Well its official. Statement from the the World Health Organization (WHO)…
Surprising to absolutely nobody. Better late than never I suppose....The U.N. health agency defines an international emergency as an “extraordinary event” that constitutes a risk to other countries and requires a coordinated international response.
Well folks the facts are this thing is all over China in every state, I don’t recall seeing a similar situation in the last 50years. The spread is extraordinarily quick. It’s no surprise governments are waking up to this fact and many borders are closing. They don’t want a similar situation until they know more about this thing so tough measures are needed. It’s better to go in hard and be safe than sorry. as you know airport screening is not effective, infected folks have made it through and started spreading within their countries. No need to panic or fear just take actions with a safer than sorry attitude first is the rational way to go.
Incompetent and late to the party, probably pushed out of embarrassment that governments and organisations are taking actions regardless
itamine D and lots of it. The sooner you start taking, the more you build up.
Iodine, never forget it. The sooner you start taking, the more you build up.
Magnesium for Acute Illness. The sooner you start taking, the more you build up.
Selenium. Succesfull against AIDS.
Viamine C for repair. Stops bleedings. Buy time released. 4 times a day when sick.
Don’t drink alcohol.
Exponential growth is at the heart of why we need to respond early to the possibility of a pandemic, long before we have all the information we would like. But our intuition is misleading concerning exponential growth.
I seems likely to me that there are many people reading and maybe commenting on this site who have not read or watched “The Crash Course,” and so have not done the thought experiment demonstrating our lack of a sense for exponential growth – the Fenway Park quiz.
Maybe we need a link on this site to that section of the book that we can refer to as needed, so that everybody gets a sense of it.
Briefly, imagine that you are in the largest stadium you have ever seen, handcuffed to a seat in the top row. There is a magic eyedropper on the floor of the stadium that delivers water once a minute. The first minute it delivers 1 drop, the second minute it delivers 2 drops, the third minute it delivers 4 drops, the fourth minute it delivers 8 drops – that is, each minute it delivers twice as many drops as the minute before.
How long do you have to escape from the handcuffs before you drown? Just make a wild a guess. What is your first thought? Don’t cheat yourself, because it is your sense of growth that matters here.
How much more time do you have if the stadium is twice as large as you thought?
How long do you have to escape the handcuffs – that is, when do you first notice that the stadium is filling with water and that you need to take action?
The answer is that you have fifty minutes, less than an hour, to escape. At forty-nine minutes the stadium is half full. At forty-eight minutes it is a quarter full. At forty-five minutes it is less than three percent full. If the stadium is actually twice as large as you thought, you have one minute more – the time to double the amount of water delivered. Again, when do you notice that there is a problem?
Basically the WHO said this is a grave issue (without any specific science behind it - like R0 estimates, mortality, or latency period) but hey China is doing such a great job, that Xi is on the ball, it was great being there, I love China.
Then more damaging - there should be no restriction on global travel or trade, and if people put them on we are going to confront them and ask them to take them down, because it’s our job to protect China’s economy and the economy of the world, and if a lot of people have to get sick and die to do that we’re on board.
Totally pathetic!!! They don’t care about the spread of this disease in any meaningful way nor are they going to do anything that costs any significant amount of money - please just wash your hands and hope you don’t die.
Disgraceful. And Stocks loved it. Straight up from the press conference onward.
If I were inclined to place a bet, it would be on an R_0 towards the high end of the scale and a significantly higher CFR than what we’ve been lead to believe thusfar. Based on what isn’t being clearly communicated versus what is.
Chris, you said a few times that total number of infected people can be seriously under-reported due to people not being tested, lack of test kits, etc. Doesn’t this make the fatality rate over-rated by the same factor? Official fatality is ~170/6800=2.5%, and if we assume that only 30% are diagnosed and counted that makes the real fatality rate ~170/2000=0.85%. Still much higher than flu, but better than 2.5%. Am I wrong?
Thanks for great work!
Thanks for the link. Doc
China is going nuts. The numbers of cases coming into the U.S. are growing. People are confused. The stock market is pitching and heaving. And the impeachment circus is going to end with the Democrats’ humiliation soon, meaning suddenly the media will soon need a new shiny object to chase.
