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Go check out the case fatality rate and estimated r0 for the Spanish Flu of 1918-the deadliest pandemic of the past several centuries. You'll note that its char

Go check out the case fatality rate and estimated r0 for the Spanish Flu of 1918-the deadliest pandemic of the past several centuries. You'll note that its characteristics are fairly similar to what we know of Covid-19. The only break we get is that young adults don't seem nearly as susceptible to Covid-19 as they were to Spanish Flu. But everything else points to the possibility of a pandemic along the lines of Spanish Flu. That's why we are so concerned. Media aside, the CDC isn't prime to exaggeration, and China isn't prone to completely shutting down the economy of entire provinces of millions of people without dire need. And there's every reason to believe we will have a similar experience to China's.

themagician 7y ago
Everything else doesn’t point to that. Media FUD points to that. If we have a similar experience to that of China it seems like it won’t be a big deal. In 2018-2019 80,000 people died from the flu in the United States. 80,000. No one really cared. The death rate for the current coronavirus seems to be about 2%, but it’s likely even lower than that since so many cases are going unreported since the symptoms are so mild in most people. I see this whole thing as some kind of bizarre media externality. The disease here is a social one. It’s like the media has evolved in such a way that FUD has manifested into something that is almost tangible. It’s not the coronavirus you need be worried about, but the meta-coronavirus. It’s making people crazy.
- shard972 7y ago
  Your repeating bullshit and should delete your comment. Anyone looking at the situation knows there is a serious concern that the deathrates will heavily depend on if people will have access to critical care like drugs and ventilators. If COVID-19 reaches flu levels of infection its insane to believe that countries like africa or even a lot of western countries would be able to give such medical treatment to 10% of their populations.
- mike_d 7y ago
  > The death rate for the current coronavirus seems to be about 2% The United States has about 2.7 hospital beds per thousand people. Hospitalization and attentive care is the biggest contributor to survival rates for COVID-19 patients. This is why medical professionals are concerned that is spreads effectively without presenting symptoms. One day you are going to wake up and every primary care facility will be overwhelmed.
  - themagician 7y ago
    I’ll start to worry after the first 80,000 people die. The US has shit medical care for most people. People will get sick and die before thinking about going to the hospital. I wouldn’t worry about them being overwhelmed.
    - empath75 7y ago
      Then people will die at home.
    - mlyle 7y ago
      > I’ll start to worry after the first 80,000 people die. Flu's already horrible. You'll take it seriously only when it's proven that it's going to be much, much worse than flu? I'm glad that most people take measures before calamity.
- allannienhuis 7y ago
  Agree with you 100%. I have a family member that specializes in communicable disease - she's got 25+ years of experience working on the front lines specializing in responding to disease outbreaks like this. She literally writes the policies and training material for professionals in this area. She's absolutely livid at the way the media and politicians are dealing with this. The CDC and WHO are being forced to respond the way they are because of the political and social pressure. They're trying to keep people from panicking but they just get accused of trying to cover up 'the truth' if they try to downplay the media driven frenzy.
  - pbourke 7y ago
    Can you ask your family member why she thinks China is destroying their economy over this?
  - candybar 7y ago
    I've never really been worried about disease outbreaks in the past but this is different. > she's got 25+ years of experience working on the front lines specializing in responding to disease outbreaks like this. She literally writes the policies and training material for professionals in this area. This isn't the right set of qualifications when it comes to understanding the total impact. Aside from the front line staff often not having a high-level understanding of epidemiology, I also don't think she understands the economic costs of containment. Early on, there was a huge amount of complacency because we've been successful in the past and nothing like this ever came to pass. Expertise in some narrow field can only go so far - unless they are familiar with this particular case, how different it is from other pathogens they have experience and sufficiently mathematically inclined to be able to extrapolate beyond the existing data. We have a once-in-a-life type of pathogen IMO and 25-years of experience may not matter much if they are merely looking back in their experience to find similar situations. > She's absolutely livid at the way the media and politicians are dealing with this. The CDC and WHO are being forced to respond the way they are because of the political and social pressure. They're trying to keep people from panicking but they just get accused of trying to cover up 'the truth' if they try to downplay the media driven frenzy. How people tend to respond to events like this is part of the reality of the situation. You can't simply hand-wave away the social, political and economic consequences of the expected responses and how that affects the disease-fighting efforts. This reminds me of the financial crisis - if you did a top-down analysis, it pointed to an unprecedented situation and it was easy to see how the market actors would response in a way that would compound the crisis but but most experts had never seen something like this, didn't have a comprehensive understanding of how things work, had never seen true panic and had some flawed models telling them that in some perfect world, things are fine and some of the earlier market movements were irrational overreactions.
- animalnewbie 7y ago
  > symptoms are so mild... I have to confess that im not following the entire situation but your statement brings me some hope so I'm asking- can one get affected and still not get sick at all? I'm also hearing that people can get and ARE getting reinfected.
  - empath75 7y ago
    The majority of cases are mild or don’t have any symptoms. It’s 10 times deadlier than the flu, but that just means 4 out of 1000 40 year olds will die from it compared to 4 out of 10,000 for the flu. 95% of people under 18 have no symptoms. There are no reported deaths of children. But if you have heart disease or diabetes or other health issues, or are over 70, you’ve got a 1 in ten chance of dying or worse.
bsder 7y ago
> The only break we get is that young adults don't seem nearly as susceptible to Covid-19 as they were to Spanish Flu. The suspicion was that Spanish Flu set off cytokine storms in young people with robust immune systems. This doesn't seem to be happening with Covid-19.
- cstejerean 7y ago
  Yes, instead it’s setting off cytokine storms in older people.
- bcrosby95 7y ago
  Actually it didn't at first. The Spanish Flu went through 3 waves. The first wave was very similar to the standard flu. Fairly mild, primarily killed the elderly and sick. It first appeared around January. The 2nd wave is what killed young people. It didn't show up until August.
chillacy 7y ago
More people died from the Spanish Flu than from combat in WW1 and WW2 combined. That was the first global pandemic due to soldiers traveling around the world. What's a modern version going to look like in an era of airplane travel?
- themagician 7y ago
  25x more people died from the flu in 2018 in the United States alone then have died from COVID-19 globally.
  - mlyle 7y ago
    ... so far.
    - themagician 7y ago
      Even this year… 16,000 people have died from the flu so far, and this is a particularly mild year, save for the high amount of childhood deaths. COVID-19 seems to be almost completely manufactured hysteria based on fuzzy math which includes using very low estimates of the number of infected to artificially increase the fatality rate.
      - mikeyouse 7y ago
        When all of the top epidemiologists, public health officials, and physicians from around the globe are sounding the alarm to take something seriously - it's probably a good idea to take it seriously. If it turns out that Covid-19 is a dud in terms of impact, it will be because of not in spite of the substantial steps people are taking to be prepared.
        themagician 7y ago
        All the headlines seem menacing but then I look at the data and stand back and say WTF. It already is a dud. Relatively speaking, very few people die from this. 80%+ of confirmed cases are so mild you have to wonder why they were even tested. It seems to not spread as fast as the flu. No children have died. Basically, it’s been three month and 2,000 people over 70 have died globally. More people died from the flu LAST WEEK IN THE US ALONE.
adrr 7y ago
Diamond Princess cruise ship shows that it’s not even close to Spanish flu in mortality. Because the symptoms are mild for 80% of people, the reported cases are severely underreported. Only when a whole populace is tested do we see the true infection rate.
- jnbiche 7y ago
  OK, you've mentioned two different measurements: infection rate (I'm guessing you're referring to R0) and mortality (do you mean mortality rate or case fatality rate, because I was referring to the latter one). The cruise ship had a strict room-based quarantine, so that would not infect the R0 of a general community-based outbreak, unless we institute similar measures (confining people to their houses, which is likely not feasible). If you're referring to case fatality rate, I'm really interested in that data. Do you have a link? The case fatality rate from the cruise ship is a very small sample, and a very specific population, so it's susceptible to all kinds of bias. It's unlikely to be an accurate reflection of case fatality rate in the general population. Still, I'm interested in those numbers. I've not been able to find them online. Did they test all the people on the cruise ship?
- koheripbal 7y ago
  Diamond Princess cruise ship shows nothing yet. Most those who got sick are still sick. You cannot do the mortality math until people are either dead or cured.
tim333 7y ago
>every reason to believe we will have a similar experience to China's. With a bit of luck you may have an experience more like Singapore, the UK or Vietnam (30 active cases, 72 recovered, 15 active, 8 recovered, and 0 active, 16 recovered respectively) China got off to a bad start due to the thing starting there and being unexpected.
- koheripbal 7y ago
  Singapore has tested thousands of people, and meticulously traced every single contact. In the US, we are far far worse off with cases popping up everywhere of unknown origin and almost zero testing.

