7 ms·

Coronavirus Death Toll Rises to 805, Passing SARS

68 points by minkeymaniac 7y ago

neonate 7y ago
https://archive.md/7Ca9m https://archive.md/7Ca9m
vikramkr 7y ago
It looks like the course of disease progression could be unpredictable, with patients who intially seemed to not have too harsh a case of the disease taking sudden turns for the worse after days or even a week of mild symptoms. 10% of patients having abnormal initial symptoms would also make control of the disease a lot harder if 10% of people escape your screens. Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/health/coronavirus-patients.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/health/coronavirus-patien...
- mrb 7y ago
  Honestly, given the precedent—China lied to the WHO about SARS (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2003/apr/21/china.sars https://www.theguardian.com/society/2003/apr/21/china.sars )—I am baffled the WHO isn't sending a commission to monitor deaths at hospitals or how many bodies they burn at crematoriums. There are unverified anonymous reports that 2 crematoriums alone are burning 2-4x more deaths than officially reported in the whole country, and a lab technician at a hospital guesstimating 200-400 deaths daily at his hospital. Unless you have a commission with feet on the ground, you can't verify or trust what China is reporting.
  - corporate_shi11 7y ago
    A mission of WHO representatives has finally been approved. "...Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director general, said a team of international experts has been assembled, with the goal of sending the first members of the team to China by early next week. He said he is hoping officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will be part of the mission." https://www.npr.org/2020/02/08/804130735/whos-tedros-china-has-agreed-to-allow-international-team-probe-coronavirus https://www.npr.org/2020/02/08/804130735/whos-tedros-china-h...
  - Renaud 7y ago
    >a lab technician at a hospital guesstimating 200-400 deaths daily at his hospital. I believe you mean this: https://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/242834342 https://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/242834342 Discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/f0miwj/a_hospital_worker_from_wuhan_is_posting/ https://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/f0miwj/a_hospital_wo... I would take it with a grain of salt but I agree that we should have little trust into the official reports from China, their track record is pretty bad and the government control over all news and discussions end up generating wild theories that basically can't be entirely proven or disproven. The death of Li Wenliang, the whistle-blower doctor and subsequent censoring of online discussions about the way he was treated by the authorities are also not helping: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3049634/li-wenliang-chinese-academics-call-justice-coronavirus-whistle https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3049634/li-...
  - kps 7y ago
    It's the 9th in China, right? Someone on Reddit¹ has accurately predicted what China will report 4 days ago, following a quadratic. ¹ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/ez13dv/oc_quadratic_coronavirus_epidemic_growth_model/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/ez13dv/oc_...
  - duxup 7y ago
    China was refusing a great deal of outside help and input until very recently.
  - bart_spoon 7y ago
    The WHO and CDC have been trying to send people for weeks, and China has been refusing. Only today did they finally agree to let a committee from the WHO come to the country.
henryw 7y ago
New cases seem to be going down https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-cases/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-cases/
- empath75 7y ago
  There is some speculation that that is because they are at their limit for how many tests they can do per day.
  - scoot 7y ago
    It would be flat in that case.
    - mrb 7y ago
      GP means if their processing limit is 3k tests per day, then at most they can report 3k new confirmed cases per day. And that's pretty much what we've seen since Jan 31: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%9320_Wuhan_coronavirus_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%932...
    - scotth 7y ago
      That's assuming supply of testing kits is constant.
      - throwaway1997 7y ago
        Not just that, the hospitals are completely jammed in certain areas which means if you get the illness it's often safer to just stay at home - but then it goes unreported.
      - scoot 7y ago
        Which is a different constraint to the one in the message I was replying to.
  - terenceng2010 7y ago
empath75 7y ago
From what I have seen, the daily death toll is doubling every 5 days or so. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-toll/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-... I don’t know how long that can continue but at that rate it won’t be more than a couple of months before thousands are dying per day... Edit: since it takes 2 to 3 weeks to die from it, we really should be comparing the deaths now to the cases two weeks ago, which gives a much much higher mortality rate than is currently reported — maybe as high as 20% Based on how fast it spread, I definitely expect there to be ~300 people dying per day by next week, so you’re taking a SARS equivalent every 2 or 3 days.
- scoot 7y ago
  According to the site you linked to, the daily deaths growth factor is trending downwards.
  - dpcan 7y ago
    I'd argue that there is absolutely no "trend" whatsoever. It's just that some people are dying from it, and that's what happens to some people when they get a virus.
- chmod775 7y ago
  > Based on how fast it spread, I definitely expect there to be ~300 people dying per day by next week, so you’re taking a SARS equivalent every 2 or 3 days. To put that into perspective: About 700 people die in traffic accidents in China every single day. So that'd be a point where it would (slowly) become a factor in mortality rates if it wasn't checked within 2020.
  - eru 7y ago
