no air travel, lots of the dead were from secondary bacterial infections and there were no antibiotics back then. Too many things are different
  - dharma1 7y ago
    I think majority of the deaths relating to Spanish flu were actually from secondary infections (bacterial pneumonia) rather than the virus itself
  - russholmes 7y ago
    They seem to be confusing mortality rate (MR) with case fatality rate (CFR). Mortality rate is deaths per thousand per year applied to the whole population. Despite its name, CFR is the proportion of actual cases who die, and is a probability rather than a rate. The CFR is estimated at between 10 - 20 %, i.e. a symptomatic member of the population (a case) has a 10 - 20 % chance of dying. 30 % of the global population of 1.8 billion were infected over the several year course of the epidemic, which equates to 600 million cases leading to 60 - 120 million deaths. MR was >2.5 %, so more than 2.5 % of the global population died per year during the epidemic. With a population of 1.8 billion, this equates to >45 million deaths per year over several years.
alperakgun 7y ago
China infection rates could be as high as 100K, as the 5% number is based on tested cases.
- mirimir 7y ago
  Right, and that could reduce the mortality rate. But then, perhaps the influenza mortality rate is also an overestimate, in that people who aren't severely affected won't get diagnosed.

Jamwinner 7y ago

The differince I imagine is how it has 'fresh' hosts, and can spread quickly, possibly overwhelming care, or complicating other medical issues. The flu seems throttled by varied, but somewhat common, resistance in humans, where this has little or none. Otherwise, no, it seems to me, a layman, as being about as intense as the flu from a purely individual, symptomatic perspective.

hliyan 7y ago

I too, wonder about this. The article starts with: > Some infectious disease experts But only two experts quoted in the article predict a potential pandemic. The main worry, though is that it's infectious while asymptomatic, which apparently was not the case with SARS: > Tools like quarantine and isolation—which were key to controlling SARS—are unlikely stop spread of a virus that can transmit during the period from infection to symptoms, experts say. Also, of those who died, how many were weak/immunocompromised to begin with, and how many were healthy adults?

internet_user 7y ago
Everyone is so fixiates on deaths. 25% of SARS survivors have lungs mangled so badly they cannot exercise or walk very much. Does that count as healthy adults not dying?

eecc 7y ago

Might be that the demographies matter. Influenza kills economically unproductive members of society while Corona (not sure, I’m speculating here) Is more severe in the productive groups. Or more simply, the mortality might be higher

drKarl 7y ago
So you're proposing that influenza has a net positive effect on society as a cleanser of the unproductive or unfit? I don't know if I should consider that thinking closer to Darwinian or to Nazi theories...
- Scarblac 7y ago
  I don't see that as Darwinian. Darwin just describes what happens and how that led to differences in species, he doesn't give it value judgments like "net positive" afaik.
  - eecc 7y ago
    And neither do I give a value judgment on the difference in alert level between the yearly Influenza and this Corona outbreak: I’m just - speculatively - attempting an explanation, without necessarily endorsing it. It’s the same reasoning behind the alarm behind HIV in Africa: not only it kills, it removes the economically active demographic from the economy while tying up even more in their assistance... Everyone please take time to read and make sure you properly understand what you have just read before reacting.

themgt 7y ago

Two points against this general "but the flu" argument: An October 2019 novel Coronavirus simulation by Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, World Economic Forum, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation [1][2], projected 65 million dead and widespread knock-on economic and societal problems during 18 months of pandemic. Not that this is a likely outcome for nCoV-2019 (which is likely less lethal than the imaginary virus), but it's worth understanding SARS-like viruses can be significantly more serious than the flu. Secondly, the flu is "baked in the cake" in our general medical and societal infrastructure. A novel virus will be additive to flu infections and even at similar rates of infection/death could cause a noticeable impact. As an analogy, 1.25 million people die in road crashes each year, but if some catastrophic, widespread automotive software bug/malware caused an additional 1.25 million road deaths in 2020, it would rightfully be a massive story, could potentially overwhelm emergency and medical services, and would be something to be concerned about mitigating as much as possible. [1] http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/scenario.html http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/scenario.htm... [2] https://youtu.be/AoLw-Q8X174 https://youtu.be/AoLw-Q8X174

