AIBU to ask if you are worried about the new coronavirus? - continued

[IvyBush123]

Here is the old thread:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/3813759-AIBU-to-ask-you-if-you-are-worried-about-the-new-Coronavirus?pg=40

Here is a twitter video from Wuhan I want to share because it so heartbreaking. People happily celebrating shortly before it became known that there was a virus outbreak. There already were some rumors but people didn’t believe them:
twitter.com/WLaowai8/status/1225637845508837377

@Yourtunbridgewells: The info you are sharing (472000 deaths in the UK) is very scary. Is this a worst case scenario.

@justdeckingthehalls: Epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding writes that it is airborne on twitter: twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1226236552059260928
N95 masks help against airborne transmission don’t they?

Or perhaps it is the contrary Red and the decision not to stop flights is political.

Good point meredith.
It's possible the super spreader only displayed mild symptoms of a cold, so people might not have avoided him like the plague as they say.

Or perhaps it is the contrary Red and the decision not to stop flights is political.*

I'm sure Red can and will answer for themselves but politics aside from a disease control POV I suspect there is very little to be gained by banning direct flights into the UK from China or anywhere else in that part of the world.

Can I join? I’m scared 😬 I wish I wasn’t.

A colleague of mine returned from China in November and a few of the team have been ill with flu/coughs colds. I know I’m being irrational but what if 😬 I’ve heard that the outbreak may have started earlier than China said.

Irrational I know.

Or perhaps it is the contrary Red and the decision not to stop flights is political.

Yes. Probably in the absence of evidence, I'd agree. However there would have to have been a discussion with experts on this to a certain extent too, because the political implications of large numbers of people testing positive who had just come into the country would be hugely damaging. It has to be a political decision based on the probability of the number of COVID-19 entries being very low to begin with. Otherwise the political decision to keep flights backfires massively. It has the potential to cause mass outrage and panic (which is destablising in its own right).

But given now the evidence to stop flights doesn't seem to be there either, from that information coming out of the US, that decision does appear to be generally proportionate and justify not stopping them.

There doesn't seem to be a mass of evidence to suggest that screening has completely failed.

Now this could, yet in time, prove to be utterly naive and a huge number of cases have gone undetected only for random clusters of the virus to pop up unexpectedly all over the place.

But we now have no idea if this will have come directly from China either.

What about the person who travels to Nigeria, infects a bunch of people there, and then someone travels from Nigeria to the UK or to the US and starts an outbreak?

Ultimately a travel ban has very obvious limitations. You can't ignore the possibility of an indirect infection from a cluster in a third party country with low health care standards.

Do we close the borders to everywhere but places with high quality health care services and good infection control handling procedures?

Its the debate about what is effective and what is proportionate. Is it effective to completely close the border merely to China? At this point, I think its highly debatable.

In the case of China, given to enter the UK you have to have a visa and funds to travel if you are a Chinese citizen, there is an economic barrier here which might have some impact. It self limits the number of Chinese citizens who can actively travel and the UK have the power to restrict visas more opaquely and with less political fallout if they feel the need.

It's no worse than flu which you can all die of anyway. Get a grip!

It's no worse than flu which you can all die of anyway. Get a grip!

Don't be ridiculous and try educating yourself.

It's no worse than flu which you can all die of anyway. Get a grip!

TBH I think the threat is less about the level of the death rate and more about the complication rate being high enough to jam up the entire health care service...

... but thats a point that seems to have been completely lost by the international media.

I think there should be more emphasis on this aspect rather than the death rate.

Has there been any updates about that hoo ha that was going on in Port Talbot?

It was hysterical nonsense.

Yes I agree the complication rate is quite high, coupled with panic and the existing issues of the NHS as it is the real problem that is could cause is a breakdown of the infrastructure of the NHS. That could mean deaths outside of the coronavirus caused due to a lack of medical care.

Given how panicked these threads are getting when to seek medical advice and when to self care is going to have to be the point driven across

Chinese healthcare is quite different and therefore could be a contributory cause as well.

I may be wrong but actually flu/coronavirus both lead to the same type of complications that cause deaths it is just at the moment the coronavirus seems to be causing it more. I wonder if the immune response that is causing it is due to is newness as well - that is why children are not seeing the complications the immune system is different

Re the 39 new cases on board the Cruise Ship and the report that 4 were seriously ill. Which sounded really bad.

There has been an update issued on this. Apparently there was some confusion on the figures. The 4 serious cases are the number of serious cases out of all 175 who have (so far) been diagnosed with the disease and not just the 39 new cases today.

