If I tell my boss a Chinese looking bloke on the train sneezed over me and I need to self quarantine, do you think he’ll let me take two weeks off?

Case fatality rate for
Influenza in the west (not sure about China) is about 0.01 percent from the data I have seen – this one is estimated to be 2 percent.

Basically, if they were comparable and you worked in an office of 100 people, each year two of your colleagues would drop dead from the flu. Which they don’t.

So it’s not Ebola but there will be a lot more body bags if it spreads as much as seasonal flu.

Just going to leave a link to a Nature article from 2017 talking about the new biosecure lab in Wuhan, what it researches, and China’s apparently relaxed attitude to enforcing biosecurity:
https://www.nature.com/news/inside-the-chinese-lab-poised-to-study-world-s-most-dangerous-pathogens-1.21487

On the topic of face masks, they have been shown to be somewhat effective at stopping seasonal colds/flu being spread by the infected I believe.

I also think that it says something good about Asia, when we constantly get bombarded with the message that life is cheap in places like China. People care enough about the society they live in, that out of politeness and respect – if they have a cold and need to go out – they wear them.

Compare and contrast to the cockwomble presenteeism here where colleagues and people on the underground think that it’s perfect acceptable to cough and splutter in your face.

Which they don’t.

More’s the pity.

Just going to leave a link to a Nature article from 2017 talking about the new biosecure lab in Wuhan, what it researches, and China’s apparently relaxed attitude to enforcing biosecurity:

Hah. Pot meet kettle.

Look up Pirbright and Foot and Mouth – although the Pirbright lot still like to deny it was them.

Just anounced on SKY NEWS, The Wirral, to the left of Liverpool is going to be home to 200 evacuees from China while they are in isolation, for 2 weeks,lots of speculation on where theyre going to be put, we have 4 local hospitals all quite full and run down, and little signs of the Chinese building a new hospital in 7 days for us.

Told me the other day he’d ploughed through the Witcher in a couple of goes. That’s how bad it’s getting.

Read all three pages and this is the bit that stands out for me. Surely he must have just covered the main storyline?

Here’s an untreatable virus to reduce the population by 5%!

It’ll have to choose something more effective if it only kills 5%

That’s still 350 million dead. That’s quite tangible, no?

Told me the other day he’d ploughed through the Witcher in a couple of goes. That’s how bad it’s getting.

That’s whiskey and a revolver territory.

Fffffffuuu….

https://marlin-prod.literatumonline.com/pb-assets/Lancet/pdfs/S0140673620302117.pdf

Jan 29th 2019-nCoV clinical report that studied a small sample of 99 patients from Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital, finding a key group of patients progress rapidly to ARDS, septic shock, and multiple organ failure. 23% ITU admission, 17% ARDS, 11% mortality

Pretty shite fatality rate.

Now if it was “Captain Tripps” I’d be bricking it (99.8% risk of catching, 100% fatality rate).  The opening book of The Stand is a horrific description of a superflu getting loose.

Now a Costa cruise ship with 6000 on board locked down in Marseille with two ill passengers 😷

Basically, if they were comparable and you worked in an office of 100 people, each year two of your colleagues would drop dead from the flu. Which they don’t.

But that would assume that every person in the office caught flu every year?

Yeah, it would – my experience of my place in London is that everyone gets it when it goes around. Let’s say, 30 percent get it though – that’s still a dead person every other year or so.

When was the last time you had a colleague dying of the flu? Never here – probably because the demographics at work eg age – are not right for dying from the flu. This appears to be killing people who are fit and well though.

My point being that at 2 percent mortality rate, we will all know someone who dies from it if it goes large.

Maybe governments, people and work places will finally wake up in regards to public health and infectious disease.

Factor in that most flu in the workplace is just people with colds too.

Yes – but let’s remember that 2 percent is still 15.3 times higher than the 0.13 percent stated for the United States seasonal flu mortality rate.

They aren’t comparable. At all.

