Impact of the new Coronavirus where you are?

[SCgarman]

20 minutes ago, Corylax18 said:

That graphic was created by someone who is either willfully ignorant or has a vested interest in continuing the hype. It is completely devoid of context and falls apart pretty quickly when analyzed against the spread of other common diseases. (Mainly the flu) 

The real Virus is in our Minds. People spread falsehoods (like the graphic above) without verifying or fact checking them themselves, then all of a sudden it becomes "fact." 

I completely agree with you that comparing this to other virus outbreaks is a mistake, if your goal is to keep scaring people. But a quick/dirty comparison to the good old flu virus should make anybody feel a lot better about this "epidemic."

This virus is close to being a world pandemic. Just look at the stock market and all the people abroad staying home and not going anywhere. Is it all just "hype" in your opinion?We here in the USA haven't really been affected like other countries.....YET. but the possibility is certainly there.

[Hollywood Ninja]

The fact that most of it (95% +) is unsubstantiated hype at best and outright, willful lies in many cases. 

Look at the video [mention=10472]rcarlson[/mention] posted a few posts above this one. First, it has no context/reference to the spread rate of diseases that we are all familiar with already. if the common flu was included in that graphic, nobody would be looking at it, because ALL the other diseases(covid 19 inculded) would be immeasurably small in comparison. That graphic and most of the news coverage has been designed to scare you, not to educate you. Because scary boosts ratings, boring old facts don't. 

There are typically about 25-30 MILLION flu hospitalizations per year, in US alone, the number of cases is even higher than that. so in an average 6 month flu season that's more than 4 MILLION hospitalization cases A MONTH.

Or roughly 100x the growth rate of COVID 19, using only verified hospitalizations, not even total flu cases. That's for a disease that we already "understand" and have a vaccine for. We don't know shit about this disease and we've managed to hold the growth/spread and death rates orders of magnitude below a disease that runs rampant through humanity every year. 

Its the same with deaths too. As I stated in a previous post over 80,000 people died from the flu in the 17-18 US season. Or about 13,333 per MONTH, again, in that same 100x rate over the Covid 19 viruses' current rate. 

We are all being lied to. Why? I don't know, but what a great distraction from the Human Rights protests in Hong Kong, or Epstein's murder, or failed "trade negotiations", etc. etc.

 

Based on the number of cases vs those that have died, COVID is 20x more lethal than the common flu. So your “100x rate” is not statistically correct. If 25-30 million people contract COVID, deaths would far surpass that of the common flu.

 

I will agree that media hype is not helping most situations.

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[rcarlson]

41 minutes ago, Corylax18 said:

The real Virus is in our Minds. People spread falsehoods (like the graphic above) without verifying or fact checking them themselves, then all of a sudden it becomes "fact." 

Help a brother out with this.  

21 minutes ago, NYgarman said:

This virus is close to being a world pandemic. Just look at the stock market and all the people abroad staying home and not going anywhere. Is it all just "hype" in your opinion?We here in the USA haven't really been affected like other countries.....YET. but the possibility is certainly there.

Different consequences, and one's in its infancy whereas the other has plagues the globe since from at least the early 20th century.  Correct me if I'm missing you on this, but are you saying that if COVID19 were as ubiquitous as the common flu there's no need for alarm?  And/or are you just generally skeptical of doomsday predictions from notoriously bad sources?  If it's the latter, I'm with you -- very with you -- not so much on the first.   

With what's known of it at this stage, I'll give you that it's premature to curl up in the fetal position and say goodbye to our loved ones.  I do recall the Avian Flu histrionics, as well as others.  Not willing to dismiss so quickly here though.       

[Corylax18]

2 minutes ago, NYgarman said:

This virus is close to being a world pandemic. Just look at the stock market and all the people abroad staying home and not going anywhere. Is it all just "hype" in your opinion?We here in the USA haven't really been affected like other countries.....YET. but the possibility is certainly there.

No, it isn't. The numbers simply don't back that up, not even close. 

