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There’s almost nothing new in this article, for what it’s worth. A genetic analysis of two infections show a mostly identical genome. This does not definitivel

by zaroth 7y ago

There’s almost nothing new in this article, for what it’s worth. A genetic analysis of two infections show a mostly identical genome. This does not definitively tell you anything about how those two people were infected. Everything else is speculation wrapped in clickbait. For the vast majority of people, an infection of this coronavirus would be more mild than catching the flu. A reasoned analysis (such as what was provided yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine) puts the fatality rate of COVID-19 on the same order of magnitude as the flu. It is new and very sensationalized. I think it’s absolutely imperative to try to maintain a rational stance of the actual relative impact of this coronavirus versus a typical flu season.

akmarinov 7y ago
If it’s that harmless why is China crashing the world economy over it?
- zaroth 7y ago
  China very well may be using an excuse to test their ability to control their population. They may be performing whatever acts they think they need to do based on analysis of how people will perceive it, and not based on the expected actual effect it might have. Or any other number of reasons. “Because China” is not an argument that holds any scientific merit in an analysis of the severity of COVID-19. Up to 3,000 have died from COVID so far, mostly in Hubei. Hubei has a population of ~60 million, which is ~18% of the US population. About 60,000 people died from flu-related illness last year in the US. The same proportion in Hubei would be 10,800. So it seems it is demonstrably less harmful than flu. Why China or the World is reacting the way is it will be a great question 3-6 months from now in retrospect.
  - magicsmoke 7y ago
    It could be due to the criticism they got over covering up the 2003 SARS epidemic. If under responding gets you global condemnation let's try over responding instead.
    - pergadad 7y ago
      As if China cares about global condamnation. they wouldn't do any of this if it wasn't serious.
  - dennisgorelik 7y ago
    It looks like the main reason why almost all COVID cases reported in Hubei - is because only in Hubei they consistently test for COVID. In other provinces (and countries) they practically do not test for COVID, and therefore they do not detect COVID in other provinces.
  - mygo 7y ago
    > Up to 3,000 have died from COVID so far, mostly in Hubei. Hubei has a population of ~60 million, which is ~18% of the US population. About 60,000 people died from flu-related illness last year in the US. The same proportion in Hubei would be 10,800. So it seems it is demonstrably less harmful than flu. How do you come to that conclusion? This is not an apples to apples comparison. You’re looking at the annual deaths in the US and comparing them to 2 months of deaths mostly in Wuhan, and those Wuhan deaths were largely curbed due to extremely draconian policies enacted to slow the spread. If you want to begin to try to compare annual deaths to Wuhan deaths so far, then if ~3,000 people died in 2 months in Wuhan, then you’d have 18,000 deaths in Wuhan in a year assuming a linear distribution (which has its flaws). But that’s still not apples to apples, since that’s with the extreme mitigation policies that are in effect in Wuhan, and seasonality comes into play for the flu over the span of a year (more deaths in the colder months) but we don’t know how seasonality will impact coronavirus yet. If Coronavirus is to become widespread and uncontainable, then it is still ramping up to whatever “normal” levels you’d expect to see (if it becomes a recurring seasonal bug like the flu), and that’s also assuming that Wuhan’s absolute death count isn’t impacted by its total population size —- there’s a larger population in the US, and different healthcare practices, population density, travel patterns, authoritarian-draconian policies, all with positive and negative effects onto the R0. I don’t see how you can definitively say that the flu is demonstrably more harmful. But it may be helpful to say that the flu makes things worse, since they have similar symptoms and not everybody has their flu shots. A big threat to mitigation would be maxing out the healthcare infrastructure. If more people got their flu shots then less people would be showing up to the hospital with flu-like symptoms that aren’t covid-19.
triangleman 7y ago
Reading this article actually had the effect of reducing my level of alarm, because it introduced the possibility that some of my household has already caught this bug in the last 6 weeks and we got through it.
- pbourke 7y ago
  I wouldn't feel too sure about that. They estimate 150 - 1500 total infected right now. There would be substantially fewer even 1 week ago (R0 of 2, roughly 1/2 last week. R0 of 3, roughly 1/3, etc). It's possible the number of infected in the region only broke triple digits a couple of weeks ago. But exponential processes being exponential, there could be many thousands in 1-2 weeks. Edit: Stated another way, from what we know of the course of the disease (14-21 days from infection till fatality) the critical and fatal patients identified this weekend likely entered the disease process 2-3 weeks ago when the total number of infections was small. Edit 2: another confounding factor is that these numbers seem assume that all of the current infected are traceable to the index patient. I think it's very possible that there are other "trees" of infections spreading at the same time from different unidentified index patients. I'm guessing that's true because studies show that airport screening misses >50% of cases. Additional sequences on WA patients will be hugely informative.
knzhou 7y ago
It's an objective and trivially verifiable fact that there's a city in this world whose healthcare system was completely overwhelmed, after they built multiple giant hospitals in a week. That doesn't happen in a normal flu season, and that's why we're talking about this.
- zaroth 7y ago
  It’s obvious those “hospitals” were for production value, a giant “look how much we’re doing to fight this” sign, live streamed to millions across China as they went up. At least one of the buildings is already slated for demolition later this year. I dare any news organization to put a live count of flu infections and fatalities up next to the COVID counts. https://qz.com/1792705/coronavirus-the-engineering-behind-wuhans-rapidly-built-hospitals/ https://qz.com/1792705/coronavirus-the-engineering-behind-wu...
  - knzhou 7y ago
    And were the crowds of sick people who filled these hospitals paid actors too?
    - zaroth 7y ago
      Of course not. Please understand that I’m not claiming there was not an outbreak in Wuhan. Here’s one of the new hospitals on a live stream, by the way; https://youtu.be/acPqpVBZd1s https://youtu.be/acPqpVBZd1s Most are expected to close by the end of March. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/qa-wuhans-biggest-temporary-hospital-close-march-69327671 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/qa-wuhans-biggest-te...

