Coronavirus - worldwide breaking news, discussion, stats, updates and more

[MrCurry]

At this early stage, it’s hard to get clear info as even if the authorities know, they may have good reasons not to allow panic to develop. I’m just wondering how wise it might be to get ahead of the rush and do a spot of panic buying precautionary stocking of non perishable provisions this weekend, or if it takes off and becomes a pandemic, is it going to be unavoidable anyway?

I’m thinking things like lentils, dried chickpeas, rice, etc, on which you could live for months if you really had a good reason not to leave the house.

 

[SpookyFrank]

The first case has been reported in New York.

And if it can make it there, it can make it anywhere.

 

[weltweit]

Did anyone else get this strange question when the authorities were saying that the disease had passed the species boundary, well there was the sort of implied question what exactly were they doing with those animals?

 

[fishfinger]

Did anyone else get this strange question when the authorities were saying that the disease had passed the species boundary, well there was the sort of implied question what exactly were they doing with those animals?

Overcrowding, living in close proximity, and breathing in the same viruses as the animals. Poor sanitation - that sort of thing.

 

[weltweit]

Overcrowding, living in close proximity, and breathing in the same viruses as the animals. Poor sanitation - that sort of thing.

That sounds very rational thank you.

 

[Yossarian]

Did anyone else get this strange question when the authorities were saying that the disease had passed the species boundary, well there was the sort of implied question what exactly were they doing with those animals?

At markets like the one in Wuhan, all kinds of wild animals are crammed into cages next to each other before they are sold as food, so it's not surprising viruses end up jumping between species - SARS emerged in a similar way.

 

[Rimbaud]

I listened to the R4 sciencey show last night, rational people saying informed things about preparation and risk. Conclusion - China has been forward thinking and we shouldn't lay awake at night worrying.

It was immediately followed by the news which was all doom and gloom

China spent the crucial first days of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak arresting people who posted about it online and threatening journalists

The whole reason this spread is because the Chinese government punishes reporting of bad news. They are not being forward thinking at all.

"Just days before the entire city was quarantined, Wuhan hosted a major banquet involving 40,000 families to try to set a world record, The Times reported."

That banquet should not have gone ahead, but the government was still claiming it could not spread human to human and arresting people for "spreading rumours" if they reported the truth.

Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

This is the second time in one year where a major epidemic has been caused by the censorship regime and suppression of bad news.

The Chinese government deserves absolutely no praise whatsoever for their mishandling of the situation. The blame lies squarely with the Central Government and particularly with Xi Jinping, who has systematically rolled back any space for whistle-blowing or reporting bad news. We're also seeing that after the virus spread to be out of control thanks to cover ups, they are now over-reacting to save face and shutting down supply chains and as a result, leaving hospitals in Wuhan under-resourced and in a state of breakdown.

Far from being far sighted, their mishandling of the coronavirus could be the most disastrous mismanagement since the Great Leap Forward, which was also largely caused by people covering up bad news and claiming bumper harvests when there was a famine.

 

[Rimbaud]

This recording has gone viral on Wechat, managed to find a subtitled version.

 

[weltweit]

Rimbaud sounds grim.

And sounds a lot more serious than the UK news media are making it out to be.

 

[weltweit]

Of course why would they be building a new hospital urgently unless they expected a lot of cases.

 

[Rimbaud]

Rimbaud sounds grim.

And sounds a lot more serious than the UK news media are making it out to be.

UK news are still largely dependent on official mainland Chinese sources, journalists won't be able to get access to Hubei province, so that is why. The stuff leaking out on social media within China, and what Chinese friends in Guangdong and Hubei are telling me, seems like it's a lot more serious.

I wished a friend in Guangdong Happy New Year and she said she is doing nothing today, just watching news on Youtube through VPN. Apparently all outdoor activities are cancelled, eating out is forbidden, and they have been ordered by the government not to visit relatives, so all there is to do is stay at home and eat a simple meal with nothing special. Pretty miserable New Year.

