Suicide is a big problem, buy it's scary in a different way. I'm not personally worried about a suicide epidemic, or catching suicide from someone.

And yet there are actually suicide clusters, with people essentially "catching it" from their friends or loved ones who've committed suicide.

A copycat suicide is defined as an emulation of another suicide that the person attempting suicide knows about either from local knowledge or due to accounts or depictions of the original suicide on television and in other media.

A spike of emulation suicides after a widely publicized suicide is known as the Werther effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide

Unbelievably you are correct. You can "catch it". Amazing.

This seems like equivocation on the meaning of "catching it." Isolating yourself so that you either have no close relationships or somehow never hear about any suicides among your close relationships is a fairly nonsensical proposal, and probably wouldn't in fact decrease your chances of committing suicide.

You're attacking a strawman here. I never proposed any of that and of course no one is suggesting that you use the exact same airborne infectious disease quarantine procedures for suicide too.

The realization that suicide has contagious properties does have practical ethical ramifications for journalism. It's not some impractical theoretical matter that can't be acted on.

I went to a talk on this very matter. Kurt Cobain's suicide is an interesting case study on how journalism affects the development (or attenuation) of suicide clusters.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8897665

You may be interested in this discussion about a paper about suicide clusters in young people.

https://www.nationalelfservice.net/mental-health/suicide/sui...

The notion of communicability is a broad one, and there are numerous concepts of "epidemic" which extend beyond the notion of purely biologically infectious (bacterial, viral, parasitic) diseases, including "epidemic of obesity", "epidemic of violence", etc.

It was an article regarding the latter which made the general case (and I'll see if I can't turn it up). Effectively: if you have a phenomenon which includes transmission from carrier to susceptible populations, then you're dealing with a case of epidemic.

This generalises in some interesting (and quite probably controversial) ways. Richard Dawkins's notion of the meme -- a unit of transmissible cultural information -- falls squarely within the model, and suggests a further generalisation:

Epidemics exist where there is an infectious agent (biological, material, energetic, informational) originating from some source or reservoir which causes a negative functional or behavioural change in a susceptible population spreading along vectors of transmission. They further have characteristics of exposure-response, latency, transmissivity (e.g., source => individual, sometimes individual => individual), susceptibility or resistance, symptomatic / asymptomatic periods, morbidity and mortality rates, etc.

This means we can look at agents including the familiar bacteria, aemoebae, parasites, and viruses, but also more exotic notions: prions, chemical, physical, and radiological triggers (say, heavy metals, asbestos / PM2.5 matter, radon or plutonium), and cultural or informational ones: cults, religions, mythologies, ideologies, psychological disorders, stress, and the like.

What the model offers are notions of potential containment. I've done some research to see if there's an underlying theory or model of public health or epidemiology (and would expect it to closely correspond to the above). What I've found looking through introductory texts is that there largely is not, but instead the focus is on teaching statistical monitoring methods used within the field. I'm not sure if I'm looking in the wrong places, or if there simply is no such generalised model.

But again: if you can identify specific agents (biological, material, informational, energetic), sources, vectors, susceptibility factors, and the like, then it's possible to apply fairly standard epidemiological notions to prevention.

Note that the direct medical intervention of cure is not on that list -- it's an expensive and uncertain intervention, and one that comes with very high costs. Far better to practice avoidance, increase resistance, and reduce transmission, as well as monitor aggressively for outbreaks. All of which are what we're seeing in the case of 2019-nCoV.

In the case of mental health, the study of suicide itself is foundational to sociology (Emil Durkheim's book of the same title, Suicide: https://archive.org/details/DurkheimEmileSuicideAStudyInSoci...), for numerous reasons. It turns out that rates are very consistent across time, with a few notable exceptions. There's considerable variance across place, whether triggered by culture or natural environment isn't clear. As David Simon, author of The Wire notes, dead bodies are hard to hide (see his excellent "The Audacity of Despair", ignore the recording and speaking quality issues: https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw). And suicide itself is an extreme act. So by looking at trends with time, you're finding a exceptionally strong signal of underlying social dysfunctions.

Looking at the epidemiological model, isolating yourself might reduce some dynamics of infection (vectors of transmission), but would quite likely increase others (susceptibility through social isolation). The model's underlying premise is that you simply cannot assess these factors in isolation, which would point out the flaw in your reasoning.

Suicide is a symptom of many other problems.

These sorts of comparisons are, I would respectfully argue, not very helpful because the various causes of mortality are additive, not competing to kill the same victims (generally).

We don't need a perpetual cycle of coronavirus in addition to the perpetual cycle of the flu that we already have, in addition to suicide and every other cause of death. The world's health organizations are trying desperately to curtail it before it becomes a norm.

Which is why saying "Oh, why cancel this it's no biggie" is just so misled.

If the world was in a situation where we could seriously contain and eliminate the flu, we would surely take every possible measure to do so.

Why not? Because math.

This is a contagion. Read about the Spanish Flu. This looks to be both more contagious, and more deadly in most of the published studies. We hope they are biased and overly pessimistic, but whataboutism isn't helpful here.

Your argument is like if the rug in your living room is on fire, and you say "why worry about that rug--we should really invest in fixing that roof leak." I agree roof leaks are also bad.

Here are the CDC burden (upper bound) estimates for the 2019-2020 flu season: 30 million infections, 30k deaths. In other words, 0.1% of infections are predicted to be fatal, which is substantially lower than the current estimates for 2019-nCoV.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...

They're worth effort, but the answer is that the parameters area reasonably well known. Suicide isn't increasing exponentially, for example.

Exactly this. The expected annual deaths from suicide are normally distributed whereas a highly contagious disease is long-tailed, i.e. a non-negligible probability of a huge number of fatalities.

The flu infects 30,000,000/year and kills 10,000.

Given r0, the Covid-2019 would infect 60,000,000 and kill 1,000,000 if unchecked in the US.

If this virus infects 60% of the world's population, and has a death rate of 1%, that's 50 million deaths.

Terrorism kills 2 people per year in the U.S. and we spend 100s of billions. The difference is large companies make more money building weapons than large companies make treating the flue (or mental health).

Edit: The point is, it's all about money. There's no rational reason to spend so much on terrorism and so little on mental health, yet we do.

I disagree, as I posted elsewhere in this thread these annual death rates are drawn from different distributions. The annual suicide rate is normally distributed, in other words the expected number of deaths will be around the same number each year. Terrorism and pandemics are long-tailed meaning a non-negligible probability that the rate shoots up to something much higher than your quoted two per year.

Not going to claim that that money is all well-spent, but terrorism (and security in general) is a rather different problem. A single failure can cost thousands of lives, and huge knock-on effects, as we've sadly seen.