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A worldwide shutdown of airports for two weeks is out of the question, why exactly? This is a honest question.. Its obviously one of the most potent travel vect

A worldwide shutdown of airports for two weeks is out of the question, why exactly? This is a honest question.. Its obviously one of the most potent travel vectors of the virus. When the plague struck, harbours where closed, and gates where manned on both sides. It seems quite logical, to enforce quarantine this way.

anonsivalley652 7y ago
Actions speak louder than words. It's like playing Russian roulette with thousands to millions of lives in the name of what's in your name: filthy lucre. If it gets much worse, there's a real risk it might not be stoppable and then this phony-omniscience "risk management"/emergency triage will have failed to contain it. I don't think it will be anywhere nearly as bad as 1968, but that's a relative benchmark and would be an equivocation if used to defer action.
eropple 7y ago
Because that would be an eye-poppingly ridiculous response? Seriously, this breathless "plague!" nonsense absolutely must stop and its purveyors should feel bad for doing so. Bubonic plague has an untreated mortality rate of fifty percent! This, on the other hand, is a nontrivial though increasingly global outbreak of a disease that is unlikely to seriously harm healthy people--CFR rate of mortality seems to be about three percent--and is predominantly a threat to the very young and the elderly. If this sounds familiar that should be because it maps rather closely to the flu. There are 650,000 deaths per year from the flu--who's suggesting closing the airports over such a Threat To Humanity? Turn the news off. If you have a brain predisposed to low-information panic it is bad for you.
- duxup 7y ago
  "that is unlikely to seriously harm healthy people and is predominantly a threat to the very young and the elderly" I feel like we've seen at best mixed information about that. I'm not sure that is the case.
  - eropple 7y ago
    I reserve the right to change my read if CFR spikes significantly or if infectivity proves higher than currently suspected, but, as I understand it, a 3% CFR is indicative of mortality through immune deficiency or populations with genetic vulnerability/predisposition to the infectious agent in question. It is certainly worth watching, much as SARS and H1N1 were serious health concerns that needed to be managed at state and international levels. It is not worth John Q. Public panicking about. It is certainly not worth stopping the world over. It is not bubonic effing plague.
    - duxup 7y ago
      Yeah my comment was less about the panic than it is who seems to be getting hit hard. There's a lot of mixed information, particularly strange news about cases where folks seem to be recovering and then sort of "relapse" a week or two after it is identified. The analysis that at least sounds a bit more scientific to me seems to indicate there are a lot of cases where the typically healthy folks are hit hard.
      - eropple 7y ago
        Sure. But a normal flu can put a healthy person on their backs, too. It won't kill them.
        Retric 7y ago
        The current deaths are a lagging indicator of overall mortality. A large fraction of the current infected are still at significant risk and therefore should be excluded from mortality rate estimates. China has seen 804 deaths and 2,374 recoveries the majority of cases still at significant risk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019–20_Wuhan_coronavirus_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019–20_Wuhan_... The good news is the official rate of new infections has been in steady decline and has finally dropped below 10% per day. Though that may not necessarily be completely accurate either.
    - deleted 7y ago
- abootstrapper 7y ago
  I’m not for stopping the world, but Coronavirus gets brushed off as no big deal a lot online. I feel like the big issue will be Coronavirus bogarting medical resources. Pneumonia in a healthy individual is treatable given proper treatment and resources, but if everyone has pneumonia, then we have a resource problem. Additionally, a lot of people care for the very young and the very old, and they’re not comforted with the sentiment, “well, if you’re healthy you’ll live,”
  - hef19898 7y ago
    I have the opposite impression, to me it seems that the Corona virus is seen as the end of the world online.
  - eropple 7y ago
    It gets brushed off as "not a big deal" because...right now, we don't really have a reason to think it is one. It could become one. It merits state and international attention. It does not merit panic and there is absolutely no reason to think that "everyone" will get it or will develop pneumonic symptoms from it in a way that strains medical resources in developed countries (indeed, the biggest threat is likely if it becomes a thing in less-developed countries--but it seems to be less communicable than SARS or H1N1 right now, too). It is an important issue at the levels of government and international organizations that manage things like this. But it's silly to obsess over it and it's downright immoral to shit-stir with comparisons to bubonic civilization-wrecking plague as the OP to whom I replied decided to do. And I'm going to be frank: the very young and very old could just as easily die of influenza and the people who care for the very young and very old are not, for the most part, even screening for flu shots. I have trouble mustering the emotional energy to care for their fear of the scary black swan when they're standing in a flock of white ones that are themselves dangerous.
