Holy MacKarel, you are a genius!! Not only can you tell that .001 goes 20 times into .02, but you can also tell that .001 <> .02.

I admire you for your superior math skills. Do you have a Ph.D. in math, perchance, from some better university? — god must be atheist

Very funny. So you disagree that Corona has a higher mortality rate than the seasonal flue?

What government aims for massively growing population I'd ask? The last example was Ceausescu's Romania, and not only did that policy fail, but that dictatorship has long past gone. — ssu

EU governments are, as are the US democrats. By promoting unlimited 3rd world immigration, as also promoted by the UN. (See also UN "Compact for Migration" as signed our clueless globalist l eaders.
Just to point out the obvious.

I sympathise with your sentiment, but it is not that simple. Say some regions do that and their enemies don't then their enemies will overpower them in the future. Also there is the demographic problem of an aging population not being supported by younger people. — Punshhh

I am in line generally with Kant's idea that people should not be used as a means if you can help it. Well, having children in order for them to take care of the elderly or having children to outpopulate your enemy is using children for a means. What is the cost of using people like this? The suffering person that will be born. Think of the suffering not how they can be used, or how much YOU think THEY should enjoy this or that part of life.

The point is that if there is something like Ebola in the world and physical diseases of all sorts known and as of yet unknown, who are we to throw more humans into that and cause more suffering?

Swine flu killed 150,000 - 575,000 people with 700 - 1,400 million infected. It had a case fatality rate of 0.01 - 0.08%. — Michael

Interesting differences in stat numbers. Of course these flues then stay around for years to come.

Very funny. So you disagree that Corona has a higher mortality rate than the seasonal flue? — Nobeernolife

You're plain stupid. I did not say that. I agreed with you, and admired you for your superior math skills. You could't comprehend that, and therefore the proper conclusion to draw is that you're plain stupid.

Now, you may ask me how come your math skills are superior, and you're still stupid. C'mon, man, ask me already.

Yeah, you obviously didn't read the declaration. It doesn't promote immigration. It promotes safe immigration while being "determined to address the root causes of large movements of refugees and migrants". It isn't legally binding and it doesn't detract from a State's sovereignty to decide what its immigration laws should be like in any way.

For those who want to read the actual thing instead of the xenophobic bullshit being peddled: New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants

EU governments are, as are the US democrats. By promoting unlimited 3rd world immigration, as also promoted by the UN. — Nobeernolife

Who's actually promoting unlimited 3rd world immigration now? Where are your "globalist leaders" preaching that anymore, I just ask. Things can change in 5-6 years, you know.

Doesn't look so at the Greek Turkish border now.

It's very unlikely that the case fatality rate is 2%. Most experts are guessing between 0.3 and 1% now, though there is large insecurity for the lower bound since it appears cases can go completely unnoticed.

What are you basing the .3 to 1% on? I haven't seen CFR estimates that low and it seems more like the numbers I saw for the mortality rate (which includes the types of cases that aren't reported and therefore not considered a "case" with respect to the CFR).

It's very unlikely that the case fatality rate is 2%. — Echarmion

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

89,856 cases, 3,069 deaths.

3.415%

OK, it's even more than 2%.

Predicting the fatality rate is more complicated than looking at raw data from the past and extrapolating it forward.

Those are the raw numbers. But the actual infections are probably several times higher. Some say three times, some say 10 to 20 times. That's what I am reading in various newspapers anyways.

Predicting the fatality rate is more complicated than looking at raw data from the past and extrapolating it forward. — frank

Sure, we could find a cure in which case the case fatality rate will drop significantly. But all we have to go on right now is the case fatality rate which is defined as the ratio of (known) deaths to (known) infections.

They look at demographics and how this virus compares to its kin.

Could you perhaps be confusing the case fatality rate with the mortality rate?

Right, I was referring to the mortality rate.

huh, rereading my own posts I did the same: using cfr and mortality rate interchangeably that is.

I both agree and don't. There will be more mullah and goods to go around per capita; a 2% increase in a flash. The upfall is also that retired, i.e. conventionally and economically non-contributing members go out; that way the production is at a steady rate, and relative wealth will grow.

It is true that fear may induce public panic. Stores will be ransacked. No food available. Farmers refuse to truck their stuff to town. Massive starvation, manier people die from malnutrition, than from New Coronavirus. STealing, and eating other people's loved pets becomes a fashion, and cannibalism is not out either, if things get really bad.

