Coronavirus are you worried?

[CountryGirl1234]

So this virus has infected 600+ already and seems to be picking up pace. It’ll be in the UK any day, if it’s not already. AIBU to think this is going to have a big fallout and are you concerned?

amp.theguardian.com/science/live/2020/jan/23/coronavirus-china-virus-flu-scotland-testing-wuhan-live-news-updates

It's already in the UK. Worried for my children and those who are more vulnerable.

I am an academic working in medical research. I have many friends working in virology and epidemiology and they are all very concerned about this.
It is very early days and things will change but

1. Currently approx 20-25% of patients are severely ill and require hospitalisation
2. Analysis of the genomes currently deposited in global database show clusters emerging. This suggests the virus is evolving
3. Approx 55% patients were neither in contact with the original site (seafood market in wuhan) OR other infected people. This suggests sustained human to human transmission
4. The Chinese have just enacted an unprecedented quarantine. This is just not done for a few hundred cases
5. Analysis from imperial Coll London predicts numbers of cases are far higher than officially recorded. Currently ~4000. You should realise a big factor in these calculations is the number of foreign cases recorded. Each day, as you hear about foreign cases increasing, this significantly increases the predictions of actual cases.
6. There are reports in the guardian of officials refusing to even diagnose patients severely ill and dying from pneumonia.
7. Until approx 6 weeks ago, no human alive had been exposed to this virus. We have no immunity to it. When new viruses jump the species barrier there is potential that they will become highly virulent.

So not panicking but very concerned, watching very closely.

Sorry number6 should say in China

Not enormously, but probably as worried as I am each year about flu (on behalf of babies, the elderly and the immune-compromised) and about freezing weather (on behalf of the homeless and stray cats), i.e enough to have scanned an article earlier and think “shall I worry”.

My latest white blood count is 0.2 plus I have anxiety. I'm not worried.

25 dead.

I’m on immunosuppressants, so yes, a tad concerned.

@Skittlesandbeer makes an excellent point which has been at the forefront of my mind as I live overseas in the same region.

Lunar (aka Chinese) New Year falls this coming weekend. This is the biggest event (Christmas pales in comparison here!) and everyone travels to family and friends in preparation for the weekend and in the week(s) that follow.

My Hong Kong-based colleagues are discussing amongst their families whether to cancel their planned trips to neighbouring islands or the Chinese mainland due to the virus spread.

The Chinese Govt are also taking a harder line in this due to embarrassment about the source (a seafood market in Wuhan which also had stalls selling wild animal meat including wolf puppies, bats, civets etc). In some parts of China, wild animal meat is favoured as being more nutritious/tastier than reared livestock.

The issue being that live animal markets (such as in the mega city of Wuhan, the same size as London) are ripe for viruses to spread from different animal hosts, including humans.

SARS originated as an animal virus and civets were responsible for preliminary stage spread in the country (see WHO site for confirmation).

Wolf puppies and civets

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/01/23/britain-braced-killer-coronavirus-says-health-secretary-infection/

It's here and yes I am concerned. I have a newborn baby and other small children, I want to know how to protect them.

@Gilead with you on that one. Wouldn’t be worried but being on immunosuppressants is concerning me a bit.

@everythingthelighttouches well I wasn’t that worried, until I read this! lol
I take it the flu jab wouldn’t help?
My mum has the Hong Kong flu years ago (is that what it was called?) she’s very worried!

Yes very worried
My twins need to be delivered within the next 3 weeks and will be at least a month premature. Having to spend so much time in medical settings will really stress me out. These things really make me feel for medical staff, who are the first to be exposed.

Like a couple of PPs, I think more should have been done to contain it at the first sign of a problem. It only takes one person to bring it into the country

Anti-vaxxers are busy spreading a disproved lie that this virus is a patented coronavirus that has been deliberately (or possibly accidentally, but they prefer deliberately) released into the public sphere. Patented coronaviruses do exist - just not this one.

Every day on average 75 people are killed or seriously injured by road traffic accidents in the UK. If you’re not fazed by getting in your car or even walking down the street this morning, it makes no sense to be anxious about this.

Plus, 1,000 people will be diagnosed with cancer today in the UK.... Some perspective is needed!

It’s already in Australia: a man from Wujan 🙁

I am worried as I think the number of deaths and people who are infected is far higher than what has been reported.

I'm a little bit worried as I live right next door to Thailand (1 case confirmed) and my medical insurance is shit, the hospitals here are shit and I have a young son. The sanitation of the local community is dire so if it strikes here they're either be really hardy due to the lack of sanitation and it will be like water of a ducks back or it'll spread like wild fire!

Yes because we live in an area with lots of Chinese students and I am immunocompromised. I haven't even had the flu jab because I haven't fully recovered from a chest infection I had in November which made me pretty sick.

The US embassy in Beijing reported 835 confirmed cases and 25 deaths early this morning. But I assume that confirmed cases refer to people who have had to seek medical attention and been tested for the virus. So those would be the sickest people. There's no way to count mild cases of infection who might have a fever and take some paracetamol but still be wandering around and spreading it.

There was also a case where one patient managed to infect 14 medical staff in the hospital where they were admitted, so in at least some cases it can be highly contagious.

I never worry about these epidemics.

I used to work with a woman who worried constantly about catching illnesses. I remember hearing her refuse to shake someone's hand in case she caught Ebola. She used to smother her toddler in alcohol gel when she collecred her from the childminders. My enduring memory of her is constantly having a cope-because,IMHO, her immune system was not given a chance to develop.

Having a cold, not a cope.

No
I never worry about things like that.
Worry causes stress and if you’re stressed your immune system is eventually worn down..then you become more susceptible to w hate et you are worrying about.
I’ve never worried about hiv, swine, flu, ordinary flu, Asian flu ,, bird flu or whatever else is meant to be coming around and I’ve just been fine.

@bringbackspanishflu, a few years ago, I read that this is the longest interval between flu pandemics since they'd been monitoring such things, so you could be right.

Every time there's a new respiratory virus doing the rounds, there's a big fuss but it never becomes a big deal in the end. Swine flu, SARS, avian flu - none of them have killed a tiny fraction of the numbers that died in the 2018 epidemic.

I daresay modern communications and stuff have made it a lot easier to control the spread of disease and treatments are much better so more people survive. Which is I'm not worried.

Besides, I only get flu-type things every 10 years, and I had flu last winter, so I'll be fine!