BigWahoo Loc: Kentucky

"The fatality rate of the new coronavirus is far higher than that of the seasonal flu, according to a new analysis from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

The study found a fatality rate of 2.3 percent in China as of last week, though later figures suggest the rate has increased.

In the U.S., flu fatality rates hover around 0.1 percent. Here are the latest updates and maps of where the virus has spread.

Yesterday: Americans flown home from a contaminated cruise ship in Japan said they were unaware until late that some evacuees were infected. “I didn’t know until we were in the air,” said Carol Montgomery. “I saw an area of plastic sheeting and tape.”

Cambodia’s decision to let hundreds of passengers leave another cruise ship on which a person was infected could dramatically complicate the effort to contain the virus.

Another angle: HSBC, one of Hong Kong’s most important banks, said today that it would cut 35,000 jobs over the next three years, in part because of disruptions caused by the outbreak. On Monday, Apple cut its quarterly sales expectations and warned that the virus threatened global supply chains."

tradio Loc: Oxford, Ohio

That information is based on the Chinese Center for Disease Control. Wonder how accurate that information is? It could be a lot worse than reported.

LWW Loc: Banana Republic of America

I had a talk with my family doctor about this yesterday.

The scuttlebutt is that this is almost certainly a weaponized virus, and the fear is a war ... shooting or economic ... because of it.

soba1 Loc: Somewhere In So Ca

Transfer Factor Plus
Do some research on it; do what ever it takes to build up your immune system keep hand sanitizer and get in the habit of sterilizing. After you use the ATM EBT at the stores etc.
What can you do other than that. People who live imho people who live in less populated areas stand a better chance.

thom w Loc: San Jose, CA

By EMILY BAUMGAERTNERSTAFF WRITER
FEB. 12, 2020 11:49 AM
Of all the questions scientists hope to answer about the new coronavirus sweeping across the globe, the most pressing is this: How deadly is it?

The only way to know is to figure out how many people have been infected — and that’s the real challenge.

More than 60,000 infections have been confirmed, but experts are certain there are at least tens of thousands more. Some cases haven’t been counted because patients didn’t have biological samples sent to a lab. Some never saw a doctor, and others had such mild symptoms that they didn’t even know they were sick.

Without a true picture of the total number of cases, it’s impossible to calculate a fatality rate. That’s why scores of epidemiologists and mathematicians are working to solve one of the most complex modeling problems of their time.


Situation reports from the World Health Organization provide an upper boundary of the mortality rate. As of Wednesday, there were more than 60,150 laboratory-confirmed infections around the world, resulting in at least 1,365 deaths. A bit of simple arithmetic indicates that slightly more than 2% of those infections were fatal.

But because the current infection count is too low, that death rate — known formally as a “case fatality rate” or “case fatality ratio” — is too high.

“That’s one thing we can pretty much say with certainty,” said Josh Michaud, who was an infectious disease epidemiologist with the Defense Department during the H1N1 influenza pandemic in 2009.

Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the 2% fatality rate “has been relatively stable” so far in the outbreak. “But whether that actually is a real case fatality ratio or not, I just don’t think that we have the information right now to say.”

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Funeral workers disinfect themselves
Funeral workers disinfect themselves after handling a coronavirus victim in Wuhan, China.(Chinatopix via Associated Press)
When an outbreak involves a never-before-seen virus, there are no shortcuts epidemiologists can take to determine how many people have gotten sick and how many have died. They’ll need to dig into a variety of sources to see how many coronavirus deaths were mistakenly blamed on other causes, and vice versa. They’ll also need to figure out how many infected people never interacted with the medical system.

Researchers at Imperial College London have modeled the infection’s spread based on the number of confirmed cases and the flow of travelers in and out of Wuhan, China, before quarantines took effect. The team assumed that the virus had a five- to six-day incubation period before symptoms appeared and that infected travelers were detected when they reached their destinations.

The result was a case count between 1,000 and 9,700 as of Jan. 18, a date when the official tally of infections was below 300. Uncertainties in the model resulted in a wide error range, but the true number of infected people was probably around 4,000, the team reported.

Doctor speaks with patient in online consultation
A doctor speaks with a patient during an online consultation session at a hospital in China’s northeastern Liaoning province.(AFP/Getty Images)
The WHO is creating its own research consortium to investigate the original source of the new strain of coronavirus and how readily it spreads. By honing in on those parameters, the WHO can make its models more accurate.

“The more time you have, the more evidence you have to work with, the better your estimate will be,” said Dr. Carlos del Rio, a global health epidemiologist at Emory University.

