Don’t forget Fido:

https://www.amazon.com/ZARYIEE...%2Caps%2C144&sr=8-10

Well, I wasn't planning on doing it. In fact, I think my point is how all the people wearing cheap drugstore masks are wasting their money and effort. But if I did decide to wear a mask, at least I'd know what I was doing (and wear one that seals).

Is this going to affect the release of the new Samsung S20 cell phone?? Should I bleach mine when I unbox it?

The chinese movie companies pulled 7 releases. Probably a $1 billion loss.

https://deadline.com/2020/01/c...natown-3-1202838753/

Man. A movie theatre full of Kung Flu, that’d be a big petri-dish.

I'm gonna go gargle...

quote:

Originally posted by Dtech:
Is anyone else watching World War Z tonight?

Yeah, that, Contagion, then Outbreak


ps
Train to Busan

quote:

Originally posted by skyline009:
Already few confirm with the virus infected were travelers back from China. If you understand chinese there are shit load of video from Asia talking about what happen inside China is fucking scary over there , there are videos show people drops like flies. Medical personnel are scared and screaming for help, it really look like the zombie movie.

Do you have a link to any of these astonishing videos?

The Great Pestilence Panic of 2020
BY CHARLIE MARTIN JANUARY 27, 2020

I'd like to start this column by asking you all to observe a moment of silence to remember the millions of Americans who died in the great Ebola pandemic of 2014. Who can forget the unburied bodies along the roads, vital organs turned to mush, bleeding from all orifices; the whole Dallas neighborhood of Vickery Meadow decimated, with National Guard members patrolling the streets in biological warfare suits.

"Wait," you say, "what millions? What epidemic?"

Exactly.

So now we have a new epidemic, a viral disease with the aesthetically dreadful name "Wuhan Coronavirus (2019-nCoV)." (I'm going to abbreviate this to "2019-nCoV" or even just "nCoV").

What is it?
2019-nCoV seems to have first appeared last December. According to "Clinical features of patients infected with 2019 novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China" in the Lancet (24 January 2020, among the first cohort of patients on which they're reporting, 41 patients had been admitted to hospital with a confirmed 2019-nCoV infection. You can go read the whole description — I recommend bringing a dictionary as I certainly had to look some things up — but the long and short is that these 41 patients all had pneumonia when they were admitted, and 27 of them had visited a particular market, the Huanan 華南 Wholesale Seafood Market, which is suspected to have been the source of the infection. This is what's known as a "wet" market, which means that you can buy live animals that are then slaughtered for you.


Now, coronaviruses aren't actually a new thing. In fact, you've very possibly had one yourself: they're one of the families of viruses that cause what's called "the common cold."

"Common cold" isn't a disease, it's a syndrome, a bunch of symptoms that cluster together. Usually, those symptoms are a low fever, a cough, runny nose, and a general feeling of malaise. Sometimes people, especially old people or people with weakened immune systems, get pneumonia, get really sick and die.

So far, much like influenza.

Sometimes coronaviruses mutate into something worse. It's happened twice in the last couple decades, first with SARS and then with MERS. Both are caused by coronaviruses, and both were acting like 2019-nCoV is now: a much greater likelihood of pneumonia and a higher death rate.

I'm going to write a longer article on the disease, but here's the short version. nCoV is about as transmissible as the 'flu. Transmissibility is measured by a number R0, which is basically an estimate of the number of people who will be infected in the future from each current case. This is computed using a model that fits to the number of cases.


The first estimates gave nCoV an R0 estimate of 3.6 to 3.8, but that was quickly revised downward to around 2.6.

Now, even 2.6 isn't great. You want a number less than one — that means it's going to die out on its own. But, by comparison, influenza is somewhere between 2 and 5, and measles between 12 and 18.

When it was first identified, all 41 patients were already sick enough to be admitted to hospital, and of those, 13 went into the ICU and six died.

Genetically, 2019-nCoV is most similar to Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV) and also similar to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS-CoV). Both of them caused severe respiratory distress in some patients, and MERS-CoV in particular was fatal in about a third of diagnosed cases. All three are similar to coronaviruses in wild bats in China and the middle east.

