BBC: China pneumonia outbreak: COVID-19 Global Pandemic

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[China]

On 2/17/2020 at 12:38 PM, SoCalSkins said:

Do you guys think it’s paranoia to pull my kids out of school and wait it out a few months? I work from home so I can quarantine at home without interaction with other people. This thing is worrying me.

 

Stress, rumors, even violence: Virus fear goes viral

 

TOKYO (AP) — You might have heard that the fear of a new virus from China is spreading faster than the actual virus.

 

From earnest officials trying to calm a building panic. From your spouse. From the know-it-all who rattles off the many much more likely ways you’re going to die: smoking, car accidents, the flu.

 

None of it seems to matter.

 

As the number of casesrises — more than 76,000 and counting — fear is advancing like a tsunami. And not just in the areas surrounding the Chinese city of Wuhan, the site of the vast majority of coronavirus infections.

 

Subway cars in Tokyo and Seoul look more like hospital wards, with armies of masked commuters shooting dirty looks at the slightest cough or sneeze. A restaurant owner in a South Korean Chinatown says visitors have dropped by 90%.

 

You’ve probably got a better chance of winning the lottery than buying face masks in parts of Asia. Conferences and events have been disrupted from Beijing to Barcelona to Boston. Quarrels in Japan; riots in Ukraine. Rumors that toilet paper and napkins could be used as masks emptied East Asian store shelves of paper goods.

 

“Fear is a very strong emotion, and the prevailing fear over the new coronavirus drives people to do things irrationally without thinking straight,” said Bernie Huang, 31, a high school teacher in Taipei, Taiwan, who resisted the city’s now-easing toilet paper buying spree.

 

If you take the long view, panic has marched in lockstep with pandemic for as long as history has been recorded. The plague that devastated Athens in the fifth century BC. The Black Death that eradicated much of Europe in the 14th century. And, more recently, AIDS, Ebola, SARS, MERS, swine and bird flu.

 

Scientists, statisticians and people well away from the line of fire may scoff, but the fear, which is spread by word of mouth and, more rapidly, through online posts, is real.

 

“Fear can do more harm than the virus,” Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said in response to panic buying of toilet paper, canned food and instant noodles after the government raised a risk alert over the new virus.

 

It’s perhaps most keenly felt in the places where crowds gather: churches, shopping areas, schools.

 

In the Philippines, nearly half of the pews were empty for recent Sunday Masses in many churches. At a Protestant church in northern Seoul, officials switched entirely to online worship after it was found that a virus patient had attended services days before he tested positive.

 

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One quarantined passenger hung a banner that read: “No information ... Stressed. Many bad rumors.”

 

The internet foments many of those rumors.

 

When news broke that a journalist who reports on Japan’s leader had contact with an infected driver and was in self-quarantine, a web edition of the Weekly Post tabloid magazine declared: “Coronavirus has sent shockwaves to the prime minister’s office.”

 

Fear, and possibly a dark sense of humor, may also help explain some odd behavior: images of people using orange peels as face masks; children in strollers wrapped in what looks like dry cleaning plastic.

 

The fear has also led to lawlessness.

 

In Kobe, Japan, 6,000 surgical masks were reported stolen from a hospital.

 

Several hundred residents fearing infection in Ukraine clashed for hours with police as they blocked a road to a building where more than 70 people evacuated from China because of the virus were to be quarantined.

 

Two passengers on a subway in Fukuoka, Japan, quarreled after a man not wearing a mask started coughing, prompting the man next to him to press an emergency alarm, Kyodo News reported.

 

“Fear is spreading among passengers. We plan to promote cough etiquette, such as wearing facial masks,” a city transport official told the news agency.

 

Click on the link for the full article

 

 

[China]

Confusion mounts over China's counting methods as coronavirus numbers swing wildly

 

BEIJING - Authorities in Hubei province reported good news Thursday: There were only 349 new coronavirus cases the previous day, the lowest tally in weeks.

 

The bad - and puzzling - news? Wuhan, the capital of Hubei, reported 615 new cases all by itself.

 

As Chinese leaders and state media strike a coordinated note this week on the government's ability to contain the outbreak, inconsistencies and sudden changes in official data are leaving experts - and journalists - struggling to plot meaningful trends, or even place any confidence in the figures coming from government.

