To not get the panic about Corona Virus?

[speakout]

I am not getting it- can someone explain?

Less than 1000- people infected, 26 dead. Why the hype?
I understand a few pharma companies making anti virals have made a stack of money in the past week.
In global health terms these stats are insignificant surely.
Why all the headlines?
I suspect we have many pathogens jumping species barriers on a regular basis, most probably fade away and don' t make headlines.

Can someone explain.

BBC reporting extensively on Coronavirus - incubation period is 14 days.

@Igneococcus i didn't mean the virus itself. I meant the claim he contracted it through the eyes

Oh sorry, I misunderstood that allergictoamop

No worries!

Ultimately, panicking won't achieve anything. All we can usefully do is take sensible precautions against infection, as many of us try to do in daily life anyway.

yes what TheMemory says.

Anyway... someone up thread said that swine flu came to nowt. I had swine flu and I do not think I have ever been so unwell.

There were apparently 138 deaths in england alone (from the NHS website) from swine flu. That possibly meant more than 'nowt' to the people and their families who died from it.

Has the death rate doubled since last night?

One of the doctorsat work today said they think it will end up being a pandemic, and that they don't trust the figures published by the Chinese government so far - they lied and downplayed the number of people who had SARS back in 2000ish.

Nowt as in the sense that there wasn't a pandemic with mass fatalities. Of course every death is a tragedy, but flu claims lives every year.

The main thing I remember about swine flu was the cavalier attitude some people took. We had a couple of men turn up to work claiming to have it (one was obviously ill and was afterwards off sick a long time). We had to sit in a stuffy, crowded meeting room with that guy. The second guy was sitting next to a woman who was heavily pregnant, while boasting about how he had the notorious flu.

Meant to add: we need to know if the doctor is male so OP can accuse him of mansplaining or if she is female so can be accepted by the OP.

Good we have a "hubby expert" to mansplain things.

Fuckin' hell. Get a grip. The guy works as a consultant in infectious diseases.
Mine works in a similar field. I was about to add his expert input, but I won't since he's not a woman.

Well there is one good thing that will come about if it does kill off most of humanity. The planet will recover from what we've done to it. So the environmentalists should be happy.

I don't think it will though. Would be more concerned if young and healthy people were dying. So far, we only know of it being old and/or ill people dying. That's standard for flu sadly.

Hopefully, for the OP's sake, loads of men will die because then she won't have to worry about all that mansplaining. Winner winner.

I really don’t intend to be so insensitive, but are we not due some sort of pandemic?

Okay, i understand what you meant NotTerf, now.

I hate cavalier attitudes towards flu to0 (and other illnesses). My boss gets very annoyed indeed if people take time off 'just' for a cold.... yet one of my colleagues is having chemo and it can be potentially lethal for her to catch anything.

I read (forget which newspaper) that those who are died are older men with the exception of one 37 year old man.

A (male) doctor had reported to have just died.

If that's correct isn't that statistically speaking strange it's all men? Not sure if it is correct though, all other reports use 'people'.

Not scared myself. I'm not in China (think I would be uneasy if I were). A lot of the overcrowding in the hospital might be normal, made worse by panic. They are building a new hospital to cope with it (it'll be ready next week).

There's so many pandemic scares. Increased air travel has meant more infected people are bringing it to other countries. But increased coverage means more control.

Media coverage is a lot of kindling to the panic too. Ebola been mentioned a lot in this thread. It has been a huge problem for decades, but only really been on the radar for Jo Soap recently (relatively speaking).

There were some female victims too

I'm quite worried about Corona beers stocks tanking myself, if we do get to doomsday I want my favourite beer with me!

Ok, thought all male victims was too odd.

@Thelnebriati

It looks like you need someone to explain mansplaining to you as well as how pandemics work.

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

That was both ridiculous and rude to Hulaberaal OP.

Since we are all piling in on the OP may I be the first pedant to point out that is if fewer than 1000 people , not less.

I am not a man so this is Not Mansplaining.

(I too had swine flu by he way. It was the worst illness I have ever experienced)

Piggywaspushed I think the use of less instead of fewer is epidemic. Uncontrollably. With the use of much in place of many increasing rapidly.

All is lost.

twitter.com/xinyanyu

ive been following the developments on twitter. This journalist has a lot of information, including video footage of the scenes inside the hospitals and showing the temporary hospital being erected in haste. One of the videos is quite graphic and shows patients who have passed away left in the corridor, I am not so worried about the infection spreading the the UK as there seems to be a lock down on travel in place but I feel so sad for the people affected in China, its very real to them. Cars with Whuhan number plates are being prevented from getting gas among other restrictions put in place.

A doctor from Wuhan Union Hospital said the city followed a “cold treatment” strategy at first. A directive banned doctors from discussing the disease on public platforms or speaking to media without authorization. Medical authorities, including CDC, were told to keep quiet.

I have no problem with "less than" being used with numbers.

I wouldn't refer to less people, that would be weird, I would say fewer people.

But less than is used so often in maths... e.g. < 1000 people would be read as less than one thousand people .