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 cuda1179 wrote:
A doctor in my home town has gone full-on nutso. He started doing his rounds for a few days in a complete hazmat suit (the enclosed air kind), was warning patients and staff of how the medical system would be overwhelmed, and was handing out pamphlets that were Alex Jones levels of conspiracy theory.

When questioned about his actions by the hospital higher ups he basically rage quit.

I recently went to a large car show in Toronto and there was a man walking around wearing latex gloves, a face mask AND a dust mask on top of that. Don't know why he didn't just stay home. People can be weird, especially when we reflects upon theoretical dangers.

The UK has tested 4,500 suspected Coronavirus victims. 9 have been positive.

All the people who came back from Wuhan and were put in quarantine have been released after 2 weeks with no sign of infection.

South Korea looks like it's got a bit of a problem now.

 Mr Nobody wrote:

 cuda1179 wrote:
A doctor in my home town has gone full-on nutso. He started doing his rounds for a few days in a complete hazmat suit (the enclosed air kind), was warning patients and staff of how the medical system would be overwhelmed, and was handing out pamphlets that were Alex Jones levels of conspiracy theory.

When questioned about his actions by the hospital higher ups he basically rage quit.

I recently went to a large car show in Toronto and there was a man walking around wearing latex gloves, a face mask AND a dust mask on top of that. Don't know why he didn't just stay home. People can be weird, especially when we reflects upon theoretical dangers.

There are definitely end-of-the-world enthusiasts in every town, it just freaks me out that a guy who's literal profession it is to know better doesn't. At least he's not one of those anti-vax doctors though.

Well with people in usa refusing to go to chinese restaurants due to virus...

Some measures are getting "bit" over. It's not that much different if at all to 2009 us one and countries weren't rushing to shut down us from rest of the world now did they? (and unlike now it was younger people that died then mostly) people in europe didn't refuse to go to mcdonalds now did they?

And spring comes soon enough getting rid of flu's then.

Racism or stupidity, either way this is being blown out of proportions.

Update from Fuzhou aka F U city/prosperous city: 2 deaths so far related to corona virus; public gathering areas has reopened, but people must wear masks and be checked for temperatures.

Wuhan remains a hotspot, but everywhere else has been declining as far as cases and deaths go in China. But I have seen some report that a cruise ship docked in Japan and end up causing some more infections; as well as Taiwan.

I also read/seen reports about vicious act: such as intentionally rubbing hand against car door handles, tossing 100 RMB(Chinese currency) bills out the window from high rise housing. So beware out there.

My personal affairs: international flight was canceled and the system automatically moved me back a day to 3/1/20; I was accommodated by the company to move my flight from 2/22/20 to 3/1/20 locally; now I just need to move my local US flight back a day too.

tneva82 wrote:
Well with people in usa refusing to go to chinese restaurants due to virus...

Unfortunately racism remains pretty rampant here. It is probably more tragic how utterly unsurprising this is.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

tneva82 wrote:
Well with people in usa refusing to go to chinese restaurants due to virus...

Unfortunately racism remains pretty rampant here. It is probably more tragic how utterly unsurprising this is.

failure of integration into one society due to fragmentation into "tribes"-

Was there a recent update regarding the incubation period? Last I read it was between 17 to 24 days with out showing symptoms. Has that changed? I haven't seen anything about that recently.

It's always been 14 days as far as I know.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
It's always been 14 days as far as I know.

One of the network news channels here speculated last week that the incubation period 'might' be longer. This is, of course, extremely helpful.... in spreading paranoia.
Tonight (and most of the last week) they just blithely rattled off 'nearly 80,000 cases worldwide' and didn't bother with the slight nuance that 75,569 of 76,769 were in mainland China. Because a worldwide pandemic sounds more threatening and gets better ratings.

Mind you, the US Center for Disease Control web page doesn't help much either. Countries with confirmed cases are just all universally mapped in dark blue, regardless of if they have just 14 cases total (like the US), maybe 2 like Russia or Sweden, or 75,000 cases like China.

*numbers from WHO's Feb 21st report.


In a lot of ways the misinformation and public handling is worse than disease itself. Ukraine apparently had a riot protesting the arrival of buses transporting Ukrainians home from Wuhan. Rocks thrown at the buses and at cops.
None of the arrivals have tested positive for the disease.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51581805

Iran is reporting deaths from the Coronavirus but nobody seems to have come into contact with any foreigners ? They claim the victims have never left their local village/town ?