 

Hubei authorities have changed their criteria for counting cases twice in the past week. An earlier change that international researchers applauded led to a sudden spike in case numbers on Feb. 12. And the latest shift, the sixth time that national guidelines have been edited since Jan. 15, caused an overnight drop in new cases from 1,693 to 349.

 

Jonathan Read, an epidemiologist at the University of Lancaster, said case definitions sometimes do need to be edited as authorities come to grips with how a novel pathogen manifests itself.

 

"That said, it is very unhelpful for surveillance purposes to change how you define a case too often," he said.

 

The latest inconsistency - under which one city appeared to have more cases than the total in the province - apparently arose because Hubei province deducted cases that have not been confirmed through genetic tests from a total reported case number, which includes all diagnoses made by physicians using other methods.

 

At best, the constant changes have frustrated scholars. At worst, they have raised suspicions.

 

Click on the link for the full article

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[skinsmarydu]

It's on the move. 😥

[twa]

 

[SoCalSkins]

I was freaking out because of my young kids. Now that I have seen the numbers being relatively low risk in kids I’m not freaking out much. The initial numbers being thrown around was 10% death rate. Most parents would be very worried if that was the real number. I am concerned about my parents but when you think your kids are at a high risk it’s a different level of worry. Maybe it will subside as they age but mine are still very young.

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😯

[twa]

😎

 

John Price, president and CEO of Houston-based Greffex Inc., told the Houston Business Journal that Greffex's scientists completed the coronavirus vaccine this week. The vaccine should now move to animal testing by the necessary government agencies — in the U.S., that's the Food and Drug Administration. Countries impacted by the outbreak, like China and Vietnam, have their own agencies with their own clinical testing regulations.

 

https://www.khou.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/hbj-houston-genetic-engineering-co-completes-coronavirus-vaccine-ceo-says/285-6dcbb988-286f-4ba5-8b98-b68dc5385c49

[twa]

 

Quote

 

Here’s Why The Cruise Ship Quarantine Turned Into Such A Disaster

Bad ventilation and a botched quarantine on the Diamond Princess likely caused hundreds of illnesses and two deaths in the largest outbreak outside China.

 

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“It’s very easy in retrospect to question public health decisions,” said WHO’s Ryan. “It will be very important to study this particular event and see what the issues have been that have led to the transmission to the people that have been on that ship.”

But even with only a little hindsight, experts in respiratory disease transmission in confined settings say some lessons are apparent from the saga of the Diamond Princess and Westerdam.

Cruise ships can’t filter air well enough to stop the spread of viruses

“Get off that ship — there are a lot better places to isolate people,” Purdue University's Qingyan Chen, an expert on ventilation during virus outbreaks, told BuzzFeed News. “In ships, you cannot filter the air well enough to stop viruses.”

Health experts have warned about the potential for cruise ship outbreaks for years. A ship’s ventilation system, which relies on recirculated air filtered by medium-strength air filters, is an efficient way of spreading virus particles from room to room aboard a ship, said Chen. In a 2015 study, he and his colleagues looked at the spread of flu aboard cruise ships, finding that one infected person would typically lead to more than 40 cases a week later on a 2,000 passenger cruise, with transmission occurring through the ventilation system. In contrast, on land, the coronavirus seems to have a reproductive rate of two new cases per infected person, which would lead to three new cases in that time.

A 2018 CDC study of two Alaskan cruise ships that suffered flu outbreaks found that 83% of 410 passengers on the two ships were infected with some respiratory illness within the second week of the cruises, with how soon passengers boarded the ship presenting the biggest determinant of their risk.

 

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/cruise-ships-quarantine-botched

[TheGoodBits]

Appears the “window of opportunity” for containing this may be closed. It’s going around the world, and it’s going to stop until vaccines are available. Could be years. 

 

 

[TheGreatBuzz]

Still more likely to die from any number of things we face every day.  Wake me up when there is real cause for concern.

[Larry]

[twa]

that thread seems rather hyperbolic .

[Larry]

1 minute ago, twa said:

that thread seems rather hyperbolic .

Pretty sure exponential growth produces a parabola. At least for a while. 

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[twa]

the Chinese area round here is taking a financial hit already.

 

at least I get served faster.

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[twa]

 

Dang

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