    Wikipedia says about a few hundred thousand people globally die in a typical flu season that barely gets a mention in the news. That's perhaps the more topical comparison? Oh, and that doesn't include the people who die of the common cold--which is caused by a variety of viruses, the only common thing about them being our immune system's similar reaction. Rhinovirus are the most common, but also coronavirus.
clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago
What's the R0 value?
- zamalek 7y ago
  Estimated between 2.1 and 3.7, if I'm remembering correctly.
- guramarx11 7y ago
  somewhere between 2.2~(3 | 4 ?), one thing though, unlike SARS, WARS(nCoV) is already contagious during incubation period(14 days) and even before any symptoms cough/fever shows up, this SUPER complicates any measure to quarantine it
  - totalZero 7y ago
    Just a heads-up, the WHO discourages geographic labels for diseases. Those labels may be totally orthogonal to the disease itself (as is the case with Spanish Flu), they punish localities for outbreak of (or association with) disease, and the fear of stigma could impact local officials' decisions about reporting outbreaks and seeking help from disease experts. https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/notes/2015/naming-new-diseases/en/ https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/notes/2015/naming-new-d...
    - uranusjr 7y ago
      I’ll stop calling this WARS when they stop saying MERS.
coldcode 7y ago
People are modeling the disease and thinking it will peak in a few weeks. I wonder how accurate such a model is if you have no idea how many people actually have the disease but have not been counted. The number of clusters of people with the virus are expanding (like the ski chalet in France). Could they create new expansions we aren't able to know yet?
post_break 7y ago
Official death toll. Part of me, and a growing number of people online, bet it's in the thousands, and it's being swept under the rug.
- postalrat 7y ago
  Or you are simply fantasizing about it being true.
  - post_break 7y ago
    I don't fantasize about the death of people sorry.
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    Possibly, but wouldn’t it be nice to be proven wrong in that case?
  - nexuist 7y ago
    It's not a fantasy, but it's also not entirely malicious here. I can't find a source off the top of my head but the way China issues death reports is substantially different than how doctors do it in the West. In China if you die of heart failure while having nCoV-2019, your death certificate reports heart failure instead of the coronavirus. In the West, it would list both reasons as the cause of death. It is theorized that many doctors are listing the cause of death as pneumonia and not coronavirus because of this. It is similarly possible that some people die faster than they are able to be tested (the current test takes about 9 hours to complete). Regardless, it would be foolish to believe this as the golden "actual" number, even ignoring the CCP's (and frankly, other countries') vested interest in fudging these numbers. It would be unlikely that it counts deaths from before the medical community recognized this virus, deaths that have occurred before test results have been returned, and deaths that have occurred outside of the healthcare system (i.e. in quarantined apartments, households, remote villages, or secretive military bases).
    - AlbertoGP 7y ago
      I can't find a source off the top of my head but the way China issues death reports is substantially different than how doctors do it in the West. In China if you die of heart failure while having nCoV-2019, your death certificate reports heart failure instead of the coronavirus. In the West, it would list both reasons as the cause of death. This is one source of that being standard procedure for the flu, from an individual which has been reporting about China in his YouTube channel for years, having lived there: “... but I asked my wife, because she’s a Chinese doctor, I asked her, why is it that China only reports [say] 43 or 53 deaths a year from flu, but in the rest of the world we see these massive numbers, like in America 50K-80K a year? And well, she explained to me very simply: when somebody goes to the hospital in China with a complication, let’s say heart disease, or pneumonia, or you know, any other ailment, and then contracts the flu which then exacerbates that ailment and eventually leads to death, on the death certificate they’ll write down the cause of death as: heart disease, or pneumonia, or whatever that preexisting condition was, not as death from the flu. However in countries like America, if somebody goes and they have a preexisting condition but they die due to complications brought on by the flu, on their death certificate would be written «death due to complications brought on due to influenza», and so it’s marked down as a death caused by flu.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HE7Iz7HLpYg&t=4m12s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HE7Iz7HLpYg&t=4m12s BTW, that’s the same video I mentioned in another discussion three days ago: “China Sacrifices a Province to Save the World From Coronavirus” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22254414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22254414
camillomiller 7y ago
I’m still wondering if the Mobile World Congress will get canceled because of this. 5 companies pulled out already. Gsma minimizes the impact and consequences, but think about this: what if one single person is found positive? How would they manage the quarantine of the tens of thousand of attendees? If you were Barcelona’s mayor what would you do? Prioritize public safety and risking the bankruptcy of the event organizers, or let everything happen risking a health crisis? Hard decisions...
- optymizer 7y ago
  Risk of getting coronavirus is the reason I decided not to attend MWC after having registered and made all arrangements. I have family that will not survive an infection if I end up being infected. I was trying to rationalize that maybe it is not that risky but then I saw there are several companies attending that have "Wuhan" in the name, e.g. Wuhan Silicon Technologies Inc. Even if those were banned, there are dozens (hundreds?) of companies from China attending. Personally I decided it is too risky for my situation, but that's not to say others shouldn't go. I just worry about getting 300,000 people in a venue for 3 days. Sounds super risky. I might actually work from home for 2 weeks after my colleagues come back from the conference just to be safe.
