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I've been comparing this with the Swine Flu pandemic of 2009. H1N1 ended up not being as fatal as SARSCoV2, but we didn't know that at the time. People were s

I've been comparing this with the Swine Flu pandemic of 2009. H1N1 ended up not being as fatal as SARSCoV2, but we didn't know that at the time. People were saying it had a CFR of >1% in Mexico (where the original outbreak was). That number dropped way down as better data came in after the outbreak. But still, up to 575,000 people may have died from it. That's not nothing. And... nobody cared? People were calm. It was on the news, but there was no panic. I think part of it was how social media has changed the way we consume and respond to information. I've seen extreme panic on FB, Reddit, HN, Twitter -- which seems to cause more panic. Everything in the media is turned up to 11 now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic It's interesting to go back further and read this Bird Flu article from 2005, where a UN Health Official warned of 150 million possible deaths, and said things like, "It's like a combination of global warming and HIV/Aids 10 times faster than it's running at the moment." So, the media has always turned things up to 11, but something about the current era has exacerbated the issue. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4292426.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4292426.stm

piyh 7y ago
We also had China set the tone with the largest quarantine in history. Leaders are looking at the precedent on how to act.
- nostromo 7y ago
  That is very true. Keep in mind the original SARS had a death rate of 10%, so obviously there was a tremendous amount of fear that this new related virus would be similarly lethal.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Leaders are looking at the precedent on how to act. No, they aren't US policy of suppression was an abrupt policy turn that came with this report: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/196234/covid19-imperial-researchers-model-likely-impact/ https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/196234/covid19-imperial-rese... The Chinese example didn't change overnight, the information available about predicted outcomes of different policy approaches in the US and UK did, and that's what drove policy change, including the Trump Administration flipping from claiming it was a hoax cooked up by political opponents to treating it as a serious issue.
munk-a 7y ago
I mean, if you're curious about differences in reaction I don't think you need to look any further than the handling and messaging going on. When Ebola was a concern Obama acted quickly to contain the threat and put a lot of resources into addressing the issue immediately - so much so that his administration was strongly criticized for wasting resources on a "non-issue". This time around the outbreak originated in China that covered up the issue initially and ended up making the issue a lot worse than it could have been. Additionally, once everyone should've been paying attention on a global scale, Mr President down there in the US just tried to downplay the possible effects of a pandemic and it looks, at the moment, like he again just made everything worse. Usually we can sit safe and confident at home that the government is overreacting to the situation and everything will be fine, this time around the authorities most globally visible (the US and China where the outbreak started) have obviously bungled their response and we're seeing a lot of panic because people don't have faith in the ability for the globe to respond in a unified manner.
- dvt 7y ago
  Trumpian rhetoric aside, it's really unfair giving the histrionic media a pass on this. The toilet paper outages were stoked by the media. Instead of seeing op-eds with "stop raiding stores for toilet paper," all we saw (and still see) is "this president is incompetent." Just this morning, CNN was frothing at the mouth at Trump calling it the "China virus" -- I mean, yeah, it's a virus that came from China -- and they have an op-ed on how this term is stoking xenophobia.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    Honestly, "China Virus" is just xenophobia and deflection - it wasn't a term adopted by the populace at large - pushing it as a name for the virus has been a right wing effort. The usage of that term is solely to try and deflect responsibility for anything domestic to China and pass the buck... it also has the potential to cause hate crimes in a time when we really should be unifying as nations.
  - daeken 7y ago
    > Just this morning, CNN was frothing at the mouth at Trump calling it the "China virus" -- I mean, yeah, it's a virus that came from China -- and they have an op-ed on how this term is stoking xenophobia. That's because it is. There have been many reports of harassment and assaults on Chinese Americans, and this kind of label doesn't go away. The term "Spanish Flu" is still used 100 years later, not because it originated there (it didn't -- it almost certainly originated in midwestern USA) but because the media paid more attention there. The terms we use matter.
MikeAmelung 7y ago
I'm not an epidemiologist, but... isn't it a little early to say "H1N1 ended up not being as fatal as SARSCoV2"?
- nostromo 7y ago
  Thanks for the clarifying question. I was talking about case fatality rate, or the number of people that die from the disease out of total cases. It's certainly possible that SARSCoV2 will have fewer total deaths than H1N1.
  - briandear 7y ago
    > number of people that die from the disease out of total cases. Out of confirmed infections. The fatality rate would only decrease as more people are discovered to have been infected.
  - MikeAmelung 7y ago
    Thank you for clarifying, but what I'm thinking is that our CFR denominator is off by a whole lot right now. Could be wrong, of course, I'm still not an epidemiologist.
    - Gwypaas 7y ago
      My, also not epidemiologist estimate, would be that the only way to have any measure on the spread today when comparing countries is the number of deaths per capita compared to the strain of the healthcare system. Add some factor for the mean time from infection to death and you have it. Everyone who is ill enough to be about to die will end up in a hospital, with the virus already being transmitted in the society the point in testing everyone else is trending towards negligible. Sure if the measures taken allows the rate becomes low enough again, then contact tracing might become worth doing again. You can also try to do statistical tests on some cohorts of population and extrapolate from there but if the resources are limited then saving lives counts more.
- OkayPhysicist 7y ago
101404 7y ago
> ... up to ... may have ... Now, that's some hard facts you have there!