Coronavirus is that shiny object. The media will not be honest or accurate or fair. It will lie, cheat, and give voice to leftist leakers with agendas. That’s why Trump needs to go around the media, straight to us.
Trump needs to go on the air, to the American people, and lay out the situation. Then Team Trump needs to step up the game by arm-twisting the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) into talking to us, at length, in detail. Get those science nerds in their lab coats out there, in front of the camera, every day, bombarding us with info. Talk our ears off.
The current lack of information is an invitation for the void to be filled with nonsense and lies designed to undermine the presidency – sadly, the media cares nothing about the infection risk and everything about its weird obsession with undoing the 2016 election. There is already a plan – the CDC is on this – but that plan has not been communicated to the people. The people are worried – they’ll be very, very worried when the media pumps up the threat.
If the president assures the citizenry that he understands this is a priority and that he is vectoring in America’s best scientists to respond, that not only foils the cheesy partisan political attack that is coming. It helps the actual defeat of this potential epidemic. Instead of inspiring panic, the presentation of the Administration as having this crisis well in hand will serve to calm fears as well as tell people what to do.
Do you know what you should do? I’m not sure I do. And the information has been so sketchy that right now most of us don’t know the Coronavirus from the Dos Equis virus, the most interesting flu in the world.
Pummel the people with information. Make those eggheads do briefings every day. Get a soothing one who can communicate to be the face of the CDC. And Hugh Hewitt has another good point – no one is telling us how the disease got here, what flights, what airports. Get that out there. People want to know if a carrier was in their mall or school or whatever. And explain why the hell you can still gobble a bat, jump on a plane, and fly to America? Why haven’t we limited or banned flights? Are we screening passengers? How? We need to know.
Trust us with the information and we will trust the Administration.
This is not just a public health crisis – it’s a political fight too. Sorry, but that’s the truth, and Trump is under no obligation to allow himself to be lied about as W. was. Luckily, though, Trump is a master communicator – plus, he’ll fight back.
So they declared an emergency and promised to support Xi’s ongoing leadership verbally and with a boost in global stock prices. (Nothing makes you want to suddenly buy lots of stocks like a global pandemic. /s)
Would love to hear you China savvy folks tell us more about the Mandate of Heaven and the risk to current leadership as Chinese people die, their medical system is conspicuously overwhelmed and economy stumbles during lockdown.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2020/01/29/it-is-easy-to-overreact-to-the-chinese-coronavirus/#more-44737
Chris, as you know, we need to know what the False Negative rate is for the screening test being used via CDC to identify patients infected with nCoV. So, do you know? Does anyone know? Haven’t seen it published anywhere.
Further, if (as is the case), CDC recommends screening only ‘symptomatic close contacts of test+ patients with nCoV’ then how can we know if asymptomatic contacts are infected with the virus and are spreading it?
I understand that CDC and public health officials do not want to prematurely overburden our healthcare infrastructure, but since we (the USA) do not have a burdensome number of close contacts of +cases that we are presently following, I would argue that they should all be tested daily to see who ‘converts’, when they ‘convert’, and where ‘conversion’ of a negative test to a test that is positive for nCoV occurs along the spectrum of symptomatology.
Thanks, Doc
A couple observations I have made. 1) When I started talking to wife over the weekend to prepare she kept downplaying things. Finally I said “We prepare for other things, we should prepare for this to. Why are you downplaying the possibility?.” She said “I know the danger I just don’t want it to be true.” A little later we were talking about implications if it spread and she kept bringing up deaths and how the flu is more deadly so why do I keep mentioning deaths it can cause. I never had even brought up deaths - I explained to her I am more worried about impact to infrastructure, supplies, etc. if huge portions of the population are home sick at any one time. Imagine if 30% of the work force are out of commission for weeks at a time, and this goes on for months! She said she hadn’t thought about that. 2) Another observation is how report after report seems to do the whole compared to flu or compared to SARS the coronavirus is not that bad thing. As Chris points out it is not a good comparison. Now it seems report after report is downplaying wearing face masks and trying to shame people who have or will buy some. Personally, I think much of this has to do with the authors fears that they do not want to actually face rather than a large coordinated campaign (although could be partly that as well). I think they are like my wife had been - they don’t want it to be true so it makes them feel better thinking it’s not likely true. Although, if it is coordinated then that makes me think they seem to be trying awfully hard to convince us not to prepare which makes me wonder what they know, which makes me want to prepare even more! 