The funeral home industry will strive. So will the doomsday prophet industry. Doomsday prophets and street preachers have been industriously preaching the end of the world, I think since the world began. — god must be atheist

Seems reasonable :up:

I'm getting hungry just re-reading what I've so far written. Cheers, off to the kitchen. — god must be atheist

Hopefully it was the talk of stores without food that inspired your hunger and not the talk of cannibalism :yikes:

Hehe. I view cannibalism as a cross between cannabis and banalism.

But I don't condone it. Apparently the mad cow disease is caused by any species eating its own. This is actually a fact, I ain't joking. Or rather, not a fact, but how I remember what may have been a fact.

A good day to reminisce:

In my view Trump has now secured the essential state power mechanisms (why he's now so happy on TV) thanks to unquestioning loyalty of the Republican base that have kept all the Republican senators and congress members in line, and avoided a revolution of the moderate Republicans teaming with the Democrats to impeach him.

So great for Trump. And a great day for Trump supporters for sure.

However, supporting an incompetent statesman who falls in love with dictators is not necessarily a good future for any American, including Republicans. When a real crisis comes, history has shown that governments filled with loyal sycophants simply lose their grip on the situation. — boethius - April 2018 - Re: Kavanaugh and Ford

The cuts started in 2018, as the White House focused on eliminating funding to Obama-era disease security programs. In March of that year, Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer, whose job it was to lead the U.S. response in the event of a pandemic, abruptly left the administration and his global health security team was disbanded.

That same year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was forced to slash its efforts to prevent global disease outbreak by 80% as its funding for the program began to run out. The agency, at the time, opted to focus on 10 priority countries and scale back in others, including China.

Also cut was the Complex Crises Fund, a $30 million emergency response pool that was at the secretary of state’s disposal to deploy disease experts and others in the event of a crisis. — Fortune

The real question is how probable the possibility of a pandemic is. — ssu

A pandemic is probable if containment fails, which is itself likely due to at least the two facts that asymptomatic infected people are apparently infectious, and that countries are unlikely to close their borders and tell everyone to stay at home, because to do so would have devastating effects on the world's economies.

:eyes: :up:

Interesting stats from here: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

There are 94,170 cases and 3,219 deaths, putting the case fatality rate at 3.418%. However, 39,764 still have the disease, with 6,773 in serious or critical condition. If we just look at the 54,406 closed cases, there are 51,187 recoveries to the 3,219 deaths. Almost 6% of closed cases closed in death.

A pandemic is probable if containment fails, which is itself likely due to at least the two facts that asymptomatic infected people are apparently infectious, and that countries are unlikely to close their borders and tell everyone to stay at home, because to do so would have devastating effects on the world's economies. — Janus

Essentially all the experts agree containment has failed and it's already a pandemic. Already a week or two ago some top experts predicting 70% of the world population catching the virus within 1 year.

That cases keep rising in South Korea, a relatively easy country to control borders and using as extreme quarantine and testing measures as they can, means there's basically no way to contain the virus. Hence, very predicable that containment has failed in Italy and is failing everywhere else.

There are 94,170 cases and 3,219 deaths, putting the case fatality rate at 3.418%. However, 39,764 still have the disease, with 6,773 in serious or critical condition. If we just look at the 54,406 closed cases, there are 51,187 recoveries to the 3,219 deaths. Almost 6% of closed cases closed in death. — Michael

It's not valid to conclude 6% because death closes a case much earlier than recovery, so statistically biases such a calculation towards death. Of course, you're correct that simply dividing the total cases by deaths is also not valid.

Furthermore, there can be lot's of mild cases that have gone undetected.

However, total cases and deaths is only part of the story even if we have accurate data (and trusting the Chinese and Iranian data, that make up most of the sample size to date, is simply unwise; the WHO takes it on face value for political reasons and not scientific reasons).

In the case of China, it can still be seen from space that their economy is not anywhere close "back to normal" as one would expect if they're only have on the order of a hundred new cases per day in a country of a billion people. Likewise, an even further crackdown on "spreading rumors" would not be needed; everyone would be on social media happy they aren't sick, containment in Wuhan worked and praising the party for saving the day.

Hence, the speculation is there is a full blown epidemic in all of China at this point.

Also remember China locked millions of people in their houses, there could be lot's and lot's of dead people just lying in their apartment (if the problems below occurred it's the easiest option ... then just fish them out slowly and claim they never existed).

The other hugely important statistic is the percent of people needing intensive care, in particular oxygen and respirators. There's only a limited amount of this equipment and, in particular respirators, require very intensive care, and even more intensive care when put in "best chance of survival mode" (that may require paralyzing the patient to avoid their breathing fighting the respirator).