- totalZero 7y ago
  In my view there's little upside to attending MWC this year for most large companies. They can publicize their new products just about as well by sending devices to reviewers and making cool videos, so there's very limited upside. And the downside is immense. Travel does a number on the immune system. Plus, if they're anything like me, people who travel to MWC for work will tend to get short-changed on sleep. That said, I don't think it really hurts the industry as a whole if MWC is cancelled, in the long term. But it may hurt MWC.
  - camillomiller 7y ago
    Last year at MWC I slept 8 full hours. Over 5 days. It’s the forced networking after running around all day that really gets you... I hardly remember a year that I didn’t get back with a cold, a hurt back, a sore throat and so on. Why do we still do this to ourselves? I will absolutely cheer the first company that organizes the first streaming only event. Just get the products in the hand of reviewers a day or two before... What we don’t consider though is that mwc is also basically a place where salespersons and clients sit down to sign contracts. Not sure what it means for them if it gets canceled
falcolas 7y ago
Not to downplay the impact of the Coronavirus or it’s victims, but here is a bit of context: In roughly the same timeframe in the US, influenza and pneumonia has killed roughly 10,000 people, and has a mortality rate of 7.1%. The epidemic level starts at 7.2% https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm https://abcnews.go.com/Health/1300-people-died-flu-year/story?id=67754182 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/1300-people-died-flu-year/stor...
- econcon 7y ago
  Influenza isn't killing healthy people. It mostly kills old or new horns.
  - falcolas 7y ago
    So is the Coronavirus.
    - igivanov 7y ago
      no. for this one, no reported infections in children 15yo or younger.
      - bart_spoon 7y ago
        It absolutely has infected children, as young as 36 hours old. There hasn't, however, been any reports of children dying.
        igivanov 7y ago
        technically you are probably correct though I was more replying to the parent's statement that it kills newborns >The outbreak was first reported on December 31, but no children younger than 15 years old had been diagnosed as of January 22. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine said at the time that "children might be less likely to become infected or, if infected, may show milder symptoms" than adults. >Since then, doctors have recorded a few one-off cases among children: a 9-month-old girl in Beijing, a child in Germany whose father was diagnosed with the virus first, and a child in Shenzhen, China, who was infected but displayed no symptoms. >On Wednesday, Chinese authorities confirmed that an infant in Wuhan, China, had tested positive for the virus 30 hours after being born; the baby's mother is a coronavirus patient. https://www.sciencealert.com/experts-are-puzzled-over-why-so-few-children-have-caught-coronavirus-so-far https://www.sciencealert.com/experts-are-puzzled-over-why-so...
datashow 7y ago
I have serious doubt on the death count. According to the numbers I got from https://news.qq.com/zt2020/page/feiyan.htm https://news.qq.com/zt2020/page/feiyan.htm now: Death rate in Hubei province is 780/27100 = 2.88% Death rate in all the other provinces combined is 32/10127 = 0.32% So the death rate in Hubei is 9 times of other provinces. Is this really possible? ZheJiang province has 1075 confirmed cases now, but still 0 death count. Seriously? Hong Kong only has 26 confirmed cases, but already has 1 death count. For SARS, China has a 6.6%, much lower than other countries. For example, Hong Kong has a death rate of 17%. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr... ) Do international researchers use China's officially reported count in their modeling?
- optymizer 7y ago
  Just wanted to call out that I think calculating death rate as "deaths / infections" works for past infections but is wildly inaccurate today because the majority of infections have no resolution yet. I'd say "deaths / recoveries" or maybe "deaths / (deaths + recoveries)" is probably better, with the caveat that it is likely much higher than the final number it's going to settle at as more people recover. I've been using recovery numbers from https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6 https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h... .
  - datashow 7y ago
    Great work. But I don't see "deaths / recoveries" or "deaths / (deaths + recoveries)" on your webpage.
    - inferiorhuman 7y ago
      That's because most reputable sources don't have enough information to make a reasonable estimate of the case fatality rate. The JHU map only shows raw numbers. If you're using deaths as a proportion of known outcomes, Hubei has come down to about 35%. Other provinces are reporting, at most, six deaths. I don't believe the numbers coming from China for one bit. Yes, Hubei is overwhelmed, but it really wouldn't take much to overwhelm most health care networks (in- or outside China). Dutch wire service BNO News is reporting that a Japanese national who died in Wuhan was believed to be infected with the coronavirus but not included in the official coronavirus death count.
volgo 7y ago
Just curious, how does it compare to H1N1 currently? Think it will be more or less contained?
- guramarx11 7y ago
  short answer is we have to wait for "28 days later", the long answer is... complicated, please take this with a grain of salt the first tide of WARS(nCoV) "Contagion" have either become ill(hospitalized and quarantined) or dead, so now we're waiting to see if the number of cases outside of China still climbs as a local transmission epidemic If this tide continues, international country like eg Singapore can super-spread this into global pandemic like H1N1 unless we close off borders and ban all flights/shippings economics/travels... How viable is such containment actually remains to be seen, lets pray for the best

