Without delving into any of the numbers here since they're still mostly speculation (we don't know how many people are really infected / dead), I think it's safe to say that two deadly seasonal illnesses is worse than one and is an outcome worth trying to prevent.

The issue isn't absolute numbers. We don't know the deadliness of the current outbreak. Lets take the flu for example. According to CDC https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e.... The death rate is around 0.09% at the worst according the numbers on the cdc estimates (Which is a very pessimistic estimate). If the coronavirus has a mortality rate of 1/100 it would make 10x more deadly than the flu.

That's the mortality rate in the US. Worldwide it's much higher and goes up to 600,000 deaths annually.

Yes, and for Cononavirus, it will be even more.

I would love nothing more than to wager on that claim with anyone keen.

This thread is full of cringeworthy doomsdayers and armchair epidemiologists throwing around unsubstantiated nonsense. When your only knowledge of this comes from the media people should be a bit more selfaware.

The fact that qAnon folks are all over this and one day old accounts turning up saying millions will die speaks volumes for the level of discourse here.

Bet on the above comment stands for anyone. $1000 USD sound ok? Put your money where your mouth is.

Is there any platform where this could be done, or any proxy that one could trade in order to place this bet? I would also gladly put US$1000 on this.

Long Bets (longbets.org) would be one. Unfortunately, the minimum period there seems to be 2 years.

How are you any different than the other “armchair epidemiologists” in this thread? If anything, I’d say you’re worse than others as you want to profit over a potential pandemic where thousands may die.

The stock market has taken a hit over this outbreak fear. Go place your contrarian bets there if you’d like.

So $1000 then on the above statement I was responding too? Am keen, there's numerous p2p betting marketplaces we can do this in.

Put your money where your non-contrarian mouth is if you are so sure, the media told you so it must be true right?

Mark my words no one will mention this stuff in 3 months.

That's a good hedge bet for whoever takes it.

[citation needed]

People keeps saying things like, "Yeah, well last year way more people died of the flu!"

Yeah, well that was an entire year. This is a few weeks. The goal is to get ahead of things, not to wait until it's too late.

I'm still not sure I understand this. If US alone has ~60k deaths from the flu a year, that still works out to be much more (1153 deaths per week).

It's actually very simple. The Flu has a stable amount of people it kills per year and is already quite established in the human population so it infects a very large number of people per year. nCov on the other hand is a new and poorly understood virus and has only just been introduced to humanity. Extrapolating the number of people it's killed out a few weeks or months, the death rate would be much higher than the flu. The mortality rate is also not firmly understood, with estimates ranging between 2% and 20%.

> If US alone has ~60k deaths from the flu a year

That was one particularly bad season. It's usually in the 30k - 40k range.

> that still works out to be much more (1153 deaths per week)

That particularly bad season had ~45MM cases, so that was an average of 865k infections per week. 2019-nCoV is that 1% of that infection rate.

The reported confirmed counts have grown by a factor of ~1.5 every day, fitting reasonably well with exponential growth. If this rate continued, in 35 days it would reach the world population. Obviously, in the real world the growth flattens out way earlier, from natural causes, and especially because of the attempts to confine it.

Comparing the total number of cases or deaths to flu outbreaks from previous years does not make much sense at this point, when the numbers are growing rapidly, but in a month they probably are easier to compare. Neither does comparing average counts per week, because the growth is not linear. The data for the progression of flu (or any other disease) outbreaks exists, and comparing to their growth rate would put it better in perspective. Regardless of armchair analysis, the WHO declaration means it's something requiring unusual action, which flu is not.

Something else to consider is that flu outbreaks aren't typically taken very seriously by most people, while the widespread fear and media coverage of the 2019-nCov all but guarantees more serious responses from both the general public and the government.

Consider the recommendations to thoroughly wash one's hands during flu season as a precaution against getting the flu. How many people take that advice seriously? You can bet there'll be a lot more hand washing all around once this coronavirus hits people's local areas, not to mention all the mask wearing that'll happen (though unfortunately, most people will be wearing those dinky surgical masks which will be of dubious effectiveness), and people isolating themselves.

On the other hand, we have vaccines for the flu that are available well in advance of flu outbreaks (though not nearly enough people take them), while we've got no publicly available ones for 2019-nCov. That's another confounding variable that makes it hard to compare the two.

As an exercise in understanding exponential growth, for one month would you rather receive $20,000 or 1 penny on day one, 2 on day two, doubling each day until the end of the month. Try it with a calculator or program.

People are concerned because this has a high growth rate that, unless contained, would cause large number of deaths

More importantly, the flu has a vaccine. New versions of it are released each year according to what health organizations think will be the dominant variants.

The new virus has no vaccine.

I think you mean 1 strand of the flu has a vaccine that only a small percentage of the public administer.

Usually it's a 4-strain vaccine but your point stands.

But, it has a vaccine. If it were necessary to prevent a pandemic, governments around the world could create emergency vaccination programs and emergency production programs for more of the vaccine, and they could be tailored to the strain that was creating the danger.

That's not an option to stop this Coronavirus at all.

Because:

* Coronavirus has no vaccine

* Coronavirus infected can be contagious for longer than flu patients

* The longer incubation period means more chances for people to get sick, especially since the disease comes on gradually. People will think they have an ordinary cold, go to work, and infect people.

* We understand the progression of the flu in most variants. We don't know all the effects of the Coronavirus, we just have descriptions of the symptoms.

* Flu is basically everywhere already, Coronavirus is not. It's not a choice between one or the other, it's a choice between one or both. If we could declare an emergency and have some chance of stopping flu from getting to some part of the population, we would.

