I don't disagree with your position - if there's a wide-spread epidemic, things will go bad, especially as the healthcare system gets overwhelmed. But that's not a novel or interesting point of view, and I doubt many would disagree. So why go around inciting panic?

Lets try some other numbers. If 1% of the population gets infected, and 1% needs extra medical care, that's 200 people. If 0.1% of the population is infected and 0.1% of the population need extra medical care, that's... two people. That's not so scary, and I'm not going to slowly suffocate. (There's no need to threaten me with asphyxiation, thanks.) We don't have any reliable information, so any numbers used for "back of the envelope" math might as well be relating my birth date to star signs and be used to find my future lover, for all the basis in reality they ultimately have.

I mean, you're scared. I get it, I'm scared too. I feel powerless in the face of this epidemic and being told to wash my hands a bit more, and touch my face less only serves to reiterate my impotence. Is that where the thirst for disaster potential comes from? An addiction to the panic endorphins?

(I am genuinely curious, and am hopeful that mns' comment will stimulate commentary about the meta-topic.) (And apologies for singling you out personally, ajsnigrutin, the other sibling replies are of the same nature and yours was the comment I chose to reply to.)

That is where speed of spreading the disease comes in. If you can limit it so that 1% of population in local area is sick simultaneously, then it is fine.

If you cant limit the speed of spreading the disease, then the hospitals will miss those needed respirators and more people will die. Cause respirator is necessary if you are one of the unlucky ones.

Which is where "hysteria" around locking areas, washing hands and testing people on airports comes in. That is why locking cities, working from home and having some reasonable amount of food so that you are comfortable. The whole point is to slow down spreading, so that resources are available for sick people.

> I feel powerless in the face of this epidemic and being told to wash my hands a bit more, and touch my face less only serves to reiterate my impotence. Is that where the thirst for disaster potential comes from? An addiction to the panic endorphins?

It is not impotent to wash hands and touch face less and avoid unnecessary crowd. That done in masses is to slow down the spread. It is all actually useful.

But if you get a bunch of "it's just a flu" people, who sneeze everywhere and don't wash their hands, that "1%" number gets higher. I'm not saying we should close up the whole country, but basic measures (you're ill, even if it is just a flu, you stay home... people must wash hands. Hand desinfectants at stores, schools, etc. No large gatherings if it's not neccessary. If you can, work from home, if someone near you got sick. etc)

According to the Chinese papers, something like 15% of cases are serious and need hospitalization. If it does become widespread, it would be a major calamity (though most people would survive and the world would move on once it is over).

As to whether it will become widespread, the jury is still out. China appears to have gotten it under control, but it took drastic measures to do so. The rest of the world has yet to demonstrate an ability and willingness to do the same. There is a decent chance this will spread as widely as the swine flu did, but with more than 20x the case fatality rate, we would be looking at tens of millions of deaths worldwide.

And you forgot the last thing: Europeans would never put the money in.

The Coronavirus isn't new. Since mid-January we knew this will be serious. Nothing has been done since to prepare.

Maybe Europeans can't build a field hospital in ten days, but we haven't even tried to start building anything in 40 days.

We wait until it hits our shores, as is now the case and then throw our hands up in the air.

it already has hit your shore.

From the parent:

"as is now the case"

that was edited in.

Yes I felt I needed to edit it in because you thought I didn't know about the COVID-19 cases.

> If you're patient zero here, you get a comfy private room, your own bed, 5 doctors, 10 nurses, whole research teams, respirators, priority with all the tests, examinations, etc. Same for patient 1, 2, 3.

I read a similar comment from someone on another forum. If you're certain this will end up a pandemic, with almost everyone eventually catching it, your best move is to catch the virus as soon as possible, ensuring you'll get the best care.

Though this assumes you can't get it a second time, after the antibodies are generated. This appears not to be the case with this virus, possibly.