    - wolco 7y ago
      Less communicable than SARS? No, it is more because SARS was only communicable when the patient was at their worst. This can spread during all phases. The mortality is lower than SARS but much higher than the flu. To put it in real terms. If you take the number of people you ever met in your life and gave them a bad flu you might find one who dies. Compare that to taking your mother/father/brothers and immediate families and giving them corona where at least one would die. Compared to SARS where someone in your immediate family would die or ebola where either you or your wife would die.
- cobookman 7y ago
  > mortality seems to be about three percent--and is predominantly a threat to the very young and the elderly. The Chinese figures can’t be trusted as the CCP is trying to save face. Li wenliang died from the virus and was a healthy 33yo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang
- ourmandave 7y ago
  Truly, how about instead of headlines with body counts they say what the mortality rate is compared to this year's common flu. Honestly all these distractions cut into my Left 4 Dead play time.
  - hef19898 7y ago
    Talking about it, my latest Plague Inc. round is on hold since this morning! But then it was a Fungus I played...
- yomly 7y ago
  From here[0] it seems like there is an additional mechanism by which people can be at risk: >Peng: Based on my observations, a third of patients exhibited inflammation in their whole body. It was not necessarily limited to young adults. The mechanism of a cytokine storm is about whole-body inflammation, which leads to a failure of multiple organs and quickly evolves into the terminal stage. In some fast-progressing cases, it took two to three days to progress from whole-body inflammation to the life-threatening stage. It is at least noteworthy that Dr Li Wenliang died in his late 30s... Also the mortality rate seems to be very hard to report on due to compounding issues: 1. Chinese death certificates not recording compounding illnesses as cause of death - making attribution hard. 2. There is a two-three week lag on infected to death but a ~4 day lag on infected detection thus a naive mortality calculation of: mortality = deaths / infected Is not going to cut it and is misleading at best. 3. There is a mixture of factors making reporting accurately hard: Wuhan health services are at max capacity and everything from detection to care is strained. There is also some mixture of political factors which may mean that numbers coming out of China could be tailored towards some kind of narrative. I agreed there's a lot of FUD which is probably unnecessary, especially outside of Asia. I think within Asia it is a bit more founded given that population density is so high (just think about things like aircon usage in places like Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand) AND we've just come out of Chinese New Year which is the largest annual human migration event. My current read on the situation is that everyone else's fear and overreaction will keep me safe at the very least. I also imagine that there will be a degree of y2k type ignorance revolving around the issue once the dust settles: people on the ground who worked on it will say it was a big fucking deal and crisis was averted through a lot of hard work and coordination. People who were unaffected by it will think it was all a bunch of BS and there was nothing to ever have worried about. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22263022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22263022
- ryanwaggoner 7y ago
  A mortality rate of 3% is 30-100x that of the common flu. It does not “map rather closely”, and comparing total deaths from an endemic disease like the flu to a brand new one that hasn’t spread globally yet is highly intellectually dishonest, and I think you know that. In addition to mortality rate, a highly contagious illness that puts 10-20% of infected in the ICU will quickly overwhelm even the most developed healthcare systems. “Panic” is never really warranted, but there’s a reason China put their entire economy on lockdown. They have the data that you don’t, and they seem pretty concerned. Whether we should shut down airports is a discussion worth having, but whether this is a serious global threat has already been well established. Unclear on why you seem determined to ignore the experts, none of whom seem to think this is no big deal.
0xTJ 7y ago
Doing that would be a massive overcompensation. This virus is bad, and it's awful for the people that have it and their families, but it's not shut-down-the-world bad.
yread 7y ago
Here is a look at reports from outside the Hubei province in China https://sinopsis.cz/en/an-analysis-of-reported-cases-of-2019-ncov-related-deaths-outside-hubei-province/ https://sinopsis.cz/en/an-analysis-of-reported-cases-of-2019... The deaths are really mostly old people with preexisting conditions there.
jagger27 7y ago
It warms my heart to imagine zero air travel CO2 emissions for a few weeks.