 

[cupid_stunt]

If that voicemail is real, that's a complete nightmare.

It's clearly nowhere near under control, as a second hospital is to be built now.

China's Wuhan to build second designated hospital to treat coronavirus patients: state media

China's Wuhan city, the centre of the outbreak of the new coronavirus, will build a second dedicated hospital to treat patients, state media the People's Daily reported on Saturday.

www.reuters.com

 

[Artaxerxes]

Bit concerned by all this, I’ve got a fucked immune system and work in a tourist hot spot.

Wuhan, China, is scrambling to build a hospital in just 6 days to treat coronavirus patients as its health system gets overwhelmed

Wuhan is in lockdown over the deadly virus, and doctors say existing hospitals are severely overwhelmed.

www.businessinsider.com

Fucking hell, they can't even repair potholes in 6 months around here!

Men with guns aren’t pointing them at capita that’s why.

Might improve a lot of they did mind.

 

[weltweit]

BBC says Britain is trying to trace 2000 visitors from Wuhan.

is understood that the aim is to eliminate those who have flown on to other destinations and to check on the health of others in case they might have the coronavirus.

It is believed that this could involve as many as 2,000 people
]

 

[elbows]

If that voicemail is real, that's a complete nightmare.

The voice mail can be true without all the facts in it being true.

For example, there is unlikely to be a way for medical staff there to know that 100,000 people are infected. Methods could be used to estimate that number, but there is no way that order of magnitude of people have actually been tested for this coronavirus. And there are so many other common illnesses that will have similar symptoms in all but the really serious cases.

Medical staff themselves are not immune to panic, and they are probably being asked to deal with an impossible situation with a scary order of magnitude. That doesnt mean they are in a position to properly judge the actual order of magnitude.

 

[Cid]

UK news are still largely dependent on official mainland Chinese sources, journalists won't be able to get access to Hubei province, so that is why.

Hmm... really? Communication within China isn't that restricted, and there are around 1000 US citizens in Wuhan, including a consulate (recent news says they're arranging a flight out). There's also a British consulate in Wuhan. Though I suppose they may have been relying too heavily on official statements, since the kind of journalism that requires you to find decent sources in a city that rarely gets much attention outside China would actually take some effort.

 

[elbows]

The media love the human stories and the lockdown stories so they have not been shy of trying to get stuff from normal people on the ground.

People in the affected cities are very well placed to tell us about the panic, the shortages, various other human aspects. In most cases they wont actually be well placed to judge the spread of infection. Hospitals being overloaded with people turning up isnt as much of a guide as we'd think either because its sort of inevitable once public fear of the disease crosses a certain point. If you are there now and you catch a cold, you are quite likely to think you've caught the new coronavirus even when you havent, and seek medical attention.

 

[cupid_stunt]

This modelling is being wildly reported, let's hope it's wrong.

Using case data scraped from official reports, a team led by Jonathan Read [a biostatistics researcher] at Lancaster University plotted a temporal map of the coronavirus’s spread, starting on January 1, when local authorities closed the meat-and-animal market where the virus is believed to have crossed into humans from an unknown source. They worked under the assumption that any spread following the first of the year could only be between humans.

The models they constructed predict a dire start to February: further outbreaks in other Chinese cities, more infections exported abroad, and an explosion of cases in Wuhan. “In 14 days’ time, our model predicts the number of infected people in Wuhan to be greater than 190,000,” the authors write.

Scientists Predict Wuhan's Virus Outbreak Will Get Much Worse

New estimates of how far the virus could spread suggest an explosion of cases will hit the Chinese city and more infected individuals will show up abroad.

www.wired.com

 

[Cid]

This modelling is being wildly reported, let's hope it's wrong.

Hadn't realised the market was closed as long ago as the 1st. Given that you'd need to establish that the virus wasn't just flu, and where it came from before doing that, it does seem to indicate that this has a had a long time to spread already.