Now it's time for a short interlude on interpreting numbers. MERS was fatal a third of the time among diagnosed patients. But SARS, MERS, and now nCoV are often either asymptomatic or cause mild cold-like symptoms. Right now, mortality in nCoV is running around 5 percent among diagnosed patients. Neither number reflects what it would be if we included all the people who "had a cold" and never had the virus tested.

What It's Not
It's (almost certainly) not the start of a worldwide pandemic that will kill hundreds of millions or billions of people. It's not as deadly as SARS or MERS were; think back to when MERS was around, remember how worried you were, and worry about 16 percent as much.

It's (almost certainly) not some Communist Wuhan Secret Lab bioweapon. Basically, remember Occam's Razor: the simplest explanation is to be preferred. This is another variant of a virus that's probably been around forever and was probably killing people in Confucius's time. The difference is that without gene sequencing and modern medicine, it was called "it's so sad, grampa caught pneumonia and passed away" instead of "scary death-virus coronavirus." But as a bioweapon, when it's only got an R0 of 2-3 and a 5 percent mortality, it sucks.
It's not because of eating bat soup. The virus can't survive being boiled long enough to make bats tender. The first patients probably did get it from being around live bats.

So what should you do about nCoV?

First of all, if you can avoid getting it, you should. That's my considered medical advice.

Luckily, the odds are extremely good that you can — there are in the order of tens of thousands of people who have it and billions of people overall. If you weren't in China or countries near China recently you're very unlikely to get it.

Don't hang out with live bats. But in this country, that's more likely to give you rabies than coronaviruses, and believe me, if you get rabies you'll wish you just got nCoV.

In particular, if you're over about 60, definitely avoid getting nCoV. The median age at death from reported cases by the 25th was 75. Considering how many people smoke in China, I'd bet money that death and existing pulmonary disease are very highly correlated, although the medical reports just say "significant comorbidities."

If you have been in China, and particularly in Hubei or especially in Wuhan, and you think you're catching cold, wash your hands, put on a surgical mask or cover your mouth with a handkerchief, and go to the doctor. At the doctors they'll probably have masks available at the door. And make sure to tell your doctor where you've been.

If you haven't been to China, and you're not old, and you don't have COPD or serious asthma or tuberculosis, well, wash your hands a lot anyway. We say these viruses are "air transmitted" but that's more often by contact.

Again, though, look at the numbers. CDC estimates millions of people get the flu every year; of those, hundreds of thousands are hospitalized, and tens of thousands die. We've mostly stopped measles in this country, but among people who do get the measles, about one in a thousand die.

The same precautions you would take against nCoV are the precautions you can take against the flu, and flu is far riskier overall.

Remember the History of Disease Panics
We in the U.S. had no Ebola epidemic in 2014. We did have an epidemic of Ebola panic, and the Ebola panic — like a lot of false news stories — had lasting effects. (I mentioned those millions of victims sarcastically elsewhere and it was completely believed. In fact there were only about 29,000 cases and 11,000 deaths reported in the 2014 epidemic. (Some estimates were that as many as 70 percent of the cases went unreported, but even doubling the reported cases would only be about 58,000 cases.)

But there were absolutely reliable sources explaining how the CDC was covering it up, how it was really a Russian/Chinese/CIA bioweapon, how someone they know on social media said that people were dropping dead in the street and rotting.

Then, of course, there was cannibalism in the Superdome, and before that a flood of radiation that was going to kill everyone on the West Coast after Fukushima...

And you'd think people would eventually learn.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-p...lence-panic-of-2020/

New virus? People die in the tens of thousands every year from flu ...

---

While the impact of flu varies, it places a substantial burden on the health of people in the United States each year.

CDC estimates that influenza has resulted in between 9 million – 45 million illnesses, between 140,000 – 810,000 hospitalizations and between 12,000 – 61,000 deaths annually since 2010.

