https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/puzmZFQGRTiiquwLa6tT-g/confere...

The entire world is going into a freaking panic over this. And they’re spewing out nonsense that the China government is lying, and their numbers cannot be trusted. Which doesn’t really help the situation, and it clouds the scientific understanding of this incident.

Then the 2 moronic scientific papers that were published whipped everyone up into a frenzy.

(1) The German paper said that people can transmit it asymptomatically, which means this is some kind of Frankenstein virus that can transmit over 14 days, and infect others when not showing any symptoms.

(2) The Indian paper that suggested that this virus was man-made, and thus fueled the conspiracy theories about it being a bio weapon. And this fed more fuel to the fire for #1.

Two scientific papers that were both terribly wrong!

And what was the result? It created mass panic.

So there you have it. Fake news that created real mass panic in the real world.

Some good highlights from this transcription were:

* This is like SARS, but less deadly. Yes, it is infectious and contagious, but it is also less deadly than SARS.

* The virus will likely burn out in May, because it doesn’t do well in warm and humid weathers. So Australia with its hot wildfires will be spared. Go take a vacation in the hot and dry outback of Australia everyone. You’ll be fine out there.

* The 2.2 reproductive R0 number is a perfect theoretical scenario, but it will likely not happen in this case, since China mandated the quarantine. And the entire country is a ghost town, with people wearing face masks in public, and avoiding any outdoor activities. This should help to slow the spread, and kill off the virus, like how SARS mysteriously disappeared.

So, governments around the world, need to be vigilant, and do what they can to contain the spread of the virus, but we should be ok. There is no need to panic right now. The fear is worse than the disease.

The leaders of the world needs to step forward and make regular public health announcements about this. And to calm the public down, and stick to known scientific facts and evidence.

Unfortunately, we have morons as our elected leaders.

So I'm not going to just shrug and say it's no big deal. It could be. I'm a programmer, I know powers of 2 intimately. We're at 2^15 and doubling every 5 days. If that keeps up for a month we'll be at 1M infected and 16K dead. From there it's another 50 days to 1B infected and 1-2M dead. I'm keeping an eye on that, if it doesn't slow down before 2^20 (1M) then I've already planned to bug out with my loved ones to the mountains of Panama for a couple months until this blows over.

I think it won't come to that, but I'm keeping an eye on the progression and doubling rate. The thing with exponential growth is it always ends. The question here is does it end in time?

I found this in the article posted above:

”So the 20,000 cases in China is probably only the severe cases; the folks that actually went to the hospital and got tested. The Chinese healthcare system is very overwhelmed with all the tests going through. So my thinking is this is actually not as severe a disease as is being suggested. The fatality rate is probably only 0.8%-1%. There’s a vast underreporting of cases in China. Compared to Sars and Mers we are talking about a coronavirus that has a mortality rate of 8 to 10 times less deadly to Sars to Mers. So a correct comparison is not Sars or Mers but a severe cold. Basically this is a severe form of the cold.”

The response indicated that the deaths were likely significantly under-reported, as in: not counting the people dying while waiting to get into the hospital, or who never make it there. Plausible since there is both no incentive to report higher rates than confirmed, and not a lot of spare bandwidth to test cases already lost.

The real question now is which is more under-reported, cases or deaths. Either way, reading here details of the mechanism of death, it is far too virulent and deadly for complacency.

Looks like the prevailing approach is a very healthy Normalcy Bias.

Much of the rest of the world has sufficient capacity to hospitalize patients to prevent an outbreak. China being China is behind both due to recent industrialization and also an authoritarian state which lied about the dangers.

Take it how you want, but this is a severe flu which would not have survived in more industrialized nations.

Look at the mortality rate outside of Wuhan to see what the real mortality under a controlled environment look like.

If the rest of China looks like Hubei in a few weeks, we will be in pandemic conditions throughout all of China. If other countries start to look like China in a month or two, we will be in pandemic conditions throughout the world.

Your "if" is completely unfounded. Outside of China infections are not following any exponential trend at all.

The Chinese government’s senior medical adviser has said the disease is hitting a peak in China and may be over by April. He said he was basing the forecast on mathematical modelling, recent events and government action.

Dale Fisher, chair of the Global Outbreak Alert & Response Network that is coordinated by the World Health Organization, said that predicted “time course” may well be true if the virus is allowed to run free in Wuhan.