A good outbreak model is a lot like an iceberg, said Marc Lipsitch, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The iceberg’s tip — the part you see — is the patients who die. This is the easiest number to assess for the simple reason that deaths are hard to miss.

All the other infected people are the part of the iceberg that’s underwater. Epidemiologists divide them into tiers.

Just below the surface are the patients who get sick enough to be hospitalized. Below them are patients who seek basic medical attention. The next tier is made up of people who nurse their illnesses at home, and the last is the people who have no symptoms.

In 2009, when Lipsitch was helping the CDC determine the severity of the H1N1 flu, he and his fellow researchers recognized that no single data source could capture all five tiers. So they gathered surveillance data from various parts of the U.S. health system and pieced them together to generate their iceberg model.

Sign in Chicago hospital during 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak
A hospital employee in Chicago wears a mask during the 2009 H1N1 swine flu outbreak. (Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune)
One key contributor was the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Officials there didn’t try to count every single person who became infected. Instead, they focused on carefully documenting every patient who was hospitalized. Thanks to that precision, researchers could determine the relationship between hospitalizations and deaths.

Meanwhile, in the much smaller city of Milwaukee, there weren’t enough deaths to make calculations that were statistically significant. Instead, officials decided to count every single H1N1 patient who sought some kind of medical attention. Their records allowed researchers to gauge the relationship between visiting a primary care doctor and being admitted to a hospital.

At the CDC, workers conducted telephone surveys to ask people whether they had come down with flu-like symptoms around the time the outbreak began in April and May and, if so, whether they’d seen a doctor. (Luck was on their side, Lipsitch said, because anyone with a flu-like illness in the spring almost certainly had the new H1N1 strain because the seasonal flu had subsided. That’s not the case this time because the coronavirus took off in the midst of flu season.)

Within eight months, scientists had a reliable model of the H1N1 virus that included everyone except those who were infected without realizing it. To count them, researchers would need to collect blood samples from randomly selected members of the public and test them for H1N1 antibodies, a sign that the person had been exposed and their immune system had responded. But such tests were too time-consuming and expensive to justify.

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In any outbreak, disease severity data tend to skew high at first, for the simple reason that the sickest patients are most noticeable.

“The patients who are worse off are more likely to seek medical care and be diagnosed,” Messonnier said.

In the early days of the H1N1 influenza pandemic, which was traced to pigs in Mexico, it looked like 10% of people infected there were dying of the flu. Then health workers identified a slew of infections so mild that people didn’t even see a doctor. Once those cases were taken into account, the death rate plunged below 0.1%, Lipsitch said.

“In the end, that flu was no more deadly than regular seasonal flu,” Michaud said.

There’s another reason experts think the coronavirus case count is off: missing data.

Whether they acknowledge it or not, the outbreak has Chinese health officials strapped for time and resources. Workers may not have the bandwidth to keep records of patients with mild infections, even though they belong in the total case count, Michaud said. Nor are there enough test kits available to diagnose every patient they suspect is infected. Even the death count — the most reliable figure — could be too low.

Testing for coronavirus
Samples from patients are ready to be tested for the new strain of coronavirus at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.(AFP/Getty Images)
Experts also suspect Chinese officials are withholding data that could be embarrassing to them, such as the number of medical workers who have died so far.

“We need to bring this virus out into the light so we can attack it properly,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general.

Another complicating factor is that death rates for an infection can vary across the globe. Disparities in the quality of medical care are exacerbated in an outbreak, when people and resources are stretched to their limits.

“Shortages will certainly cause more deaths in Wuhan,” Del Rio said. Meanwhile, if a few dozen patients “popped up in Atlanta, they’d be treated in luxury.”

A map showing the spread of coronavirus around the world
The patterns of infection outside China will be more useful for health officials around the world than any data from Beijing. The virus’ behavior in the other 27 countries and territories that have it will provide a better picture of its typical severity — and what would happen if it began spreading in the United States.

Scientists aren’t ruling out the possibility that the virus will evolve in a way that makes it more lethal, or that helps it spread from person to person (or both). But they point out that it wouldn’t be in a virus’ best interests to kill its host before it can spread to a new one.

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At this point, the new coronavirus seems to have more in common with the regular flu than with exotic diseases like Ebola or Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), both of which had fatality rates around 40%. Among a group of 17,000 people with confirmed coronavirus infections, 3% were classified as critical, 15% had severe infections and 82% were mild, said Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s acting head of emerging diseases. Of the 2% who died, many were elderly with underlying health issues that made them more vulnerable.

“We can say pretty confidently that this isn’t killing people left and right,” Del Rio said.

A 2% fatality rate may sound low, but it’s high enough to cause real damage in a worst-case scenario where the virus isn’t stopped.