What does the stock market have to do with the science of a virus spreading? Nothing. What does stupid people falling for lies have to do with the science of a virus spreading? Nothing. The stock market is dropping because a handful of people thought they might try to front run some drops, high volume algorithms picked up on this activity, then the run away train started. Just like the flash crash in December 18, we've automated so much of the trading process these days that huge drops just don't mean what they used to. The market will gain it back, just like the last 10 or 15 times we had 6, 7, 8, 9 hundred point drops. 

The "affect" on the worst affected country is fewer cases and deaths than a large US state sees in the same period during a typical Flu season. So yes, lots of people are getting sucked into the Hype, but that shouldn't be your justification for falling for it too.  

If this virus is really this bad, than why doesn't the entire world fall into a tail spin every winter? When a disease that has proven itself (over decades) to be more virulent and deadly sweeps across the northern hemisphere? 

[Corylax18]

32 minutes ago, Hollywood Ninja said:

 

Based on the number of cases vs those that have died, COVID is 20x more lethal than the common flu. So your “100x rate” is not statistically correct. If 25-30 million people contract COVID, deaths would far surpass that of the common flu.

 

I will agree that media hype is not helping most situations.

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Do you have the numbers to back this up, or did you hear it somewhere? I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just asking you to "show your work." (or that of whoever you quoted)

In the post you quoted, I broke down the most recent numbers I could find for this disease against a typical (not bad) flu season. I know the numbers for this current disease are changing rapidly and should be taken with a grain of salt, but I cant find any numbers anywhere that show this disease is actually more deadly, or will be more deadly as we get our heads around it. 

I understand the death rates in rural china looked pretty scary at points, but look at the numbers from developed countries. Just like the last few "end of the world" diseases (SARS, EBOLA, Avian/Swine flu) the transmission and death rates fall off a cliff when we start looking at developed nations. 

[Corylax18]

30 minutes ago, rcarlson said:

Help a brother out with this.     

I think we (Humanity) are our own worst enemy in these situations. Everything is "viral" these days, videos, tweets, ads, etc. The disease has spread like wild fire, to every inch of the planet, to the minds/bodies of billions. On the internet.

But the viral spread of the disease itself has been slower and more easily contained than the common flu virus is. We've whipped ourselves into a frenzy, in our heads, on our computer monitors, but the disease itself is lagging FAR behind the spread of its reputation. If the real thing was spreading as fast as its reputation on the internet/on TV than I would agree that we're all screwed. Unfortunately the gap between the truth and reality seems to be getting larger and larger each time one of these "new" diseases comes around. 

36 minutes ago, rcarlson said:

Different consequences, and one's in its infancy whereas the other has plagues the globe since from at least the early 20th century.  Correct me if I'm missing you on this, but are you saying that if COVID19 were as ubiquitous as the common flu there's no need for alarm?  And/or are you just generally skeptical of doomsday predictions from notoriously bad sources?  If it's the latter, I'm with you -- very with you -- not so much on the first.   

With what's known of it at this stage, I'll give you that it's premature to curl up in the fetal position and say goodbye to our loved ones.  I do recall the Avian Flu histrionics, as well as others.  Not willing to dismiss so quickly here though.       

 To your first sentence. We are more effectively slowing/stopping the spread of a disease we know very little about (in its infancy) than a disease that we've had almost a century to figure out. The standard flu vaccine in the United States this year contained an H1N1(swine flu) antibody. Yes, millions of Americans voluntarily got injected with weak virus cells from one the last "world ending" diseases. I did myself. Imagine telling people that 10 years ago, when we were all going to die from the swine flu. 

My point is, COVID 19 is, scientifically speaking, a nasty cold. Given time (just like with H1N1, avian flu, sars, ebola, etc. etc.) We will figure out how to deal with it. Quite honestly, I'm stunned that the inoculation and death rates for more common flu strains are where they are. So to answer your question, I'm very skeptical of the regular (once every couple years) predictions of doomsday. The gross over reactions do more damage to the world as a whole than the diseases themselves. 

I am very willing to dismiss this one, like I did with the last however many "epidemics" that we all survived.

We're one big natural disaster away from forgetting all about this crap. Look at how quickly we forgot about WW III with Iran, or them shooting down a plane full of civilians, or any of the other things I posted above. Take shots at me if you want, but a new, brighter, shinier object will come along to distract us before too long. 

