6 ms·

Japanese woman confirmed as coronavirus case for second time

104 points by doppp 7y ago

blackrock 7y ago
I’m gonna say it. We should be lucky this virus originated in China. It was bound to happen with all the globalization. What they did with their lockdown, and welding people inside their apartment buildings, is a godsend for the rest of us. They bought the world time to prepare, to understand the virus, and maybe develop a remedy or vaccine. But instead of taking positive action, most people of the world just mocked the Chinese people. This was incredibly short sighted. Imagine if this virus originated from bats in South America. Or from bats in Austin or Seattle, and with a president too incompetent to mobilize or do anything. If the mortality and infection statistics hold across the board, then a large majority of us might be dead by now.
- president 7y ago
  Not surprising that a guy with a username of a company that shills for China is spouting apologist nonsense. Imagine praising a government that has not been transparent with a deadly disease not just once with COVID-19 but with SARS many years back leading to so many unnecessary deaths. Not to mention - how do you expect people to take action when the CCP actively withheld crucial information about the virus and to this day refuses to cooperate with the CDC?
  - blackrock 7y ago
    Typical nonsense from Doomers like you, with nothing substantial to add to the conversation. They’ve shared plenty of information, including the damn genome of the virus itself, immediately after it was discovered to have an unknown signature. And what is the CDC going to do that will be helpful anyways? Are they going to send a bunch of English speaking scientists into Wuhan, to communicate with people who speak in Chinese? How will that help? They’ll need to be babysat, and provided a translator, and special accommodations, when China is in crisis mode. People like you hold the authorities of China, to a standard that you yourself can’t even match. Read this to get an understanding between the American CDC versus China’s CDC. https://www.quora.com/Will-the-Wuhan-virus-and-the-subsequent-handling-of-it-lead-to-the-collapse-of-the-Chinese-Communist-Party https://www.quora.com/Will-the-Wuhan-virus-and-the-subsequen... Read this from China’s CDC to see the statistics and case studies. https://github.com/cmrivers/ncov/blob/master/COVID-19.pdf https://github.com/cmrivers/ncov/blob/master/COVID-19.pdf
  - jsjddbbwj 7y ago
    Pretty sure you can say the same thing without crying and without using personal attacks.
    - president 7y ago
      Nobody is crying here except the people of China who are being further oppressed at a crucial time like this. Pretty sure you could post some counter-arguments instead of posting unsubstantive comments that take the argument nowhere.
svd4anything 7y ago
> Tierno said much remains unknown about the virus. “I’m not certain that this is not bi-phasic, like anthrax,” he said, meaning the disease appears to go away before recurring.
- void_nill 7y ago
  I've seen this many times in the last few weeks. Can people please stop copying and pasting individual sentences of an article out of the actual context of the article and posting them in the comments. Even without a comment of their own. This way the article cannot be viewed objectively and that is also the reason why misinformation is spread. We are not in other "social communities" here. Thank you.
  - svd4anything 7y ago
    Ok I get it. But in truth your reaction is a coping mechanism for information that makes you uncomfortable. The quote is not misinformation and is actually the entire primary point of the article. Which in my experience those type of comments help me decide to read it in full. Anyway, sorry it annoys you.
  - svd4anything 7y ago
    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-reinfection-explainer/explainer-coronavirus-reappears-in-discharged-patients-raising-questions-in-containment-fight-idUSKCN20M124 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-reinfection-...
throwaway122378 7y ago
Time to panic? Edit: lots of downvotes but that was a serious question.
- echelon 7y ago
  China panicked in Wuhan. People got welded inside their homes.
  - redis_mlc 7y ago
    > People got welded inside their homes. Great netaphor! The article mentioned the Japanese woman is a tour bus guide, so you can imagine how serious that is.
    - modwest 7y ago
      Don’t think they were speaking metaphorically
      - dalacv 7y ago
        forced quarantine. imagine trying that in the US
        3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
        Because the US fundamentally won’t take strong-arm approach is why everyone should be prepared to hunker down in their own homes for a few weeks or even months if there’s a local outbreak. You can’t trust anyone sick to voluntarily quarantine.
        PopeDotNinja 7y ago
        This is why having people working paycheck to paycheck without health insurance is the worst. You can't stay home when you can't afford to. A lack of job security doesn't help either.
rosstex 7y ago
Mayo Clinic assessment of the 2003 SARS coronavirus: >A biphasic course has been described in many patients, with an initial illness followed by improvement and then subsequent deterioration. This worsening can present as recurrent fever 4 to 7 days after initial defervescence, new chest infiltrates, respiratory failure, or watery diarrhea. In a cohort of 75 patients in Hong Kong, 85% had recurrent symptoms after initial improvement. The authors described a triphasic course with fever, myalgia early in week 1, and recurrent fever, hypoxemia, diarrhea, and shifting chest infiltrates in week 2. Twenty percent of patients progressed to ARDS during the third week of the illness. Quantitative reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) of nasopharyngeal aspirate in 14 patients with relapse showed peak viral loads occurred at day 10 after onset of symptoms, suggesting that the late deterioration may be due to the host immune response rather than to uncontrolled viral replication. (Granted, the Japanese woman's symptoms disappeared for almost a month before reappearing.) https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(11)62689-X/pdf https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(11)...
