Merged 2019-nCoV / Corona virus

Status
Not open for further replies.
Brisbane man being tested for coronavirus

A man is in isolation in his Brisbane home as Queensland Health authorities run tests on whether he is carrying a new strain for coronavirus.

The man was showing symptoms of the SARS-like illness and had recently returned from Wuhan in China, where the outbreak began.

Authorities said there was no cause for alarm.

Queensland's Chief Medical Officer Dr Jeanette Young said "we've got one gentleman that we're following at the moment who has travelled to Wuhan and has developed a respiratory illness".

"He is recovering at home.

"We've done some tests on him and are awaiting test results."
Click to expand...

Unlike New Zealand, we do have a lot of people travelling to and from China. Especially here in Canberra, where we have two world-class universities with large international student populations. I catch buses with them every day.
 
It's one of many coronaviruses (-virii, whatever), not THE coronavirus. They can cause everything from a bad cold to SARS & MERS. This one is new to science, though, and appears to have come from bats, which are eaten in the area where it first occurred. It's happily settled in to humans though, and is now human-transmissible.

Eating wild animals has introduced a lot of interesting diseases to humans.
 
Try this for scary:

Pneumonia - China (Guangdong): RFI RFI means request for information.
Date: 10 Feb 2003
From: Stephen O. Cunnion, MD, PhD, MPH <cunnion@erols.com>

This morning I received this e-mail and then searched your archives
and found nothing that pertained to it. Does anyone know anything
about this problem?
"Have you heard of an epidemic in Guangzhou? An acquaintance of mine from a teacher's chat room lives there and reports that the hospitals there have been closed and people are dying."--
Click to expand...
That was an understatement.

We get notices of unexplained death clusters all the time. I had never seen a notice that hospitals had closed.
 
Last edited:
Skeptic Ginger said:
Influenza is thousands of time more deadly and more easily spread.
Click to expand...

Complete nonsense.

With 170 confirmed cases and 3 deaths, the fatality rate is almost 3%.

Let's be generous on the side of infections and go with the quoted 1700. My maths says that's just under 0.3%.

The fatality rate for influenza and pneumonia is 0.01%.

I repeat - you're being dishonest. "Thousands of time more deadly"?

It's utterly clear that statement is false. If anything, it's at least twenty times more deadly than influenza. I don't know why you want to continue posting dishonestly on this subject but maybe you could stop doing it.

I'm not scare-mongering, but I am stating facts and using mathematics.

Skeptic Ginger said:
Now, can we discuss this reasonably without the hype?
Click to expand...

Hype doesn't fuss me, but I'd like to think we could deal with it honestly.

Skeptic Ginger said:
It's not far earlier in the picture. SARS was a mysterious pneumonia killing health care workers before the news media even caught wind of it. I'll see if I can dig up some of those initial warnings.
Click to expand...

Where you clearly contradict yourself!

The Chinese covered that up and it wasn't until the death total became too big to hide that it became news.

This time, the Chinese government is being very fast in advising the state of affairs. The only reason it's news is because the CCP allowed it to be.

arthwollipot said:
Unlike New Zealand, we do have a lot of people travelling to and from China.
Click to expand...

Sorry, I was being facetious. You might have missed where I noted the 40% Chinese kids at my boy's school. That's not an over-estimate.

There is a huge Chinese diaspora in NZ, and most of them live in this area. We also have the bonus of enormous Chinese tourism as well as the "locals", who travel to & from extensively.

If you have it in Aussie, you can bet it's already here.
 
The Atheist said:
Complete nonsense.
With 170 confirmed cases and 3 deaths, the fatality rate is almost 3%.
Let's be generous on the side of infections and go with the quoted 1700. My maths says that's just under 0.3%.
The fatality rate for influenza and pneumonia is 0.01%.
I repeat - you're being dishonest. "Thousands of time more deadly"?
It's utterly clear that statement is false. If anything, it's at least twenty times more deadly than influenza. I don't know why you want to continue posting dishonestly on this subject but maybe you could stop doing it.
I'm not scare-mongering, but I am stating facts and using mathematics.
Hype doesn't fuss me, but I'd like to think we could deal with it honestly.
Where you clearly contradict yourself!
Click to expand...
I'm pretty sure I didn't contradict myself. And your definition of dishonestly leaves a bit to be desired.

Moving on, why is flu more deadly:

Right now you cannot compare fatalities vs known cases because we have no idea what the denominator actually is. Until an antibody test is developed and becomes available, we have no idea what the actual number of cases is. You can't calculate the fatality rate without a proper denominator. There could be thousands of asymptomatic cases.

In addition, there are so many strains of influenza, one has to look at each strain if one wanted to compare this new virus to influenza.