The WHO have just changed the coloured lightbulb.

Or maybe they no longer need to do that and use Hue?

lots of speculation on where theyre going to be put,

Unused staff accommodation at Arrowe Park apparently.

The WHO have just changed the coloured lightbulb

That’ll be bloody Daltrey’s fault, I have gone right off him since he went all Brexity. Never mind his Teenage Cancer Trust efforts!

Yeah, it would – my experience of my place in London is that everyone gets it when it goes around. Let’s say, 30 percent get it though – that’s still a dead person every other year or so.

If even 30% of your staff are getting influenza every year there is something very wrong with your organisation, and it must be properly affecting your business productivity. Real flu, not a bad cold, is a proper debilitating condition which will stop you going to work for 2 weeks, and probably still leave you a bit unproductive on week 3 – thats assuming of course you don’t get any really bad side effects!

When was the last time you had a colleague dying of the flu? Never here – probably because the demographics at work eg age – are not right for dying from the flu. This appears to be killing people who are fit and well though.

Its not quite as rare as you think. One of the reasons people don’t die of flu is we vaccinate the old, the young, healthcare workers and the vulnerable. That not only stops them being as likely to get sick but helps to reduce its propagation in the rest of the nation. Another is that we have mostly been exposed to some sort of flu virus at some point in our lives so have a degree of natural immunity. Despite that, some normally fit and healthy people will contract flu, will get particularly sick and some will die. Technically the might not die from flu, but say from pneumonia or septicaemia as a secondary infection.

If even 30% of your staff are getting influenza every year there is something very wrong with your organisation, and it must be properly affecting your business productivity. Real flu, not a bad cold, is a proper debilitating condition which will stop you going to work for 2 weeks, and probably still leave you a bit unproductive on week 3 – thats assuming of course you don’t get any really bad side effects!

Probably less than 1 person a year gets flu in our office, mild colds a bit more common.

In fact I don’t know anyone who has had flue so far this winter….

Yeah, it would – my experience of my place in London is that everyone gets it when it goes around. Let’s say, 30 percent get it though

I imagine they say they get flu because a cold doesn’t sound band enough to stay off work (even though it is).

I’ve had real flu twice and I knew somebody who died of it (although with an underlying medical condition) so I do know the difference!

Valid points – I might have tied myself in knots a bit – but I reiterate that the estimated mortality rate is 15 times higher than seasonal flu in the US.

So it’s not at all like your usual seasonal flu – based on current estimates. Even when you take into account the vaccines for flu (the mortality rate is still the mortality rate).

R0 has been revised again – it’s now between 2.24 and 3.5.

I’m of the opinion that the Chinese aren’t shutting vast areas of their country, causing billions in economic damage for something no worse than season flu. If they are, then that is stupidity of quite epic proportions. Do you think the CCP are that stupid?

FYI, the CDC put yearly symptomatic influenza infection of al types rate in the US at between 5 and 20 percent and a median R0 value of 1.28 for seasonal flu – the flu pandemics have never gone higher than the 2.0 for the 1918 Spanish flu.

On the topic of face masks, they have been shown to be somewhat effective at stopping seasonal colds/flu being spread by the infected I believe.

I expect they’re mostly effective by stopping a primary point of infection which is people sticking their fingers up their noses. Hard to do that whilst wearing a facemask.

One of the reasons people don’t die of flu is we vaccinate the old, the young, healthcare workers and the vulnerable.

Thing is, there’s no such thing as “the” flu vaccination. There’s a squillion different strains of flu and the vaccine protects against maybe three or four strains that it’s predicted might surface in the coming year. IIRC the efficacy of the flu vaccine in the US in 2019 was ~30%. It gets worse as the year rolls on.

Assuming this latest outbreak came out of the blue, the chances of a 2019 vaccine helping are somewhere between slim and none.

How many people are at home with a bad case of the sniffles rather than kill you dead coronavirus?  This will screw up the currently published state confirmed infection v death stats.