[Puros Y Vino]

I found this article to be interesting.  The excerpt below caught my eye.  As part of my job, I've been on daily briefing calls regarding the cases in Canada.  Our stats so far are good, but we don't seem to be making all the right decisions so far.  Had our documented cases ballooned into full blown confirmed cases, it would be a lot worse. The recent spike in Italian cases is very interesting and troublesome.  I've been tracking the stats daily, their jump is huge given how quickly their numbers rose from low single digits.

“In its first six weeks, 2019-nCoV has killed more people than SARS did during its entire 9-month outbreak.  

 

[rcarlson]

1 hour ago, Corylax18 said:

I think we (Humanity) are our own worst enemy in these situations. Everything is "viral" these days, videos, tweets, ads, etc. The disease has spread like wild fire, to every inch of the planet, to the minds/bodies of billions. On the internet.

But the viral spread of the disease itself has been slower and more easily contained than the common flu virus is. We've whipped ourselves into a frenzy, in our heads, on our computer monitors, but the disease itself is lagging FAR behind the spread of its reputation. If the real thing was spreading as fast as its reputation on the internet/on TV than I would agree that we're all screwed. Unfortunately the gap between the truth and reality seems to be getting larger and larger each time one of these "new" diseases comes around. 

 To your first sentence. We are more effectively slowing/stopping the spread of a disease we know very little about (in its infancy) than a disease that we've had almost a century to figure out. The standard flu vaccine in the United States this year contained an H1N1(swine flu) antibody. Yes, millions of Americans voluntarily got injected with weak virus cells from one the last "world ending" diseases. I did myself. Imagine telling people that 10 years ago, when we were all going to die from the swine flu. 

My point is, COVID 19 is, scientifically speaking, a nasty cold. Given time (just like with H1N1, avian flu, sars, ebola, etc. etc.) We will figure out how to deal with it. Quite honestly, I'm stunned that the inoculation and death rates for more common flu strains are where they are. So to answer your question, I'm very skeptical of the regular (once every couple years) predictions of doomsday. The gross over reactions do more damage to the world as a whole than the diseases themselves. 

I am very willing to dismiss this one, like I did with the last however many "epidemics" that we all survived.

We're one big natural disaster away from forgetting all about this crap. Look at how quickly we forgot about WW III with Iran, or them shooting down a plane full of civilians, or any of the other things I posted above. Take shots at me if you want, but a new, brighter, shinier object will come along to distract us before too long. 

Fair 'nuff.  

[SmokyFontaine]

I also believe that the global political climate plays a role in this. Chinese government policy is to lie through your teeth and deny, deny, deny, moreso today, than even back a few years during SARS. Any number out of China, not vetted by a 3rd party is going to be under-reporting. Economists talk about the doubling and halving rule when looking at China. If China says something is bad, you have to double how bad it likely is in real life. If they something was good with the economy, you half to handicap it by half to get somewhere around the real numbers. 

If we're trying to get conspiracy theorist about this, the last thing China wants is the economic isolation and travel isolation that the virus has sprung on them. If you think this has been tough for the global economy...just wait for the Chinese economy figures. Just kidding - it will probably show that things went down slightly. Double it...at least. 

There are a handful of countries who we should inherently doubt the veracity of any economic or health statistic that is released through official channels. China is near the top of that list. THAT is what scares me personally. We don't know how bad this really is because we can't rely on the epicenter's information. 

[Corylax18]

23 minutes ago, SmokyFontaine said:

I also believe that the global political climate plays a role in this. Chinese government policy is to lie through your teeth and deny, deny, deny, moreso today, than even back a few years during SARS. Any number out of China, not vetted by a 3rd party is going to be under-reporting. Economists talk about the doubling and halving rule when looking at China. If China says something is bad, you have to double how bad it likely is in real life. If they something was good with the economy, you half to handicap it by half to get somewhere around the real numbers. 

If we're trying to get conspiracy theorist about this, the last thing China wants is the economic isolation and travel isolation that the virus has sprung on them. If you think this has been tough for the global economy...just wait for the Chinese economy figures. Just kidding - it will probably show that things went down slightly. Double it...at least. 