themagician 7y ago

Everything else doesn’t point to that. Media FUD points to that. If we have a similar experience to that of China it seems like it won’t be a big deal. In 2018-2019 80,000 people died from the flu in the United States. 80,000. No one really cared. The death rate for the current coronavirus seems to be about 2%, but it’s likely even lower than that since so many cases are going unreported since the symptoms are so mild in most people. I see this whole thing as some kind of bizarre media externality. The disease here is a social one. It’s like the media has evolved in such a way that FUD has manifested into something that is almost tangible. It’s not the coronavirus you need be worried about, but the meta-coronavirus. It’s making people crazy.

shard972 7y ago
Your repeating bullshit and should delete your comment. Anyone looking at the situation knows there is a serious concern that the deathrates will heavily depend on if people will have access to critical care like drugs and ventilators. If COVID-19 reaches flu levels of infection its insane to believe that countries like africa or even a lot of western countries would be able to give such medical treatment to 10% of their populations.
mike_d 7y ago
> The death rate for the current coronavirus seems to be about 2% The United States has about 2.7 hospital beds per thousand people. Hospitalization and attentive care is the biggest contributor to survival rates for COVID-19 patients. This is why medical professionals are concerned that is spreads effectively without presenting symptoms. One day you are going to wake up and every primary care facility will be overwhelmed.
- themagician 7y ago
  I’ll start to worry after the first 80,000 people die. The US has shit medical care for most people. People will get sick and die before thinking about going to the hospital. I wouldn’t worry about them being overwhelmed.
  - empath75 7y ago
    Then people will die at home.
  - mlyle 7y ago
    > I’ll start to worry after the first 80,000 people die. Flu's already horrible. You'll take it seriously only when it's proven that it's going to be much, much worse than flu? I'm glad that most people take measures before calamity.
allannienhuis 7y ago
Agree with you 100%. I have a family member that specializes in communicable disease - she's got 25+ years of experience working on the front lines specializing in responding to disease outbreaks like this. She literally writes the policies and training material for professionals in this area. She's absolutely livid at the way the media and politicians are dealing with this. The CDC and WHO are being forced to respond the way they are because of the political and social pressure. They're trying to keep people from panicking but they just get accused of trying to cover up 'the truth' if they try to downplay the media driven frenzy.
- pbourke 7y ago
  Can you ask your family member why she thinks China is destroying their economy over this?
- candybar 7y ago
  I've never really been worried about disease outbreaks in the past but this is different. > she's got 25+ years of experience working on the front lines specializing in responding to disease outbreaks like this. She literally writes the policies and training material for professionals in this area. This isn't the right set of qualifications when it comes to understanding the total impact. Aside from the front line staff often not having a high-level understanding of epidemiology, I also don't think she understands the economic costs of containment. Early on, there was a huge amount of complacency because we've been successful in the past and nothing like this ever came to pass. Expertise in some narrow field can only go so far - unless they are familiar with this particular case, how different it is from other pathogens they have experience and sufficiently mathematically inclined to be able to extrapolate beyond the existing data. We have a once-in-a-life type of pathogen IMO and 25-years of experience may not matter much if they are merely looking back in their experience to find similar situations. > She's absolutely livid at the way the media and politicians are dealing with this. The CDC and WHO are being forced to respond the way they are because of the political and social pressure. They're trying to keep people from panicking but they just get accused of trying to cover up 'the truth' if they try to downplay the media driven frenzy. How people tend to respond to events like this is part of the reality of the situation. You can't simply hand-wave away the social, political and economic consequences of the expected responses and how that affects the disease-fighting efforts. This reminds me of the financial crisis - if you did a top-down analysis, it pointed to an unprecedented situation and it was easy to see how the market actors would response in a way that would compound the crisis but but most experts had never seen something like this, didn't have a comprehensive understanding of how things work, had never seen true panic and had some flawed models telling them that in some perfect world, things are fine and some of the earlier market movements were irrational overreactions.
animalnewbie 7y ago
> symptoms are so mild... I have to confess that im not following the entire situation but your statement brings me some hope so I'm asking- can one get affected and still not get sick at all? I'm also hearing that people can get and ARE getting reinfected.
- empath75 7y ago
  The majority of cases are mild or don’t have any symptoms. It’s 10 times deadlier than the flu, but that just means 4 out of 1000 40 year olds will die from it compared to 4 out of 10,000 for the flu. 95% of people under 18 have no symptoms. There are no reported deaths of children. But if you have heart disease or diabetes or other health issues, or are over 70, you’ve got a 1 in ten chance of dying or worse.

