@thevfmaddict
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I would name it after Dr Li Wenliang the doctor who first tried to warn about it and has since died of it. Its not unusual to name medical conditions after the doctor who first documented a condition. I suspect he would – given his efforts and were he still alive – see such a naming as a mark of respect. Long may his name be remembered and honoured.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
And in Brighton the massive University of Sussex plus numerous small (cramped) clubs. A veritable playground of delight for coronavirus.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
MASKS
The Government are recommending FFP3 respirator masks for medical staff (sometimes called N95) these are valved masks. I’m picking then up at £3.95 for two currently from a local outlet that I advised just over a week ago to buy in BULK. They are selling like hot cakes already and that’s a good price. Ebay prices are already approaching £3 each. I can prices in general being £5+ each inside a month. If you know a local pharmacy well and which does not rip folks off it may be worth asking what they can get them at for you and if the price is good buy a stock.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
I truly hope all Forumites are now getting into full preparedness mode. Now is the time to buy masks before they increase exponentially in cost while availability plummets. Likewise with hand sanitizing gels. Experience from China and Hong Kong suggests that paper products such as tissues and toilet paper also go into short supply very quickly. Beyond that its a case of stockpiling anything which you would normally buy in crowded locations because you will want to avoid such places as much as possible.
Someone said to me today that this is rather like an apocalyptic disaster movie playing out in real time before our eyes. Certainly all footage from China looks exactly like one. Empty streets, folks in something akin to full NBC suits in every direction and street disinfecting by all manner of gigantic spraying devices. Bodies being collected from houses and apartments everywhere and the authorities sealing people in large multi-occupant dwellings the second it is suspected there are infected individuals inside. There is footage of bodies being collected from homes in provinces where China say there have been no verified coronavirus deaths. Well if you don’t test the dead for the virus then that will always be the case, won’t it. Oh well lets be thankful that the infected don’t turn into zombies desperate to infect others.
To use an analogy – Is what we are seeing still only the ‘phoney war’ with real carnage yet to come? I suspect it is. I also suspect that fatality rates are in reality far higher than published figures suggest. This is getting grimmer by the day. I don’t mean to scaremonger. Quite the opposite really. Unless one recognises what one is facing one is never likely to be prepared. So I’ll finish as I began. Get ready folks. Prepare to stay safe. The time is surely now given the 4 day doubling time.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
Doubling time now down to 4 days. That’s all right then. This thing cant last much more than a couple of months. Because everyone on planet Earth will have it in 72 days time. ❗
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
Current estimates coming out of China are that despite 500 deaths (approx) to date about 2K confirmed cases remain critical. Therefore even if three out of every four of those 2K pull through that’s still 500 more deaths among confirmed cases; meaning the fatality rate will be twice that which the figures currently suggest. That’s not good.
My wonder is also whether China are testing community dead to see if they had 2019-nCoV and then including them in confirmed cases and deaths? Because sure as heck there will be deaths that occur in the community before that poor individual even attended a medical unit.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
Yes, Ed, the knock on effects are potentially as dangerous or even more dangerous than the virus itself. The ebay cost of masks in the UK have risen 5,000%. The morally bankrupt are making a killing and it was only morals that kept me from buying every mask I could lay my hands on a week or so ago. Because sure as hell this was obvious by then to a guaranteed get rich quick proposition.
I’m also concerned there will be shortages of pharmaceuticals. Cocktails of antivirals currently used to treat HIV are being used to threat this and the production capacity for those compounds has not the slightest chance of meeting needs once this breaks worldwide.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
Figures Update
Often of late initial figures re number of new cases are incomplete only finalising a day or two later. The figures for 3Feb to 4Feb have now been updated and rather than showing a flattening off now show the fastest rate of growth yet seen in China.
If the growth is like this in a state both capable of using and actually using the most extreme measures to contain this virus, then from where I stand the call is surely made – This virus for all practical purposes cannot be contained. To me that means worldwide pandemic guaranteed unless a vaccine or effective antiviral appear pretty damn pronto.
APOLOGIES TO LES
You posted while I was typing.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
Sorry, Les, but the evidence suggests there’s more chance I’ll win the EuroMillions tonight than 2019-nCoV failing to become a worldwide pandemic. Many experts suspect the true number of infected individuals is in excess of 200,000 in China. If so there is less than zero chance of containment.
Only the worst cases seek medical care and are officially ‘diagnosed’. This probably means that the virus is not as deadly as even the worst current estimates but and its a big BUT even those who weather infection can still infect others who cannot survive it. The Chinese people are terrified of mentioning symptoms. It could be normal flu. The trouble is though that if they you are even remotely suspected of having it and normal flu is enough to provide suspect symptoms, you are forcibly dragged off to quarantine and housed with those who quite possibly do. Because individuals are not being isolated in solitary confinement. So in a way having a cold or normal flu can easily be fatal because you end up forcibly housed in a hotbed 2019-nCoV rich environment. No wonder Chinese folks are keeping quite about flu like symptoms.
