Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

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

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

White supremacy is terrorism.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

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

Peak wingnut was a lie.

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

This really is a full service blog.

I was promised a recession.

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

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

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

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 Coronavirus / Novel Coronavirus Update – Thursday / Friday

Novel Coronavirus Update – Thursday / Friday

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“Silver lining” (if true) — pangolins are teetering on the edge of extinction due to ‘wild food market’ hunting; taking them off the menu would be really helpful.

And, just a reminder, people in glass houses…

Reader Interactions

19Comments

  1. 1.

    bjacques

    The new season has delivered plenty of surprise twists; a Chinese Doctor Who is really stretching it.

     

     

    I’ll get my coat

  2. 2.

    Rusty

    A more current fatality tally is 636.  That is a big jump.  The cured number is nice but that will matter more when the death toll stops accelerating.

  3. 3.

    Rusty

    Oops, the first article had the more updated number, I ended up focussing on the larger picture.  All this hot takes a week ago about how SARS killed a lot more people are looking really stale right now.

  6. 6.

    WereBear

    Whatever the flu was last year, it nearly killed Mr WereBear. He’s STILL recovering from it.

    Climate change and clueless authoritarians who think they can order anything around: very bad combo platter. Do not want.

  7. 7.

    Cermet

    So a child dies and likely anti-vaxxiers helped to kill this child. These are evil monsters; also, this mother was determined to use ignorance to treat her son. Unfortunately, she can still breed – too bad she’s the one who deserves the Darwin award, not her poor child. I also bet, the child never had the flu vaccine. Just disgusting how people in this modern age still cling to any mythology rather than science.

  8. 8.

    Princess

    This cruise ship…basically there are 3000 people who are spending their days doing nothing but breathing in the recirculated air of coronavirus victims. Every time a new case is found, the quarantine starts all over again. They’re all going to get it, one by one. If I had a family member on that ship, I would be raising hell (no doubt without result).

  11. 11.

    Starfish

    @Cermet: Her behavior is commonly propped up by libertarians in Colorado. The governor refused to sign a bill to make personal philosophy exemptions ever so slightly more difficult last year.

  13. 13.

    Fair Economist

    The healthcare approach to this virus is wrong. Quarantines and even contact tracing won’t stop this (details to follow). 2019-nCoV is going to be a pandemic, and to limit its spread we will have to test every possible carrier – meaning everybody with a cough or fever on the entire planet. This will be an enormous undertaking and we must gear up for it as soon as possible.

    Why won’t current approaches work? Suppose a newly infected individual shows up in a naive group or area. There is about an 80% chance according to WHO they’ll never have serious symptoms. Suppose they infect 3 other people. About half the time *none* of them will ever have serious symptoms either. So the first person that shows up at a doctor’s office meriting testing by current protocol doesn’t show up until the 3rd generation of infections, about a MONTH (1 week 1st + 1 week 2nd + 2 weeks incubation) after the first infection.

    Further, when the first evidence of spread shows up the index case is now SEVEN degrees of separation from a few dozen asymptomatic carriers wandering about (3 back to the first infection, and four forward to the most recent infections.) Remember the story is it’s only six between any random two people in the country! This can *never* be stopped with any kind of quarantine or contact tracing.

    The only stop is to assume *anybody* with mild symptoms could be a carrier, test them rapidly, and if positive *isolate* them at home because there will not be facilities to handle the enormous numbers. That means we will have to test on a regular basis almost *everybody* on the planet with a cough or with fever. That is an enormous number of tests and it’s going to take a war footing approach to make enough. If we can test new carriers fast enough we can get R0 below 1 and control the disease long enough to produce a vaccine. Otherwise, we are all Wuhan, and I don’t mean that in a metaphorical supportive sense.

    Yes, producing billions of 2019-nCoV tests is going to be very expensive BUT it’s still a lot less expensive than tens of millions dead and a worldwide economic shutdown for the better part of a year, which is what we’re going to get otherwise.

  14. 14.

    PenAndKey

    @Princess: Pretty much. If this were Hollywood that cruise ship would be replaced with a plucky band of heroes stuck in small town America with a military blockade and a countdown before an aerial firebombing. There’s no real good answer to the ethics involved, but they’ve essentially condemned the entire ship complement to this disease. If it goes on too long, and based on the apparent transmission speed it very well could, I expect to hear at least one story of someone trying to escape.

    @Fair Economist:

    From everything I’ve seen this is likely to be the fifth endemic coronavirus and most likely we’ll be stuck with it long term. That’s cold and flu level severity, not tens of millions dead annually pandemic levels of danger. At a 2% death rate among hospitalized patients it’s bad, but given that when it’s not a severe case the symptoms basically boil down to “what you get when you get the common cold” I would be absolutely shocked if that was even close to the actual percentage. It’s likely far, far lower and more in line with the other already endemic coronavirus strains.

  16. 16.

    Fair Economist

    @PenAndKey: The death rate is 11-15% among hospitalized patients. The vast majority of the current hospitalized patients haven’t been there long enough to die, which is 2-3 weeks on average. Mortality on out-of-China patients has been better because many are mildly symptomatic patients who got picked up on virus checks.

    Long-term it will probably be comparable to seasonal flu, but there will be a lot of deaths between here and there if we don’t control it.

  17. 17.

    brettvk

    What both the antivaxxers who helped kill a child and the Asian wild food consumers have in common is a stubborn determination to embrace their ignorance and reject science. If Chinese citizens are eating wildlife for health/medicinal reasons they’re no better than the Goopsters; but I don’t know if there’s a skeptical science-based element in China pushing back against nonsense. I’m all for people living with cultural traditions if they’re harmless but I think rhinoceroses are more important than a rich guy’s worries about his penis.

  19. 19.

    Tehanu

    @Cermet:  She ought to be charged with manslaughter at the very least, and the people who told her that crap should be shot. Potatoes in his socks? What is this, the fkg Dark Ages?

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