Disease Burden of Influenza | CDC
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

All right, my turn:

As long as we’re talking about “panics,” when and where did they occur in this country as a result of Ebola, SARS, MERS, or even the really scary diseases (IMO) like MRSA and related antibiotic-resistant types? And I’m not referring to hyperbole about countless subjects on the teevee that people complain about so much while finding it so entertaining that they never, ever resort to that thing called the “off” button.

I’m referring to people hiding in their houses and boarding up grandma in the chicken coop until she gets over the sniffles, armed citizens blocking roads to enforce quarantines, mobs’ looting drugstores not for booze but for antibiotics and antivirals, the police stopping commuters and taking their body temperatures, or even the mass use of paper masks. The last time I’m aware of any of that’s happening was during the 1918-19 flu pandemic. Has it happened in this country more recently and I just didn’t notice it in my small town?

If none of that happened, was the actual reaction of the vast majority of normal people what anyone would reasonably call a “panic”? That term gets thrown around very carelessly, but not only by the people whose jobs depend upon keeping us masses entertained with excitement and drama. In addition to not actually panicking over nothing, perhaps the rest of us should also stop using that word that doesn’t describe how most of us have actually responded to these reports.

Added:

Then there are the things that people like health care professionals and emergency response managers do about these threats. They pay attention to them, monitor what’s happening, provide information, and issue warnings as appropriate. And why? Not because they’re “panicking” any more than the rest of us, but because that’s their job: We hire and pay them to do those things, as well as taking more direct action to prevent or mitigate the bad things that can happen. What’s more, in this country they are highly successful at doing all those things. It’s why we can laugh and joke here about things that kill thousands and are truly worthy of panics in other parts of the world.

quote:

Originally posted by sigfreund:
All right, my turn: Has it happened in this country more recently and I just didn’t notice it in my small town?

The last real panic I've seen is recorded below. It was absolutely terrifying.

quote:

Originally posted by sigfreund:
If none of that happened, was the actual reaction of the vast majority of normal people what anyone would reasonably call a “panic”? That term gets thrown around very carelessly, ... perhaps the rest of us should also stop using that word that doesn’t describe how most of us have actually responded to these reports.

Exactly, and thank you, sir.

Keeping an eye on the progress of a disease and exercising "reasonable" precautions just in case things go all wahoonie-shaped isn't panic, it's precaution. Same reason I carry: It's not paranoia, but preparedness.

I am glad that social media was not around when polio was rampant in the United States. Seeing kids in iron lungs on television was scary enough.

Q: you know what’s worse than the corona virus?

A: lime disease.

The thing that worries me most is when "experts" tell me not to worry. Then there are the casual experts (where's jimmy123?) who see death behind every door. We've got a bunch of causal experts here on the forum. What is it they say about opinions? They're like assholes and we all have one.

If you find an idea, there's another person who has a debunk for it. Its really hard to find hard facts. I don't even know where people get the commonly referenced fact that 60,000 good folks die of the flu each and every year. We hear that estimate voiced each year. Then the flu season gets under way. We have our own tough guys who say they'll never get the shot. But somehow (luck I assume) they never die.

So now we have a new evil disease that is supposed to kill us all. I'm guessing those are the ones with all their retirement dollars in the ineffective face mask vendors. Now the worst possible forecast, they've delayed the release of some movies. Not burned the films, but only release of the openings. OH how terrible, they delayed the release! And some fool here and other places has somehow parlayed that into a billion $ loss. Maybe as bad, the release of the very newest cell phone may be contaminated! Delivery will be made in a bucket of Clorox. They're even worried about the newest I phone delivery or production. Not a word of the rubber dog shit shortage. Oh what are we ever going to do.

Well, at least until spring when we all forget about it.

Without sounding like jimmy, lol, most of the people who die from the flu each year are already immunocompromised. Old, sick, etc. 60,000 sounds like a lot but car accidents kill more I believe. It’s a matter of scale.

quote:

Originally posted by pedropcola:
Without sounding like jimmy, lol, most of the people who die from the flu each year are already immunocompromised. Old, sick, etc. 60,000 sounds like a lot but car accidents kill more I believe. It’s a matter of scale.

Well everyone dies of something.

quote:

Originally posted by limblessbiff:


A: lime disease.

Scurvy??