anonsivalley652 7y ago

Actions speak louder than words. It's like playing Russian roulette with thousands to millions of lives in the name of what's in your name: filthy lucre. If it gets much worse, there's a real risk it might not be stoppable and then this phony-omniscience "risk management"/emergency triage will have failed to contain it. I don't think it will be anywhere nearly as bad as 1968, but that's a relative benchmark and would be an equivocation if used to defer action.

eropple 7y ago

Because that would be an eye-poppingly ridiculous response? Seriously, this breathless "plague!" nonsense absolutely must stop and its purveyors should feel bad for doing so. Bubonic plague has an untreated mortality rate of fifty percent! This, on the other hand, is a nontrivial though increasingly global outbreak of a disease that is unlikely to seriously harm healthy people--CFR rate of mortality seems to be about three percent--and is predominantly a threat to the very young and the elderly. If this sounds familiar that should be because it maps rather closely to the flu. There are 650,000 deaths per year from the flu--who's suggesting closing the airports over such a Threat To Humanity? Turn the news off. If you have a brain predisposed to low-information panic it is bad for you.

duxup 7y ago
"that is unlikely to seriously harm healthy people and is predominantly a threat to the very young and the elderly" I feel like we've seen at best mixed information about that. I'm not sure that is the case.
- eropple 7y ago
  I reserve the right to change my read if CFR spikes significantly or if infectivity proves higher than currently suspected, but, as I understand it, a 3% CFR is indicative of mortality through immune deficiency or populations with genetic vulnerability/predisposition to the infectious agent in question. It is certainly worth watching, much as SARS and H1N1 were serious health concerns that needed to be managed at state and international levels. It is not worth John Q. Public panicking about. It is certainly not worth stopping the world over. It is not bubonic effing plague.
  - duxup 7y ago
    Yeah my comment was less about the panic than it is who seems to be getting hit hard. There's a lot of mixed information, particularly strange news about cases where folks seem to be recovering and then sort of "relapse" a week or two after it is identified. The analysis that at least sounds a bit more scientific to me seems to indicate there are a lot of cases where the typically healthy folks are hit hard.
    - eropple 7y ago
      Sure. But a normal flu can put a healthy person on their backs, too. It won't kill them.
      - Retric 7y ago
        The current deaths are a lagging indicator of overall mortality. A large fraction of the current infected are still at significant risk and therefore should be excluded from mortality rate estimates. China has seen 804 deaths and 2,374 recoveries the majority of cases still at significant risk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019–20_Wuhan_coronavirus_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019–20_Wuhan_... The good news is the official rate of new infections has been in steady decline and has finally dropped below 10% per day. Though that may not necessarily be completely accurate either.
  - deleted 7y ago
abootstrapper 7y ago
I’m not for stopping the world, but Coronavirus gets brushed off as no big deal a lot online. I feel like the big issue will be Coronavirus bogarting medical resources. Pneumonia in a healthy individual is treatable given proper treatment and resources, but if everyone has pneumonia, then we have a resource problem. Additionally, a lot of people care for the very young and the very old, and they’re not comforted with the sentiment, “well, if you’re healthy you’ll live,”
- hef19898 7y ago
  I have the opposite impression, to me it seems that the Corona virus is seen as the end of the world online.
- eropple 7y ago
  It gets brushed off as "not a big deal" because...right now, we don't really have a reason to think it is one. It could become one. It merits state and international attention. It does not merit panic and there is absolutely no reason to think that "everyone" will get it or will develop pneumonic symptoms from it in a way that strains medical resources in developed countries (indeed, the biggest threat is likely if it becomes a thing in less-developed countries--but it seems to be less communicable than SARS or H1N1 right now, too). It is an important issue at the levels of government and international organizations that manage things like this. But it's silly to obsess over it and it's downright immoral to shit-stir with comparisons to bubonic civilization-wrecking plague as the OP to whom I replied decided to do. And I'm going to be frank: the very young and very old could just as easily die of influenza and the people who care for the very young and very old are not, for the most part, even screening for flu shots. I have trouble mustering the emotional energy to care for their fear of the scary black swan when they're standing in a flock of white ones that are themselves dangerous.