* People with compromised immune systems like the elderly, or babies, or people with existing illnesses or lung problems know to avoid people infected with influenza. Since it's possible for people capable of infecting others with Coronavirus to not even know they carry it, it's harder to avoid for those vulnerable to it.

It's much cheaper to respond to a virus like this in early stages than it is to wait until we see "how serious" it is. All in all, getting things moving now is a good idea.

You mixed up your numbers. 3-5 Mio SEVERE CASES, not overall infections.

> Worldwide, these annual epidemics are estimated to result in about 3 to 5 million cases of severe illness, and about 290 000 to 650 000 respiratory deaths.

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/influenza-(...

> The flu has resulted in 9.3 million to 49 million illnesses each year in the United States since 2010. Each year, on average, five to 20 percent of the United States population gets the flu.

https://www.healthline.com/health/influenza/facts-and-statis...

Let's assume 10 mil Corona cases in US (like flu lower bound), with 2% mortality. That's 200k deaths. If we assume 49 mil cases (flu higher bound), it's 1 mil deaths just in US.

This 2% number that keeps being thrown around is based on dividing the number of confirmed deaths (which is likely to be relatively accurate) by the number of confirmed infections (which is almost certainly a massive underestimation). It's basically meaningless.

Simply because it has a mortality rate a couple of orders of magnitude greater than the flu's. Something like 8 percent of the world gets the flu in a given year. Millions will die if that happens for this one.

Assuming the CFR remains stable. Most new infectious diseases rapidly drop in mortality because of natural selection: those variants of the virus that make people sickest result in their hosts not surviving or not coming into contact with other people to spread the virus, so the strain that becomes endemic tends to become less virulent and more adapted to its host. This has happened with leprosy, syphilis, HIV, and Ebola, and there's no reason to believe it wouldn't happen with nCOV (if the outbreak isn't contained entirely, as SARS was).

In fairness though, the containment ship has sailed for nCOV.

It’s scary to see it so close to home. I’m in Northern Ireland and saw two hazmat ambulances gunning it into the center of Belfast today.

I’ve never seen a hazmat ambulance in this country - wouldn’t have even known we had them or what they looked like.

I suspect we’ll get outbreaks in many more regions over the next few days.

It's highly unlikely that those ambulances are related to the virus. There are 0 confirmed cases in Northern Ireland, and if it was a suspected case the government and media would be all over it to find people who were potentially infected.

I’m afraid you have more faith than I do in local government.

I wouldn’t expect them to try to “cover it up” but I’d very much expect them to act slowly in notifying and not take it as seriously as they should.

The measure of transmissibility seems to be as high as the Spanish Flu, and the mortality rate is still an open question.

The Spanish flu killed 50-100 million people. Worth reading about it.

While infected to mortality is 3% according to official numbers, which is bad, recovered:dead is less than 50% by the same numbers. Ok have trouble with these reported numbers however, and believe recovered higher. We just don't know. Cross species infection vectors are never good.

Maybe the emergency is less about severity and more about the urgency of attempting containment.

The possibility has been raised that if this goes global, it could become an illness that, like the flu, just sort of continually floats around and we're stuck dealing with it. We don't really want another such illness. If freaking out about it right now can even move the needle on the odds of avoiding that scenario, it might be a good plan.

I haven't heard of the flu shutting down a 11 million habitant city. The flu doesn't kill 290-650k per cycle, its more like 12-60k.

It sounds like a lot, but seasonal influenza does kill 290-650k people annually. The 12-60k range is for the U.S., alone.

> 290k-650k death

Where are you getting that number? It a magnitude of 10 off

Global.

https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p1213-flu-death-esti....

Global deaths due to seasonal influenza are in that range.

Because it has a higher lethal rate than Influenza and it has the potential to evolve and become much more infectious than it is currently.

"it has a higher lethal rate than Influenza"

That is not known at this point.

It's not, for now. The problem is that you'll never know if the virus is serious or not until it's too late.

The rates of those requiring ICU seem a lot higher for one.

If nothing else, it's worse in that there's zero vaccination mitigation available. If the flu vaccine was 0% effective this year, that would also be a health emergency.

On top of that, it seems to have worse mortality rate, transmissibility rate, and asymptomatic contagion -- so a little worse in every way, probably.

As with the flu, you're very unlikely to be personally killed by it unless you're over 65, under 5, or in poor health.

I thought flu vaccine efficacy varies year to year and is frequently not that great.

You're correct. See [1]. It's usually less than 50% effective, and as low as 19%. A troubling fact is that effectiveness has been on a downward trend the last 4 years.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/effectiveness-studies....

Flu can be managed with vaccine, on-the-spot test kits and antiviral drugs.

AFAIK the flu vaccine is terrible ineffective. I would have to google numbers but the reliability is low.

Although it's not perfect (you're not totally immune), it's still effective at significantly bringing down hospital visits & mortality rates.

This is especially true for those with weak immune systems. As for a source, see the "Effectiveness" section https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/Infectious/Influenza/Pages/you...

Quote "One European study in 2008 found a 66% vaccine efficacy (VE) against confirmed influenza for children aged 9 months to 3 years, while a Japanese study of children aged 6 months to 6 years found VE against influenza A ranged from 42% to 69% depending on the vaccine match"

Another source with an effectiveness section has similar numbers: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/misconceptions.htm

That's very far away from your "flu vaccine is terrible ineffective" statement.

I used to think commenters on this site were somewhat smart.

Please don't post unsubstantive comments here. If you know more than others, share some of what you know so that we all can learn, or simply don't comment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html