- nostromo 7y ago
  If you want rigid certainty, you're not going to find it in epidemiology so you should turn back now. Nobody knows how many people died from H1N1 in 2009. The CDC has only estimates and the range is huge: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/spotlights/pandemic-global-estimates.htm https://www.cdc.gov/flu/spotlights/pandemic-global-estimates... And that is why I used the words I did.
11235813213455 7y ago
The number of death from air pollution alone is much higher (4.6m/year https://www.google.com/search?q=number+of+death+from+pollution https://www.google.com/search?q=number+of+death+from+polluti...) than from those viruses With quarantines and traffic, activity, consumption slowdown, the air quality is getting much better, did we just discover the solution for global warming indirectly? which is a much more important problem than those human viruses by the way
- beaunative 7y ago
  Hey. 4.6m over the course of a year is not much compare to this. 50-150m lives could be lost in a matter of a few months if this virus get out of control.
tanilama 7y ago
SARS doesn't even come close to the infectiousness of COVID-19. China only registered like 8k patients by the end of it, even you times that by 10, that still dwarfed by the COVID-19 on global scale, and it is only the beginning. The reason COVID-19 get singled out might not be the mortality rate alone (it looks edging close to 10% right now in Italy, which is alarmingly scary), but more on its impact on paralyzing our health care system with a swarm of people requires hospitalization. And it achieves all this in record time. I don't agree this is a perception problem, the threat is real. Social media can panic, but you can't really tell people it is OK when patients are lying/dying on the floor of hospitals.
- MiroF 7y ago
  I'm confused as to what this comment is replying to - the GP never made any comparison between SARS and COVID-19. I suspect that you might have confused SARSCov2 for SARS?
  - p1necone 7y ago
    I imagine most of the people reading it made that mistake. I've only ever seen it referred to as COVID-19 or Coronavirus. I assumed SARSCov2 was a more specific name for the virus involved in the early 2000s SARS outbreak.
    - frenchyatwork 7y ago
      SARS-CoV2 is the name of the virus for the 2019 Coronavirus. The previous one was just SARS-CoV.
- nostromo 7y ago
  > it looks edging close to 10% right now in Italy, which is alarmingly scary Please stop dividing deaths by confirmed cases and reporting that as mortality rate. The number of confirmed cases is much, much larger than actual cases, in particular in outbreak zones where testing is very limited.
  - 7y ago
united893 7y ago
Did we ever run out of ventilators during the 2009 pandemic? 5% of untreated cases (e.g: no ventilator) end up being fatal -- if you look at the numbers in Iran.
briandear 7y ago
> People were calm. It was on the news, but there was no panic. Because it wasn’t an election year in the US.
raz32dust 7y ago
I am not sure if you can infer from two past epidemics that this one will be the same. Every epidemic is different. This one spreads way faster than H1N1 and is harder to control because of asymptomatic carriers. Sure, information (and misinformation) travels much faster now, but I am not sure if that is necessarily a bad thing. It might have done more help than harm in this case for all we know. I think that is the case because this one is not as deadly, so sensationalization and fear-mongering is not easy. If the fatality rate was like 50% (as it was for Avian flu, I found recently to my surprise), it could have been way worse with the media.
- moises_silva 7y ago
  Do you have a source for asymptomatic carriers? From https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prepare/transmission.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prepare/transmissi... >>> Can someone spread the virus without being sick? People are thought to be most contagious when they are most symptomatic (the sickest). Some spread might be possible before people show symptoms; there have been reports of this occurring with this new coronavirus, but this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads. Doesn't seem to indicate asymptomatic carriers are a big concern?
  - wool_gather 7y ago
    There are people getting sick without having been in contact with other people who are sick. How else would that happen? "Most contagious when symptomatic" is not even remotely the same thing as "not contagious unless symptomatic". We also don't have a good picture of what symptoms look like aside from the most serious cases.
    - moises_silva 7y ago
      How would you possibly know reliably they were not in contact with anyone sick?, particularly when being in contact means touching any surfaces where the virus landed hours or it seems even days ago
  - icedchai 7y ago
ewoodrich 7y ago
Schools and businesses weren't shutting down for months during the swine flu pandemic. Experts are treating this as a serious threat and that's not something the media is responsible for.
- nostromo 7y ago
  They did in Mexico.
ManuelKiessling 7y ago
Well, at least the situation in Italy is not simply a (social) media phenomenon; the health system is overwhelmed for real. Stuff like this has not been the case with the 2009 swine flu pandemic, or has it?
baxtr 7y ago
I think a major difference between Swine Flu and SARS-2 is that it did not affect as many countries simultaneously as now, and, we did not see so many people ending up in the ICU. As I understand the numbers being: 10-20% end up in a hospital, 5-10% end up in ICU, half of them die. I don't remember anything similar for the 2009 pandemic.
hyko 7y ago
The actual differences in CFR have non-linear effects on the scariness of the outbreak: COVID-19 has demonstrated an ability to crush the healthcare system of a modern, wealthy G7 nation, and that has (rightly) spooked people.
himinlomax 7y ago
There was a vaccine for H1N1.
easytiger 7y ago
I know from personal experience social media amplification is making people sick in itself. 2009 h1n1[1] was aggressively pushed by the WHO as having a 60% CFR[2]. Similar issue to corona19, basing everything on literal test results. Meaningless! Presumably why WHO telling the world to test everything. [1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8094655.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8094655.stm [2] https://jech.bmj.com/content/62/6/555.abstract https://jech.bmj.com/content/62/6/555.abstract [3] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/pandemic-what-flu-pandemic-1817715.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families... [4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/16/swine-flu-pandemic-warning-helpline https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/16/swine-flu-pand...