There are a handful of countries who we should inherently doubt the veracity of any economic or health statistic that is released through official channels. China is near the top of that list. THAT is what scares me personally. We don't know how bad this really is because we can't rely on the epicenter's information. 

Good point, very good point.

The WHO has had a "high level" team in China since mid January. But, that team is only as good as the access they're given. The last two reports from the WHO show a decline in the rate of new transmissions in China(figure 2), but not yet in the rest of the world. But, that's all predicated on the accuracy of the info we're getting from Chinese health officials. 

The WHO has even recommended that countries begin lifting their travel and shipping bans to/from China. Which seems like a big deal, something that News networks might want to communicate, if they were interested in communicating facts. I don't put a ton of stock into this information, as its changing rapidly and the WHO hasn't exactly been batting 1.000 so far, but its better than the news we've been getting.

The "Strategic Objectives" area just under Figure 3 is particularly interesting, they make a point to say that they believe reducing transmission rates can "be achieved through a combination of public health measures." They then list those measures, and none of them are travel bans or mass quarantines. 

https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/situation-reports/

https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200224-sitrep-35-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=1ac4218d_2

 

[SenorPerfecto]

Maybe I'm a big ol virus wet blanket, but I think it's a tad overblown. I wouldn't change my plans if I currently had a trip planned to Japan, or S Korea or Italy or the other non-Wuhan places that are supposedly affected. If you're an adult (i.e. not a child, pregnant, or an old person), the chances you will catch it and it will be worse than the flu are very very tiny.

 

It DOES however make a nice piece of filler in the neverending 24-hour news cycle between Trump tantrum tweets and Kobe memorials.

[Frozen North]

It’s killing my investments 

[Duxnutz]

Found this episode of Four Corners troubling. 

 

[Ken Gargett]

sorry - i posted this separately. should have gone here.

really interesting piece from the Atlantic. 

 

 

You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus

Most cases are not life-threatening, which is also what makes the virus a historic challenge to contain.

JAMES HAMBLIN

10:39 AM ET

XIAO YIJIU / XINHUA / EYEVINE / REDUX

 

In May 1997, a 3-year-old boy developed what at first seemed like the common cold. When his symptoms—sore throat, fever, and cough—persisted for six days, he was taken to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Hong Kong. There his cough worsened, and he began gasping for air. Despite intensive care, the boy died.

Puzzled by his rapid deterioration, doctors sent a sample of the boy’s sputum to China’s Department of Health. But the standard testing protocol couldn’t fully identify the virus that had caused the disease. The chief virologist decided to ship some of the sample to colleagues in other countries.

At the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, the boy’s sputum sat for a month, waiting for its turn in a slow process of antibody-matching analysis. The results eventually confirmed that this was a variant of influenza, the virus that has killed more people than any in history. But this type had never before been seen in humans. It was H5N1, or “avian flu,” discovered two decades prior, but known only to infect birds.

By then, it was August. Scientists sent distress signals around the world. The Chinese government swiftly killed 1.5 million chickens (over the protests of chicken farmers). Further cases were closely monitored and isolated. By the end of the year there were 18 known cases in humans. Six people died.

 

This was seen as a successful global response, and the virus was not seen again for years. In part, containment was possible because the disease was so severe: Those who got it became manifestly, extremely ill. H5N1 has a fatality rate of around 60 percent—if you get it, you’re likely to die. Yet since 2003, the virus has killed only 455 people. The much “milder” flu viruses, by contrast, kill fewer than 0.1 percent of people they infect, on average, but are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths every year.

Severe illness caused by viruses such as H5N1 also means that infected people can be identified and isolated, or that they died quickly. They do not walk around feeling just a little under the weather, seeding the virus. The new coronavirus (known technically as SARS-CoV-2) that has been spreading around the world can cause a respiratory illness that can be severe. The disease (known as COVID-19) seems to have a fatality rate of less than 2 percent—exponentially lower than most outbreaks that make global news. The virus has raised alarm not despite that low fatality rate, but because of it.

