COVID-19

[ZAFCorrection]

@peanut

I said "it could be." I did not assume anything. But my conditional probability senses are telling me that a chinese-looking dude buying masks has a higher chance of having grown up in another country than a white dude buying 2x4s.

Double edit:

This does bring up an interesting question on woke scholasticism, though. Is it more racist to assume a heightened probability of someone being a foreigner and being sensitive to that, or is it more racist to go the solipsistic route and treat everyone as a monolithic entity until it is confirmed otherwise?

@jason

They can bust balls all they want. It's a free country as they say. But introverted me can also think they are obnoxious for giving me shit when I am just trying to go about my business. Now, if you want to bust my balls while also expecting that there be no chance of me taking it in a negative way, then that would be a bridge too far. As I mentioned.

[Dream of Freedom]

Indian scientists discovered insertions in the 2019 coronavirus not found in any other coronavirus. The insertion has similar composition to that of HIV leading to the thought that the virus was manufactured.

Isn't that what the conspiracy theory is that it escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_I ... f_Virology

[Jason]

@ZC

I would hope you beat the shit out of them. That's why I make it a policy to only bust old lady and wheelchair bound balls. And even then, I usually look for both.

[Peanut]

Point of fact in my neighborhood white guys buying 2x4s are most likely going to be immigrant Slavs.

What is the monolithic entity? Whiteness? My reference point was Asian Americans in Cali

I was not trying to accuse anyone of racism btw. I was just annoyed by erytu's post. I think engagement of the 'other' with good intentions is typically a good thing. Maybe that's the extrovert's assumption.

[AnalyticalEngine]

I think engagement of the 'other' with good intentions is typically a good thing. Maybe that's the extrovert's assumption.

That's the thing though--based on how those guys reacted in Sclass' post, it sounds like they didn't appreciate the comments very much. It's really best to treat people in public how they'd like to be treated, and it's pretty damn easy to lose sight of the coronavirus situation when it's not really happening in the US/Europe/etc yet. For all we know, those guys have family members in Wuhan who are actively sick. Or they're roommates with someone who is. Or maybe they just wanted to make sure the wipes wouldn't ruin the finish on their countertops in peace. These types of comments aren't the end of the world, but it's also pretty clear those two people didn't enjoy being on the receiving end.

It's important to remember this is a real crisis with real people dying. There's a human cost to pandemics, and we can't lose sight of that in all the lentil hoarding and culture war commentary.

[Jason]

I know its not really relevant and it might even be considered in bad taste being that people are dying from it, but its a really cool sounding name. Like in a "if Batman had an arch enemy who was a virus" type of way. Of course Batman would have an anti-Wuhan Coronavirus repellent in his utility belt and this shit would have been ka-powed in thirty minutes.

[thrifty++]

Why is it always China all these diseases keep coming from. Coronovirus, SARS, Bird flu etc. Its supposed to be such a rich country now. But this doesn't seem to align with a successful developed economy. Seems as though there are poor hygiene and health standards.

[AnalyticalEngine]

It's largely because China is a densely populated country with less regulatory oversight. A lot of these pandemic diseases were caused by a pathogen jumping from an animal host to a human host. That's more likely to happen in conditions where humans and animals are close together and proper protocol isn't followed/enforced. This is also how we've created a lot of antibiotic resistance problems too, so it's not just limited to viruses.

Stuff like swine flu jumped over from livestock. Other things, like the current coronavirus, are speculated to come from wet markets. As China industrializes and grows, it creates conditions that amplify these risks. Then you add the fact that air traffic has more than quadrupled since SARS, and you've got the perfect conditions for a global pandemic.

[thrifty++]

China is also a huge country though. I would say parts of Europe and Japan are likely more densely populated. But yes maybe lack of regulatory standards. Despite being so rich it doesn't seem to have developed in so many other ways.

[5ts]

Every death from this is a tragedy, and I have no evidence that anyone here or anywhere else is making light of that just because it's not widespread in the US. That doesn't mean you can't have some humor. I guess I am a fan of black humor, and yes I have laughed at my own misfortunes and maladies and will continue to do so even on my deathbed.

Since we are all in this together I hope China gets this under control and strengthens regulation to at least attempt to keep this from happening again.

[AnalyticalEngine]

Fun fact that plague is almost airborne HIV. Despite plague being caused by a bacteria and HIV a virus, they both attack the immune system. That's one of the reasons HIV is so devastating: it attacks the very cells (those killer T cells mentioned earlier) that are supposed to destroy it. Plague also attacks the lymphatic system and can even reproduce inside of phagocytes (the immune cells that eat bacteria). That's why both are so bad.