piyh 7y ago

We also had China set the tone with the largest quarantine in history. Leaders are looking at the precedent on how to act.

nostromo 7y ago
That is very true. Keep in mind the original SARS had a death rate of 10%, so obviously there was a tremendous amount of fear that this new related virus would be similarly lethal.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> Leaders are looking at the precedent on how to act. No, they aren't US policy of suppression was an abrupt policy turn that came with this report: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/196234/covid19-imperial-researchers-model-likely-impact/ https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/196234/covid19-imperial-rese... The Chinese example didn't change overnight, the information available about predicted outcomes of different policy approaches in the US and UK did, and that's what drove policy change, including the Trump Administration flipping from claiming it was a hoax cooked up by political opponents to treating it as a serious issue.

munk-a 7y ago

I mean, if you're curious about differences in reaction I don't think you need to look any further than the handling and messaging going on. When Ebola was a concern Obama acted quickly to contain the threat and put a lot of resources into addressing the issue immediately - so much so that his administration was strongly criticized for wasting resources on a "non-issue". This time around the outbreak originated in China that covered up the issue initially and ended up making the issue a lot worse than it could have been. Additionally, once everyone should've been paying attention on a global scale, Mr President down there in the US just tried to downplay the possible effects of a pandemic and it looks, at the moment, like he again just made everything worse. Usually we can sit safe and confident at home that the government is overreacting to the situation and everything will be fine, this time around the authorities most globally visible (the US and China where the outbreak started) have obviously bungled their response and we're seeing a lot of panic because people don't have faith in the ability for the globe to respond in a unified manner.

