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Covid-19 Outbreak of new SARS-like coronavirus (Covid-19)

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Japan not gaining anything these last few days, meanwhile my country just skyrocketed past cruiseship to almost double the amount in a day, from 500 to 800. I am doomed. I hope they cancel eurovision because of it.
 
I haven't paid much attention to the coronavirus hysteria, although I was at the grocery store and noticed some of the stuff had been picked over. I think this fall under the "If it doesn't directly affect me I don't care" category.
 
I think this fall under the "If it doesn't directly affect me I don't care" category.
This will affect you. So people can either choose to prepare or keep their head in the sand until it's too late. I've been storing food for a while now long before Corona. I knew the food shortages were coming but I did not expect them to blame it on Corona and to use this virus/alleged pandemic in order to ramp things up. You do not want to be outside when the panicked food rushes begin. They've already begun in many places.

I strongly suggest that everyone stores food, at least 3 months worth, ideally 1 year+ worth of food and supplies. This year might be the last year that we see consistently-stocked supermarket shelves. Ideally the best thing to do is to start growing your own food. You can grow microgreens and mushrooms inside an apartment for eg if you don't have space.
 
I strongly suggest that everyone stores food, at least 3 months worth, ideally 1 year+ worth of food and supplies. This year might be the last year that we see consistently-stocked supermarket shelves.

*facepalm*

The world's not ending Grimez. And fortunately unlike climate change this will actually happen fast so everyone will see who's right fairly quickly.

You don't need a years worth of supplies. You probably don't need 3 months worth of supplies.

Getting 2 weeks of supplies is smart.
Getting a month isn't a terrible idea, neither is a few months really. Not because there won't be food but because you won't have to expose yourself.

But a year?
"we might never see stocked shelves again".

That's over the top. There's no justification for that and telling everyone to do that is just going to cause food shortages for no good reason.

I find it so frustrating that I keep having to alternate between people who aren't taking Coronavirus nearly seriously enough, and those that really are blowing it out of all proportion.

So basically I'm accused of being an alarmist and having my head in the sand back and forth.
 
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Worst-case estimates for U.S. coronavirus deaths

by Sheri Fink | The New York Times | 13 Mar 2020

Projections based on C.D.C. scenarios show a potentially vast toll. But those numbers don’t account for interventions now underway.

The C.D.C. scenarios have not been publicly disclosed. Without an understanding of how experts view the threat, it remains unclear how far Americans will go in adopting socially disruptive steps that could help avert deaths.

Officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and epidemic experts from universities around the world conferred last month about what might happen if the new coronavirus gained a foothold in the United States. How many people might die? How many would be infected and need hospitalization?

One of the agency’s top disease modelers, Matthew Biggerstaff, presented the group on the phone call with four possible scenarios — A, B, C and D — based on characteristics of the virus, including estimates of how transmissible it is and the severity of the illness it can cause. The assumptions, reviewed by The New York Times, were shared with about 50 expert teams to model how the virus could tear through the population — and what might stop it.

The C.D.C.’s scenarios were depicted in terms of percentages of the population. Translated into absolute numbers by independent experts using simple models of how viruses spread, the worst-case figures would be staggering if no actions were taken to slow transmission.

Between 160 million and 214 million people in the United States could be infected over the course of the epidemic. "That could last months or even over a year, with infections concentrated in shorter periods, and staggered across time in different communities. As many as 200,000 to 1.7 million people could die," according to one projection.

And, the calculations based on the C.D.C.’s scenarios suggested, 2.4 million to 21 million people in the United States could require hospitalization, potentially crushing the nation’s medical system, which has only about 925,000 staffed hospital beds. Fewer than a tenth of those are for people who are critically ill.

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The assumptions fueling those scenarios are mitigated by the fact that cities, states, businesses and individuals are beginning to take steps to slow transmission, even if some are acting less aggressively than others. The C.D.C.-led effort is developing more sophisticated models showing how interventions might decrease the worst-case numbers, though their projections have not been made public.