The good news is that coronavirus is extremely unlikely to turn into airborne HIV because it attacks respiratory tract cells (also possibly gastrointestinal tract cells for other strains/in animals). Viruses are usually pretty specialized to the cell they attack, so it's very unlikely for a coronavirus to start attacking lymphocytes.

Interesting research on plague and HIV: https://www.the-scientist.com/research- ... -hiv-54468

ETA: I think I might stand slightly corrected because it looks like measles actually can attack epithelial cells and immune cells.

[Solvent]

China's not a rich country yet. Although if you listen to whatever media idiot of the moment happens to be on tv it is possible to be confused about that.
Don't confuse big and growing rapidly with rich, and don't listen to Trump.

[Jason]

and don't listen to Trump.

"Hey Mitch, speaking of Nancy, do you think I should use condoms with this Gyna Virus going around?"

[Peanut]

@peanut

To go OT a bit further, when I was a kid, I had a neighbor who by general acclamation was the nicest person around. She was also constantly at our door, talking loudly, using our backyard for gardening (blowing past my window constantly), pressuring me to get into her particular kind of fiddle music since I played the violin, and generally being up in my shit. She was a moderate source of misery in my life for a few years, but not a word was said officially by me or anyone else since she was a nice, folksy woman and I would have just been an asshole.

As others have stated, kindness is giving people what they think they need, not what you think they need.

Are you seriously kidding me? This woman had no boundaries and your family let her get away with way too much. And if anyone had tried to set boundaries you would have likely seen her flip out and Mrs. Nice disappear bc people without boundaries get angry when others try to set some. You teach people how to treat you. You "would have just been an asshole" for trying to alleviate this "moderate source of misery"? No, no, no.


Getting back to the topic: I don't understand why there is so much panic. Is it the unknowns about it? Tens of thousands of people die a year from the flu, correct? This thing doesn't seem on a zika or ebola level at all.

[daylen]

Getting back to the topic: I don't understand why there is so much panic. Is it the unknowns about it? Tens of thousands of people die a year from the flu, correct? This thing doesn't seem on a zika or ebola level at all.

Of course it is the unknowns. It is always the unknowns.

This thread is interesting to watch as mostly a neutral player on the side lines, because it is an excellent example of how panic to one person is preparation to another. This is a situation where even slight personality differences stand out. Even though several people have mentioned just this.. there is still an untraversable gap between each party.

[AnalyticalEngine]

Ebola was never something to really freak out about because it's actually really hard to spread and kills you pretty fast. Diseases like that usually burn out because you die before you spread it. You could only really catch ebola from direct fluid exposure, so it had basically zero chance of spreading in Western nations.

People really only freaked out about Zika because it causes birth defects. And again, being mosquito-borne, we knew the upper limit on where it would spread.

Coronavirus is like the flu, if by flu you mean pandemic flu and not seasonal flu. Seasonal flu is often underestimated yes (go get your flu shot!), but we know how it spreads and we have a vaccine. As has previously been mentioned, seasonal flu only reinfects around 1-2 people for every 1 person who gets infected. It also only has a mortality rate of 0.01%-0.8%.

This is compared to the coronavirus. While we still lack data on the coronavirus, it likely has a reinfection rate of 2-4 and a mortality rate of 3%-7%.

Meaning this virus has the potential to be like the Spanish Flu pandemic. Also remember early efforts to contain infections can be critical because they slow down the spread. Pandemics have the potential to overwhelm healthcare systems, which makes the mortality rate go up because people can't get care. By containing the virus, it slows the spread, letting production systems (masks, anti-viral, etc) and medical systems be less overwhelmed.

So don't panic but don't underestimate the threat either. Just because we've been fortunate enough to not see Spanish Flu-level pandemics in the Western world in our lifetimes doesn't mean one still couldn't happen.

New York Times has a good article about the facts here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... ntain.html

And one last note, I think it's important to remember the reason a lot of this stuff (zika, ebola, swine flu) never got worse is specifically because of our institutions. It's vogue these days to hate on WHO, CDC, medical system, etc, but these people have squashed a lot of pandemic threats. It's easy to forget that when someone stops something from getting worse, you never actually have to experience the worst. That doesn't mean those institutions are unnecessary though. (not really responding to anyone in the thread with this last point, more just general observations I've noticed elsewhere)

[jacob]

Getting back to the topic: I don't understand why there is so much panic. Is it the unknowns about it? Tens of thousands of people die a year from the flu, correct? This thing doesn't seem on a zika or ebola level at all.

To be fair, words like panic and alarmism are sometimes thrown around too easily as well. There's always some contention between those who go too far and those who don't go far enough whenever there's no right answer. The ghost of Wheaton. Consider for example the disproportionate response wrt the war on terrorism vs securing furniture that could otherwise tip over and crush you. Both have similar mortality rates, but clearly there's more to human reactions than just the risk of dying.