dvt 7y ago
Trumpian rhetoric aside, it's really unfair giving the histrionic media a pass on this. The toilet paper outages were stoked by the media. Instead of seeing op-eds with "stop raiding stores for toilet paper," all we saw (and still see) is "this president is incompetent." Just this morning, CNN was frothing at the mouth at Trump calling it the "China virus" -- I mean, yeah, it's a virus that came from China -- and they have an op-ed on how this term is stoking xenophobia.
- munk-a 7y ago
  Honestly, "China Virus" is just xenophobia and deflection - it wasn't a term adopted by the populace at large - pushing it as a name for the virus has been a right wing effort. The usage of that term is solely to try and deflect responsibility for anything domestic to China and pass the buck... it also has the potential to cause hate crimes in a time when we really should be unifying as nations.
- daeken 7y ago
  > Just this morning, CNN was frothing at the mouth at Trump calling it the "China virus" -- I mean, yeah, it's a virus that came from China -- and they have an op-ed on how this term is stoking xenophobia. That's because it is. There have been many reports of harassment and assaults on Chinese Americans, and this kind of label doesn't go away. The term "Spanish Flu" is still used 100 years later, not because it originated there (it didn't -- it almost certainly originated in midwestern USA) but because the media paid more attention there. The terms we use matter.

MikeAmelung 7y ago

I'm not an epidemiologist, but... isn't it a little early to say "H1N1 ended up not being as fatal as SARSCoV2"?

nostromo 7y ago
Thanks for the clarifying question. I was talking about case fatality rate, or the number of people that die from the disease out of total cases. It's certainly possible that SARSCoV2 will have fewer total deaths than H1N1.
- briandear 7y ago
  > number of people that die from the disease out of total cases. Out of confirmed infections. The fatality rate would only decrease as more people are discovered to have been infected.
- MikeAmelung 7y ago
  Thank you for clarifying, but what I'm thinking is that our CFR denominator is off by a whole lot right now. Could be wrong, of course, I'm still not an epidemiologist.
  - Gwypaas 7y ago
    My, also not epidemiologist estimate, would be that the only way to have any measure on the spread today when comparing countries is the number of deaths per capita compared to the strain of the healthcare system. Add some factor for the mean time from infection to death and you have it. Everyone who is ill enough to be about to die will end up in a hospital, with the virus already being transmitted in the society the point in testing everyone else is trending towards negligible. Sure if the measures taken allows the rate becomes low enough again, then contact tracing might become worth doing again. You can also try to do statistical tests on some cohorts of population and extrapolate from there but if the resources are limited then saving lives counts more.
OkayPhysicist 7y ago

101404 7y ago

> ... up to ... may have ... Now, that's some hard facts you have there!

nostromo 7y ago
If you want rigid certainty, you're not going to find it in epidemiology so you should turn back now. Nobody knows how many people died from H1N1 in 2009. The CDC has only estimates and the range is huge: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/spotlights/pandemic-global-estimates.htm https://www.cdc.gov/flu/spotlights/pandemic-global-estimates... And that is why I used the words I did.

11235813213455 7y ago

The number of death from air pollution alone is much higher (4.6m/year https://www.google.com/search?q=number+of+death+from+pollution https://www.google.com/search?q=number+of+death+from+polluti...) than from those viruses With quarantines and traffic, activity, consumption slowdown, the air quality is getting much better, did we just discover the solution for global warming indirectly? which is a much more important problem than those human viruses by the way

beaunative 7y ago
Hey. 4.6m over the course of a year is not much compare to this. 50-150m lives could be lost in a matter of a few months if this virus get out of control.

tanilama 7y ago

SARS doesn't even come close to the infectiousness of COVID-19. China only registered like 8k patients by the end of it, even you times that by 10, that still dwarfed by the COVID-19 on global scale, and it is only the beginning. The reason COVID-19 get singled out might not be the mortality rate alone (it looks edging close to 10% right now in Italy, which is alarmingly scary), but more on its impact on paralyzing our health care system with a swarm of people requires hospitalization. And it achieves all this in record time. I don't agree this is a perception problem, the threat is real. Social media can panic, but you can't really tell people it is OK when patients are lying/dying on the floor of hospitals.