by zaroth 7y ago

akmarinov 7y ago

If it’s that harmless why is China crashing the world economy over it?

zaroth 7y ago
China very well may be using an excuse to test their ability to control their population. They may be performing whatever acts they think they need to do based on analysis of how people will perceive it, and not based on the expected actual effect it might have. Or any other number of reasons. “Because China” is not an argument that holds any scientific merit in an analysis of the severity of COVID-19. Up to 3,000 have died from COVID so far, mostly in Hubei. Hubei has a population of ~60 million, which is ~18% of the US population. About 60,000 people died from flu-related illness last year in the US. The same proportion in Hubei would be 10,800. So it seems it is demonstrably less harmful than flu. Why China or the World is reacting the way is it will be a great question 3-6 months from now in retrospect.
- magicsmoke 7y ago
  It could be due to the criticism they got over covering up the 2003 SARS epidemic. If under responding gets you global condemnation let's try over responding instead.
  - pergadad 7y ago
    As if China cares about global condamnation. they wouldn't do any of this if it wasn't serious.
- dennisgorelik 7y ago
  It looks like the main reason why almost all COVID cases reported in Hubei - is because only in Hubei they consistently test for COVID. In other provinces (and countries) they practically do not test for COVID, and therefore they do not detect COVID in other provinces.
- mygo 7y ago
  > Up to 3,000 have died from COVID so far, mostly in Hubei. Hubei has a population of ~60 million, which is ~18% of the US population. About 60,000 people died from flu-related illness last year in the US. The same proportion in Hubei would be 10,800. So it seems it is demonstrably less harmful than flu. How do you come to that conclusion? This is not an apples to apples comparison. You’re looking at the annual deaths in the US and comparing them to 2 months of deaths mostly in Wuhan, and those Wuhan deaths were largely curbed due to extremely draconian policies enacted to slow the spread. If you want to begin to try to compare annual deaths to Wuhan deaths so far, then if ~3,000 people died in 2 months in Wuhan, then you’d have 18,000 deaths in Wuhan in a year assuming a linear distribution (which has its flaws). But that’s still not apples to apples, since that’s with the extreme mitigation policies that are in effect in Wuhan, and seasonality comes into play for the flu over the span of a year (more deaths in the colder months) but we don’t know how seasonality will impact coronavirus yet. If Coronavirus is to become widespread and uncontainable, then it is still ramping up to whatever “normal” levels you’d expect to see (if it becomes a recurring seasonal bug like the flu), and that’s also assuming that Wuhan’s absolute death count isn’t impacted by its total population size —- there’s a larger population in the US, and different healthcare practices, population density, travel patterns, authoritarian-draconian policies, all with positive and negative effects onto the R0. I don’t see how you can definitively say that the flu is demonstrably more harmful. But it may be helpful to say that the flu makes things worse, since they have similar symptoms and not everybody has their flu shots. A big threat to mitigation would be maxing out the healthcare infrastructure. If more people got their flu shots then less people would be showing up to the hospital with flu-like symptoms that aren’t covid-19.

triangleman 7y ago

Reading this article actually had the effect of reducing my level of alarm, because it introduced the possibility that some of my household has already caught this bug in the last 6 weeks and we got through it.

pbourke 7y ago
I wouldn't feel too sure about that. They estimate 150 - 1500 total infected right now. There would be substantially fewer even 1 week ago (R0 of 2, roughly 1/2 last week. R0 of 3, roughly 1/3, etc). It's possible the number of infected in the region only broke triple digits a couple of weeks ago. But exponential processes being exponential, there could be many thousands in 1-2 weeks. Edit: Stated another way, from what we know of the course of the disease (14-21 days from infection till fatality) the critical and fatal patients identified this weekend likely entered the disease process 2-3 weeks ago when the total number of infections was small. Edit 2: another confounding factor is that these numbers seem assume that all of the current infected are traceable to the index patient. I think it's very possible that there are other "trees" of infections spreading at the same time from different unidentified index patients. I'm guessing that's true because studies show that airport screening misses >50% of cases. Additional sequences on WA patients will be hugely informative.

knzhou 7y ago

It's an objective and trivially verifiable fact that there's a city in this world whose healthcare system was completely overwhelmed, after they built multiple giant hospitals in a week. That doesn't happen in a normal flu season, and that's why we're talking about this.

zaroth 7y ago
It’s obvious those “hospitals” were for production value, a giant “look how much we’re doing to fight this” sign, live streamed to millions across China as they went up. At least one of the buildings is already slated for demolition later this year. I dare any news organization to put a live count of flu infections and fatalities up next to the COVID counts. https://qz.com/1792705/coronavirus-the-engineering-behind-wuhans-rapidly-built-hospitals/ https://qz.com/1792705/coronavirus-the-engineering-behind-wu...
- knzhou 7y ago
  And were the crowds of sick people who filled these hospitals paid actors too?
  - zaroth 7y ago
    Of course not. Please understand that I’m not claiming there was not an outbreak in Wuhan. Here’s one of the new hospitals on a live stream, by the way; https://youtu.be/acPqpVBZd1s https://youtu.be/acPqpVBZd1s Most are expected to close by the end of March. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/qa-wuhans-biggest-temporary-hospital-close-march-69327671 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/qa-wuhans-biggest-te...