bsder 7y ago

> The only break we get is that young adults don't seem nearly as susceptible to Covid-19 as they were to Spanish Flu. The suspicion was that Spanish Flu set off cytokine storms in young people with robust immune systems. This doesn't seem to be happening with Covid-19.

cstejerean 7y ago
Yes, instead it’s setting off cytokine storms in older people.
bcrosby95 7y ago
Actually it didn't at first. The Spanish Flu went through 3 waves. The first wave was very similar to the standard flu. Fairly mild, primarily killed the elderly and sick. It first appeared around January. The 2nd wave is what killed young people. It didn't show up until August.

chillacy 7y ago

More people died from the Spanish Flu than from combat in WW1 and WW2 combined. That was the first global pandemic due to soldiers traveling around the world. What's a modern version going to look like in an era of airplane travel?

themagician 7y ago
25x more people died from the flu in 2018 in the United States alone then have died from COVID-19 globally.
- mlyle 7y ago
  ... so far.
  - themagician 7y ago
    Even this year… 16,000 people have died from the flu so far, and this is a particularly mild year, save for the high amount of childhood deaths. COVID-19 seems to be almost completely manufactured hysteria based on fuzzy math which includes using very low estimates of the number of infected to artificially increase the fatality rate.
    - mikeyouse 7y ago
      When all of the top epidemiologists, public health officials, and physicians from around the globe are sounding the alarm to take something seriously - it's probably a good idea to take it seriously. If it turns out that Covid-19 is a dud in terms of impact, it will be because of not in spite of the substantial steps people are taking to be prepared.
      - themagician 7y ago
        All the headlines seem menacing but then I look at the data and stand back and say WTF. It already is a dud. Relatively speaking, very few people die from this. 80%+ of confirmed cases are so mild you have to wonder why they were even tested. It seems to not spread as fast as the flu. No children have died. Basically, it’s been three month and 2,000 people over 70 have died globally. More people died from the flu LAST WEEK IN THE US ALONE.

adrr 7y ago

Diamond Princess cruise ship shows that it’s not even close to Spanish flu in mortality. Because the symptoms are mild for 80% of people, the reported cases are severely underreported. Only when a whole populace is tested do we see the true infection rate.

jnbiche 7y ago
OK, you've mentioned two different measurements: infection rate (I'm guessing you're referring to R0) and mortality (do you mean mortality rate or case fatality rate, because I was referring to the latter one). The cruise ship had a strict room-based quarantine, so that would not infect the R0 of a general community-based outbreak, unless we institute similar measures (confining people to their houses, which is likely not feasible). If you're referring to case fatality rate, I'm really interested in that data. Do you have a link? The case fatality rate from the cruise ship is a very small sample, and a very specific population, so it's susceptible to all kinds of bias. It's unlikely to be an accurate reflection of case fatality rate in the general population. Still, I'm interested in those numbers. I've not been able to find them online. Did they test all the people on the cruise ship?
koheripbal 7y ago
Diamond Princess cruise ship shows nothing yet. Most those who got sick are still sick. You cannot do the mortality math until people are either dead or cured.

tim333 7y ago

>every reason to believe we will have a similar experience to China's. With a bit of luck you may have an experience more like Singapore, the UK or Vietnam (30 active cases, 72 recovered, 15 active, 8 recovered, and 0 active, 16 recovered respectively) China got off to a bad start due to the thing starting there and being unexpected.

koheripbal 7y ago
Singapore has tested thousands of people, and meticulously traced every single contact. In the US, we are far far worse off with cases popping up everywhere of unknown origin and almost zero testing.