But compared to the current flu season, we have 3 fatalities (could be higher by now) compared to CDC estimates of the current season: 6,600 – 17,000 flu deaths

So total deaths, the flu is more dangerous. Of course, flu is too ordinary. People are freaking out over this new virus because it's new and it is a coronavirus and the news media like sensation, it sells the news.


The Atheist said:
The Chinese covered that up and it wasn't until the death total became too big to hide that it became news.
Click to expand...
No, that is not what happened.

You have to distinguish between inadequate infrastructure, local face saving and the actual Chinese government. They all played different parts at different times in the SARS pandemic. It's probably similar now.
 
Last edited:
The Atheist said:
Sorry, I was being facetious. You might have missed where I noted the 40% Chinese kids at my boy's school. That's not an over-estimate.

There is a huge Chinese diaspora in NZ, and most of them live in this area. We also have the bonus of enormous Chinese tourism as well as the "locals", who travel to & from extensively.

If you have it in Aussie, you can bet it's already here.
Click to expand...
Yeah, fair enough. The case in Brisbane is not yet confirmed, as far as I'm aware.
 
When news of SARS was at its peak I remember reading about two peculiar facts

It could be spread by sharing the same toilet.

there was a study I read a few years later about possible transmission in one hotel in China through aerosols from a toilet plume. They never proved that was the mode by which the other neighbors caught it, but it's intriguing.

I suppose there's no word yet on how people not in the markets are getting this new coronavirus? I guess SARS is the working model for now.
 
Venom said:
When news of SARS was at its peak I remember reading about two peculiar facts

It could be spread by sharing the same toilet.

there was a study I read a few years later about possible transmission in one hotel in China through aerosols from a toilet plume. They never proved that was the mode by which the other neighbors caught it, but it's intriguing.

I suppose there's no word yet on how people not in the markets are getting this new coronavirus? I guess SARS is the working model for now.
Click to expand...
There was an issue with sewage drainage at one apartment building so that would include toilets. That might be what you are thinking of. Hong Kong seals apartment building to contain SARS
WHO officials said they still believe the disease spreads mainly by close contact, but reported that epidemiologists were considering the possibility that systems in the building somehow spread infectious bodily secretions.
Click to expand...

There were also the nine international travelers that had been in the same elevator that all got infected on their way out of the country.

It turned out there were super-spreaders:
Gerberding also said some SARS patients seem to be "extremely efficient transmitters" of the disease. In Hanoi, for example, one patient transmitted the illness to 56% of the healthcare workers who came in contact with him or her, she said.
Click to expand...

One reason we were able to contain the SARS pandemic is there were few or no asymptomatic cases. If you can identify all cases you can isolate them and their contacts. As an example:
WHO officials said in statement. "Because of his early identification of the disease, global surveillance was heightened and many new cases have been identified and isolated before they infected hospital staff. In Hanoi, SARS appears to be coming under control."
Click to expand...


The current new virus is spreading person to person so that's likely to be respiratory secretions.
 
deadrose said:
It's one of many coronaviruses (-virii, whatever), not THE coronavirus. They can cause everything from a bad cold to SARS & MERS. This one is new to science, though, and appears to have come from bats, which are eaten in the area where it first occurred. It's happily settled in to humans though, and is now human-transmissible.

Eating wild animals has introduced a lot of interesting diseases to humans.
Click to expand...
Bats are particularly bad. They harbour bad diseases that don't kill them but kill us. Apparently they have a super immune system that is always turned up to 11. In Australia they have spread a disease via horses to vets who go to treat the sick horse. The Hendra virus has a 100% fatality rate. Fortunately it can't be spread between humans.



https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2018-09-14/hendra-virus-confirmed-on-nsw-property/10248080
 
The Atheist said:
Yet, with the virus this one's most closely related to being SARS and with numbers increasing exponentially, it might be a lot like SARS.
Click to expand...
That is, a vast amount of hype? There were less than ten thousand SARS infections and under eight hundred deaths. Measles killed six thousand in the Congo.
 
catsmate said:
That is, a vast amount of hype? There were less than ten thousand SARS infections and under eight hundred deaths. Measles killed six thousand in the Congo.
Click to expand...

But SARS could potentially have been much worse if it's spread hadn't been controlled. It seems to me that people were right to be alarmed enough to take action. The fact that they were successful doesn't suggest that they weren't right.
 
catsmate said:
There were less than ten thousand SARS infections and under eight hundred deaths. Measles killed six thousand in the Congo.
Click to expand...

1 - the death total is already six, and that's a whole week after the story broke. It does appear to be a less deadly coronavirus than MERS or SARS, but it's still far too early to say with any certainty where this will end up.

2 - pretty sure there's a good vaccine for measles.
 
cullennz said:
Though both are pretty vague.
Click to expand...

I was going to go with a humorous title, as I did with the famous "MERS Attacks" thread, but used the scientific name of the virus instead, which seems appropriate in the science & medicine section.

How the hell is that vague?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Back
Top Bottom