Coronavirus 2019-2020 thread (no unsubstantiated rumours!)

obj 705A said:

meaningless & misleading comparison, when a young patient with no underlying health issues gets influenza does he go to the hospital to get treated? no ofcourse not when I get influenza I would do nothing & just wait for it to pass & I would get better automatically, but if I got the Wuhan flu.. if I do not go to a hospital & wait for it to pass will I just automatically get well & survive?

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Yes, actually - if you're young with no health complications then that's the overwhelmingly likely outcome. One of the concerns health authorities have is that people could be spreading the virus without ever developing symptoms. What does that tell you about its lethality? Does that sound like something that puts everyone who catches it in a morgue?

obj 705A said:

meaningless & misleading comparison, when a young patient with no underlying health issues gets influenza does he go to the hospital to get treated? no ofcourse not when I get influenza I would do nothing & just wait for it to pass & I would get better automatically, but if I got the Wuhan flu.. if I do not go to a hospital & wait for it to pass will I just automatically get well & survive?

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You don’t need to go to hospital when you get flu because there’s no treatment for it. It’s NOT because it is a weaker disease and needs less attention. You will need to rely on your own immune system to fight the virus. So the hospital tells you not to come. They will tell you the same thing your mom and grandma have been telling you. Drink plenty water and take rest. There is nothing else that they can do.

However, it doesn’t mean it’s not bad. In the currently ongoing flu season since November 2019, over 6600 Americans have died of the influenza virus. The the common flu kills a lot more people. It is a serious epidemic (yes, that’s the definition given by the WHO). And the bad part is that it comes back every year. WHO estimates that, annually, 290,000 to 650,000 people die of influenza-caused symptoms. Annually! It means the influenza comes back every year and kills that many people every year.

We don’t pay too much attention to flu because we are so used to it.

People are panicking with the new Coronavirus because it’s new.

obj 705A said:

but if I got the Wuhan flu.. if I do not go to a hospital & wait for it to pass will I just automatically get well & survive?

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Actually yes. Most people who get infected by the Coronavirus recover automatically (that’s a bad medical word since no one can recover automatically. It’s your own immune system fighting back). When a patient develops life threatening symptoms, like short of breaths, the hospital can only do things to ease the symptoms and hope for the best.

Exactly the same goes with the flu. Exactly the same. And many times, just like the Coronavirus, patients with the flu develop such devastating symptoms that even hospitals cannot help. And the patient will end up dying. As I mentioned above, every year, 290,000 to 650,000 people around the world develop devastating symptoms from the flu and end up losing their lives. So far this year, 6600 Americans have lost their lives from flu.

This seems serious enough, Cambodia confirm the first case of the new coronavirus...

There is so little concrete information we can use when we are trying to assess this new virus. The media around the world and in China have been all over the place in how they portray this. The supposed facts are that incubation could take up to 2 weeks! During this time, the infected individual may not have any symptoms during incubation or even after. On top of this, they are apparently infectious even when no symptoms show. It's too early to say if all humans more or less react similarly when it comes to how their immune system deals with the virus.

This means it's entirely possible that the virus has been going around for ages before it was even recognised. It could have infected tens of thousands and perhaps most of these people recovered naturally while under the impression they have a common cold or just a strong case of the flu. I'm not yet aware if there is a definitive list of definitive symptoms that just about everyone infected receives. In the absence of these answers, we have no idea about what the true mortality rate is. What we know is that there are no vaccines and probably won't develop any in time if even possible. Treatment/curative options are still very limited. The best strategy is effective quarantine. This requires effective detection and contact tracing which are almost impossible because of the stealthy nature of this virus.

Its presence is impossible to verify without time consuming lab tests of suitable fluid samples. It doesn't necessarily give anyone fevers and it's spreadable the whole time and can survive a week on some surfaces! Sounds like a supervirus designed by nature to knock humanity to its knees... if the mortality rate was high. Who knows how it will mutate.

These are the realities of the situation just based on what I've read from sources I consider reliable. Practice good personal hygiene wherever you are.

plawolf said:

If you do get this new Coronavirus and wait for it to pass without going to a hospital, and provided you are young and healthy, your survival odds are extremely good.

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"extremely good" odds are not good enough, if I get influenza then I'm 100% sure it will pass without me doing anything.

with the Wu flu they said out of 2.5k infection "hundreds" are in "critical condition" so no less than 6%, even though they are cared the best way in hospital no less than 6% of them are in critical condition, if you pick a random sample of people & infect them with influenza do you think 6% or more of them would be in critical condition! by the way back when it was just around 40 deaths they said one or few were actually young & healthy with no underlying health problems even though they did everything for them in the hospital, does that look like influenza to you?