The flu-like virus has killed more than 1,100 people and infected nearly 45,000, predominantly in China and mostly in Wuhan.

Singapore has reported 50 coronavirus cases, one of the highest tallies outside China, including mounting evidence of local transmission.

[...]

Asked why there were so many cases in Singapore, he said there were comparatively more tests being conducted on the island.

“We have a very low index of suspicion for testing people so...we do have higher ascertainment,” he said, but added that there was a lot about transmission of the virus yet to be understood.

I'm not sure what to tell you. Unless you think that this virus somehow only targets people living in China, it's only a matter of time before it takes hold in other countries. This is not one that you can simply quarantine and isolate away like SARS. This one seems to be communicable at the earliest onset of symptoms, or even perhaps before.

What are your thoughts on this?

You may be a programmer, but certainly not a virologist. That’s not how that works.

Before a billion infected, well obviously. Flu infects about 9-45 million people a year, so there's a ballpark model. If we take 45M and 2% mortality as the worst case scenario - and really, it could be worse than that even. It's still a million deaths. That hasn't been seen since the Spanish flu at the end of World War I.

Traveling will increase the risk to become in contact with somebody who is infected.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-51425702

Four adults and a child were diagnosed with the virus after coming into contact with a British national who recently returned from Singapore.

The five Britons, who stayed in the same ski chalet, were not in a serious condition, French officials said.

> We're at 2^15 and doubling every 5 days. If that keeps up for a month we'll be at 1M infected and 16K dead.

Obligatory: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/extrapolating.png

This is also math. But it’s not the way things work.

The fact that you are already planning to bug out, despite being on a different continent is also a little bit telling.

"A study has found that 40 health-care workers were infected with the novel coronavirus by patients at a single Wuhan hospital in January, underscoring the risks to those at the frontlines of the growing epidemic."

https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/coronavirus-chin...

>...South Central Hospital. The deputy director went there to help in their ICU. He found that two-thirds of the medical staff in the ICU were already infected.

I was thinking maybe they should get low risk health workers (young fit) to deliberately get the virus under holiday conditions and then return to run the hospitals when immune.

There are other virology / epidemiology forums which may be of use, but I don't have these links at-hand.

For instance, the following link is a highly descriptive, accessible analysis of nCoV-2019: http://virological.org/t/analysis-of-wuhan-coronavirus-deja-...

OPs article does have merit, as far as giving a first-person account of treating the virus and quarantine procedures, but you'll learn a lot more about the virus itself if you follow the research.

“ nCoV2019 has a furin-sensitive motif at the traditional S1/S2 border fo the spike protein, i.e. RRAR, that was lacking in SARS (which depends on cathepsin cleavage a few amino acids downstream). nCoV2019 lacks the secondary minimal furin cleavage site, i.e. RNTR, that is found in SARS. Therefore, the endoproteolytic cleavage pattern is expected to be different between nCoV2019 and SARS.

Prediction of O-glycosylation sites reveals a cluster of Serine residues, just before and after the RRAR cleavage site, with a high propensity to form a “mini-mucin” patch at that site. It is positioned to protect the putative fusion peptide region in the native or pre-fusion Swiss-Model projection of the probable nCoV2019 structure.”

Not sure how to ‘follow the research’ when the first page has 12 proper nouns/terms I’ve never encountered...

Spike protein --> the proteins on the surface of a virus used to attach onto or enter a host cell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peplomer

RRAR --> This is a group of amino acids: Arginine Arginine Alanine Arginine. Here is the list of abbreviations: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Class/MLACourse/Modules/MolBioR...

For a discussion of cleavage --> https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/endoproteolytic

For a discussion of it relevant to another virus --> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC103966/

Mucin --> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mucin

O-Glycosylation --> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-linked_glycosylation

So this is a discussion of the differences in how these viruses uses their respective spike proteins to trigger endoproteolytic cleavage in the host cell. Specifically, what the impact of different positionings of their amino acids is.

For example, the idea "Furin-sensitive motif" means that there is a section of the spike protein which contains the amino acids described (RRAR), which is sensitive to the protein Furin in host cells.

See here as well: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6756975_Proteolysis...

1) In complex problems outside your domain, trust the experts.

2) These experts should go out and sell the truth in way laypeople understand them. Which is incredibly hard as everyone prefers dooms day scenarios it seems.

Just kind of sad even HN doesn't get that as this thread clearly shows.