Coronaviruses are similar to influenza viruses in that they are both single strands of RNA. Four coronaviruses commonly infect humans, causing colds. These are believed to have evolved in humans to maximize their own spread—which means sickening, but not killing, people. By contrast, the two prior novel coronavirus outbreaks—SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome, named for where the first outbreak occurred)—were picked up from animals, as was H5N1. These diseases were highly fatal to humans. If there were mild or asymptomatic cases, they were extremely few. Had there been more of them, the disease would have spread widely. Ultimately, SARS and MERS each killed fewer than 1,000 people.

COVID-19 is already reported to have killed more than twice that number. With its potent mix of characteristics, this virus is unlike most that capture popular attention: It is deadly, but not too deadly. It makes people sick, but not in predictable, uniquely identifiable ways. Last week, 14 Americans tested positive on a cruise ship in Japan despite feeling fine—the new virus may be most dangerous because, it seems, it may sometimes cause no symptoms at all.

Read: The new coronavirus is a truly modern epidemic

The world has responded with unprecedented speed and mobilization of resources. The new virus was identified extremely quickly. Its genome was sequenced by Chinese scientists and shared around the world within weeks. The global scientific community has shared genomic and clinical data at unprecedented rates. Work on a vaccine is well under way. The Chinese government enacted dramatic containment measures, and the World Health Organization declared an emergency of international concern. All of this happened in a fraction of the time it took to even identify H5N1 in 1997. And yet the outbreak continues to spread.

---

The Harvard epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch is exacting in his diction, even for an epidemiologist. Twice in our conversation he started to say something, then paused and said, “Actually, let me start again.” So it’s striking when one of the points he wanted to get exactly right was this: “I think the likely outcome is that it will ultimately not be containable.”

Containment is the first step in responding to any outbreak. In the case of COVID-19, the possibility (however implausible) of preventing a pandemic seemed to play out in a matter of days. Starting in January, China began cordoning off progressively larger areas, radiating outward from Wuhan City and eventually encapsulating some 100 million people. People were barred from leaving home, and lectured by drones if they were caught outside. Nonetheless, the virus has now been found in 24 countries.

Despite the apparent ineffectiveness of such measures—relative to their inordinate social and economic cost, at least—the crackdown continues to escalate. Under political pressure to “stop” the virus, last Thursday the Chinese government announced that officials in the Hubei province would be going door to door, testing people for fevers and looking for signs of illness, then sending all potential cases to quarantine camps. But even with the ideal containment, the virus’s spread may have been inevitable. Testing people who are already extremely sick is an imperfect strategy if people can spread the virus without even feeling bad enough to stay home from work.

Lipsitch predicts that, within the coming year, some 40 to 70 percent of people around the world will be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19. But, he clarifies emphatically, this does not mean that all will have severe illnesses. “It’s likely that many will have mild disease, or may be asymptomatic,” he said. As with influenza, which is often life-threatening to people with chronic health conditions and of older age, most cases pass without medical care. (Overall, around 14 percent of people with influenza have no symptoms.)

Lipsitch is far from alone in his belief that this virus will continue to spread widely. The emerging consensus among epidemiologists is that the most likely outcome of this outbreak is a new seasonal disease—a fifth “endemic” coronavirus. With the other four, people are not known to develop long-lasting immunity. If this one follows suit, and if the disease continues to be as severe as it is now, “cold and flu season” could become “cold and flu and COVID-19 season.”

At this point, it is not even known how many people are infected. As of Sunday, there have been 35 confirmed cases in the U.S., according to the World Health Organization. But Lipsitch’s “very, very rough” estimate when we spoke a week ago (banking on “multiple assumptions piled on top of each other,” he said) was that 100 or 200 people in the U.S. were infected. That’s all it would take to seed the disease widely. The rate of spread would depend on how contagious the disease is in milder cases. On Friday, Chinese scientists reported in the medical journal JAMA an apparent case of asymptomatic spread of the virus, from a patient with a normal chest CT scan. The researchers concluded with stolid understatement that if this finding is not a bizarre abnormality, “the prevention of COVID-19 infection would prove challenging.”

Read: 20 seconds to optimize hand wellness

Even if Lipsitch’s estimates were off by orders of magnitude, they wouldn’t likely change the overall prognosis. “Two hundred cases of a flu-like illness during flu season—when you’re not testing for it—is very hard to detect,” Lipsitch said. “But it would be really good to know sooner rather than later whether that’s correct, or whether we’ve miscalculated something. The only way to do that is by testing.”