- s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
  Similar to SARs and the 1918 Flu cause your own immune system to suffocate you as it sends too many white blood cells to the infection. It's called a cytokine storm. This is why this virus is not only dangerous to the old and weak, a healthy person's immune system becomes a liability in the following phases of infection. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4711683/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4711683/ https://mmbr.asm.org/content/76/1/16 https://mmbr.asm.org/content/76/1/16 http://cytokinestorm.com/ http://cytokinestorm.com/
  - knzhou 7y ago
    This just isn't true. The 1918 flu mortality rate had a peak for people in their 20s (the so-called W shaped curve). But COVID-19's mortality rate is much lower for the young, like most illnesses.
    - s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
aazaa 7y ago
Two things stand out: 1. This was a tour bus guide. Someone who had almost certainly come into contact with people from different countries. 2. She's not the first patient to relapse.
vackosar 7y ago
Cov19 likely contains HIV like mutation making it more infectious and maybe harder to build immunity to https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3052495/coronavirus-far-more-likely-sars-bond-human-cells-scientists-say https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3052495/coro...
sigmaprimus 7y ago
There is so much about this disease that is still unknown, the mere thought that it might lie dormant then flare up again like some sort of herpes infection(the mention bi-phasic but it could be much worse) is terrifying. One possible positive if there is such a thing is that if "Wuhan Fever" becomes a pandemic that kills off a large enough portion of the global population maybe it will solve the global warming crisis or at the least slow it down.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- JamesBarney 7y ago
  The upside of your family dying in that car wreck is you'll save on your health insurance each month.
  - sigmaprimus 7y ago
    Good point, but I would think even the current travel restrictions being imposed by various countries must result is a reduction of greenhouse gas production. I would also imagine that there may be a reduction in holiday travel plans just out of fear of being quarantined. Not to mention the effect a global recession would have on CO2 production.
    - Fjolsvith 7y ago
      And, with global demand for oil dropping, gas will get cheaper!
- hurrdurr2 7y ago
  You had me until the second paragraph. Perhaps we can have a way to reduce global climate change without mass suffering and death.
- triceratops 7y ago
  > a pandemic that kills off a large enough portion of the global population...will solve the global warming crisis The global warming crisis is a crisis because it has the potential to kill off a large portion of the global population. I'm not an expert or anything but a pandemic that does the same thing doesn't seem like an improvement.
skokage 7y ago
FTA: >"Japan has changed its strategy in combating the contagion, seeking to slow its spread and minimize the number of deaths." In my personal opinion living and working here, this society is very slow to change and things that could greatly assist in slowing the spread, such as adopting a Work From Home policy, will only occur once it's too late. Almost no one is allowed to work from home here, even those with office/tech jobs that can completely be done remotely with no issues. In addition, workers are granted an incredibly small amount of days off, and most would rather get onto their very crowded trains and commute into the office even when unwell as opposed to taking one of their limited days off. All that being said I'm not freaking out about it the way most people here are, but I wish companies would react a bit faster and change their work culture to accommodate the very easy things that could be done so people can limit their interactions with others when something like this is occurring. You can pretty much guarantee that one person with the virus getting onto a sardine can train during their morning commute is going to infect several other people in the process, and no amount of face masks the people here are so fond of will do anything to keep an infection at bay.
- FortCollinsDev 7y ago
  I’m having flashbacks from Plague Inc.
- qiqitori 7y ago
  Could be that my (IT) company is an outlier, but we've been told that we should work remote and only come to the office if we absolutely must. And if we do go to work, we are to avoid riding the trains during rush hour. Business trips are all canceled. Well that's the company I'm employed by, but the company I'm currently deployed at (until today) is an automotive company and they don't seem ready to allow much remote work to take place.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
    > my (IT) company IT as in Information Technology or Italy?
- leolink 7y ago
blackrock 7y ago
What has been the efficacy of antibiotics on this virus? Normally if you get sick, and it develops into bronchitis, the doctor just prescribes you some antibiotics, the ZPack. Has that not helped in this situation?
- s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
  Antibiotics don't work for viral infections, only bacterial infections.
Grue3 7y ago
The virus seems to be spreading much slower in Japan than in Korea or Italy. Despite having infections quite early, the number of cases is still surprisingly low, with linear growth instead of exponential. Maybe some cultural factors like self-isolation and not touching each other are at play here.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Benmcdonald__ 7y ago
  Japan is the most hygiene and clean country. Bowing instead of handshakes would help too. Also public touching is uncommon
lbeltrame 7y ago
From this report from the NHK (https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20200227_12/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20200227_12/) it shows that she was discharged very quickly after being diagnosed. Compared to the other cases we've seen, IMO this points to a mistake when testing, as the people in the comments have discussed.