“When people change their behavior," said Lauren Gardner, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering who models epidemics, “those model parameters are no longer applicable,” so short-term forecasts are likely to be more accurate. “There is a lot of room for improvement if we act appropriately.”

Those actions include testing for the virus, tracing contacts, and reducing human interactions by stopping mass gatherings, working from home and curbing travel. In just the last two days, multiple schools and colleges closed, sports events were halted or delayed, Broadway theaters went dark, companies barred employees from going to the office and more people said they were following hygiene recommendations.

The Times obtained screenshots of the C.D.C. presentation, which has not been released publicly, from someone not involved in the meetings. The Times then verified the data with several scientists who did participate. The scenarios were marked valid until Feb. 28, but remain “roughly the same,” according to Ira Longini, co-director of the Center for Statistics and Quantitative Infectious Diseases at the University of Florida. He has joined in meetings of the group.

The C.D.C. declined interview requests about the modeling effort and referred a request for comment to the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Devin O’Malley, a spokesman for the task force, said that senior health officials had not presented the findings to the group, led by Vice President Mike Pence, and that nobody in Mr. Pence’s office “has seen or been briefed on these models.”

The assumptions in the C.D.C.’s four scenarios, and the new numerical projections, fall in the range of others developed by independent experts.

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Dr. Longini said the scenarios he helped the C.D.C. refine had not been publicly disclosed because there remained uncertainty about certain key aspects, including how much transmission could occur from people who showed no symptoms or had only mild ones.

“We’re being very, very careful to make sure we have scientifically valid modeling that’s drawing properly on the epidemic and what’s known about the virus,” he said, warning that simple calculations could be misleading or even dangerous. “You can’t win. If you overdo it, you panic everybody. If you underdo it, they get complacent. You have to be careful.”

But without an understanding of how the nation’s top experts believe the virus could ravage the country, and what measures could slow it, it remains unclear how far Americans will go in adopting — or accepting — socially disruptive steps that could also avert deaths. And how quickly they will act.

Studies of previous epidemics have shown that the longer officials waited to encourage people to distance and protect themselves, the less useful those measures were in saving lives and preventing infections.

“A fire on your stove you could put out with a fire extinguisher, but if your kitchen is ablaze, that fire extinguisher probably won’t work,” said Dr. Carter Mecher, a senior medical adviser for public health at the Department of Veterans Affairs and a former director of medical preparedness policy at the White House during the Obama and Bush administrations. “Communities that pull the fire extinguisher early are much more effective.”

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From flu to coronavirus

Dr. Biggerstaff presented his scenarios in a meeting held weekly to model the pandemic’s effects in the United States, Dr. Longini said. Its participants had been at work for several months before the emergence of the virus, modeling a potential influenza pandemic. “We just kind of retooled, re-shifted,” said Dr. Longini. “The priority’s now coronavirus.”

The four scenarios have different parameters, which is why the projections range so widely. They variously assume that each person with the coronavirus would infect either two or three people; that the hospitalization rate would be either 3 percent or 12; and that either 1 percent or a quarter of a percent of people experiencing symptoms would die. Those assumptions are based on what is known so far about how the virus has behaved in other contexts, including in China.

Other weekly C.D.C. modeling meetings center on how the virus is spreading internationally, the impact of community actions such as closing schools, and estimating the supply of respirators, oxygen and other resources that could be needed by the nation’s health system, participants said.

In the absence of public projections from the C.D.C., outside experts have stepped in to fill the void, especially in health care. Hospital leaders have called for more guidance from the federal government as to what might lie in store in the coming weeks.

Even severe flu seasons stress the nation’s hospitals to the point of setting up tents in parking lots and keeping people for days in emergency rooms. Coronavirus is likely to cause five to 10 times that burden of disease, said Dr. James Lawler, an infectious diseases specialist and public health expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. "Hospitals need to start working now,” he said, “to get prepared to take care of a heck of a lot of people.”