Originally, doctors in the U.S. were advised not to test people unless they had been to China or had contact with someone who had been diagnosed with the disease. Within the past two weeks, the CDC said it would start screening people in five U.S. cities, in an effort to give some idea of how many cases are actually out there. But tests are still not widely available. As of Friday, the Association of Public Health Laboratories said that only California, Nebraska, and Illinois had the capacity to test people for the virus.

With so little data, prognosis is difficult. But the concern that this virus is beyond containment—that it will be with us indefinitely—is nowhere more apparent than in the global race to find a vaccine, one of the clearest strategies for saving lives in the years to come.

---

Over the past month, stock prices of a small pharmaceutical company named Inovio more than doubled. In mid-January, it reportedly discovered a vaccine for the new coronavirus. This claim has been repeated in many news reports, even though it is technically inaccurate. Like other drugs, vaccines require a long testing process to see if they indeed protect people from disease, and do so safely. What this company—and others—has done is copy a bit of the virus’s RNA that one day could prove to work as a vaccine. It’s a promising first step, but to call it a discovery is like announcing a new surgery after sharpening a scalpel.

Though genetic sequencing is now extremely fast, making vaccines is as much art as science. It involves finding a viral sequence that will reliably cause a protective immune-system memory but not trigger an acute inflammatory response that would itself cause symptoms. (While the influenza vaccine cannot cause the flu, CDC warns that it can cause “flu-like symptoms.”) Hitting this sweet spot requires testing, first in lab models and animals, and eventually in people. One does not simply ship a billion viral gene fragments around the world to be injected into everyone at the moment of discovery.

Inovio is far from the only small biotech company venturing to create a sequence that strikes that balance. Others include Moderna, CureVac, and Novavax. Academic researchers are also on the case, at Imperial College London and other universities, as are federal scientists in several countries, including at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Anthony Fauci, head of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, wrote in JAMA in January that the agency was working at historic speed to find a vaccine. During the SARS outbreak in 2003, researchers moved from obtaining the genomic sequence of the virus and into a phase 1 clinical trial of a vaccine in 20 months. Fauci wrote that his team has since compressed that timeline to just over three months for other viruses, and for the new coronavirus, “they hope to move even faster.”

New models have sprung up in recent years, too, that promise to speed up vaccine development. One is the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness (CEPI), which was launched in Norway in 2017 to finance and coordinate the development of new vaccines. Its founders include the governments of Norway and India, the Wellcome Trust, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The group’s money is now flowing to Inovio and other small biotech start-ups, encouraging them to get into the risky business of vaccine development. The group’s CEO, Richard Hatchett, shares Fauci’s basic timeline vision—a COVID-19 vaccine ready for early phases of safety testing in April. If all goes well, by late summer testing could begin to see if the vaccine actually prevents disease.

Read: Coronavirus is devastating Chinese tourism

Overall, if all pieces fell into place, Hatchett guesses it would be 12 to 18 months before an initial product could be deemed safe and effective. That timeline represents “a vast acceleration compared with the history of vaccine development,” he told me. But it’s also unprecedentedly ambitious. “Even to propose such a timeline at this point must be regarded as hugely aspirational,” he added.

Even if that idyllic year-long projection were realized, the novel product would still require manufacturing and distribution. “An important consideration is whether the underlying approach can then be scaled to produce millions or even billions of doses in coming years,” Hatchett said. Especially in an ongoing emergency, if borders closed and supply chains broke, distribution and production could prove difficult purely as a matter of logistics.

Fauci’s initial optimism seemed to wane, too. Last week he said that the process of vaccine development was proving “very difficult and very frustrating.” For all the advances in basic science, the process cannot proceed to an actual vaccine without extensive clinical testing, which requires manufacturing many vaccines and meticulously monitoring outcomes in people. The process could ultimately cost hundreds of millions of dollars—money that the NIH, start-ups, and universities don’t have. Nor do they have the production facilities and technology to mass-manufacture and distribute a vaccine.

