Corona Virus, How Has It Affected Your Area So Far?

There is literally no one saying we should lock everyone up for the rest of their lives. *** nobody. It's just for a couple months so that we don't overwhelm the hospitals and people die from it. It'll be relatively mild if we take those steps for now, and then everything will be fine. But idiots like you are going to cause thousands, if not millions, to die, because you can't use logic and listen to people who know better than you.

This is either incredibly ignorant or callous beyond belief. Allow me to assume it's merely the former.

The "It's not any more dangerous than the flu!" bit is, at best, a wild misrepresentation of the facts. The problem is not that the specific symptoms are that bad in most people, it's that it is an order of magnitude more infectious. Combined with the fact that people are often asymptomatic for a week (or forever! we can't test enough to know for sure!) you get a disease that very quickly spreads to absolutely everyone without some kind of shift in policy.

Which means that even a <1% fatality rate kills millions by itself, to say nothing of the cascade effects; full hospitals and overworked/sick medical staff means other people die of other things that they would have survived otherwise.

I started backreading this thread after getting summoned, and HOLY ***.

I'm locking the thread, and I'm genuinely considering extending the anti-vax policy to this lunacy about the *** INSANE "oh it's not a big deal" crowd. You people are *** psychopaths.

If you're not familiar with the anti-vax policy, you can ask Lordgrim about it when his suspension is up.

I'm unlocking this thread, with the following caveat:

The old anti-vax rule about "anything that deliberately flies in the face of public health/science gets you nuked, no appeal" is in play for this.

Behave yourselves accordingly.

As a premise, it's still too early to discuss SARS-CoV-2 numbers, because we simply don't have the bigger picture yet. So take this with a grain of salt.

Many people die yearly from the flu worldwide, that's correct. The estimate is about 290000 to 650000 people dying from the flu yearly (Influenza A virus in 80% of the cases) (Iuliano et al. Estimates of global seasonal influenza-associated respiratory mortality: a modelling study. Lancet. 2018;391:1285-300. 10.1016/S0140-6736(17)33293-2).
It's ok to find this scary, but what does it really mean? It means that 0.008% of world population in 2017 died from the flu (mostly in sub-saharian africa, but i digress), and that's what we call a mortality burden: it gives us no data on how this people died, how many required hospitalization or intensive care, or even how many were infected in the first place.
In order to compare SARS-CoV-2 to Seasonal Influenza (which is what you are referring to as the FLU, but it's just a tiny part of the Orthomyxoviridae family) we need at least 3 sets of data: how easily they spread (R0), how easily they get you seriously sick (need of intensive care) and how easily they kill you (mortality/lethality rate).

How easily they spread.
The estimated R0 for the seasonal flu is about 1.3 (Biggerstaff et al. 2014. Estimates Of The Reproduction Number For Seasonal, Pandemic, And Zoonotic Influenza: A Systematic Review Of The Literature.), while estimated R0 for SARS-CoV-2 ranges from 2.4 to 6.5 (Di Wung et al. 2020. The SARS-CoV-2 outbreak: what we know DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijid.2020.03.004). This means that SARS-CoV-2 is definitely more contagious (or extremely more contagious; like I already stated, we will need to look back at the numbers when we have the bigger picture). As a reference, R0 is the number of new infections a single infected patient can create.

How often they get serious.
In 2018-2019 italian’s biggest authority in public health (ISS) registered for the whole year 812 serious cases of seasonal flu, which required intensive care (205 of these died). The total number of influenza-like cases where 8072000 (https://www.epicentro.iss.it/ben/2019/luglio-agosto/sorveglianza-integrata-influenza-2018-19). This means only the 0.01% of those 8072000 required intensive care. As for SARS-CoV-2, the number of people currently infected in Italy is (estimated to be) 62013, of these 3612 are in intensive care right now, meaning roughly 6%. If you’re not familiar with what an intensive care unit is, 3612 people is an impressive amount. No, it’s not a regular hospital room/bed, look it up.

How easily they kill you.
It’s way too early to *** SARS-CoV-2 mortalty/lethality rate correctly. We’ll have to discuss about the case-fatality rate, which is good enough for our purpose. The case-fataliy rate is reported to be about 7.2% in Italy and 2.3% in China (Onder G, Rezza G, Brusaferro S. Case-Fatality Rate and Characteristics of Patients Dying in Relation to COVID-19 in Italy. JAMA. Published online March 23, 2020. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.4683). This is the single data that is more susceptible to bias, since it vastly depends on how many people you identify as SARS-CoV-2 positive (swab or ct scan, the latter having a better sensitivity): in Italy, at the moment, only people who show symptoms compatible with the disease are tested. Actually, not even every symptomatic person is tested (let alone a chest ct scan) unless they get hospitalized. I’m sure you could argue that, based on this, the whole data is meaningless, that we don’t know if it’s really worse than the flu. Well, no seasonal flu epidemic has challenged our hospitals like this in such a short amount of time. I’ve never seen so many bilateral pneumonias and, most importantly, I’ve never heard of undertakers having a month long queue for cremation.
For reference, the mortality rate for seasonal flu in 2017-2018 in the US was about 0.1%(https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html).
This is real, our people are dying, and for most of them, we don’t know how to help them. They die alone in an hospital bed, surrounded by people fully dressed in what looks like a space suit, who can’t even give them a smile because their face is fully covered. It is heartbreaking.
I hope you found this helpful.

No its not.

Well we do hear bad things about the British press over here.

The "D" in coviD-19 literally stands for "Disease"

Stop being so tribal. All media lies. Their only job is to spark fear or outrage to generate clicks. The old days of a reporter investigating a story to get to the truth are over

I guess what we hear about the British press is true then.

Probably. But this also applies to CNN.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/27/822407626/mystery-in-wuhan-recovered-coronavirus-patients-test-negative-then-positive?

It’s either legit or it’s sensationalism.

If everything in print is sensationalism, your problem might be cynicism.

Really hope that isn't the case, the scenario in that story is frightening to say the least.

You're assuming I have a problem. I do not. Knowing that the media is not trustworthy just means I need to do a little more work to get the news. Unlike most people, I don't only read news from 1 side. Read it all, acknowledge the contradictions, and sort through it.
And if I see some sources being really outrageously bad (like promoting the use of fish bleach, then claiming someone else was promoting it after a person died), then I can use those sources to decide which contradiction is the wrong one.

I've seen this out of a few news sources. China started reporting this a while ago. You can't really trust much out of China, but sadly this might be true.

I’m leaning towards the false negative interpretation of that story. We don’t know the confidence levels of the tests they’re using.

This is a very likely scenario as well.

You’re assuming that because I posted after you my comment on cynicism was directed solely at you and not the thread/activity on this page in general.

If I wanted to directly address you I would quote you. Like I just did.

Fair enough