outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidkroll/2014/11/02/potential-ebola-patient-being-tested-at-duke-results-monday-morning/2/

The Associated Press and other press outlets have agreed not to report on suspected cases of Ebola in the United States until a positive viral RNA test is completed.

Even though widespread panic gets them all those nice clicks they like so much?

want to share a couple of articles i've read over the past couple of days that i think were very strong

there's this from the NYT, which only mentions ebola as a means of illustrating the larger point of the way the public misperceives health threats and the deleterious effects on policy this can have, but is a very good read. the author cites and links to some of the work of lisa rosenbaum, who writes the clearest, most insightful stuff on the human side of medicine this side of atul gawande

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/03/emotion-is-not-the-best-medicine-ebola-case-further-shows/?ref=health

then there's this (free) essay in the new england journal of medicine, written by a couple of HIV/AIDS activists, describing their reaction to the ebola hysteria. i wasn't around for most of the worst of the AIDS scare firsthand, but the ugliness of that time is one of the first things i think about when i see some of the more troubling responses to ebola's arrival in america

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1413425?query=TOC#t=article

hey so what happened? haven't heard a peep about EBOLA since, oh, last Tuesday.

everybody got sick and died

it's just ~so weird~

you can still panic if you want to

Crap, now my Ebola commemorative plates are as worthless as my Franklin Mint Benghazi Coins and my Ground Zero Mosque pewter figurine chess set.

sounds like things aren't going well in Mali right now, but I guess it doesn't matter since no one in the US is sick

Death toll has passed the 5000 mark.

yeah pardon my glibness upthread. the media's boredom w/ ebola in the last 7 days is offensive on multiple levels.

white people etc

alas no surprise. Dr Spenser's press conference in NY seemed to come off well tho (except for de Blasio comparing the health workers to the US military cuz you know "HELPING" PEOPLE).

They're just deliberately avoiding unnecessary panic by not turning every suspected case into a headline. Which is a good thing + food for the conspiracy crowd simultaneously, I suppose.

World Health Organization trials show new Ebola vaccine to be highly effective

it's over!

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-35308743

maybe not...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/01/15/ebola-case-reported-in-sierra-leone-one-day-after-who-declared-the-outbreak-over/?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories_ebola-920am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

they were pretty straightforward about the fact that they expected some recidivism

great roundup from huffington post here

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ebola-panic-us_us_56fabbd7e4b014d3fe243d86?n4h5rzyr8vs6mvx6r

Anthrax making another comeback:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-11/scientists-warn-anthrax-just-one-threat-as-russian-permafrost-m/7720362

Ice-age diseases potentially to follow.

this seems scary: https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/19/asia/china-coronavirus-spike-intl-hnk/index.html

We all gonna die and no one gives a fuck?

the population of the wuhan metropolitan area is like 20million and we're talking about only a few hundred cases currently, seemingly all or mainly from tainted meat consumption. i'm not worried

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne-UnC2QpsU

I'm not worried, but that's still the *reported* number of cases. The question is how fast it can spread. Certainly the Chinese government is taking it seriously enough to more or less lock down Wuhan, which is nothing to sniff at for a population of 11 million. 26 dead so far, a couple of cases in the US, a couple in Europe. Those numbers are tiny, but if I've learned anything from movies and books it's that we're all going to die and/or turn into zombies.

26 million people are on quarantine. This is serious. Cases are spreading woeldwide and i wouldn't believe the chinese numbers

We all gonna die and no one gives a fuck?

― nostormo, Friday, January 24, 2020 1:32 PM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

go to hell imo

Not worried too, but this looks like SARS part 2, numners will rise probably

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlxmKsTvcLg

the people will survive imo

We all gonna die and no one gives a fuck?

Everything is grist if all you want to do is amuse yourself, but if you're going to make fun of it, at least say something witty.

I got a couple of disposable face masks yesterday.

My shoulder hurts, is it coronavirus

is it your dominant arm?

Xi Jinping just called it a 'grave situation' and 30 Chinese provinces are now on high alert.

48 million people on lockdown, 42 deaths, that discrepancy shows that the Chinese government must know even more than it is saying out loud.

I've been writing about this on the China thread, but to sum up.

My wife is from Hubei, her sister is in Wuhan and parents in Ezhou, both on lockdown now. Actually sister and her son were due to fly over to the UK on Wednesday, obviously that has been cancelled. Everyone is just staying home, which works for a while but not forever of course. Also the summer school I run brings about 200 students from Wuhan to the UK every summer, this is also a concern, school will be out of business if they cancel.

The word is that this isn't as serious as SARS but is spreading more rapidly.

Holy shit Camaraderie! Best wishes for your fam.

so far all is fine! just a bit of a stress, of course, and my wife is pretty worried of course.

it's really odd to see Wuhan and especially Ezhou on the news

obv I don’t know how this will all shake out but the level of hysteria in some corners of the internet borders on imo wishful fantasies that it’s a worse case scenario and level of subconscious craving for this sort of apocalypse is it’s own sort of frightening

Nothing new under the sun, etc. Eschatological yearnings are here to stay.

a lot of people subconsciously prefer the apocalypse over their status quo; nb i think this is to some extent misguided but it isn't new

only to some extent misguided to prefer apocalypse to their status quo?

Depends on your status quo, no?

part deliberate understatement as a joke, part i am sympathetic to thinking that a radical upheaval of everything feels preferable to just trudging along sometimes

e.g. the very real pain of having your head sawn off still works as a joke preference after you've had toothache for long enough

They were semi-careful on the radio this morning to be alarming but ... cautiously alarming. The guy who briefed the WHO said, if it's not contained, worst case he expects this to peak late April or early May, with 150,000 cases *per day.* That's what his model showed, at least, and only the worst case scenario. But that's a pretty bad scenario!

there's probably a whole discussion about who's entitled to feel un-Panglossian and who isn't but it shd probably go on another thread. disaster has always been an appealing spectacle to many people for good, bad and indifferent reasons. personally i hope the people of Wuhan and environs can get back to their preferred daily routine asap

I suspect it’s more about the spectacle than the despair but I don’t have evidence or anything

I had to take my daughter to the doctor for something unrelated yesterday and most people were wearing facemasks. TBF, large Chinese population in my neighborhood so maybe people are assuming that there's a decent risk someone here has traveled to Wuhan. Also I think facemasks are just more of a thing in China itself after SARS etc so people from there are probably more accustomed to breaking them out.

So far from what I can glean, it's not so much how deadly this is as how fast it can spread and how new it is (i.e. no one has built up immunity) -- in other words so far it doesn't look likely to kill a large percentage of its victims, but it may just have so many victims that it will cause a significant number of deaths, particularly among more vulnerable populations?

Or I guess 80 deaths / 2700 cases maybe is particularly deadly?

SARS apparently had a 10% death rate and a 50% death rate for patients over 65 years, by comparison. Avian flu was much higher -- 60%, but much less transmissible.

IANAV but my sense is that the fear depends on believing that China is lying about the numbers but aiui WHO has been on the ground and would know if a massive coverup was underway?