internet_user 7y ago
There is a table circulating the internet that’s been eerily accurate for the last week or so. In both cases and deaths. I will try to find it and link to it ina follow up comment. It predicts a million deaths in a month from now, based on the observed R0 of this coronavirus.
yread 7y ago
This is one scary graph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Log-linear_plot_of_coronovirus_cases_with_linear_regressions.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Log-linear_plot_of_corono...
- mirimir 7y ago
  Yeah, and if you project to Feb 28, you get ~100 million deaths. Deaths have plateaued somewhat over the past few days, but even then we're looking at a million or so.
- 7y ago

gexla 7y ago

> because the true severity of the outbreak isn’t yet known, it’s impossible to predict what the impact of that spread would be This seems to be a key quote. When you're making a bet, you should know the odds. Influenza is a known thing. I'm not going to think about that facemask knowing that influenza is going around, etc.

internet_user 7y ago
According to Dr Charles Leung from HK (some high ranking public health official? Didn’t get his job title) - early numbers in pandemics are usually underestimated. He called on preparing for a global outbreak, calling odds not insignificant. His live interview is on YouTube. He estimates 44k already infected globally.
- benji_is_me 7y ago
  I can't find the interview. Could you link it?
  - gexla 7y ago
    Here's another source which mentions the 44K number. The previous comment might have got the name wrong. http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/01/experts-ncov-spread-chinas-cities-could-trigger-global-epidemic http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/01/experts-n...
    - internet_user 7y ago
      Yes, Gabriel Leung is the correct name. Thank you.
  - internet_user 7y ago
    His name is Gabriel Leung, dean of hong kong's school of medicine. https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3047813/china-coronavirus-hong-kong-medical-experts-call https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/artic... his live interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYyH4N8VXvA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYyH4N8VXvA https://www.tellerreport.com/news/2020-01-27---viruses--hong-kong-experts--44-thousand-cases-already-.rkH-oLRh-U.html https://www.tellerreport.com/news/2020-01-27---viruses--hong... He expects 150k infections daily at some point: https://www.ccn.com/dramatic-hong-kong-data-predicts-coronavirus-outbreak-infecting-150000-every-day/ https://www.ccn.com/dramatic-hong-kong-data-predicts-coronav...

bouncycastle 7y ago

> am I missing something here? There are vaccines and antiviral meds available for flu though.

hadlock 7y ago

The problem is that you don't know if the virus is going to mutate to become more lethal/virulent or less as time goes on. Each identified outbreak that passes a certain threshold needs to be treated as a potential pandemic. The risks of letting another Spanish Influenza or Ebola go global are not worth it. There is also some unsubstantiated talk (CDC has come out and said it's not evidence supported yet) that this virus can spread before the host shows symptoms which is unusual. Your healthy coworker could come into the office and infect everyone, then come down three days later with the symptoms, and a week later the whole office is out sick. Or school.

robjan 7y ago

Flu is an example of a virus that we cannot control and now comes back every year, kills hundreds of thousands and puts huge strain on global healthcare systems. One thing we are desperately trying to prevent is the Coronavirus becoming another seasonal virus on top of the flu. There are also additional risks like a higher fatality rate in otherwise healthy people and the likelihood of the virus mutating into something that can spread like wildfire.

bouncycastle 7y ago
If you happen to be lucky and live in a country with a functioning health care system, the flu is easily managed. There are vaccines, test kits and antiviral medications. An anecdote: my daughter had some fever in Japan, so we took her to the doctor. No other symptoms. The doctor did a swab test which tested positive for flu. Next, a nurse came in and administered a drug that is breathed in by taking deep breaths. Next day, my daughter was all fine like nothing happened. No sign of flu. (And I didn't have to pay a single yen. I looked up the price of the of the flu test kits and they will set you back at least $200 a piece in the US)