 Kilkrazy wrote:
It's always been 14 days as far as I know.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/coronavirus-china-updates/2020/02/22/72dd19de-54ea-11ea-b119-4faabac6674f_story.html?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter
"BEIJING — Scientists were studying a case in China that suggested the incubation period for coronavirus could be longer than 14 days, potentially casting doubt on current quarantine criteria even as the epidemic moved into new regions.

The potential for a longer incubation period was linked to a patient in China’s Hubei Province, where the virus was first detected in December. A 70-year-old man was infected with coronavirus, but did not show symptoms until 27 days later, the local government reported."


There are also reports of people getting re-infected with the virus;
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-chengdu-idUSKBN20F13C?taid=5e50e2eaee23af00013232b3&utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter
"BEIJING (Reuters) - A coronavirus patient initially discharged after recovering in southwestern Sichuan province’s Chengdu city has been readmitted after testing positive during a quarantine period at home, the city’s public health clinical center said on Friday.

The patient tested positive during a check-up 10 days after being discharged, the center said in a statement. Similar cases have been reported in other regions.

The positive result after discharge was likely due to a discrepancy in samples, the state media People’s Daily reported late Friday, citing an expert.

Official guidelines say patients must test negative for the virus twice, with at least a day between tests, before being discharged.

Hospitals had used nose and throat swabs for such tests before discharging patients, but are now required to use samples from lungs, where the virus is most likely to be detected as it develops, Lei Xuezhong, a doctor working on a treatment for coronavirus-caused pneumonia in Sichuan province told People’s Daily."

I wonder what the sensitivity and specificity of the tests they are using is. If it is low, you could get a lot of false positives or false negatives. Would not expect them to be particularly good given the virus is new.

People have been re-infected with Ebola.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
People have been re-infected with Ebola.

I told them not to go back to Soup Plantation.

One thing I've been wondering, and what might make this worse, is if people who have recovered from the virus continue to shed it after recovery. Its not unheard of for survivors of many diseases to become asymptomatic carriers. Even if they are healthy, they still shed the disease. Given we know that you can shed it prior to symptoms it seems possible that you'd keep shedding after recovery.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
It's always been 14 days as far as I know.

I've seen quite a few places saying it can be longer. 14 was more of a rough estimate and not a certainty even from the official sources.

I would have thought that to be extra safe they would have at least added a week onto the quarantine.

I think we have to assume that the WHO are pretty good at assessing infectious diseases and desgning the protocols for dealing with them.

The way viruses work, it seems a bit unlikely someone could be pumping out lots of particles for weeks without having any symptoms.

I think the danger is more that a mild case of Corona virus is like having a cold, or mild flu, so people won't go to the doctor.

Reading the news now, I cannot see any other option but a pandemic. I cannot see poorer countries being able to contain this and its just a matter of time.

Its not doom and gloom its going to happen and we all have to deal with it.


Lets hope the scientists come up with something quickly.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I think we have to assume that the WHO are pretty good at assessing infectious diseases and desgning the protocols for dealing with them.

We don't have to assume that at all. In fact, given that they dragged their feet for a week at the very beginning, hem, hawed, and refused to call it an emergency or put any protocols in place, we have evidence of exactly the opposite.
Even once they have protocols, individual countries putting them in place and enforcing them is an issue.

darkness screamer wrote:Reading the news now, I cannot see any other option but a pandemic. I cannot see poorer countries being able to contain this and its just a matter of time.

The ones currently failing this weekend are South Korea and Italy. There aren't a lot of reports of 'poorer countries' having problems.

Lets hope the scientists come up with something quickly.

Average time to create, test and distribute a new vaccine is about 10-15 years. Treatment is a different matter. There are apparently some positive signs with some old malaria drugs (Chloroquine phosphate), but its not clear how much of that anyone has lying around.

That all said, the flu is still killing more people this year, and the short/medium term economic effects from the panic are likely more earth shaking than the disease. Once things settle down, its another respiratory illness that's not particularly distinct (in effect) from the ones already in circulation.

The biggest thing about it is the live demonstration that our regional and global epidemic control measures are unsurprisingly inadequate.

Poorer nations might be more resilient in terms of having fewer of their population travelling, at least outside of the major urban trade/transport hubs. If anything richer nations are more at risk since a far larger body of the population is active and mobile and capable of long distance holidays and the like.



As for the WHO dragging its heels its likely a really hard judgement call to make between a minor outbreak and a major one. We are such a mobile world today with so many economic systems heavily reliant on the regular transportation of goods and people all over the place that pulling out the stops and shutting things down costs a fortune and can cripple countries and destroy businesses.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I think we have to assume that the WHO are pretty good at assessing infectious diseases and desgning the protocols for dealing with them.

The way viruses work, it seems a bit unlikely someone could be pumping out lots of particles for weeks without having any symptoms.

I think the danger is more that a mild case of Corona virus is like having a cold, or mild flu, so people won't go to the doctor.

Your appeal to authority aside, it is hoped that such bodies respond appropriately. However, the WHO has received criticism for its response;
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-world-health-organization-draws-flak-for-coronavirus-response-11581525207

https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/17/who-is-leading-charge-against-the-coronavirus-outbreak/
WHO accused of "kowtowing to Beijing and overlooking major shortcomings in its handling of the crisis, including the initial response to the outbreak."

https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/14/asia/coronavirus-who-china-intl-hnk/index.html
"The WHO's praise of China's response have led critics to question the relationship between the two entities. The UN agency relied on funding and the cooperation of members to function, giving wealthy member states like China considerable influence. Perhaps one of the most overt examples of China's sway over the WHO is its success in blocking Taiwan's access to the body, a position that could have very real consequences for the Taiwanese people if the virus takes hold there.
The WHO's position regarding China has also renewed a longstanding debate about whether the WHO, founded 72 years ago, is sufficiently independent to allow it to fulfill its purpose."

https://www.sciencealert.com/who-tries-to-correct-wuhan-coronavirus-risk-level
"The World Health Organization, which has sometimes been criticised for its handling of past disease outbreaks, admitted an error on Monday in its risk assessment of China's deadly virus.

The Geneva-based UN agency said in a situation report late Sunday that the risk was "very high in China, high at the regional level and high at the global level."

In a footnote, the WHO explained that it had stated "incorrectly" in its previous reports on Thursday, Friday and Saturday that the global risk was "moderate".

The correction of the global risk assessment does not mean that an international health emergency has been declared."


There have been other criticisms of the WHO;
https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/has-the-world-health-organization-measured-up-381282/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/obamacare-trump-health-ebola-flu-pandemic-who-reforms-cancer-tb-a7622416.html


The WHO also has a legacy which includes the West Nile experiments on children, Ebola & HIV experimentation which infected over one million Africans under the guise of a false polio vaccine, the overreaction and fear mongering around swine flu in 2009, its inadequate response to the Ebola outbreak in 2013-2016, their International Agency for Research on Cancer having a political bias in their studies, and appointing Mugabe as a goodwill ambassador after he oversaw the decline of his country's healthcare system.

I would hope your confidence is not misplaced.

 darkness screamer wrote:
Reading the news now, I cannot see any other option but a pandemic. I cannot see poorer countries being able to contain this and its just a matter of time.

Its not doom and gloom its going to happen and we all have to deal with it.

Lets hope the scientists come up with something quickly.

Yes, with the news today from Italy, It's looking worse - it has changed my tune.

We are on the knife's edge - the next 2-3 weeks will be telling to where this will all end up in a few months.

Mez

Voss wrote:

The ones currently failing this weekend are South Korea and Italy. There aren't a lot of reports of 'poorer countries' having problems.

Though whether poorer countries report is another thing.

Still. South korea 51 million people, 830 or so cases. Not like it's even knocking down significant people to the flu.

And in Britain violence against chinese people over the corona. China gave warning to people not to go to US and for good reason. Not safe to go to western countries.

There are mixed reports on casualties in Iran, and a possible spike in fatality rates. Though a climb in fatality as the virus spreads to developing world countries is likely, I think the claims of 25% fatality seen in the press are due to infection statistics being less complete than fatality statistics.

I do think Iran is in trouble with COVID-19 but how much trouble is anyones guess. Trouble is this is not stopping the press from guessing.

Thought I'd pop out a quick update, because stuff is happening out here.

Over the weekend, my prefecture had its first 4 cases. A government worker, his teen son, a nurse at the hospital where the government worker was treated, and a businessman who had been working with Chinese companies. All in the same area as me...
...and both my girlfriend and I technically work for the same government offices as him...
There's been a little mention of what happens if it gets bad out here, but not a lot. If the school I work at is shut, it means we have to use our paid holiday... I don't have more than 2 weeks left (wasn't planning for a big disease outbreak back in July when I went to Okinawa, silly me ), so it'll be taken out of next year's holiday .

Information is a bit blurry otherwise. A lot of people who, I will be totally honest, I don't trust for accurate info on literally anything else, have been posting stuff about how it seems worse for older men, with young kids especially being more or less unaffected (which is nice). Fatality rate remains lower than just plain spaghetti flu, which is a comfort...
...however, flu cases around here have spiked the hardest I've seen in a few years (first year in Korea and 70% of kids were off sick around late December, nationwide, if I remember right...), and part of me wonders if it's not similar to swine flu in the UK a few years back, where all summer everyone panicked, then got a weird summer flu, a few people were declared to actually have swine flu, and then it all blew over and quite a few people, myself included, turned around and said "hold up, did I catch swine flu, and it just wasn't all that bad...?". So who knows.

Went to work today after the holiday for the Emperor's birthday (thanks Naruhito!), and everyone at work was wearing masks. I even had a co-worker tell me that I should probably wear one (in the most indirect, polite, Japanese way possible) from now on. I'm down to my last, however, and am tempted to hang onto it in case things get really pear-shaped. They've completely sold out now, though I suspect that supply is being directed to larger cities etc. where tbf it's better to focus on doing what can be done for containment.

To go back to that R-word, stuff has been rising. While the local facebook page for the foreign community did have a random nutter jump in to rant about "Wuhan Flu", and say some unpleasant things to some Southeast Asian people, most of it...
...has been on the part of the expats, in my opinion. I won't name names (countries) but there is a pretty solid contingent who A. rant about how Japanese people "never wash their hands after using the toilet it's so disgusting and unclean"...



...and B. being dead keen to be victims of racism - a thing about NO FOREIGNERS SIGN FOUND AT RESTAURANT SOMEWHERE and all the pearl-clutching that comes with does the rounds pretty regularly, but I've seen no such thing, not now, nor in places where you get lectured about how you'll see such things, but again I never have.

I'll try to keep posting about stuff happening, and I imagine now it's in the local area, there'll probably be more cases soon.

Japanese are obsessively clean in my experience.

People starting to panic stockpile food here in Slovenia, in preparation of hordes of infected Italians raiding our supermarkets once theirs are empty. Somewhat peeved that I have to stockpile food now in case these fools collapse the supply chain.

 posermcbogus wrote:

Went to work today after the holiday for the Emperor's birthday (thanks Naruhito!), and everyone at work was wearing masks. I even had a co-worker tell me that I should probably wear one (in the most indirect, polite, Japanese way possible) from now on. I'm down to my last, however, and am tempted to hang onto it in case things get really pear-shaped. They've completely sold out now, though I suspect that supply is being directed to larger cities etc. where tbf it's better to focus on doing what can be done for containment.

One of my cousin who is a biochemistry professor tells everyone that you can use boiling water and pour over the masks(outside/inside/ear or head wrap), then let it hang dry for reuse. If the water starts to leak through the mask then you should replace it. Wash your hands first when coming home, then use alcohol disinfectant and wipe down things like keys, wallet, phone, etc. Pour boiling water over the bottom of your shoes too, never know where you might have walked over.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
People starting to panic stockpile food here in Slovenia, in preparation of hordes of infected Italians raiding our supermarkets once theirs are empty. Somewhat peeved that I have to stockpile food now in case these fools collapse the supply chain.

The BBC did a drive-by piece on Italy's 'quarantine' yesterday. And I use the word loosely, as the road they picked had a handful of cops and some road barriers, which they moved to let people through and just let people hand off items across the 'boundary.'
No wonder they're having problems with containment.

I reckon it is impossible to stop something like this spreading, as we have seen. Not saying we shouldn't try or that being lax is okay, but I think most places are going to see this disease before long.

I reckon the fatality rate in countries with decent medical systems will not be too bad though. And the virus will likely get less virulent with time, they usually do.