outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

Mordy: I'm not making a moral judgement. I'm just saying mainland China is way more likely to contain a novel epidemic from the bushmeat trade than say D.R. Congo.

Nephew doing this at an airport hotel would be a pretty good plot point for a disaster thriller.

Useful chart for perspective:

https://i.imgur.com/czzQbWu.png

that is useful, and as usual i fear that not enough people will notice the logarithmic scale

I keep seeing numbers like this

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Which says, roughly, 500 dead, 900 "recovered", and it's easy to read that as a 30%+ mortality rate. I figure it's only because recovery takes longer than dying and there's just not been enough time yet.

The actual infected and recovered rates from Hubei are only indicative.

To move from "suspected case" to "confirmed case" requires a positive test for the virus, and to my knowledge they're still using PCR kits, which are presently limited to 2000/d for the province (and this despite the fact that China's national virus institute is 15 km from the Huanan wet market). Similarly, to move from "confirmed case" to "recovered" requires a negative result from the same test. As you might imagine, there's more demand for tests in the symptomatic than in the recovered.

If the testing kits / testing throughput were unlimited, were reported without several days lag, and everyone with symptoms was tested, we'd see more confirmed cases, and more recovered cases, as well a lot of people developing symptoms not severe enough to go to the hospitals for treatment. We'd perhaps also learn of some who got sick, stayed at home and died (and aren't currently counted). When this is all over in 6-12 months we'll get the retrospective statistics, which will infer a lot more cases and deaths that didn't match reporting criteria.

From here/now, it looks like a viral pneumonia with similar lethality to SARS (<10%, though higher in the elderly), but also somewhat more infectious than SARS.

As an aside, the Sinophobia that has predictably erupted to the surface in the West (and elsewhere) as a result of this ordeal is just as depressing.

First British national to contract the virus confirmed. Seems likely they attended the conference at the Grand Hyatt in Singapore that's linked to a bunch of the cases.

I'm in Jakarta at the moment and have my temperature taken every time i enter my hotel.

XP to Outdoor Miner, we found out he's actually rented an AirBnb, so not very much better if he is contagious but at least no contact with anyone until the two weeks have elapsed.

This is mildly encouraging:

https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/coronavirus-chinese-data-of-82-cases-are-mild-says-who

Seems they're turning Milton Keynes, or at least a bit of it, into the UK's main quarantine facility. Best thing for the place tbh.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/feb/07/coronavirus-britons-evacuated-from-wuhan-to-be-quarantined-in-milton-keynes

Foxconn, the electronics company that supplies Apple, has begun manufacturing its own surgical masks, allowing Chinese workers to churn out iPhones uninterrupted as the coronavirus crisis continues.

*whistles cheerfully*

Five British nationals have been diagnosed with the coronavirus in France, after staying in the same ski chalet and coming into contact with a person who had been in Singapore, Health Minister Agnes Buzyn said on Saturday.

The total number of people infected with the virus in France has now reached 11.

Buzyn said the group of people newly infected with the virus were not in a serious condition.

They had formed "a cluster, a grouping around one original case" after staying in the same chalet, in the Contamine Monjoie resort in Savoie in eastern France.

"That original case was brought to our attention last night, it is a British national who had returned from Singapore where he had stayed between January 20 and 23, and he arrived in France on January 24 for four days," Buzyn said.

thanks Britain

classic brits-abroad behaviour

if brexit stops this coronimperialism then I'm team boris

this guy calmly saying some mildly discouraging things

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

Two bits that jumped out at me: 'we think that the epidemic is roughly doubling in size every five days' and 'we expect the infection levels to peak at the epicenter, Wuhan, in about a month's time'.

When I sneeze up in the place
You better wash yo self
Wuhan
got you all in check
I got that street fish steez
make you respect death
Wuhan
got you all in check
And you know we come through
to wreck the medical tech
Wuhan
got you all in check
Throw your hands up in the air
You better disinfect
Wuhan
got you all in check

is that from the Wu Han Clan?

We met up with a woman from Beijing yesterday, we are trying to do business with her. She said that she thought the Chinese government should seal off Hubei and let the disease run its course there. My wife is from Hubei and most of her family are still there, so this didn't go down well. The woman also said that she thought the people of Hubei must be genetically weak and this is the work of nature improving the species. She laughed at my wife for suggesting that if the current leadership cannot handle this they should be replaced, she said without the CCP there would be no new China. Look at the UK, she said, they used to have an empire, now they are weak, and we Chinese are strong. Look, they changed their leader and now they have a worse leader. My wife is sad to hear this, not really surprised, though. This woman is from the 1% in China, from our experience her views are not exactly unusual.

Not sure why I'm writing this here, except that I feel like writing it somewhere.

Christ :(

Ime it's not just the 1%ers who buy into that rot. Let it not be said that Chinese state propaganda is ineffective.

it's not just the 1%, it's true

On a somewhat related note, one of my friends, a Canadian of Chinese descent, just got back from Hong Kong and is reportedly sharing articles over Facebook about how the seasonal flu's mortality rate is supposedly higher in the US than the 2019-nCoV's in China. According to him, disregard for this 'alternative' narrative is yet another instance of Western imperialism.

He's also a Jordan Peterson stan and claims to have fully adopted his all-beef diet…

of course the real natural selection is for people who decide to live on beef and bleach to own the libs

Just heard that more people have now died of this than died of SARS, fwiw.