Production of vaccines has long been contingent on investment from one of the handful of giant global pharmaceutical companies. At the Aspen Institute last week, Fauci lamented that none had yet to “step up” and commit to making the vaccine. “Companies that have the skill to be able to do it are not going to just sit around and have a warm facility, ready to go for when you need it,” he said. Even if they did, taking on a new product like this could mean massive losses, especially if the demand faded or if people, for complex reasons, chose not to use the product.

Making vaccines is so difficult, cost intensive, and high risk that in the 1980s, when drug companies began to incur legal costs over alleged harms caused by vaccines, many opted to simply quit making them. To incentivize the pharmaceutical industry to keep producing these vital products, the U.S. government offered to indemnify anyone claiming to have been harmed by a vaccine. The arrangement continues to this day. Even still, drug companies have generally found it more profitable to invest in the daily-use drugs for chronic conditions. And coronaviruses could present a particular challenge in that at their core they are, like influenza viruses, a single strand of RNA. This viral class is likely to mutate, and vaccines may need to be in constant development, as with the flu.

“If we’re putting all our hopes in a vaccine as being the answer, we’re in trouble,” Jason Schwartz, an assistant professor at Yale School of Public Health who studies vaccine policy, told me. The best-case scenario, as Schwartz sees it, is the one in which this vaccine development happens far too late to make a difference for the current outbreak. The real problem is that preparedness for this outbreak should have been happening for the past decade, ever since SARS. “Had we not set the SARS-vaccine-research program aside, we would have had a lot more of this foundational work that we could apply to this new, closely related virus, ” he said. But, as with Ebola, government funding and pharmaceutical-industry development evaporated once the sense of emergency lifted. “Some very early research ended up sitting on a shelf because that outbreak ended before a vaccine needed to be aggressively developed.”

On Saturday, Politico reported that the White House is preparing to ask Congress for $1 billion in emergency funding for a coronavirus response. This request, if it materialized, would come in the same month in which President Donald Trump released a new budget proposal that would cut key elements of pandemic preparedness—funding for the CDC, the NIH, and foreign aid.  

Thomas J. Bollyky: Coronavirus is spreading because humans are healthier

These long-term government investments matter because creating vaccines, antiviral medications, and other vital tools requires decades of serious investment, even when demand is low. Market-based economies often struggle to develop a product for which there is no immediate demand and to distribute products to the places they’re needed. CEPI has been touted as a promising model to incentivize vaccine development before an emergency begins, but the group also has skeptics. Last year, Doctors Without Borders wrote a scathing open letter, saying the model didn’t ensure equitable distribution or affordability. CEPI subsequently updated its policies to forefront equitable access, and Manuel Martin, a medical innovation and access adviser with Doctors Without Borders, told me last week that he’s now cautiously optimistic. “CEPI is absolutely promising, and we really hope that it will be successful in producing a novel vaccine,” he said. But he and his colleagues are “waiting to see how CEPI’s commitments play out in practice.”

These considerations matter not simply as humanitarian benevolence, but also as effective policy. Getting vaccines and other resources to the places where they will be most helpful is essential to stop disease from spreading widely. During the 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak, for example, Mexico was hit hard. In Australia, which was not, the government prevented exports by its pharmaceutical industry until it filled the Australian government’s order for vaccines. The more the world enters lockdown and self-preservation mode, the more difficult it could be to soberly assess risk and effectively distribute tools, from vaccines and respirator masks to food and hand soap.

Italy, Iran, and South Korea are now among the countries reporting quickly growing numbers of detected COVID-19 infections. Many countries have responded with containment attempts, despite the dubious efficacy and inherent harms of China’s historically unprecedented crackdown. Certain containment measures will be appropriate, but widely banning travel, closing down cities, and hoarding resources are not realistic solutions for an outbreak that lasts years. All of these measures come with risks of their own. Ultimately some pandemic responses will require opening borders, not closing them. At some point the expectation that any area will escape effects of COVID-19 must be abandoned: The disease must be seen as everyone’s problem

 

[Ken Gargett]

my brother-in-law sent me this site. really interesting. have put it in both threads.

 

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

[FireMedic]

I'm in the healthcare industry and see a lot of patients. I've only put 1 mask on a patient this flu season. I'm doing just fine. Wash your hands, use sanitizer, use common sense.