How fast or slow does the virus evolve towards lower mortality? If you get infected months later, is it still essentially the same virus, or a less aggressive strain?

Given the 2-3 week transmissible incubation period where the infected show no symptoms, it doesn't seem like there's short enough feedback loop for the lethality to be tempered through natural selection within the initial period of the outbreak (which we're just beginning).

>Given the 2-3 week transmissible incubation period

No one knows if it's transmissible during the entire incubation period. It's almost certainly not given how other viruses behave. Also the possibility of transmission during asymptomatic periods doesn't mean that it's likely, or that most transmissions happen during that time.

Good points!

There are reports that you can get it a second time, and it is worse on the second time:

https://www.theburningplatform.com/2020/02/15/hubei-doctors-...

Or, hole up and wait for a vaccine.

"As of 2020, there is no cure or protective vaccine for SARS that has been shown to be both safe and effective in humans." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...

Spot on. Medical facilities are not up to support in times of widespread epidemics. Which means most people would not get any treatment and you should expect mortality rate to increase over time as it becomes more widespread.

You can see this in provincial level mortality rates: at low infection concentrations, it's a more deadly than flu but nothing insane. But once resources are swamped (e.g. in Hubei), the mortality jumps an order of magnitude.

Thank you. I have this constant argument with those that want to shut borders and blow up our economy as a result: that if you break the stats down on Hubei vs everywhere else, it’s a very different picture of the virulence and mortality rates.

Hubei’s mortality rate for literally everything at the moment would expected to be higher than anywhere else given how stretched their resources are.

I don't understand. How is the mortality rate being worse when resources are stretched thin a point in favour of not shutting borders?

That "10 day hospital" is the field hospital equivalent of a school gym.

Yes, you are right, if 10% of people in your country get infected it would be an absolute calamity... because it is already such an extreme scenario. Does it even have a precedent in modern times?

The 1918 flu pandemic.

And that's still ignoring the factor that many of those care workers will get ill themselves compounding the problem significantly.

The numbers probably get worse with scale rather than better because larger countries can get away with having lower medical capacity than smaller countries (i.e., larger countries will be more efficient).

The U.S. could probably build a hospital very quickly, but neither China nor the U.S. can build enough hospitals quickly enough, let alone equip them, let alone train nurses and doctors quickly enough.

If the brown stuff really hits the moving fan blades, then military tent cities it will be, and it will be more like bad hospice care than like bad hospital care.

One thing this crisis will do is highlight the need for more emergency pandemic handling capacity. That means: a) faster testing of vaccines (e.g., do double-blind testing on medical staff, since they need it most), b) faster emergency mass production of vaccines, c) faster emergency distribution of vaccines.

Creation of new treatments (new anti-virals, ...) on an emergency basis is necessarily going to lag because it's much more costly and time consuming than development of new prevention (vaccines). Manufacturing new equipment (respirators) and so on also takes time (retooling, etc.). Building hospitals takes even longer (even if you can pull together to build one very quickly, equipping it will take time). And training staff takes eons. Throw in supply chain disruptions and, really, I think only emergency development and testing of new vaccines is plausible on a timescale similar to that of a pandemic.

It's not like you can have a ton of spare capacity around: that's very costly too, and there's depreciation issues. Reaction time needs to be faster instead.

One thing I'd like to see come out of this is a treaty or agreement on cross-certification and inspection of bio labs around the world, and an agreement to not develop bioweapons, or at the very very least to not develop bioweapons that are trivially transmissible from human to human. I think it's becoming clear that SARS-covid19 was leaked accidentally from the BSL-4 lab in Wuhan, or at least that it's very plausible that it came from there, and that is rather upsetting -- this must not happen again!

I thought you had a good take till I got to the end and saw a conspiracy theory that to my knowledge has very little basis in fact. Simple explanations (species jump, evidence of similar viruses in adjacent species) are way more likely than some arcane BSL 4 leak. We shouldn’t compound hysteria with wild conspiracies.