 

[SheilaNaGig]

I listened to the R4 sciencey show last night, rational people saying informed things about preparation and risk. Conclusion - China has been forward thinking and we shouldn't lay awake at night worrying.

It was immediately followed by the news which was all doom and gloom

The thing is...

With the increasing number of novel viruses and significantly dangerous outbreaks of new and known viruses, from SARS to Ebola, flu etc. however cautious careful and successful we are at keeping them contained and finding treatments and vaccines and treatments for them, it seems fairly ineviteble to me that eventually catastrophic mistakes will be made.

Unless we adopt drastic draconian collective and universal measures to guard against any and all potentially deadly pandemics, it’s only a matter of time before one of them (or a mixture of them) gets the advantage over us.

It sounds like this one will kick our arses (I suspect we won’t see it peak for some time yet) but we’ll probably manage to head it off as a global catastrophe this time. But I have a nagging feeling the odds are shortening for us in the longer term.

 

[elbows]

This modelling is being wildly reported, let's hope it's wrong.

The last paragraph of that article is one of the most important:

Read and his coauthors acknowledge that at this point all predictions are shaky, given the limited information available. But with an outbreak that’s moving as fast as this one, models like theirs are often the best tools available for public health officials to decide how to combat what’s coming next.

Funnily enough I was a victim of a disease outbreak when I was at Lancaster Uni, one of the campus cafes had what I presume was a norovirus outbreak. I bet the relevant science department there had fun analysing that one at the time, since that department there often gets in the news as a source of quotes from experts who do disease outbreak research, and this study is no exception.

 

[SheilaNaGig]

The media love the human stories and the lockdown stories so they have not been shy of trying to get stuff from normal people on the ground.

People in the affected cities are very well placed to tell us about the panic, the shortages, various other human aspects. In most cases they wont actually be well placed to judge the spread of infection. Hospitals being overloaded with people turning up isnt as much of a guide as we'd think either because its sort of inevitable once public fear of the disease crosses a certain point. If you are there now and you catch a cold, you are quite likely to think you've caught the new coronavirus even when you havent, and seek medical attention.

All this of course.

And/but if you click through that voice recording the see the replies, there’s a clp of a very crowded hospital (which may well be full of over-cautious folk) with three covered corpses in the corridor. Three dead on the floor (if true) suggests a genuinely overwhelmed system.





Would China accept international aid?

 

[Rimbaud]

Conversation on Wechat with a friend from Wuhan who is studying in France at the moment, translated (I left the original Chinese because there is some ambiguity in translation):

Me:
新年快乐 Happy New Year
你怎么过年？ How did you see in the New Year?
My friend:
我在飞机上跨年 I spent it on a plane
我还好吧 I'm alright
我家人不太好 My family aren't so good
Me:
你联系到他们吗？ Did you get in contact with them?
具体的情况我不太清楚，很难判断病毒消息的可靠性 I'm not too clear on the exact situation, it is difficult to judge the reliability of news about the virus
My friend:
联系了 Contacted them
武汉是一座空城 Wuhan is an empty city
Me:
他们怎么样？ How are they?
My friend:
所有商店关门了，超市物资不够，药店关门，所有机动车不能开 All the shops are closed, the supplies in the supermarkets are running low, pharmacies are closed, no transport is running
我爷爷卧床不起 My grandfather is in bed, can't get up
我舅舅发烧 My Uncle has a fever
Me:
我与有些广东朋友联系了，据说他们的城市也是空的，只好留在家里面过年 I contacted some friends from Guangdong, apparently their city is also empty, no choice but to spend the festival stuck at home
My friend:
我妈妈也不好 My mother is also not good
Me:

I'm very sorry to hear that
My friend:
我表妹刚刚给我打电话 My cousin just called me
她说她的同学快不行了 She said her classmate (or classmates?) are almost done (quite hard to translate this, a bit ambiguous but basically means they close to death)
Me:
我的天 Omg
My friend:
咯血，肺部严重感染，医院排不上队 Hemoptysis, severe lung infection, cannot queue at the hospital
全家就我一个人没事 I'm the only one in my family who is well
我给舅舅打电话，他有点不清醒，把自己一个人锁在房间里，不和家人接触 I called my Uncle, he feels a bit groggy, he has locked himself in his room and is avoiding contact with his family
大家都活在恐慌之中 Everybody is living in a state of panic

 

[elbows]

Hadn't realised the market was closed as long ago as the 1st. Given that you'd need to establish that the virus wasn't just flu, and where it came from before doing that, it does seem to indicate that this has a had a long time to spread already.