104 points by doppp 7y ago

I’m gonna say it. We should be lucky this virus originated in China. It was bound to happen with all the globalization. What they did with their lockdown, and welding people inside their apartment buildings, is a godsend for the rest of us. They bought the world time to prepare, to understand the virus, and maybe develop a remedy or vaccine. But instead of taking positive action, most people of the world just mocked the Chinese people. This was incredibly short sighted. Imagine if this virus originated from bats in South America. Or from bats in Austin or Seattle, and with a president too incompetent to mobilize or do anything. If the mortality and infection statistics hold across the board, then a large majority of us might be dead by now.

president 7y ago
Not surprising that a guy with a username of a company that shills for China is spouting apologist nonsense. Imagine praising a government that has not been transparent with a deadly disease not just once with COVID-19 but with SARS many years back leading to so many unnecessary deaths. Not to mention - how do you expect people to take action when the CCP actively withheld crucial information about the virus and to this day refuses to cooperate with the CDC?
- blackrock 7y ago
  Typical nonsense from Doomers like you, with nothing substantial to add to the conversation. They’ve shared plenty of information, including the damn genome of the virus itself, immediately after it was discovered to have an unknown signature. And what is the CDC going to do that will be helpful anyways? Are they going to send a bunch of English speaking scientists into Wuhan, to communicate with people who speak in Chinese? How will that help? They’ll need to be babysat, and provided a translator, and special accommodations, when China is in crisis mode. People like you hold the authorities of China, to a standard that you yourself can’t even match. Read this to get an understanding between the American CDC versus China’s CDC. https://www.quora.com/Will-the-Wuhan-virus-and-the-subsequent-handling-of-it-lead-to-the-collapse-of-the-Chinese-Communist-Party https://www.quora.com/Will-the-Wuhan-virus-and-the-subsequen... Read this from China’s CDC to see the statistics and case studies. https://github.com/cmrivers/ncov/blob/master/COVID-19.pdf https://github.com/cmrivers/ncov/blob/master/COVID-19.pdf
- jsjddbbwj 7y ago
  Pretty sure you can say the same thing without crying and without using personal attacks.
  - president 7y ago
    Nobody is crying here except the people of China who are being further oppressed at a crucial time like this. Pretty sure you could post some counter-arguments instead of posting unsubstantive comments that take the argument nowhere.