Yup I very much believe a pandemic virus of some description will wipe out millions.

Spanish Flu – estimates of unrecorded global deaths could have exceeded 100 million people…

As a side affect of the recent ‘troubles’ in Hong Kong the Chinese government have tried to clamp down on shipments of related items to here including Black TShirts, various types of flags and you guessed it, face masks of any kind. Since no one in their right mind would trust a surgical mask from China Im now having to buy them in Germany, to get shipped to the UK, and then shipped to me wrapped in in other stuff.
As a rule, dont trust the Chinese government, however I would risk taking advice from the WHO as at least you could in theory take them to court and hold then responsible.

Some interesting stuff about the 1918 flu pandemic

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ten-myths-about-1918-flu-pandemic-180967810/

How many people are at home with a bad case of the sniffles rather than kill you dead coronavirus? This will screw up the currently published state confirmed infection v death stats

Which is why that paper I posted is so worrying, currently our estimates are basically – half as bad as Spanish flu to twice as bad.

Great.

I’m of the opinion that the Chinese aren’t shutting vast areas of their country, causing billions in economic damage for something no worse than season flu.

this was my original point. Grounding 50 million people is quite a big deal. That’s like shutting down the UK. They’re not going to do that if it isn’t much more serious than the flu or anything else.

They’re not going to do that if it isn’t much more serious than the flu or anything else.

The flu is serious, and this particular strain is very serious indeed.

As a side affect of the recent ‘troubles’ in Hong Kong the Chinese government have tried to clamp down on shipments of related items to here including Black TShirts, various types of flags and you guessed it, face masks of any kind. Since no one in their right mind would trust a surgical mask from China Im now having to buy them in Germany, to get shipped to the UK, and then shipped to me wrapped in in other stuff.

I’ve just bought some masks from my local hardware store in Sydney, and am sending them to a colleague in HK. They have been pretty much unavailable here too for the past few months due to the bushfire smoke – the lady in the shop told me they had people ringing them for weeks offering to by the whole of their next shipment from them, presumably to re-sell.

1918 had a difference in that younger people tended to die rather than older and while there was an element of people moving around countries in 1918 (war) it is nothing compared to today with literally billions more people on the planet and people travelling all over the world every day in time periods of hours rather than days.

So if the fatality rate turns out to be a similar % that % will be applied to A LOT more people than in 1918.

Not seen anyone share this yet – some good graphical representations of what’s happened so far

https://multimedia.scmp.com/infographics/news/china/article/3047038/wuhan-virus/index.html

Thing is, there’s no such thing as “the” flu vaccination. There’s a squillion different strains of flu and the vaccine protects against maybe three or four strains that it’s predicted might surface in the coming year. IIRC the efficacy of the flu vaccine in the US in 2019 was ~30%. It gets worse as the year rolls on.

Assuming this latest outbreak came out of the blue, the chances of a 2019 vaccine helping are somewhere between slim and none.

Indeed that was where the panic around Swine flu came from – the strain wasn’t something that had been in any immunisation; and it particularly seemed to affect those of a younger generation – whereas infection rates and severity in older populations were lower than might have been expected which was being attributed to possibly having been exposed to a similar virus at a much earlier time in life having some natural immunity. As this virus is NOT a flu relative virus and has possibly arrived from bats, it seems unlikely that the general population will have any previous resistance/antibodies to it (obviously nobody will have antibodies for the exact new form – but if you have been exposed to similar forms in the past you may have a faster response).

The flu is serious, and this particular strain is very serious indeed.

This Corona virus is not a type of flu. At least if it was “just a new flu” the medics would have a starting point.

Well, its finally here

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2020/jan/31/coronavirus-live-updates-china-wuhan-death-toll-who-global-health-emergency-latest-news

NHS England just confirmed two cases in UK; both in same family and receiving ‘specialist medical care’.

Bloody foreign diseases coming over here and taking our lives. Don’t they know its Brexit Day?