I'm under the impression that the first known case had an illness onset date of about December 8th, with mid December often stated as the timeframe when many of the initial cases emerged.

 

[SheilaNaGig]

Oh gosh that sounds very bad Rimbaud . I send you and yours my very best wishes.

And the same for all our Urban bredren and sistren who have people in China.

 

[Cid]

I'm under the impression that the first known case had an illness onset date of about December 8th, with mid December often stated as the timeframe when many of the initial cases emerged.

That does not sound good. Nor does rimbaud’s conversation above.

 

[Rimbaud]

Hmm... really? Communication within China isn't that restricted, and there are around 1000 US citizens in Wuhan, including a consulate (recent news says they're arranging a flight out). There's also a British consulate in Wuhan. Though I suppose they may have been relying too heavily on official statements, since the kind of journalism that requires you to find decent sources in a city that rarely gets much attention outside China would actually take some effort.

It is still difficult to verify things and get accurate information for a whole variety of reasons. Even if you are in China, you are inviting trouble if you go poking around asking questions about sensitive issues, and if you are a journalist you are heavily scrutinised.

 

[elbows]

The thing is...

With the increasing number of novel viruses and significantly dangerous outbreaks of new and known viruses, from SARS to Ebola, flu etc. however cautious careful and successful we are at keeping them contained and finding treatments and vaccines and treatments for them, it seems fairly ineviteble to me that eventually catastrophic mistakes will be made.

Unless we adopt drastic draconian collective and universal measures to guard against any and all potentially deadly pandemics, it’s only a matter of time before one of them (or a mixture of them) gets the advantage over us.

It sounds like this one will kick our arses (I suspect we won’t see it peak for some time yet) but we’ll probably manage to head it off as a global catastrophe this time. But I have a nagging feeling the odds are shortening for us in the longer term.

For years before the swine flu pandemic there was the common idea (very much including within the expert community) that we were long overdue for a flu pandemic, it was just a matter of time, etc. Obviously we then had the swine flu pandemic so this overdue idea was reset.

Mistakes in response leading to wider disease spread is something we see more discussion of with outbreaks that actually have limited capacity to spread, so containment is feasible. But I would suggest that the diseases most likely to spread without a realistic prospect of containment are the ones most likely to affect humanity as a whole, and when that happens its not really a story of human error. More one of humans never having control over this stuff in the first place.

Human errors can have massive implications though. The H1N1 flu strain that emerged in 1977 and became a standard seasonal strain until displaced by the 2009 swine flu strain, is quite widely considered to have come from a lab accident.

 

[elbows]

It sounds like this one will kick our arses (I suspect we won’t see it peak for some time yet) but we’ll probably manage to head it off as a global catastrophe this time. But I have a nagging feeling the odds are shortening for us in the longer term.

I have no reason at all to assume we'll probably manage to stop it becoming a global catastrophe. Its just too early to tell, and some indicators may be suggesting greater transmissibility than we saw with SARS, so for me that means all bets are off.

 

[Cid]

It is still difficult to verify things and get accurate information for a whole variety of reasons. Even if you are in China, you are inviting trouble if you go poking around asking questions about sensitive issues, and if you are a journalist you are heavily scrutinised.

Certainly seems to be the case, total lack of concrete info. Especially in light of your post above... just surprised me a bit.

Nanjing chatter seems pretty normal looking at my wechat moments/talking to friends. People concerned of course, but nothing beyond that yet.