svd4anything 7y ago

> Tierno said much remains unknown about the virus. “I’m not certain that this is not bi-phasic, like anthrax,” he said, meaning the disease appears to go away before recurring.

void_nill 7y ago
I've seen this many times in the last few weeks. Can people please stop copying and pasting individual sentences of an article out of the actual context of the article and posting them in the comments. Even without a comment of their own. This way the article cannot be viewed objectively and that is also the reason why misinformation is spread. We are not in other "social communities" here. Thank you.
- svd4anything 7y ago
  Ok I get it. But in truth your reaction is a coping mechanism for information that makes you uncomfortable. The quote is not misinformation and is actually the entire primary point of the article. Which in my experience those type of comments help me decide to read it in full. Anyway, sorry it annoys you.
- svd4anything 7y ago
  https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-reinfection-explainer/explainer-coronavirus-reappears-in-discharged-patients-raising-questions-in-containment-fight-idUSKCN20M124 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-reinfection-...

throwaway122378 7y ago

Time to panic? Edit: lots of downvotes but that was a serious question.

echelon 7y ago
China panicked in Wuhan. People got welded inside their homes.
- redis_mlc 7y ago
  > People got welded inside their homes. Great netaphor! The article mentioned the Japanese woman is a tour bus guide, so you can imagine how serious that is.
  - modwest 7y ago
    Don’t think they were speaking metaphorically
    - dalacv 7y ago
      forced quarantine. imagine trying that in the US
      - 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
        Because the US fundamentally won’t take strong-arm approach is why everyone should be prepared to hunker down in their own homes for a few weeks or even months if there’s a local outbreak. You can’t trust anyone sick to voluntarily quarantine.
        PopeDotNinja 7y ago
        This is why having people working paycheck to paycheck without health insurance is the worst. You can't stay home when you can't afford to. A lack of job security doesn't help either.

rosstex 7y ago

Mayo Clinic assessment of the 2003 SARS coronavirus: >A biphasic course has been described in many patients, with an initial illness followed by improvement and then subsequent deterioration. This worsening can present as recurrent fever 4 to 7 days after initial defervescence, new chest infiltrates, respiratory failure, or watery diarrhea. In a cohort of 75 patients in Hong Kong, 85% had recurrent symptoms after initial improvement. The authors described a triphasic course with fever, myalgia early in week 1, and recurrent fever, hypoxemia, diarrhea, and shifting chest infiltrates in week 2. Twenty percent of patients progressed to ARDS during the third week of the illness. Quantitative reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) of nasopharyngeal aspirate in 14 patients with relapse showed peak viral loads occurred at day 10 after onset of symptoms, suggesting that the late deterioration may be due to the host immune response rather than to uncontrolled viral replication. (Granted, the Japanese woman's symptoms disappeared for almost a month before reappearing.) https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(11)62689-X/pdf https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(11)...

s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
Similar to SARs and the 1918 Flu cause your own immune system to suffocate you as it sends too many white blood cells to the infection. It's called a cytokine storm. This is why this virus is not only dangerous to the old and weak, a healthy person's immune system becomes a liability in the following phases of infection. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4711683/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4711683/ https://mmbr.asm.org/content/76/1/16 https://mmbr.asm.org/content/76/1/16 http://cytokinestorm.com/ http://cytokinestorm.com/
- knzhou 7y ago
  This just isn't true. The 1918 flu mortality rate had a peak for people in their 20s (the so-called W shaped curve). But COVID-19's mortality rate is much lower for the young, like most illnesses.
  - s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago

aazaa 7y ago

Two things stand out: 1. This was a tour bus guide. Someone who had almost certainly come into contact with people from different countries. 2. She's not the first patient to relapse.