Staying with mortality rates though. Why is this Wuhan nCov now considered a global emergency compared to say normal flu? One aspect is of course normalization. Wuhan is new, whereas the normal flu is already out of the bag. Flu kills ~50,000 Americans(*). Not everybody gets infected but if you do, the fatality rate is 0.13% and it mostly kills those with weak immune systems so people aged 5- or 65+. Also there's a vaccine, so people feel they have some agency.

Wuhan nCov has a fatality rate of 2-3% (although it's not locked down yet). That's 20x higher than normal flu. There's no vaccine and little agency (other than buying masks). Unlike SARS or Ebola, where you'd have to get close to the patient, Wuhan also transmits much more readily. If transmission rates are similar to regular flu and it goes pandemic, then you're looking at 1,000,000 dead Americans(**). That equals the sum total of all cancer and cardiovascular deaths. This would be hard to ignore even as things are emotionally normalized and dying from the flu becomes as normal as dying from cancer and heart attacks. As far as I understand, death by pneumonia is not a bad death as far as these things go?

Zika and Ebola are more spectacular in their effects and spectacularity is important to human perception ... Dying conventionally is far better than dying spectacularly. (Also why terrorism gets much more attention than crushing furniture or why falling out of the sky is far worse than getting rolled over in a car.) However, Zika is endemic (so just don't go where Zika happens) and Ebola while having a far higher mortality rate (50-60%) has a rather short reach (only spreads via contact) and so spreads much more slowly.

In short, if Wuhan nCov is not contained it would be a game changer in terms of how old people die.

(*) I'm just going to scale everything to the US because I know a lot of these numbers by heart. People can do their own divisions. There are ~330,000,000 Americans in the denominator.

(**) During the first round when nobody has immunity. As the epidemic progresses it will change perhaps becoming more or less virulent. And survivors will possible develop immunity thus changing the transmission coefficients.

Add: AE beat me to it and said it better as well.

[Lucky C]

I took a look at deaths outside mainland China, 1/20 to 1/31, and see that the growth so far is faster than linear (as expected) but slower than exponential (not sure if expected?). In fact an x^2 power curve is a great fit to the data so far (see below).

Is this due to the fact that outside China extra precautions are keeping it from growing exponentially, but we can still expect it to grow faster than linear? Or that we are possible already beyond the exponential growth stage and can expect growth to slow in the next couple of weeks? Or probably just not enough data to draw a conclusion yet?

Day, Ex-US Deaths, Day^2 + 3:
1 4 4
2 6 7
3 8 12
4 14 19
5 25 28
6 40 39
7 57 52
8 64 67
9 87 84
10 105 103
11 118 124
12 153 147

[jacob]

And one last note, I think it's important to remember the reason a lot of this stuff (zika, ebola, swine flu) never got worse is specifically because of our institutions. It's vogue these days to hate on WHO, CDC, medical system, etc, but these people have squashed a lot of pandemic threats. It's easy to forget that when someone stops something from getting worse, you never actually have to experience the worst. That doesn't mean those institutions are unnecessary though. (not really responding to anyone in the thread with this last point, more just general observations I've noticed elsewhere)

Yeah, this is a really good point! To hijack the story of the boy crying wolf (which has various endings and interpretations based on the point the reteller is trying to make), the boy sees the wolf and alerts the village. The villagers come out and in all the commotion, the wolf slinks away, without being seen by the villagers. This happens a few times until the villagers dismiss the boy as an alarmist and castigates the boy for causing a panic. Boy is fired from guard duty and the wolf can now approach unopposed. It's a broken-window fallacy of a kind.

Further reading:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0140250913/ is a popularized nonfiction description of various outbreaks and how the system in place sometimes worked as intended and sometimes failed.
https://www.amazon.com/Spillover-Animal ... 393346617/ is a good (pop nonfic) book on zoonotic diseases.
https://www.amazon.com/Hot-Zone-Terrify ... 385479565/ is a classic about the one time when airborne Ebola appeared in the US (true story btw). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reston_virus The main reason this didn't turn into a total shitshow was that this Ebola variant only caused mild symptoms in humans.

[AnalyticalEngine]

@Lucky C - It's still kind of early to know the exact rate it's spreading. That's partially due to limitations in test kits and data. The virus also has some uncertainty in its incubation period (2-14 days), so there's still a lot of unknowns here. Also often pandemics go in waves (Spanish flu, black death), so this thing is almost certainly going to take months-years to play out fully.

And to further @Jacob's point, this is the reason defensive measures are so important and why people often forget why they're important. So taking appropriate precautions (wash hands, avoid crowds, isolate when sick) is utterly critical. Don't get complacent just because prior threats have been squashed before. They were only squashed because people acted.