4 serious cases out of 175 cases does represent a much lower number than has been suggested by the figures out of Wuhan, especially if you factor in the age of those on board the ship. HOWEVER it must not be forgotten that reports out of Wuhan suggest that many complications don't appear until at least 10 days after infection, so it may be too early to start being more optimistic about this.

(Also as I've said before affluent westerners are not directly comparible to poorer chinese too).

But it is certainly better than the report that was out earlier which made for scary reading!

I am not worried at all. Full faith in our NHS after they saved my life ten months ago.

The 4 serious cases, are from those diagnosed earlier too btw.

Don't be ridiculous and try educating yourself.

I don't think I am being ridiculous, I think the hysteria on here is over the top. Not saying that we shouldn't try to stop the spread but I haven't seen much evidence that this is the next Spanish flu

Am i the only one thinking that it's already here in high numbers?

God it must be exhausting to be so worried about things like this ! It’s crap that it’s in the UK - loads more people might get it - not a whole lot we can do except get on with out everyday lives and if you get ill then get treatment and hopefully recover !!

It’s too late to stop flights now - you’d have to stop them from everywhere seeing as this is widespread now - that’s not going to happen!

I’m getting on a plane to Japan next week - I wouldn’t cancel plans to fly because of this, could catch it on the tube, or the street or the plane to Japan - but I can’t just hide in my house for weeks on end just in case

This thread is so over dramatic - But sometimes quite entertaining - love a bit of mass panic tbh 🤭

Am i the only one thinking that it's already here in high numbers?

It's probably higher than we know, but I don't know how we'd know for sure. I mean there must be loads of people round the country that have coughs and fever right now. Unless it's worthy of hospital attention, they probably won't seek medical help?

TBH, I find the whole subject just utterly fanscinating. I naturally like reading the news and trying to debug what information is out there in terms of reliability and I've always been interested in the flaws and lack of understanding of health statistics and interpretations anyway. As a story it kind of crosses both parts of my inner nerd which makes it right up my street.

I like shifting through the news on this and putting together bits and pieces to make a bit more sense of it all.

So whilst I have had my moments of anxiety over the subject, I'm also fairly laid back about the whole thing too, and very aware that if there is a pandemic as individuals we can do very little about it. I don't see the need to prep for it at all.

I do think that on balance the situation in China looks like its beginning to slow down. What happens in the rest of the world is still developing and we don't know how it will go. Overall I think its a MUCH MUCH better picture emerging than there was at the end of last week, even though there have been a number of cases found in the UK.

Still lots of unknowns - particularly with regard to Africa - though.

Same redtoothbrush I find how people can have different responses to illness interesting particularly the immune response (also in relation to sepsis). its often not the virus that kills but the body's response to that virus. Same for bacterial infections. DD and DS have twice had different responses first to chicken pox and the scarlet fever. DD shook it off in a day or two DS was really ill.

The Coronavirus is similar

www.livescience.com/why-kids-missing-coronavirus-cases.html

Its how an individual reacts to it that changes it from a mild illness to something far more serious.

Question.. the parent of a girl at DDs school returned from China 4 weeks ago. Had mild symptoms recently but did nothing about it as wasn’t ill. Now daughter also showing symptoms and is STILL IN SCHOOL as her parent thinks it’s nothing. It could be something or nothing but as neither the parent or child has alerted docs or school etc it feels like a potential disaster. What can I do, if anything? Surely the girl could be tested to eliminate covid19. But I don’t even know her full name so can hardly call up the school and say one of your 1500 kids has a temp and is hiding it. What would you do if your child told you this tonight? Anything or nothing? I’m so stressed!

There should be some form of anonymous reporting of suspected cases

@twoleftuggs I would report to the school.

the parent of a girl at DDs school returned from China 4 weeks ago

1. 4 weeks ago would put her return around 15th Jan. Timeline is early in the outbreak. At that point, even accounting for a government cover up in Hubei, infections were very low outside Hubei province.
2. China is a big place. Where she came from is important and parents could be perfectly right to simply say its nothing, if they are fully aware of the timeline of events and came from another part of China.
3. The case for the balance of probabilities, really is down to the timeline and location. Timeline suggests its very unlikely. Unless you say she went to Hubei Province and particularly Wuhan.
4. Consider the balance of probabilities argument. Is reporting going to send the entire school into a melt down of panic proportionate to the potential risk here?

RedToothBrush
Thank you for your very measured posts. They always make a lot of sense, and are greatly appreciated.

@RedToothBrush thank you, your point 4 is precisely what I want to avoid. Finding out where the parent flew in from would probably resolve my dilemma.