Dr. Lawler recently presented his own “best guess” projections to American hospital and health system executives at a private webinar convened by the American Hospital Association. He estimated that some 96 million people in the United States would be infected. Five out of every hundred would need hospitalization, which would mean close to five million hospital admissions, nearly two million of those patients requiring intensive care and about half of those needing the support of ventilators.

Dr. Lawler’s calculations suggested 480,000 deaths, which he said was conservative. By contrast, about 20,000 to 50,000 people have died from flu-related illnesses this season, according to the C.D.C. Unlike with seasonal influenza, the entire population is thought to be susceptible to the new coronavirus.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaking at a congressional hearing on Thursday, said predictions based on models should be treated with caution. “All models are as good as the assumptions that you put into the model,” he said, responding to a question from Representative Rashida Tlaib about an estimate from the attending physician of Congress that the United States could have 70 million to 150 million coronavirus cases.

"What will determine the ultimate number," he said, “will be how you respond to it with containment and mitigation.”

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Clues From 1918

Independent experts said these projections were critically important to act on quickly. If new infections can be spread out over time rather than peaking all at once, there will be less burden on hospitals and a lower ultimate death count. "Slowing the spread will paradoxically make the outbreak last longer, but will cause it to be much milder," the modelers said.

A preliminary study released on Wednesday by the Institute for Disease Modeling projected that in the Seattle area, enhancing social distancing — limiting contact with groups of people — by 75 percent could reduce deaths caused by infections acquired in the next month from 400 to 30 in the region.

A recent paper, cited by Dr. Fauci at a news briefing on Tuesday, concludes that the rapid and aggressive quarantine and social distancing measures applied by China in cities outside of the outbreak’s epicenter achieved success. “Most countries only attempt social distancing and hygiene interventions when widespread transmission is apparent. This gives the virus many weeks to spread,” the paper said, "with the average number of people each new patient infects higher than if the measures were in place much earlier, even before the virus is detected in the community."

“By the time you have a death in the community, you have a lot of cases already,”
said Dr. Mecher. “It’s giving you insight into where the epidemic was, not where it is, when you have something fast moving.” He added: “Think starlight. That light isn’t from now, it’s from however long it took to get here.”

He said a single targeted step — a school closing, or a limit on mass gatherings — cannot stop an outbreak on its own. But as with Swiss cheese, layering them together can be effective.

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This conclusion is backed up by history

The most lethal pandemic to hit the United States was the 1918 Spanish flu, which was responsible for about 675,000 American deaths, according to estimates cited by the C.D.C.

The Institute for Disease Modeling calculated that the new coronavirus is roughly equally transmissible as the 1918 flu, and just slightly less clinically severe, and it is higher in both transmissibility and severity compared with all other flu viruses in the past century.

Dr. Mecher and other researchers studied deaths during that pandemic a century ago, comparing the experiences of various cities, including what were then America’s third- and fourth-largest, Philadelphia and St Louis. In October of that year Dr. Rupert Blue, America’s surgeon general, urged local authorities to “close all public gathering places if their community is threatened with the epidemic,” such as schools, churches, and theaters. “There is no way to put a nationwide closing order into effect,” he wrote, “as this is a matter which is up to the individual communities.”

The mayor of St. Louis quickly took that advice, closing for several weeks “theaters, moving picture shows, schools, pool and billiard halls, Sunday schools, cabarets, lodges, societies, public funerals, open air meetings, dance halls and conventions until further notice.” The death rate rose, but stayed relatively flat over that autumn.

By contrast, Philadelphia took none of those measures; the epidemic there had started before Dr. Blue’s warning. Its death rate skyrocketed.

The speed and deadliness of the pandemic humbled doctors then much as the coronavirus pandemic is doing now. Some commented on the difficulty of getting healthy people to take personal precautions to help protect others at greater risk.