68 points by minkeymaniac 7y ago

https://archive.md/7Ca9m https://archive.md/7Ca9m

It looks like the course of disease progression could be unpredictable, with patients who intially seemed to not have too harsh a case of the disease taking sudden turns for the worse after days or even a week of mild symptoms. 10% of patients having abnormal initial symptoms would also make control of the disease a lot harder if 10% of people escape your screens. Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/health/coronavirus-patients.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/health/coronavirus-patien...

mrb 7y ago
Honestly, given the precedent—China lied to the WHO about SARS (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2003/apr/21/china.sars https://www.theguardian.com/society/2003/apr/21/china.sars )—I am baffled the WHO isn't sending a commission to monitor deaths at hospitals or how many bodies they burn at crematoriums. There are unverified anonymous reports that 2 crematoriums alone are burning 2-4x more deaths than officially reported in the whole country, and a lab technician at a hospital guesstimating 200-400 deaths daily at his hospital. Unless you have a commission with feet on the ground, you can't verify or trust what China is reporting.
- corporate_shi11 7y ago
  A mission of WHO representatives has finally been approved. "...Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director general, said a team of international experts has been assembled, with the goal of sending the first members of the team to China by early next week. He said he is hoping officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will be part of the mission." https://www.npr.org/2020/02/08/804130735/whos-tedros-china-has-agreed-to-allow-international-team-probe-coronavirus https://www.npr.org/2020/02/08/804130735/whos-tedros-china-h...
- Renaud 7y ago
  >a lab technician at a hospital guesstimating 200-400 deaths daily at his hospital. I believe you mean this: https://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/242834342 https://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/242834342 Discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/f0miwj/a_hospital_worker_from_wuhan_is_posting/ https://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/f0miwj/a_hospital_wo... I would take it with a grain of salt but I agree that we should have little trust into the official reports from China, their track record is pretty bad and the government control over all news and discussions end up generating wild theories that basically can't be entirely proven or disproven. The death of Li Wenliang, the whistle-blower doctor and subsequent censoring of online discussions about the way he was treated by the authorities are also not helping: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3049634/li-wenliang-chinese-academics-call-justice-coronavirus-whistle https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3049634/li-...
- kps 7y ago
  It's the 9th in China, right? Someone on Reddit¹ has accurately predicted what China will report 4 days ago, following a quadratic. ¹ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/ez13dv/oc_quadratic_coronavirus_epidemic_growth_model/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/ez13dv/oc_...
- duxup 7y ago
  China was refusing a great deal of outside help and input until very recently.
- bart_spoon 7y ago
  The WHO and CDC have been trying to send people for weeks, and China has been refusing. Only today did they finally agree to let a committee from the WHO come to the country.