[Riverstyx]

Just thinking...20% of Americans get the flu each year. 77k of ALL of China has the Coronavirus, or 0.7% of Wuhan’s 11 million people. A tightly packed city. Something about the statistics don’t make sense. My GUESS is far more people are infected but the mortality rate is far below advertised. 

[prodigy]

Isnt the "common flu" something like 100+ different strains? And the vaccine is something like antibodies for 3 or 4 of those strains? It's hard to compare this new thing generically to the "flu", when the flu is such a vastly unique animal on it's own.

I agree it's probably being blown out of proportion, but what if it's not? What if it evolves rapidly to become more lethal and more contagious? Like the plague that happened not all that long ago...



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[JamesKPolkEsq]

WHO publishes situation reports daily for COVID-19. 

https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/situation-reports

For various reasons, I don't believe the dataset from China. 

Current numbers outside of China - 2069 infections, 23 deaths. 

Corylax is right, you should be more worried about the flu. 

Or, take the data from the cruiseship (aka world's largest clinical study without consent). 692 confirmed cases, 3 deaths (all 80+).

[La_Tigre]

Lottttttssssss of broad assumptions happening in this thread...may as well participate. I truly doubt a disease with a current 3.4% kill rate has the “smarts” to be anti-establishment. But, heyo, 8 billion infected would only equal 270 million deaths (based on what “the man” wants us to know?). No need to be concerned about a global pandemic. It’s just not that virulent; couldn’t possibly be any different with different ethnicities (<ahem>small pox)... nothing to see here, take your flowering plant extracts and let’s get back to the fight for social justice. ?

 

In all seriousness, Don’t believe the “Don’t Believe the Hype” hype. Be careful. Do not take unnecessary risks for the sake of you and yours. Use known precautions to viral transmission. 

[Akela3rd]

I'm in the healthcare industry and see a lot of patients. I've only put 1 mask on a patient this flu season. I'm doing just fine. Wash your hands, use sanitizer, use common sense.

This. Washing /sanitising your hands is the key, face masks don't do anything to help prevent infection.

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[Ken Gargett]

6 minutes ago, Akela3rd said:

This. Washing /sanitising your hands is the key, face masks don't do anything to help prevent infection.

Sent from my HTC U11 using Tapatalk
 

understand that but if this thing is airborne, you could chop your hands off and it will not do a lot. 

[SCgarman]

10 hours ago, FireMedic said:

I'm in the healthcare industry and see a lot of patients. I've only put 1 mask on a patient this flu season. I'm doing just fine. Wash your hands, use sanitizer, use common sense.

Easy to say when WE are in the USA with only 50 or so cases and no deaths. 

[Cubadust]

On 2/25/2020 at 3:54 AM, JamesKPolkEsq said:

WHO publishes situation reports daily for COVID-19. 

https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/situation-reports

For various reasons, I don't believe the dataset from China. 

Current numbers outside of China - 2069 infections, 23 deaths. 

Corylax is right, you should be more worried about the flu. 

Or, take the data from the cruiseship (aka world's largest clinical study without consent). 692 confirmed cases, 3 deaths (all 80+).

The thing is though, this discussion the last couple of pages has turned in to people picking sides, seasonal flu vs corona when it's flu and corona on top of it. This is not a game of sports. Plus, like in your own example, the lack of vaccine or any way to treat this at all, is making countries close their borders, put cruiseships, small communities and now this morning a hotell in Spain with 1000 people in it in quarantien and there's still people that think this is some media driven craze to sell ads? To me, a virus that existed for only two months and is causing this much havoc is to be taken seriously and maybe, just maybe could be worthy of some media coverage.

[Cigar Surgeon]

12 hours ago, Riverstyx said:

Just thinking...20% of Americans get the flu each year. 77k of ALL of China has the Coronavirus, or 0.7% of Wuhan’s 11 million people. A tightly packed city. Something about the statistics don’t make sense. My GUESS is far more people are infected but the mortality rate is far below advertised. 

Yes. China has been lying the entire time about their numbers. Several analytics groups have been tracking their numbers since they first started announcing them and the patterns follow a predictable quadratic model. That isn't how infections spread, so it's clear the data they're providing is manufactured.