I wish the admins would put a ban on these stories over here to be honest. I haven't seen anything interesting come out of these threads, just the same surface level fear-mongering you can find on reddit and elsewhere. I don't really see how any of this "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity". "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic", well, about that...
I don't know if the hysteria is warranted or not, but at this point I'm convinced that it doesn't make for good HN discussions. People who want to discuss every development of this epidemic can find tons of places to do that already, including a plethora of subreddits focusing on various aspects of it.
I think the attention is coming from the initial numbers reported by China about a month ago, went from 2k to 80k in about 3 weeks. Something about the numbers seem odd, along with large city quarantines. If you look at the confirmed cases, neighboring countries like Vietnam have 16 confirmed, but the US already has 69. Thailand and Taiwan have 30 confirmed cases each, but Iran already has 245.
don't know why you got downvoted. I have yet to see the opinion of a doctor explaining why this virus requires specific measures compared to other types of flu-like viruses ( hint: friend working in a hospital recently told me doctors there are amazed by the frenzy on this topic, that looks to them exactly the same as other kinds of flu).
It seems politics are forced to take the same kind of exceptional measures as in other countries for fear of being accused of not being responsible.
I won't mention the other topic, but it's the second time i've found HN lacking scientific rigor the same way the general public does. I guess it's the downside of being more popular..
Let's just say that doctors and nurses treating flu patients during the flu epidemic are generally not dying from flu, and quite a few doctors and nurses treating Covid-19 patients have died from Covid-19.
The King County press conference today included a Q&A where this very question was asked ("why this virus requires specific measures compared to other types of flu-like viruses"). According to Dr. Francis Riedo, Medical Director of Infection Control and Prevention at EvergreenHealth, to paraphrase, "The difference between this Novel Coronavirus and Influenza is (1) there is no innate immunity, it is a completely vulnerable population, (2) there is no vaccine to prevent it, and (3) there is no currently effective anti-viral therapy. It is a perfect storm for a novel virus to come out without a vaccine, population base protection, or an effective therapeutic agent."
I'm not even sure what this "no innate immunity" sentence means. Old and fragile people are getting vaccined for flu every year, because they aren't immuned to the new strain of the year.
Now it is true that old and fragile people should be worried about coronavirus, but judging from death rates, it doesn't seem more deadly than the flu. So why put fear in the whole population ?
also, most people only experience nothing more than a cold symptoms. Which means most people actually have an immune system able to fight this virus quite efficiently.
Where are you getting your information? According to the Chinese CDC it is 20 times more deadly than the flu. And why does "most people only experience nothing more than a cold symptoms" imply that they "have an immune system able to fight this virus quite efficiently"? Younger and non-vulnerable people have gotten extremely sick (and died), one theory being that the more of the actual virus you are exposed to the more severe your symptoms.
influenza has 650k death over 3-5 million cases per year, according to wikipedia, which is around 16% casuality.
according to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
coronavirus has 3k deaths over 86k, which is 3%. Or if you take the other metrics, which is 40k recovered, that's 3/43 around 7% death. still way lower than the flu.
as for my remark about immune system, my point is that the vast majority of people experience very mild symptoms. Which means that their body was perfectly able to fight back and produce the antibody, just like against the other flus.
i suppose the people that got diagnosed for the coronavirus at the moment are people that felt bad enough to go to the doctor or hospital. We probably don't know about most of the cases..
China has been shut down for weeks, Japan and South Korea are shutting down, and you're here saying talking about it is a political thing. Truly an idiocracy