henryw 7y ago

New cases seem to be going down https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-cases/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-cases/

empath75 7y ago
There is some speculation that that is because they are at their limit for how many tests they can do per day.
- scoot 7y ago
  It would be flat in that case.
  - mrb 7y ago
    GP means if their processing limit is 3k tests per day, then at most they can report 3k new confirmed cases per day. And that's pretty much what we've seen since Jan 31: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%9320_Wuhan_coronavirus_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%932...
  - scotth 7y ago
    That's assuming supply of testing kits is constant.
    - throwaway1997 7y ago
      Not just that, the hospitals are completely jammed in certain areas which means if you get the illness it's often safer to just stay at home - but then it goes unreported.
    - scoot 7y ago
      Which is a different constraint to the one in the message I was replying to.
- terenceng2010 7y ago

empath75 7y ago

From what I have seen, the daily death toll is doubling every 5 days or so. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-toll/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-... I don’t know how long that can continue but at that rate it won’t be more than a couple of months before thousands are dying per day... Edit: since it takes 2 to 3 weeks to die from it, we really should be comparing the deaths now to the cases two weeks ago, which gives a much much higher mortality rate than is currently reported — maybe as high as 20% Based on how fast it spread, I definitely expect there to be ~300 people dying per day by next week, so you’re taking a SARS equivalent every 2 or 3 days.

scoot 7y ago
According to the site you linked to, the daily deaths growth factor is trending downwards.
- dpcan 7y ago
  I'd argue that there is absolutely no "trend" whatsoever. It's just that some people are dying from it, and that's what happens to some people when they get a virus.
chmod775 7y ago
> Based on how fast it spread, I definitely expect there to be ~300 people dying per day by next week, so you’re taking a SARS equivalent every 2 or 3 days. To put that into perspective: About 700 people die in traffic accidents in China every single day. So that'd be a point where it would (slowly) become a factor in mortality rates if it wasn't checked within 2020.
- eru 7y ago
  Wikipedia says about a few hundred thousand people globally die in a typical flu season that barely gets a mention in the news. That's perhaps the more topical comparison? Oh, and that doesn't include the people who die of the common cold--which is caused by a variety of viruses, the only common thing about them being our immune system's similar reaction. Rhinovirus are the most common, but also coronavirus.

clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago

What's the R0 value?

zamalek 7y ago
Estimated between 2.1 and 3.7, if I'm remembering correctly.
guramarx11 7y ago
somewhere between 2.2~(3 | 4 ?), one thing though, unlike SARS, WARS(nCoV) is already contagious during incubation period(14 days) and even before any symptoms cough/fever shows up, this SUPER complicates any measure to quarantine it
- totalZero 7y ago
  Just a heads-up, the WHO discourages geographic labels for diseases. Those labels may be totally orthogonal to the disease itself (as is the case with Spanish Flu), they punish localities for outbreak of (or association with) disease, and the fear of stigma could impact local officials' decisions about reporting outbreaks and seeking help from disease experts. https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/notes/2015/naming-new-diseases/en/ https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/notes/2015/naming-new-d...
  - uranusjr 7y ago
    I’ll stop calling this WARS when they stop saying MERS.

coldcode 7y ago

People are modeling the disease and thinking it will peak in a few weeks. I wonder how accurate such a model is if you have no idea how many people actually have the disease but have not been counted. The number of clusters of people with the virus are expanding (like the ski chalet in France). Could they create new expansions we aren't able to know yet?

post_break 7y ago

Official death toll. Part of me, and a growing number of people online, bet it's in the thousands, and it's being swept under the rug.