Also - some of you might find this song called Here Comes The Plague interesting. It was released around January 10. Heavier song so might not be everyone’s style - but eerie timing to be released before Coronavirus really made headlines!
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/deathriderdemons
Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loiFUWKF8LY
She sounds like a person who views old people as burdens to society. Seems like she would be happy for the coronavirus to take care of them.
A Chinese citizen’s tale from Wuhan tells that hospitals are overflowing with people. Hospitals have a limited number of test kits for use and will not test everybody who is sick for nCoV.
What a great strategy for keeping the numbers of “confirmed cases” low.
Fatalities recorded with way more accuracy than infected - which could skew CFR down… likely by a lot.
Chris, you said a few times that total number of infected people can be seriously under-reported due to people not being tested, lack of test kits, etc. Doesn’t this make the fatality rate over-rated by the same factor? Official fatality is ~170/6800=2.5%, and if we assume that only 30% are diagnosed and counted that makes the real fatality rate ~170/2000=0.85%. Still much higher than flu, but better than 2.5%. Am I wrong?Kkamenev, your calculations would only be correct if all the undiagnosed cases were mild and they all survived. The flip side of the "undiagnosed" argument is that people who die from the virus before they get 'officially' diagnosed aren't being counted either. This was probably the case early on before anyone understood we were facing a new virus and it will be the case again (perhaps already) if the medical system gets too overloaded. Who is going to bother diagnosing the dead when they can't even process the samples of the living in a timely manner? So basically, we don't know anything for certain other than the fact that we are working with a flawed set of data....but it is all we have.
There are great discussions going on here. I am grateful to have this site as a resource that I can trust - about as much as I can trust any media.
It seems to me that our levels of emotional resilience directly affect our propensity to fear as well as abilities to cope and make rational risk related decisions in the face of a pandemic threat. Where we live, work and how we interact with our communities on a daily basis will determine what additional steps we may need to protect ourselves/loved ones in the face of a new risk. There are no guarantees, but obviously some locales are going to see greater risks than others - which can be said for any type of emergency. Prepare according to your risk, not your fears.
Where we are with our emotional resilience will also determine how ready we are for something like self-imposed isolation. So many people these days are uncomfortable with spending time alone or with diminished social contact. Those who are unable to handle quarantine type situations are likely to experience far more stress (and therefore compromised immune system) than those who have prepared by regularly doing things to enhance their mental and emotional resilience and are more comfortable with solitude as a result.
I really liked Gail Tverberg’s article, which I posted above, with her take that this is just one more of nature’s ways to thin the population. I agree and it is my personal belief that overall humans have intervened too much medically speaking to alter natural life and death cycles. I see disease and viruses as nature’s way of keeping population numbers in check. We have skewed that, often with the best of intentions of course, but with consequences as well.
We have often talked on this site about the need for population control. Well, is a pandemic not naturally occurring population control? Are we right to try to fight and isolate it? Or would it be wise to let nature take its course? It is a deep question, and one that I think requires serious consideration. Yes, there are many consequences to allowing that to happen. But there are also many consequences to intervening and letting population continue to grow… these are serious ethical considerations that require serious debate. But I doubt there are any world leaders who have the balls to even consider opening up such a dialogue. Just like they don’t have the balls to deal with any of the other serious predicaments facing all of us.
Thank you Chris and Adam as well as all contributors for providing cogent, trustworthy information to help with decision making. I hope everyone in the community stays well and is able to avoid this virus!
Jan
Thanks for your comments on this Mark
My gut says that a fatality, especially under these conditions, “raises more eyebrows” and would be way more accurately recorded that the whole spectrum of infected people. I’m trying to fit some logic to it here:
Potential causes of missed counts of:
Fatalities: