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"Guys, we've now been informed that the continent of Australia is on fire and the venues we were supposed to play are now smoldering ruins. As you can imagine, we're all pretty bummed about this because it totally fucks up the routing for the Pacific islands leg of our tour, and how often do you get to hit Fiji?"

Yeah this is basically the issue with it. We are bummed, our routing has been fucked up, and how often would we get to hit this other place. Us. Us. Us.
 
Yep - it started with masks and disinfectant, then it was toilet paper, then rice, now it seems to be food and all kinds of other supplies, scary how fast something like this can snowball. People are spending a lot of time standing in queues in crowded shops wearing masks that don't really offer that much protection against the virus. The government says there are adequate supplies of things, but nobody believes anything they say after the events of the last 8 months.

Details on the quarantine for arrivals from the mainland haven't been finalised but it doesn't sound like it's going to be a very tight seal - Hong Kong residents will apparently be told to self-quarantine at home, others will apparently be told to stay in hotel rooms or quarantine facilities the government is trying to set up. Truck drivers from the mainland are also likely to be exempted, there'd be serious shortages of vegetables, etc. if they weren't.

Shortly after Jimmy Hoffa got Pacino’d in that boring arse film, the truck drivers are the ones we’re relying on.
 
oh crap. just looked up where i'm flying to on Tuesday and found this.
Little bit freaked by the prospect of all the airport staff wearing face-masks because some local people have bee infected.
Should i buy something to put on my face? Coronavirus: Indore airport authorities distribute masks to security personnel, staff | Indore News - Times of India

No harm in it. I don't know about India, but here in East Asia, it's commonplace to see staff and customers wearing face masks (at any time of the year, but particular in the flu season).
 
China had its deadliest day, on Friday, with 82 deaths, taking the total to 722, including a US citizen, the first foreigner. :(

Looks like the death rates will overtake that of SARS, 774 deaths, today.

I hope these drug tests find an answer soon.
 
Is it too optimistic to suggest that the China line on this “confirmed cases” graph from the John Hopkins tracker page is flattening out, rather than accelerating upwards into a parabola? I wonder how much faith we can put in these figures, or whether the flattening out reflects limits on the testing capacity available, rather than a levelling out of the rate of infection?

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I wonder how much faith we can put in these figures, or whether the flattening out reflects limits on the testing capacity available, rather than a levelling out of the rate of infection?

From Wuhan and the surrounding cities, there are reports of a massive shortage of testing kits and other equipment, health workers and facilities being completely overwhelmed, people being turned away from hospitals, people being unable to get to hospitals in the first place because transport has been shut down, people actively avoiding hospitals because they don't want to be sent to facilities full of thousands of sick people placed 1 meter apart - and even if the Chinese government was able to determine an accurate number of people infected, they cannot be relied upon to disclose it honestly.

So I don't think there's much of a relationship between the figures released by China and reality, I don't know what the true number of infections or deaths might be, but I doubt Beijing would give an overstated one.
 
I think there's still some missing information about the time period during which a carrier can infect others.

They have said that during the first 14 days during which a person is incubating the disease they may not have symptoms but they can infect other people.

But what about after the first 14 days when perhaps the illness is more visible presumably they can infect others at that time too. And what about when the illness appears to have receded, are people still infectious then?
 
Does anyone have any up-to-date figures for infections etc? Last I heard there have been about 600 deaths but this may have been understating the figures. Still most fatalities have been in Hubei.
 
Does anyone have any up-to-date figures for infections etc? Last I heard there have been about 600 deaths but this may have been understating the figures. Still most fatalities have been in Hubei.

In China, confirmed cases over 34,500 & 722 deaths.

One report was suggesting it's likely to be at least 150-200,000 cases now, but it's impossible to know, as labs can't keep up with the required testing.
 
In China, confirmed cases over 34,500 & 722 deaths.
..
Where did you see those figures if you don't mind me asking?

On another matter I have read that Chinese medical staff in Hubei are expected to work 10 hour shifts with no no breaks for food or toilet which seems pretty extreme to me.
 
Where did you see those figures if you don't mind me asking?

On another matter I have read that Chinese medical staff in Hubei are expected to work 10 hour shifts with no no breaks for food or toilet which seems pretty extreme to me.

Sky News, on the telly box. Also see my post #879 - China had its deadliest day, on Friday, with 82 deaths, taking the total to 722, including a US citizen, the first foreigner.

This was yesterday's figures, which will get updated later today...

Since 31 December 2019 and as of 7 February 2020 8:00 CET, 31 503 laboratory-confirmed cases of novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) infection have been reported, including 638 deaths.

 
cupid_stunt interesting and those figures seem more up-to-date, the BBC website seems to have got confused with multiple articles most of which are few days old I haven't seen any recent articles for a while.
 
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On a slightly different angle I wonder if this outbreak could change China's interest in wild meat and if it could possibly reduce the obsession with Chinese medicine and the demands that makes on African wildlife?
 
5 Brits in France, part of a skiing party, have been confirmed to have caught it, one had been a recent visitor to Singapore & infected the others.
 
5 Brits in France, part of a skiing party, have been confirmed to have caught it, one had been a recent visitor to Singapore & infected the others.
Bad luck for them, as far as I could tell Singapore only has a handful of cases. That visitor must have been unlucky. Either that or there are more cases there than have been reported.
 
Bad luck for them, as far as I could tell Singapore only has a handful of cases. That visitor must have been unlucky. Either that or there are more cases there than have been reported.

Singapore was up to 33 cases last time I checked. Also, the 3rd case confirmed in the UK had travelled from there too, so it wasnt very surprising to hear that Singapore was linked with the latest cases as well.

A specific business conference at a particular hotel is strongly linked to cases who caught it there and then travelled to other countries:


edited to add - I've only just started reading about the French chalet cases, so I havent seen anything linking the person involved in that outbreak to the above conference. But it looks like the dates they were in Singapore match the conference.
 
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In China, confirmed cases over 34,500 & 722 deaths.

One report was suggesting it's likely to be at least 150-200,000 cases now, but it's impossible to know, as labs can't keep up with the required testing.

I suppose the “confirmed cases” are always going to be somewhat lower than the actual number of infections, since it takes two weeks after infection for the symptoms to show, then some further time (days?) for the person to get medical attention, tested and get a test result back. So in reality, even if those confirmed cases statistics were accurate, they would reflect the number of infections which happened some 2-3 weeks ago.

Your numbers of 150-200k don’t look too unrealistic then.
 
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