I was talking to a friend yesterday whose company's HK offices are now all closed. There was also a sad piece on the radio featuring Chinese families resistant to quarantine centers, because while they feel their family members would be nominally cared for (that is, fed), they recognized that sending loved ones to a quarantine center was tantamount to sending them off to die.

a friend in LA tells me that at some chinese restaurants there they are taking everyone's temperature when they enter the restaurant and making them wear masks. that's quite overboard. people in downtown SF are wearing masks as well....but they are probably 80% asian. i don't think they're helping with the sinophobia; on the other hand maybe they don't care about that, they just want to make sure they don't get sick.

Speculation on what's going on in North Korea other than five dead already

https://www.dailynk.com/english/sources-five-north-koreans-died-coronavirus-infections/
https://www.thedailybeast.com/north-koreas-secret-coronavirus-crisis-is-crazy-scary/

Crazy that that biggest outbreak anywhere outside of China is a cruise ship with 3600 as-yet-uninfected people still aboard. 136 cases confirmed on the Diamond Princess so far. Sounds like a nightmare scenario - especially given the advanced danger with the cruise-ship age demographic.

I'm going to Singapore tomorrow.

3600 as-yet-uninfected is actually quite reassuring (I mean excluding the obvious possibility of them becoming infected).

On the Diamond Princess, the passengers/crew were originally told that with every new case, their 14-day quarantine would be reset. The ventilation system between cabins is connected, and people without any close contact with known cases were infected. It was like some preface to a J.G. Ballard novel social breakdown.

The current plan is they'll keep the original quarantine end date of Feb 19 for the whole ship, except for resets “only for close contacts of newly confirmed cases.”

There's still probably a interesting low-budget screenplay in the story...

Speaking of cruise ships, some of the strictest health security I've ever experienced was on a cruise ship. Virtually non-stop invitation/instruction to wash or disinfect hands, and an explicit disclaimer that anyone seriously ill will be quarantined. But cruise ships are also a good example of how this stuff often goes down. The cruise lines get a lot of shit for making people sick, but more often than not it's someone on board that was sick to begin with that gets the germ ball rolling. And then things spread and people are stuck.

all is well

Nothing can stop them from dancing! Optimistic patients with mild symptoms caused by the #coronavirus dance at a temporary hospital in Wuhan pic.twitter.com/EKY0jyczh4

— China Xinhua News (@XHNews) February 10, 2020

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/b50b698a36ce50bad98d86f5b77c461705c19f9c/24_26_3193_2367/master/3193.jpg?width=1920&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=4769c993f26a16f58258d4cd45481587

You (literally) make me feel like dancing ...

Interesting that life in Chinese cities far from Wuhan have been affected this much:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking/comments/f0qjm9/what_the_coronavirus_forcing_me_in_lockdowns/

Sobering analysis:

GAZETTE: But what is most important for the public to know about this?

LIPSITCH: There’s likely to be a period of widespread transmission in the U.S., and I hope we will avert the kind of chaos that some other places are seeing.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/02/harvard-expert-says-coronavirus-likely-just-gathering-steam/

My wife was on the train yesterday morning, and seated across from her was a woman wearing a face mask. When my wife sneezed, the woman got up and moved.

I hope that I die to a disease with a more impressive name than COVID-19.

It’s an abbreviation for “coronavirus disease 2019.” The World Health Organization’s director-general explained in a media briefing Tuesday how careful they had to be when picking a moniker: “We had to find a name that did not refer to a geographical location, an animal, an individual or group of people, and which is also pronounceable and related to the disease.”

Shouldn't have a name so close to the best birds IMO

Relatively few face masks here in Singapore, compared to Indonesia.

Jesus.

we estimated that the number of infected individuals during early epidemic double every 2.4 days, and the R0 value is likely to be between 4.7 and 6.6

This paper offers a potential reason why COVID-19 (and SARS, which also attaches to lung cells via the ACE2 receptor) is more virulent in Asians. The study clearly needs replication with more tissue donors.

We also noticed that the only Asian donor (male) has a much higher ACE2-expressing cell ratio than white and African American donors (2.50% vs. 0.47% of all cells). This might explain the observation that the new Coronavirus pandemic and previous SARS-Cov pandemic are concentrated in the Asian area.

(which was not peer-reviewed)

Rather little of the COVID-19/2019 nCoV literature has gone through the whole peer review process. We're already up to ~540 results on Scholar, mostly preprints.

More cruise ship drama:

https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/coronavirus-cruise-ship-rejected-by-five-ports-runs-out-of-options

2300 people being scooted around in international waters as nobody is willing to let them dock, food and medicine running out.

I guess it makes a change for wealthy westerners to be the boat people being forced away from ports.

this guy sells knockoffs and also ends up describing what he's seeing https://www.fashionrepsfam.ru

^ spam

There has been a very big jump in the number of cases within China in the last 24 hours, though that has followed a change to the way in which patients are diagnosed, so it’s not obvious whether things are getting worse or whether they’re just getting better at identifying how bad it was.

Russian containment measures are going about as well as you’d expect:

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/02/12/russians-escape-coronavirus-quarantine-cages-a69257

A woman who’d been told she’d tested negative but still had to stay in lockdown for two weeks short-circuited the electro-magnetic lock on her hospital cell and escaped.