Likewise, maintaining a quarantine effectively requires specialized equipment.

So, running out of treatment equipment means mortality rises and running out of quarantine equipment means lot's of health professionals get sick too (added to the likelihood of just getting it at home or out and about).

The fatality rate is an order or magnitude higher than the flue, the survival rate needing intensive care maybe 2 orders of magnitude higher than the flue, and the virulence maybe several factors higher than the flue (as high as 7, compared to 1.6 for the flue) and of course there's not a large portion of the global population that simply doesn't get the flue any given season (due to still having immunity from last seasons).

The virus may survive on surfaces up to 9 days (compared to 2 hours for the flue ... which means you can get this disease in the mail ... which in turn means if you test a Amazon warehouse you may find coronavirus, so you don't as to not make such a massive economic disruption so instead you just keep online the most efficient way to spread the virus exponentially through, perhaps low probability but super high impact, totally random infections that make entirely unexpected and unexplained clusters), incubation maybe as high as 3 weeks, it seems now highly likely asymptomatic carriers can spread the disease, and there's some evidence people can simply catch the disease again even once they have recovered.

All of the above is also complicated by the fact people will continue to need care for other things. This creates 2 issues. First, people come into the hospital for other reasons but happen to have coronavirus, transmit it to health workers who then transmit it to other patients and visitors in hospital for other reasons. When a place get's contaminated, they aren't disinfecting the entire place for no reason; it's just that bad in terms of persistence in the environment which quickly becomes an impossible task at a large scale. Second problem is that as health services are strained, people start dying from other things due to lack of care, so those people must be added as casualties of the pandemic. There is lot's of pneumonia anyways.

All this combines to create a complete global health catastrophe. Although there's already plenty of global health catastrophes due to poor policies, so what's one more, this one was likely preventable with policies previously in place, so is unfortunate in that regard.

Basically it's the mutabu virus, just played out in China with the US as a "don't place sycophant in charge" thematic sub-plot, and changing the main plot to preserve face rather than "the weapon" ... and infecting the entire world instead of blowing up a small town, is what I'm saying.

This may seem preemptively overly dramatic, but 700 million people are already in quarantine, self isolation or restricted travel in China, which is 10% of the global population and happened within the span of months; it's fairly reasonable to expect the same to happen to the rest of the globe within the next few months now that containment within China has completely failed and the rest of the world is where China was about 2 months ago.

The speed of this outbreak also means that it's unlikely the virus will lose much in lethality, as evolving to be less lethal as viruses normally do is an evolutionary process that takes time ... but such quick spreading doesn't create less strains than had it proliferated over a longer amount of time and so different strains may emerge that can infect people again (on-top of it, potentially being the case, that many can get the same strain again).

The only viable way to even slow down the virus significantly at this point requires basically shutting down the global economy. We're in the down-playing and denial phase from Western governments, in my opinion, to avoid pressure to take radical measures until it is too late for those to serve any purpose (as they calculate it's unavoidable anyways, no reason to harm the economy more than necessary in the process).

Maybe I should cancel my trip to London this weekend. I guess the underground and nightclubs aren't a good idea right now and I should stay at home.

But then that would be no fun. :confused:

Really depends on age. A bad outcome radically increases with age ... which will also help spread the virus exponentially when the younger generations realize it's not a huge threat to them and need to go about their business at some point.

If you're young, main problem of travel is potentially being trapped in quarantine ... but Western governments seem to have decided to stop trying to maintain containment, but they may turn that policy on and off randomly for PR reasons.

This may seem preemptively overly dramatic, but 700 million people are already in quarantine, self isolation or restricted travel in China, which is 10% of the global population and happened within the span of months; it's fairly reasonable to expect the same to happen to the rest of the globe within the next few months now that containment within China has completely failed and the rest of the world is where China was about 2 months ago. — boethius

The current plan seems to be to slow down the spread enough to delay the peak until summer, when warmer weather will make it easier to deal with.

If you're young — boethius

I'm 31, which I'm going to say is young.

Yes, delay is the goal of the current policies of closing schools and banning large events.

However, unless policies are global and significant, such as shut all schools in the world, shutdown international travel, and maximize self quarantine and work from home ... there maybe little way to delay much now that containment has failed.

Also, it's completely unclear at this point if summer will abate the virus as summer does with the flue.

Delay is good anyways of course.

We seem right before the uncontrollable and exponential global growth phase. My guess is that the pattern that developed in Wuhan will repeat on a global scale but much worse as there's no way to take the radical measures China did on a global scale, but we will see if current or new policies are effective for slowing the virus globally in the next weeks.