MiroF 7y ago
I'm confused as to what this comment is replying to - the GP never made any comparison between SARS and COVID-19. I suspect that you might have confused SARSCov2 for SARS?
- p1necone 7y ago
  I imagine most of the people reading it made that mistake. I've only ever seen it referred to as COVID-19 or Coronavirus. I assumed SARSCov2 was a more specific name for the virus involved in the early 2000s SARS outbreak.
  - frenchyatwork 7y ago
    SARS-CoV2 is the name of the virus for the 2019 Coronavirus. The previous one was just SARS-CoV.
nostromo 7y ago
> it looks edging close to 10% right now in Italy, which is alarmingly scary Please stop dividing deaths by confirmed cases and reporting that as mortality rate. The number of confirmed cases is much, much larger than actual cases, in particular in outbreak zones where testing is very limited.
- 7y ago

united893 7y ago

Did we ever run out of ventilators during the 2009 pandemic? 5% of untreated cases (e.g: no ventilator) end up being fatal -- if you look at the numbers in Iran.

briandear 7y ago

> People were calm. It was on the news, but there was no panic. Because it wasn’t an election year in the US.

raz32dust 7y ago

I am not sure if you can infer from two past epidemics that this one will be the same. Every epidemic is different. This one spreads way faster than H1N1 and is harder to control because of asymptomatic carriers. Sure, information (and misinformation) travels much faster now, but I am not sure if that is necessarily a bad thing. It might have done more help than harm in this case for all we know. I think that is the case because this one is not as deadly, so sensationalization and fear-mongering is not easy. If the fatality rate was like 50% (as it was for Avian flu, I found recently to my surprise), it could have been way worse with the media.

moises_silva 7y ago
Do you have a source for asymptomatic carriers? From https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prepare/transmission.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prepare/transmissi... >>> Can someone spread the virus without being sick? People are thought to be most contagious when they are most symptomatic (the sickest). Some spread might be possible before people show symptoms; there have been reports of this occurring with this new coronavirus, but this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads. Doesn't seem to indicate asymptomatic carriers are a big concern?
- wool_gather 7y ago
  There are people getting sick without having been in contact with other people who are sick. How else would that happen? "Most contagious when symptomatic" is not even remotely the same thing as "not contagious unless symptomatic". We also don't have a good picture of what symptoms look like aside from the most serious cases.
  - moises_silva 7y ago
    How would you possibly know reliably they were not in contact with anyone sick?, particularly when being in contact means touching any surfaces where the virus landed hours or it seems even days ago
- icedchai 7y ago

ewoodrich 7y ago

Schools and businesses weren't shutting down for months during the swine flu pandemic. Experts are treating this as a serious threat and that's not something the media is responsible for.

nostromo 7y ago
They did in Mexico.

ManuelKiessling 7y ago

Well, at least the situation in Italy is not simply a (social) media phenomenon; the health system is overwhelmed for real. Stuff like this has not been the case with the 2009 swine flu pandemic, or has it?

baxtr 7y ago

I think a major difference between Swine Flu and SARS-2 is that it did not affect as many countries simultaneously as now, and, we did not see so many people ending up in the ICU. As I understand the numbers being: 10-20% end up in a hospital, 5-10% end up in ICU, half of them die. I don't remember anything similar for the 2009 pandemic.

hyko 7y ago

The actual differences in CFR have non-linear effects on the scariness of the outbreak: COVID-19 has demonstrated an ability to crush the healthcare system of a modern, wealthy G7 nation, and that has (rightly) spooked people.

himinlomax 7y ago

There was a vaccine for H1N1.

easytiger 7y ago

I know from personal experience social media amplification is making people sick in itself. 2009 h1n1[1] was aggressively pushed by the WHO as having a 60% CFR[2]. Similar issue to corona19, basing everything on literal test results. Meaningless! Presumably why WHO telling the world to test everything. [1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8094655.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8094655.stm [2] https://jech.bmj.com/content/62/6/555.abstract https://jech.bmj.com/content/62/6/555.abstract [3] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/pandemic-what-flu-pandemic-1817715.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families... [4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/16/swine-flu-pandemic-warning-helpline https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/16/swine-flu-pand...