vackosar 7y ago

Cov19 likely contains HIV like mutation making it more infectious and maybe harder to build immunity to https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3052495/coronavirus-far-more-likely-sars-bond-human-cells-scientists-say https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3052495/coro...

sigmaprimus 7y ago

There is so much about this disease that is still unknown, the mere thought that it might lie dormant then flare up again like some sort of herpes infection(the mention bi-phasic but it could be much worse) is terrifying. One possible positive if there is such a thing is that if "Wuhan Fever" becomes a pandemic that kills off a large enough portion of the global population maybe it will solve the global warming crisis or at the least slow it down.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
JamesBarney 7y ago
The upside of your family dying in that car wreck is you'll save on your health insurance each month.
- sigmaprimus 7y ago
  Good point, but I would think even the current travel restrictions being imposed by various countries must result is a reduction of greenhouse gas production. I would also imagine that there may be a reduction in holiday travel plans just out of fear of being quarantined. Not to mention the effect a global recession would have on CO2 production.
  - Fjolsvith 7y ago
    And, with global demand for oil dropping, gas will get cheaper!
hurrdurr2 7y ago
You had me until the second paragraph. Perhaps we can have a way to reduce global climate change without mass suffering and death.
triceratops 7y ago
> a pandemic that kills off a large enough portion of the global population...will solve the global warming crisis The global warming crisis is a crisis because it has the potential to kill off a large portion of the global population. I'm not an expert or anything but a pandemic that does the same thing doesn't seem like an improvement.

skokage 7y ago

FTA: >"Japan has changed its strategy in combating the contagion, seeking to slow its spread and minimize the number of deaths." In my personal opinion living and working here, this society is very slow to change and things that could greatly assist in slowing the spread, such as adopting a Work From Home policy, will only occur once it's too late. Almost no one is allowed to work from home here, even those with office/tech jobs that can completely be done remotely with no issues. In addition, workers are granted an incredibly small amount of days off, and most would rather get onto their very crowded trains and commute into the office even when unwell as opposed to taking one of their limited days off. All that being said I'm not freaking out about it the way most people here are, but I wish companies would react a bit faster and change their work culture to accommodate the very easy things that could be done so people can limit their interactions with others when something like this is occurring. You can pretty much guarantee that one person with the virus getting onto a sardine can train during their morning commute is going to infect several other people in the process, and no amount of face masks the people here are so fond of will do anything to keep an infection at bay.

FortCollinsDev 7y ago
I’m having flashbacks from Plague Inc.
qiqitori 7y ago
Could be that my (IT) company is an outlier, but we've been told that we should work remote and only come to the office if we absolutely must. And if we do go to work, we are to avoid riding the trains during rush hour. Business trips are all canceled. Well that's the company I'm employed by, but the company I'm currently deployed at (until today) is an automotive company and they don't seem ready to allow much remote work to take place.
- dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
  > my (IT) company IT as in Information Technology or Italy?
leolink 7y ago

blackrock 7y ago

What has been the efficacy of antibiotics on this virus? Normally if you get sick, and it develops into bronchitis, the doctor just prescribes you some antibiotics, the ZPack. Has that not helped in this situation?

s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
Antibiotics don't work for viral infections, only bacterial infections.

Grue3 7y ago

The virus seems to be spreading much slower in Japan than in Korea or Italy. Despite having infections quite early, the number of cases is still surprisingly low, with linear growth instead of exponential. Maybe some cultural factors like self-isolation and not touching each other are at play here.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Benmcdonald__ 7y ago
Japan is the most hygiene and clean country. Bowing instead of handshakes would help too. Also public touching is uncommon

lbeltrame 7y ago

From this report from the NHK (https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20200227_12/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20200227_12/) it shows that she was discharged very quickly after being diagnosed. Compared to the other cases we've seen, IMO this points to a mistake when testing, as the people in the comments have discussed.