This is one case where it's worth overreacting to. Biological epidemics are the only thing that has had the capacity to kill >50 million people in a year. In my risk classification hierarchy I put pandemics above nuclear war and wayyyy above terrorism. Yet we've spent trillions on the war on terror the past 20 years while there's no coordinated plan in the U.S. for this yet. If there's even a 2% chance of this going pandemic in the U.S. we should be allocating at least a billion with apolitical expert driven policy implementations to prevent spread.
My jaw dropped when I read that the State Dept allowed infected Americans to fly with uninfected persons to the U.S. from Japan against the express recommendations of the CDC. This is what we're dealing with and I'm not optimistic.
The plans the US already has for a flu pandemic should mostly carry over, no? COVID is probably worse than the seasonal flu, but it's not outside the reasonable range of what a flu pandemic could do.
> COVID is probably worse than the seasonal flu, but it's not outside the reasonable range of what a flu pandemic could do.
I think the issue is that we don't know yet how bad COVID-19 is. China is hiding stuff and it's not clear what is going on over there. There are also some uncomfortable, if true, things about it: like asymptomatic transmission for 2 weeks and ability to survive on surfaces for 5 days on certain conditions.
> it's not outside the reasonable range of what a flu pandemic could do.
By about 3-4 orders of magnitude, it is. The flu tends to kill about 60K people annually and most of those are old or very young or already had a compromised immune system. This is with the figures known so far and before there is a vaccine around 2-3%. If left unchecked it would overwhelm available health care capacity pretty quickly.
The Chinese mis-handled this. But it would be a mistake to think that the west is super prepared for something like this compared to China. ICU capacity is limited, test capacity is limited. Our advantages are mostly in more transparent messaging and wealth. Those two will have a big impact on the economic and health care aspects but it may not be enough to drop this down to the level of yet another flu.
A flu pandemic, in official terminology, is a different and more severe thing than the seasonal flu. The government regularly plans for such outbreaks and isn't afraid to spend a billion dollars when needed; for example, about 5 years ago they preemptively struck against bird flu by obliterating poultry farms at government expense. (And that one didn't even affect humans!)
I don't think you're getting your numbers from an accurate source either. The flu kills a lot more than 6k people by every estimate I've seen.
Normally, yes, but the seasonal flu is excluded from the definition so we don't have to say that there's an annual recurring pandemic. When agencies talk about flu pandemic preparations, they're referring to an outbreak so severe that it no longer counts as just the seasonal flu.
Right. But COVID-19 isn't influenza related so all these flu comparisons are moot as far as I'm concerned. The mortality appears for now - with all the figures that I've seen - to be much higher.
If this thing keeps going like it has for the last couple of weeks then it will make the last H1N1 pandemic look like a walk in the park. The final count on that was 100's of thousands dead in 199 different countries. And it didn't take off nearly as fast as this.
But new pathogens always look much worse than they are because we haven't got testing sorted out yet. We test the very serious cases, we don't test the mild cases.
Yes, that's a good point. Especially valid because there is a very real limit on the number of test kits available. That's also a risk in case of asymptomatic spreading.
> This is with the figures known so far and before there is a vaccine around 2-3%.
There's still a lot of uncertainty around the fatality rate here. For cases outside China, the fatality rate so far is about .2%, compared to about .1% for seasonal influenza. By contrast, in Hubei the reported fatality rate is around 4-5%. (Numbers are as of last week so might be slightly outdated now).
My guess is that the 2-3% estimate is too high. In Hubei there is probably a reporting bias towards counting the more sick cases -- mild or asymptomatic COVID cases are probably being reported less often.
Typically not. But that's not how this stuff works. It is bell curves all the way. So your old, very young and vulnerable people will make up the bulk of those that die but there will be plenty of regular people in the prime of their life that will die as well.
That was an anomaly in many other ways too. Keep in mind that a good chunk of the world was still recovering from WWI. Being exposed to some other disease earlier in life can give a similar effect to vaccination.
This is one of the reasons why HIV spread was not as bad as it could have been in Western Europe where exposure to a disease still gave some benefits many centuries later:
Yes. Old and very young people are typically more susceptible, but 29 year olds can die from even the seasonal flu, and the potential that young people can be atypically susceptible to a pandemic is well-known.
Health care professionals will tend to be vaccinated against flu, so they are less likely to get it, so you'd be looking at a very small population which is why you don't see more deaths.
If we widen this slightly to healthy but unvaccinated 29 year olds we do start to see deaths from flu.
I think mutually assured destruction works well enough to prevent all out nuclear war between multiple nuclear armed states. Riskiest scenario there is a nuclear state attacking a non-nuclear state that cannot retaliate in kind.
With a pandemic there's no one to negotiate with to come to an armistice.
My jaw dropped when I read that the State Dept allowed infected Americans to fly with uninfected persons to the U.S. from Japan against the express recommendations of the CDC. This is what we're dealing with and I'm not optimistic.