I don't want to be that one guy who say "we are doomed" encouraging panic, however saying that the Wu flu can be cured 100% in a healthy patient even if he stays home & takes absolutely no medication... it's practicaly like lying to one's self just to assure himself "everything's fine".

obj 705A said:

"extremely good" odds are not good enough, if I get influenza then I'm 100% sure it will pass without me doing anything.

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How can you be 100% sure? Influenza kills hundreds of thousands of people a year, not all of them were already on death's door. How can you know your next bout of influenza won't set off a cytokine storm that would kill you in hours?

obj 705A said:

with the Wu flu they said out of 2.5k infection "hundreds" are in "critical condition" so no less than 6%

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obj 705A said:

if you pick a random sample of people & infect them with influenza do you think 6% or more of them would be in critical condition!

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You seem to misunderstand some very basic statistical facts. The ~2.5k aren't the total number of infections, those are confirmed infections - people sick enough to be admitted into a hospital and administered a test for the virus, or people interviewed by medical authorities due to contact with other confirmed cases and tested positive for the virus. This is smaller - probably far smaller - than the total number of infected, which isn't known. There are people walking around with it who won't show symptoms and would never know they had it.

Your thought experiment of infecting six random people and seeing how many survive is an attempt to estimate the lethality of a virus given the total number of infections. That simply isn't known in this case.

obj 705A said:

by the way back when it was just around 40 deaths they said one or few were actually young & healthy with no underlying health problems even though they did everything for them in the hospital, does that look like influenza to you?

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No, it doesn't look like influenza at all. So far it looks much milder than influenza, which infects millions and kills hundreds of thousands each year.

obj 705A said:

"extremely good" odds are not good enough, if I get influenza then I'm 100% sure it will pass without me doing anything.

with the Wu flu they said out of 2.5k infection "hundreds" are in "critical condition" so no less than 6%, even though they are cared the best way in hospital no less than 6% of them are in critical condition, if you pick a random sample of people & infect them with influenza do you think 6% or more of them would be in critical condition! by the way back when it was just around 40 deaths they said one or few were actually young & healthy with no underlying health problems even though they did everything for them in the hospital, does that look like influenza to you?

I don't want to be that one guy who say "we are doomed" encouraging panic, however saying that the Wu flu can be cured 100% in a healthy patient even if he stays home & takes absolutely no medication... it's practicaly like lying to one's self just to assure himself "everything's fine".

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Get yourself educated on how virus and bacteria infection work.
I got swine flu before and I came out just fine. A few days of very high fever were tough but somehow I pulled it through.

obj 705A said:

"extremely good" odds are not good enough, if I get influenza then I'm 100% sure it will pass without me doing anything.

with the Wu flu they said out of 2.5k infection "hundreds" are in "critical condition" so no less than 6%, even though they are cared the best way in hospital no less than 6% of them are in critical condition, if you pick a random sample of people & infect them with influenza do you think 6% or more of them would be in critical condition! by the way back when it was just around 40 deaths they said one or few were actually young & healthy with no underlying health problems even though they did everything for them in the hospital, does that look like influenza to you?

I don't want to be that one guy who say "we are doomed" encouraging panic, however saying that the Wu flu can be cured 100% in a healthy patient even if he stays home & takes absolutely no medication... it's practicaly like lying to one's self just to assure himself "everything's fine".

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No, you don't have a 100% chance of recovering from influenza. Just because you have always recovered before doesn't mean you always will.

SampanViking said:

There has been a lot to talk this morning about pre-symption infectiousness and conjecture of the true level of cases being much more than the reported figure.

So lets state the obvious. If the level of contagion is far higher than reported, but the level of fatalities still the same (not an unlikely scenario) then the virulence and lethality of the virus is obviously less than has been initially thought.
Yes obviously there is need for concern and vigilance over the emergence of anew virus, but also please, a sense of proportion and not cheap sensationalism..

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We have no clue about the method the guys using there.

To confirm a death due to coronavirus in first place they have to know that the given person had that.

So, there can be an error in categorising the death and another error in categorising the sick persons.


Question is which has higher underestimate, the number of cases, or the number of deaths.

There is no quick / cheap test , it complicating to establish statistics.


By this it looks like the main issue is the pneumonia in the severe cases.

It can affect 25% of the cases, and it is very bad, the normal bacteria induced pneumonia can be fatal / extreme sever without antibiotics .( I have second hand experience about it )