Funny thing is we are proving that in the UK we will do the same. Those Brits evacuated from Wuhan are not isolated individually. Its long been said that the easiest place to catch an infection is in a hospital that is about to become even truer. When something like this goes pandemic its amazing how far it travels. Even in 1918 when there was far less travel than today Spanish Flu raked Alaska.
For now its a rear guard action of delaying tactics. Hold its growth down as much as possible in the hope that a vaccine or an effective antiviral treatment can be developed before the major damage occurs.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
Today, 1 February, is the first day that the total number of recovered individuals to-date in China has exceeded the number of deaths to-date. While this is obviously good news it must be put into context. For the death rate to be 2% there will need to be 49 recovered patients for every dead patient. So we have a long way to go yet before we will have a fix on the actual rate. The death rate for SARS was originally vastly underestimated let’s hope that is not the case with 2019-nCoV.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
…………….. The medical advice was that provided there was no close contact, defined as within 2 meters for 15 minutes there was close to zero chance of transmission. …………..
The 2 metre distance I get but the 15 minutes makes no sense to me.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
Approx 25% increase in confirmed cases to-date yesterday. That’s some leap for a single day given that the bulk were in China where extensive lock-downs are already in place.
The R0 (pronounced R-naught) which is sometimes called the Reproduction Rate is sitting between 2-2.2. So each case generates two more. That’s similar to the R0 of the 1918 Spanish Flu which infected a quarter of the world’s population at that time. So one can see exactly why the WHO are concerned as to what will happen once this hits states with little ability to contain it.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
Your local butcher wasn’t wrong there, Bob. And I’m sure you are spot on also about that being even truer today. Folks don’t want to think where it comes from. Its easy to demonstrate. Tell someone there’s a Butchers at the end of your road and no-one bats an eye lid. But tell them there’s a shop at the end of your road that sells chopped up animals and just watch their faces.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
Nothing to do with the siting of the isolation location but it suddenly occurs to me that this virus, in that it will inevitably kill more of the old who are more likely to be Tory voters than the young who are more likely to be Labour voters, could have a political impact directly.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
Once 2019-nCoV gets here there is not the slightest chance I will use any public transport; except possibly cabs. The buses in London are often standing room only truly packed like sardines and the underground is even worse.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
I think we need to put the Snake flu panic in context. Bird flu pandemics have a death rate of around 2.5%, and similar proportion of serious cases. So Snake Flu is bad in terms of its spread rate and probably higher death rate, but it is certainly no Ebola, SARS or Smallpox in its lethality.
I agree its nothing like Ebola which comes close to 100% fatality and 2019-nCoV is not likely to be anywhere near as lethal as Smallpox. I’m not sure though that we can yet say that it is not as lethal or almost as lethal as SARS; the jury is surely still out on that one. In the early stages of the SARS epidemic, health officials estimated the mortality rate at less than 4%. We are still in the early stages of 2019-nCoV so the 3.5% so far is not much different. In the end SARS was more like 14% to 15%. Realistically one can never know the true rate until the pandemic is over and there is a known outcome (i.e. either death or recovery) for each confirmed case. As yet there are still one hell of a lot of confirmed cases with as yet no bankable outcome.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
@Les
Yes, China’s ‘lock down containment strategy’ seems to be reducing the exponential growth, probably because those infected are infecting fewer others themselves. However, I simply cannot see any state this is less authoritarian than China ever being able to deploy that strategy as effectively. The populations of most Western states are not as automatically compliant with government instructions as are the Chinese. Sooner or later this little nasty is pretty certain to stage a significant breakout and gain a significant foothold outside of China. So its all a race against time; which will occur first that breakout or the development of a vaccine or anti-viral effective against it? I understand that treatments currently being used to treat and control HIV are also being looked at to see if they have any effectiveness against this virus.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
I cannot disagree with your view that we only have a snapshot. However I tend to think <5% deaths is likely as the current death rate is mainly from a swamped Wuhan infrastructure which is as close as you can get to simulating a pandemic. One caveat is that the virus does not learn to be more efficient. If Bird Flu is used as an analogue, death rates climbed as human-human infections progressed. Lets hope that Snake Flu does not behave in a similar fashion.
I’m not sure, Ed. The figures from Hubei, the epicentre of this, strongly suggest we will be looking at a fatality rate well over 5%. There are currently 125 deaths from the 3,554 confirmed cases there. That is over 3.5% fatality rate already. But only 88 of the 3,544 cases have so far recovered. So that’s 3,466 who have not yet recovered and we must assume it more than likely that a significant number of those won’t recover. I don’t think we will know what fatality rate we are actually looking at for another week or so.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
Heaven knows how anyone can know the death ‘rates’ yet although we can know the number of deaths to date. Many of the infected may still peg it. Of course current deaths are despite many receiving intensive supportive care which most would be unlikely to receive once numbers swamped care capacity. So if anything 2.5% of those infected must be considered the absolute smallest number likely in the case of a full pandemic.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
Only just read this Reuters piece. OMG.
These delays will have and will cost tens of thousands of lives if not hundreds.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
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