Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

This blog will pay for itself.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

đŸŽ¶ Those boots were made for mockin’ đŸŽ”

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

We’ll be taking my thoughts and prayers to the ballot box.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 Coronavirus / Wuhan Coronavirus Update, Wednesday/Thursday

Wuhan Coronavirus Update, Wednesday/Thursday

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20Comments

  2. 2.

    Cermet

    While all new flu outbreaks are a concern, and this one still isn’t well understood, I don’t see why the Chinese are treating this like a new version of a SAR’s outbreak (accutally, they are reacting far more aggressivly on their part. I guess this is good even if it isn’t a major illness.) I can only assume there is something else that they haven’t addmitted – like this flu more readily infects the lower lungs or that they have been not been providing the true number of cases such that they are like an order of magitude worse (the former worries me far more than the later.) But time will tell, that is for sure.

  3. 3.

    Joey Maloney

    @Cermet:  Or the Chinese authorities are just still smarting over the opprobrium they suffered for underreacting early in the SARS episode and are erring on the side of extreme caution.

  4. 4.

    Anne Laurie

    @Joey Maloney: Yup!

    Also, right now Premier Xi is busy trying to, the euphemism goes, consolidate his authority on a long-term basis; not much value in becoming dictator-for-life of a country that’s teetering on the edge of global opprobrium for letting a new plague loose…

  5. 5.

    Rusty

    @Cermet:  It’s doubling every 7.4 days and killing 2.2% of its victims. Understanding that alone is sufficient to take this extremely seriously. This can easily kill more people than SARS.

  6. 6.

    oldster

    The world sure would have a lot fewer diseases if people adopted vegetarian diets. So many of these viruses get their start in human populations by jumping from animals that people eat or raise for eating.

    Humans and carrots just don’t share enough DNA to make us susceptible to their diseases.

  7. 7.

    frosty

    Popehat’s tweet was my reaction to 9/11 when I had to leave work to pick up my kids because the schools were closing. Really? Nobody’s going to attack Rodgers Forge Elementary. We aren’t that important.

  8. 8.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Breaking News: We’re all gonna die anyway.

    Never touch your face with unclean hands, no beso-beso.

    I have read that on avg, we touch our faces 2,000 times a day. That’s a whole lot of hand washing. I wonder when we’re supposed to eat?

  9. 9.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @frosty: I had to get gas after work just so I could get home. I forget how many stations I went to before I finally found one that still had some, and then all they had left was the high dollar premium.

    “Jesus Mary and Joseph, they didn’t hit the refineries.”

  12. 12.

    satby

    @JPL: like most respiratory viruses, it’s going to present as a cold unless it’s a person with compromised immunity or other respiratory complications like COPD. They also said the incubation may be as long as two weeks, so I don’t think anyone recently arrived from China ( edit: since the outbreak) has been here that long.

  13. 13.

    Barbara

    A 2% death rate for a highly transmissible virus is actually pretty high, but I doubt they have been able to count every case.

  14. 14.

    spc123

    @Cermet: Highly contagious. It looks like a fairly aggressive respiratory flu with a bit higher fatality rate than your average strong flu strain but not nearly as high as SARs. However, it could end up more deadly in aggregate numbers due to how it spreads. By tomorrow, there will be more confirmed cases than the total 2003-03 SARs outbreak.

  15. 15.

    chopper

    @Barbara:

    yeah, stats like the reproduction number and death rate are gonna take a while to get even close to accurate. that being said, anything close to 2% is bad news for a respiratory virus.

  16. 16.

    chopper

    @spc123:

    the scary thing is the fact that, apparently, you can be contagious for a number of days before being symptomatic. this is one of the things that makes measles as contagious as it is.

  18. 18.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @frosty: Especially since Rodgers Forge is a reasonably nice but mostly nondescript suburb just north of the Baltimore City line. Who’d nuke Bawlmer?

    (I type that & think, More bad guys than you’d imagine – but only through the usual bad-guy incompetence. The Port of Bawlmer is the likely entry point for a Fat Boy bound for DC, in a HANG TEN ;^D container or disguised as a the engine in an imported Sonata, but I doubt the oafs could get it onto the flatbed or car carrier without accidentally touching it off. At a loss of the sports stadiums [if it entered in the southwest] or what was once the world’s largest Redneck Refugee Resettlement Region [if it came ashore in Dundalk]. /tmi)

  19. 19.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @chopper: …anything close to 2% is bad news for a respiratory virus.

    I tried to google up some comparable stats with no luck, but working backwards from rawer data, it looks like the commoner flus show fatality rates of 0.1-0.2%, so 10-20x as deadly. As has been noted, a high R-nought is the kicker.

    (Just FTR when I was in my twenties, one of the elderly couple who were my parents’ tenants in the 2-apartment row house they owned & occupied died of complications from the flu – it turned into pneumonia & overtaxed her heart to failure. In my forties a coworker, not yet 30, succumbed to a similar progression after burning the candle for too long at too many ends. Devastating loss.)

  20. 20.

    laura

    Well thank goodness that we have robust mediacl science organizations like the CDC, and a population that respects expert opinions, and a federal government that ensures proper resources and staffing levels \\.

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