siderea: (Default)
[personal profile] siderea
Um, folks?

I've been noticing a bunch of people - friends and strangers – saying things like, "You know, influenza killed a 80,000 people in the US last year; that's the disease you need to be worried about" and "a few hundred people die of coronavirus and the world loses its mind, but you still can't get people to get their flu shots".

Please don't do this.

There is absolutely no reason to rhetorically pit influenza against coronavirus, as if concern for one is mutually exclusive of the other. It's stupid on the face of it, for one thing, and transparently a pose of more-knowledgeable-than-thou sanctimony. It might make you feel superior, but it sure isn't convincing to your audience.

For another, it demonstrates you clearly don't understand why people – including, you know, the epidemiologists – are so much more het up about the novel coronavirus than they are about influenza.

The 2019 novel coronavirus is behaving a lot more like the influenza of 1918 than the 2019 influenza did. Eighty-thousand people? That's nothing. In 1918-1919 over half a million Americans died of influenza - itself a drop in the ocean of a 50 to 100 million world-wide death toll. And that is what there is to be worried about.

If you're saying things like "the media are whipping people into a frenzy over nothing" you have clearly not been paying attention to what is happening in Wuhan right now, which is pretty much exactly what was happening in Boston in Sept of 1918, only scaled up to 11 million people.

Things in Wuhan are very bad.

Videos: A video blogger in Wuhan has been keeping a video diary, which someone else, Michael Yao, has been adding English subtitles to and republishing. The playlist of the English subtitled videos: Wuhan - After the Lockdown. The unidentified blogger volunteers with the hospital staff carpool - since public transit was shut down, many hospital workers had no way to get to and from their jobs, and volunteers stepped up to give them rides in their private vehicles – so he has opportunity to interview hospital staff he's transporting about what they're seeing. He also goes out in the community, talks to people he meets.

Video: [CW: this is emotionally very, very tough.] 【Wuhan】An Infected Emergency Room Nurse Episode 6 Feb 5, 2020. Subtitled in English. Ergeng Video is "the leading short documentaries channel in China", and one of their camera operators is married to an emergency-room nurse who is now fighting the disease, in an in-home quarrantine, which he is keeping a video diary through.

Text: My Hometown Is Being Ravaged by the Coronavirus by Xinyan Yu in the Atlantic, readable at that link here on DW. Feb 5, 2020, 6am.

Video: Vlog: how a community health center in Wuhan is fighting the virus from China Global Television Network Feb 4, 2020. Starts in English, then subtitled in English.

I'm not suggesting you, or anyone, freak out. Freaking out is generally counterproductive. But downplaying this is also counterproductive.

(no subject)

Date: 2020-02-06 03:41 pm (UTC)
malterre: derpy bear (Default)
From: [personal profile] malterre
Thank you foe sharing this

(no subject)

Date: 2020-02-06 07:54 pm (UTC)
cvirtue: CV in front of museum (Default)
From: [personal profile] cvirtue
Possibly you’ve seen this:

“Don’t scold people for worrying about the coronavirus“

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/6/21121303/coronavirus-wuhan-panic-pandemic-outbreak

(no subject)

Date: 2020-02-06 08:23 pm (UTC)
From: [personal profile] he_who_wanders
Thanks that is useful perspective and interesting information

(no subject)

Date: 2020-02-07 08:37 am (UTC)
heron61: (Default)
From: [personal profile] heron61
I definitely see your point, but from what I've read (so far, and hopefully this remains true as we see more cases) the death rate of Coronavirus is somewhere between 1/5 and 1/10 that of the 1918 flu, and Coronavirus also (unlike the 1918 flu) seems to primarily kill the same people most seasonal influenza does - people in poor health, especially the elderly. Is there reason to think it might be worse than a slightly more lethal than usual flu back before influenza vaccines were widely available?

(no subject)

Date: 2020-02-07 11:48 am (UTC)
heron61: (Default)
From: [personal profile] heron61
Everything I've read about the 1918 influenza says it had a mortality rate of 10-20% (most sources say 10%), which is horrifyingly high - is that info incorrect?

(no subject)

Date: 2020-03-11 02:30 am (UTC)
shrewreader: (Default)
From: [personal profile] shrewreader
Taubenberger and Morens (2006) put the mortality rate of Spanish influenza at 2.5% (Taubenberger, J. K., & Morens, D. M. (2006). 1918 Influenza: the Mother of All Pandemics. Emerging Infectious Diseases, 12(1), 15-22. https://dx.doi.org/10.3201/eid1201.050979. Loaded 10 March, 2020).

Today’s data from Johns Hopkins (https://bit.ly/2Q0Xv1e, loaded 10 March, 2020), puts deaths at 4,284 and cases at 118,745. That’s a mortality rate of 3.607%.

Recovered is better: 65,740, or 55.36%.

But that means that since the onset of the epidemic, 41.04% of patients are either still sick or unaccounted for otherwise.

That’s a lot of sick people, in addition to the dead.


(no subject)

Date: 2020-02-09 01:23 pm (UTC)
hairyears: Spilosoma viginica caterpillar: luxuriant white hair and a 'Dougal' face with antennae. Small, hairy, and venomous (Default)
From: [personal profile] hairyears
Also the morbidity rate: people who get it, get very, very ill indeed.

Are there good metrics out there for time off work and in-patient care, that would compare 1918 influenza with the Wuhan Corona virus outbreak?

Also, the mortality profile: in 1918, Spanish Flu had an unusual preference for working-age people. If it's the over-80's and the already-ill that make up that 3% mortality, Wuhan Coronavirus is somewhat less scary.

(no subject)

Date: 2020-02-07 10:19 am (UTC)
nancylebov: (green leaves)
From: [personal profile] nancylebov
I'm thinking that if the hospitals are swamped, a lot of people who are dependent on medical care will be in trouble.

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