postalrat 7y ago
Or you are simply fantasizing about it being true.
- post_break 7y ago
  I don't fantasize about the death of people sorry.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  Possibly, but wouldn’t it be nice to be proven wrong in that case?
- nexuist 7y ago
  It's not a fantasy, but it's also not entirely malicious here. I can't find a source off the top of my head but the way China issues death reports is substantially different than how doctors do it in the West. In China if you die of heart failure while having nCoV-2019, your death certificate reports heart failure instead of the coronavirus. In the West, it would list both reasons as the cause of death. It is theorized that many doctors are listing the cause of death as pneumonia and not coronavirus because of this. It is similarly possible that some people die faster than they are able to be tested (the current test takes about 9 hours to complete). Regardless, it would be foolish to believe this as the golden "actual" number, even ignoring the CCP's (and frankly, other countries') vested interest in fudging these numbers. It would be unlikely that it counts deaths from before the medical community recognized this virus, deaths that have occurred before test results have been returned, and deaths that have occurred outside of the healthcare system (i.e. in quarantined apartments, households, remote villages, or secretive military bases).
  - AlbertoGP 7y ago
    I can't find a source off the top of my head but the way China issues death reports is substantially different than how doctors do it in the West. In China if you die of heart failure while having nCoV-2019, your death certificate reports heart failure instead of the coronavirus. In the West, it would list both reasons as the cause of death. This is one source of that being standard procedure for the flu, from an individual which has been reporting about China in his YouTube channel for years, having lived there: “... but I asked my wife, because she’s a Chinese doctor, I asked her, why is it that China only reports [say] 43 or 53 deaths a year from flu, but in the rest of the world we see these massive numbers, like in America 50K-80K a year? And well, she explained to me very simply: when somebody goes to the hospital in China with a complication, let’s say heart disease, or pneumonia, or you know, any other ailment, and then contracts the flu which then exacerbates that ailment and eventually leads to death, on the death certificate they’ll write down the cause of death as: heart disease, or pneumonia, or whatever that preexisting condition was, not as death from the flu. However in countries like America, if somebody goes and they have a preexisting condition but they die due to complications brought on by the flu, on their death certificate would be written «death due to complications brought on due to influenza», and so it’s marked down as a death caused by flu.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HE7Iz7HLpYg&t=4m12s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HE7Iz7HLpYg&t=4m12s BTW, that’s the same video I mentioned in another discussion three days ago: “China Sacrifices a Province to Save the World From Coronavirus” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22254414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22254414

camillomiller 7y ago

I’m still wondering if the Mobile World Congress will get canceled because of this. 5 companies pulled out already. Gsma minimizes the impact and consequences, but think about this: what if one single person is found positive? How would they manage the quarantine of the tens of thousand of attendees? If you were Barcelona’s mayor what would you do? Prioritize public safety and risking the bankruptcy of the event organizers, or let everything happen risking a health crisis? Hard decisions...

optymizer 7y ago
Risk of getting coronavirus is the reason I decided not to attend MWC after having registered and made all arrangements. I have family that will not survive an infection if I end up being infected. I was trying to rationalize that maybe it is not that risky but then I saw there are several companies attending that have "Wuhan" in the name, e.g. Wuhan Silicon Technologies Inc. Even if those were banned, there are dozens (hundreds?) of companies from China attending. Personally I decided it is too risky for my situation, but that's not to say others shouldn't go. I just worry about getting 300,000 people in a venue for 3 days. Sounds super risky. I might actually work from home for 2 weeks after my colleagues come back from the conference just to be safe.
totalZero 7y ago
In my view there's little upside to attending MWC this year for most large companies. They can publicize their new products just about as well by sending devices to reviewers and making cool videos, so there's very limited upside. And the downside is immense. Travel does a number on the immune system. Plus, if they're anything like me, people who travel to MWC for work will tend to get short-changed on sleep. That said, I don't think it really hurts the industry as a whole if MWC is cancelled, in the long term. But it may hurt MWC.
- camillomiller 7y ago
  Last year at MWC I slept 8 full hours. Over 5 days. It’s the forced networking after running around all day that really gets you... I hardly remember a year that I didn’t get back with a cold, a hurt back, a sore throat and so on. Why do we still do this to ourselves? I will absolutely cheer the first company that organizes the first streaming only event. Just get the products in the hand of reviewers a day or two before... What we don’t consider though is that mwc is also basically a place where salespersons and clients sit down to sign contracts. Not sure what it means for them if it gets canceled

falcolas 7y ago

Not to downplay the impact of the Coronavirus or it’s victims, but here is a bit of context: In roughly the same timeframe in the US, influenza and pneumonia has killed roughly 10,000 people, and has a mortality rate of 7.1%. The epidemic level starts at 7.2% https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm https://abcnews.go.com/Health/1300-people-died-flu-year/story?id=67754182 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/1300-people-died-flu-year/stor...