  - wolco 7y ago
    Less communicable than SARS? No, it is more because SARS was only communicable when the patient was at their worst. This can spread during all phases. The mortality is lower than SARS but much higher than the flu. To put it in real terms. If you take the number of people you ever met in your life and gave them a bad flu you might find one who dies. Compare that to taking your mother/father/brothers and immediate families and giving them corona where at least one would die. Compared to SARS where someone in your immediate family would die or ebola where either you or your wife would die.
cobookman 7y ago
> mortality seems to be about three percent--and is predominantly a threat to the very young and the elderly. The Chinese figures can’t be trusted as the CCP is trying to save face. Li wenliang died from the virus and was a healthy 33yo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang
ourmandave 7y ago
Truly, how about instead of headlines with body counts they say what the mortality rate is compared to this year's common flu. Honestly all these distractions cut into my Left 4 Dead play time.
- hef19898 7y ago
  Talking about it, my latest Plague Inc. round is on hold since this morning! But then it was a Fungus I played...
yomly 7y ago
From here[0] it seems like there is an additional mechanism by which people can be at risk: >Peng: Based on my observations, a third of patients exhibited inflammation in their whole body. It was not necessarily limited to young adults. The mechanism of a cytokine storm is about whole-body inflammation, which leads to a failure of multiple organs and quickly evolves into the terminal stage. In some fast-progressing cases, it took two to three days to progress from whole-body inflammation to the life-threatening stage. It is at least noteworthy that Dr Li Wenliang died in his late 30s... Also the mortality rate seems to be very hard to report on due to compounding issues: 1. Chinese death certificates not recording compounding illnesses as cause of death - making attribution hard. 2. There is a two-three week lag on infected to death but a ~4 day lag on infected detection thus a naive mortality calculation of: mortality = deaths / infected Is not going to cut it and is misleading at best. 3. There is a mixture of factors making reporting accurately hard: Wuhan health services are at max capacity and everything from detection to care is strained. There is also some mixture of political factors which may mean that numbers coming out of China could be tailored towards some kind of narrative. I agreed there's a lot of FUD which is probably unnecessary, especially outside of Asia. I think within Asia it is a bit more founded given that population density is so high (just think about things like aircon usage in places like Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand) AND we've just come out of Chinese New Year which is the largest annual human migration event. My current read on the situation is that everyone else's fear and overreaction will keep me safe at the very least. I also imagine that there will be a degree of y2k type ignorance revolving around the issue once the dust settles: people on the ground who worked on it will say it was a big fucking deal and crisis was averted through a lot of hard work and coordination. People who were unaffected by it will think it was all a bunch of BS and there was nothing to ever have worried about. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22263022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22263022
ryanwaggoner 7y ago
A mortality rate of 3% is 30-100x that of the common flu. It does not “map rather closely”, and comparing total deaths from an endemic disease like the flu to a brand new one that hasn’t spread globally yet is highly intellectually dishonest, and I think you know that. In addition to mortality rate, a highly contagious illness that puts 10-20% of infected in the ICU will quickly overwhelm even the most developed healthcare systems. “Panic” is never really warranted, but there’s a reason China put their entire economy on lockdown. They have the data that you don’t, and they seem pretty concerned. Whether we should shut down airports is a discussion worth having, but whether this is a serious global threat has already been well established. Unclear on why you seem determined to ignore the experts, none of whom seem to think this is no big deal.

0xTJ 7y ago

Doing that would be a massive overcompensation. This virus is bad, and it's awful for the people that have it and their families, but it's not shut-down-the-world bad.

yread 7y ago

Here is a look at reports from outside the Hubei province in China https://sinopsis.cz/en/an-analysis-of-reported-cases-of-2019-ncov-related-deaths-outside-hubei-province/ https://sinopsis.cz/en/an-analysis-of-reported-cases-of-2019... The deaths are really mostly old people with preexisting conditions there.

jagger27 7y ago

It warms my heart to imagine zero air travel CO2 emissions for a few weeks.