Coronavirus - Is this the killer flu that will wipe us out?
Discussion
eharding said:
Gregmitchell said:
eharding said:
Exige77 said:
The economic fall out could be even worse than the potential death toll.
I think that's the rather cold calculation that has been made in China. They now have firm data on the likely impact of a general epidemic across China of the virus, and have compared that against the projected economic effect of the ongoing lock down, and have decided that re-opening for business is the lesser of two evils.Also, it won't be a case of "go back to work or CCP will make you disappear" - it'll be simply go back to work or go hungry, your choice.
Edited: same points made by previous post....
I don't think this is going to be apocalyptic, but some of the features of this disease that people seem to think make it less of a worry seem to me to be a public health nightmare.
If you think of a terrifying virus, it would be one that killed people quickly and dramatically, that would make anyone exposed very ill and maybe dead in short order. But that's easy to contain and control, and dead people don't take up beds in ICU. Something that leaves a substantial proportion of carriers mildly ill or even asymptomatic, takes a week or two to make people sick, perhaps another week to make them really sick and then leaves them needing intensive care for weeks before their case resolves either way - it seems to me that has a lot of potential to get messy.
If you think of a terrifying virus, it would be one that killed people quickly and dramatically, that would make anyone exposed very ill and maybe dead in short order. But that's easy to contain and control, and dead people don't take up beds in ICU. Something that leaves a substantial proportion of carriers mildly ill or even asymptomatic, takes a week or two to make people sick, perhaps another week to make them really sick and then leaves them needing intensive care for weeks before their case resolves either way - it seems to me that has a lot of potential to get messy.
Gregmitchell said:
Leithen said:
Whilst it is tempting and easy to beat the WHO with whatever implement lies close to hand, it needs to be understood that they are not some global health police. They can't march into countries and cut across nations or state health organisations.
At best it can coordinate in times of crisis. Little else.
Their press conferences are a joke, their stats are a joke, their predictions are a joke, their advice is a joke. UN should have stepped in much earlier.At best it can coordinate in times of crisis. Little else.
sherbertdip said:
Please stop it with the conspiracy theories, Porton Down and Boscombe Down are NOT part of the same "complex" they are about 5 miles apart and serve completely different functions.
My friend's milkman used to know someone who worked there (I think). He said that there are tunnels, or something, connecting the two sites.
Italy now at 113 cases overtakes HK and Singapore. In 3-4 days they have gone from next to nothing to locking down towns. To me this just indicates that this virus can go undetected for weeks with no symptoms or major illness then boom it hits you During that tie its probably spreading.
red_slr said:
Italy now at 113 cases overtakes HK and Singapore. In 3-4 days they have gone from next to nothing to locking down towns. To me this just indicates that this virus can go undetected for weeks with no symptoms or major illness then boom it hits you During that tie its probably spreading.
Yup, that has been stated from the beginning when people on here said another two weeks, we’ll this is Italy’s 2 weeks of incubation and asymptomatic spreading. Let’s hope it’s isolated. They’ll overtake Japan today for sure, is it because it’s so isolated and they’ve managed to test lost of people in a small area?
Edited by Gregmitchell on Sunday 23 February 12:02
red_slr said:
Italy now at 113 cases overtakes HK and Singapore. In 3-4 days they have gone from next to nothing to locking down towns. To me this just indicates that this virus can go undetected for weeks with no symptoms or major illness then boom it hits you During that tie its probably spreading.
It certainly looks like it spreads easily. In fact - and not wishing to trivialise a serious matter - it should be known as the Dairylea Virus.IIRC in the microscopic world, this makes for an evolutionary successful virus, i.e. one which infects a lot of hosts and moves from one to another easily, but doesn't kill a large proportion of hosts, thus facilitating transmission and replication.
Exige77 said:
Medics in China saying they virus could have started in Oct / Nov and been undetected until Dec.
Any infections / deaths, just written off as normal winter flu deaths until the penny dropped.
I believe it.Any infections / deaths, just written off as normal winter flu deaths until the penny dropped.
If you look at the cruise ship, people in close proximity yet in different rooms can still pass this virus around.
Then if you look at Wuhan its mostly high rise flats, at least 30 floors. They contain thousands of people. I suspect rural china is doing much better due to the physical distance between people.
red_slr said:
I suspect rural china is doing much better due to the physical distance between people.
We can hope. On the other hand, access to high quality medical care is less prevalent in rural areas, and also the much higher average age of agricultural workers in China may exacerbate the effects of the virus. Very little information, either official or via social media, seems to have been emerging from rural areas throughout the outbreak.China has long had a chronic demographic problem in rural areas - the young tend to migrate to the cities, leaving the older generation to work on the land. The average age of an agricultural worker in China is estimated to now be approaching 60, hence in the high-risk bracket for covid-19, and even if not fatal would have a debilitating effect, possibly long term, on those where hard manual labour is a daily requirement. The effect on domestic food production in China remains to be seen.
turbobloke said:
IIRC in the microscopic world, this makes for an evolutionary successful virus, i.e. one which infects a lot of hosts and moves from one to another easily, but doesn't kill a large proportion of hosts, thus facilitating transmission and replication.
Depends. A host is burnt if it recovers or dies. Either way it stops being useful. So killing the host or killing it too quickly can be maladaptive to the pathogen. Unless your mode of transmission is via mushy corpses, which might explain why Ebola became more lethal during some outbreaks. Or unless doing something really nasty to the host increases the transmission rate at the cost of burning the host out - for instance, the pneumonic form of plague is much more contagious than the bubonic form, because it's spread directly from person to person by bacteria in airborne droplets rather than by flea bites - but it is also more lethal and more rapidly so. Interestingly, plague also illustrates the other principle - the bacterium thought to be its ancestor is lethal to fleas and thus does not spread successfully via them.https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mut...
otolith said:
Depends. A host is burnt if it recovers or dies. Either way it stops being useful. So killing the host or killing it too quickly can be maladaptive to the pathogen. Unless your mode of transmission is via mushy corpses, which might explain why Ebola became more lethal during some outbreaks. Or unless doing something really nasty to the host increases the transmission rate at the cost of burning the host out - for instance, the pneumonic form of plague is much more contagious than the bubonic form, because it's spread directly from person to person by bacteria in airborne droplets rather than by flea bites - but it is also more lethal and more rapidly so. Interestingly, plague also illustrates the other principle - the bacterium thought to be its ancestor is lethal to fleas and thus does not spread successfully via them.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mut...
It’s natural mutation in a virus whereby strains develop that aren’t so good at transmitting or reproducing so die out, and the strains that are more effective at keeping themselves alive and reproducing continue to do so. For example a strain that kills in a day won’t last long, so less severe mutations are more likely to survive and these wont necessarily make the virus worse for us - it may mutate into something that’s milder. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mut...
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