econcon 7y ago
Influenza isn't killing healthy people. It mostly kills old or new horns.
- falcolas 7y ago
  So is the Coronavirus.
  - igivanov 7y ago
    no. for this one, no reported infections in children 15yo or younger.
    - bart_spoon 7y ago
      It absolutely has infected children, as young as 36 hours old. There hasn't, however, been any reports of children dying.
      - igivanov 7y ago
        technically you are probably correct though I was more replying to the parent's statement that it kills newborns >The outbreak was first reported on December 31, but no children younger than 15 years old had been diagnosed as of January 22. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine said at the time that "children might be less likely to become infected or, if infected, may show milder symptoms" than adults. >Since then, doctors have recorded a few one-off cases among children: a 9-month-old girl in Beijing, a child in Germany whose father was diagnosed with the virus first, and a child in Shenzhen, China, who was infected but displayed no symptoms. >On Wednesday, Chinese authorities confirmed that an infant in Wuhan, China, had tested positive for the virus 30 hours after being born; the baby's mother is a coronavirus patient. https://www.sciencealert.com/experts-are-puzzled-over-why-so-few-children-have-caught-coronavirus-so-far https://www.sciencealert.com/experts-are-puzzled-over-why-so...

datashow 7y ago

I have serious doubt on the death count. According to the numbers I got from https://news.qq.com/zt2020/page/feiyan.htm https://news.qq.com/zt2020/page/feiyan.htm now: Death rate in Hubei province is 780/27100 = 2.88% Death rate in all the other provinces combined is 32/10127 = 0.32% So the death rate in Hubei is 9 times of other provinces. Is this really possible? ZheJiang province has 1075 confirmed cases now, but still 0 death count. Seriously? Hong Kong only has 26 confirmed cases, but already has 1 death count. For SARS, China has a 6.6%, much lower than other countries. For example, Hong Kong has a death rate of 17%. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr... ) Do international researchers use China's officially reported count in their modeling?

optymizer 7y ago
Just wanted to call out that I think calculating death rate as "deaths / infections" works for past infections but is wildly inaccurate today because the majority of infections have no resolution yet. I'd say "deaths / recoveries" or maybe "deaths / (deaths + recoveries)" is probably better, with the caveat that it is likely much higher than the final number it's going to settle at as more people recover. I've been using recovery numbers from https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6 https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h... .
- datashow 7y ago
  Great work. But I don't see "deaths / recoveries" or "deaths / (deaths + recoveries)" on your webpage.
  - inferiorhuman 7y ago
    That's because most reputable sources don't have enough information to make a reasonable estimate of the case fatality rate. The JHU map only shows raw numbers. If you're using deaths as a proportion of known outcomes, Hubei has come down to about 35%. Other provinces are reporting, at most, six deaths. I don't believe the numbers coming from China for one bit. Yes, Hubei is overwhelmed, but it really wouldn't take much to overwhelm most health care networks (in- or outside China). Dutch wire service BNO News is reporting that a Japanese national who died in Wuhan was believed to be infected with the coronavirus but not included in the official coronavirus death count.

volgo 7y ago

Just curious, how does it compare to H1N1 currently? Think it will be more or less contained?

guramarx11 7y ago
short answer is we have to wait for "28 days later", the long answer is... complicated, please take this with a grain of salt the first tide of WARS(nCoV) "Contagion" have either become ill(hospitalized and quarantined) or dead, so now we're waiting to see if the number of cases outside of China still climbs as a local transmission epidemic If this tide continues, international country like eg Singapore can super-spread this into global pandemic like H1N1 unless we close off borders and ban all flights/shippings economics/travels... How viable is such containment actually remains to be seen, lets pray for the best