“If you can’t contain the spread, all bets are off,” Del Rio said. “Two percent of China’s population — 28 million people — is still pretty darn high. And 2% of the world? That would be a disaster.”

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Emily Baumgaertner

Emily Baumgaertner is a medical reporter for the Los Angeles Times focused on investigations and features. She joined the newsroom in 2019 from the New York Times and has a graduate degree in public health.

https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-02-11/how-deadly-is-coronavirus-fatality-rate

soba1 Loc: Somewhere In So Ca

http://rense.com/general96/how-viruses-can-easily-infect-people-through-their-eyes.php

"These tiny droplets float through the air and you can get a cold, the flu or another illness when you come into contact with them. Sneeze and cough germs spread far and fast," explained Dr. Stephanie Kelleher, a Geisinger family physician.

A physician in Wuhan China became infected with Coronavirus recently and says he is certain he became infected through his eyes while working with infected patients.

Touch a virus and rub your eyes...and you immediately re-activate it in the moisture.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-7926243/Killer-coronavirus-SPREAD-eyes.html

Or, walk through an area where someone has sneezed or coughed.

Remember, a simple uncovered sneeze can throw out about 50,000 aerosolized microdroplets, many containing viruses and bacteria, at 100 mph traveling a distance of from 19-26 feet. leaving these microdroplets suspended in the air all around them. They can be immediately taken into the moist areas of the outer eye directly from the air...or put there by touching your eyes with contaminated hands.

This is really old news...the eyes have always been a gateway to infection.

Chinese expert who came down with Wuhan coronavirus after saying it was controllable thinks he was infected through his eyes

Killer coronavirus could be SPREAD through the eyes

Furthermore, the Ebola virus has been confirmed as LIVING in human eyes...

American doctor cured of Ebola finds the virus in eye - CNN

Any wet or moist non-hostile surface or medium can be a home to Coronaviruses or any virus or bacteria.
Let's say the moisture or non-hostile wet environment outside the human body becomes dried out.
What happens for the virus or bacteria? Answer - they can remain on any surface in a dry state Waiting to be picked up by someone who then touches their mouth, nose or eyes putting the virus back into a warm, moist environment where it will begin to replicate and infect the new host almost immediately.

How long can viruses and bacteria live in a dry state outside the human body depends entirely on the type of virus or bacteria and other environmental factors. In the case of the TB bacteria, that time period can be DECADES.

We don't know what the longevity of the coronavirus is outside the human host body as of yet but a conservative projection would be at least 5 to 7 days. HIV has been shown to live in a dry state outside the human body for far longer than that.

To keep yourself as safe as possible when out in an area where infections are known, one must PROPERLY wear an N 95 rated face mask WITH A MOISTURE BARRIER...and your should seriously consider having eye protection, too."

soba1 Loc: Somewhere In So Ca

Corona Virus map updated continually
https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

EyeSawYou

Liberal ignorance is more deadly than the flu and Coronavirus combined, heck, all viruses and diseases combined. lol

letmedance Loc: Walnut, Ca.

I a currently in Taiwan and this small country has the same number of cases as the US. We are closer to China and the Taiwanese are being very cautious, Masks are sold out as everyone is wearing them, Businesses, Restaurants, and Hotels scan your body temp and require alcohol hand sanitizer before entry. The main reason for the rapid spread in China in my opinion is the population density, If I go out for any errand in Asia I will encounter ten times the number of people I would encounter in almost any part of America.

thom w Loc: San Jose, CA

Disease spreads faster in denser populations? When did you discover this? What's next? Are you going to claim that the earth is round?

sb Loc: Florida's East Coast

Don't know where you get your "scuttlebutt", but that sounds like it came right out of Rush Limbaugh's butt. Coronavirus of various strains is common in many wild animals. It generally does not transfer to humans, but Wuhan has an active market in wild animal meat. It is felt that this virus originated from pangolins sold at that marketplace. When they were butchered, skinned, and handled the virus transferred to humans, who then passed it along. This is probably how HIV and Ebola started in humans. If this was germ warfare by the Chinese, they certainly shot themselves - their economy is rapidly going in the toilet because of this virus.

thom w Loc: San Jose, CA

I'm shocked. I was sure you knew better than to try to use logic on this forum.

EyeSawYou

Correction, the Chinese economy is going in the toilet as the result of Trump's tariffs.

Elaine2025 Loc: Seattle, Wa

Amazing that you believe the lying chineese whom when the truth is told, you will find out that thousands more died than they reported. And it did not start in a meat market.

cwp3420

Thinking of Rush Limbaugh’s butt turns you on, doesn’t it, SB?