Modern societies have tools that did not exist then: advanced hospitals, the possibility of producing a vaccine in roughly a year, the production of diagnostics. But other signs are more worrying.

The world population is about triple the size it was the year before the 1918 flu, with 10 times as many people over 65 and 30 times as many over 85. These groups have proven especially likely to become critically ill and die in the current coronavirus pandemic. In Italy, hospitals are so overwhelmed that ventilators are being rationed.

“It’s so important that we protect them,” said Dr. Gabriel Leung, a professor in population health at Hong Kong University. In work accepted for publication in the journal Nature Medicine, he estimated that 1.5 percent of symptomatic people with the virus died. He and others who have devoted their careers to modeling said that looking at the experiences of other countries already battling the coronavirus was all it took to know what needed to be done in the United States.

“All U.S. cities and states have the natural experiment of the cities that have preceded us, namely the superb response of Singapore and Hong Kong,” said Dr. Michael Callahan, an infectious disease specialist at Harvard. Those countries implemented school closures, eliminated mass gatherings, required work from home, and rigorously decontaminated their public transportation and infrastructure. They also conducted widespread testing.

"They were able to reduce an explosive epidemic to a steady state one,” Dr. Callahan said.

"As in the case of an approaching hurricane," Dr. Mecher said, “you’ve got to take potentially very disruptive actions when the sun is shining and the breeze is mild.”

 
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Kinda not nice. I mean I hate North Korea too. But there's a big difference between the Kim family, directly responsible for just about everything bad about North Korea. And the general public.

And unlike most countries, the distinction between the general public and the military is pretty low because they have universal conscription for males.

So.. Keep in mind that there's really no difference between being happy North Korean soldiers are dying, and being happy North Korean civilians are dying.

These aren't people living in luxury while others starve. These are just more victims of the Kim regime.
Kinda not nice ?

Are you kidding me?
 
Come on mods, TLB, the, beyond a joke at this point.

He didn't attack Koreans for being Korean, he attacked Korean soldiers. Which I still think is wrong but it's not the same as being racist.

The key difference is, "are you saying they deserve it because they're Korean, or because they're assisting a government you believe is corrupt". The former isn't likely to be allowed, the latter is. The former is based on who you are, the latter is based on what you did.

The other consideration is that the BLUA serves bluelight, not some abstract sense of social justice. So it's considered how likely the offended party is to be here to be offended. That's why insults to public figures are tolerated but not to people here. The purpose is to reduce harm to the members of bluelight.

There are likely no north Korean bluelighters. But there are almost certainly black, LGBT bluelighters etc. So an attack to a party that most likely isn't here is a lot more likely to be considered within the realm of acceptable.

Id really rather not bring this up again here.. If someone wants to post this in the site technical help moderator abuse thread I'd be happy to discuss it there further. Otherwise if it keeps coming up here I'll have to move it there.
 
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The world's not ending Grimez. And fortunately unlike climate change this will actually happen fast so everyone will see who's right fairly quickly.
This has been happening for quite a while but most people are just completely oblivious because they don't follow closely what governments are doing in regards to food production, shipping and trading. I've been storing food for a while now since before Corona. The few people that I warned back then didn't take me seriously but have lately been calling me up with quite a bit of concern telling me that they think I was right all along (I have to give credit to people like David DuBuyne/Adapt 2030 and Christian/Ice Age Farmer for their videos following the silent news.) One reason you're not hearing about these shortages is so not to induce real panic. What's been happening is some of the worst farming/planting seasons on record. Super cold temperatures, frost, heavy rain and floods has fucked a huge area of farmland in North America and elsewhere. These researchers are speaking to the actual farmers who are sending them photos and giving them updates. It's not looking good. The governments know what's going on and USDA figures are not matching what's happening on the ground. China has been buying up farmland all across the world and controlling a lot of the food supply. They have a lot of mouths to feed. Don't be so sure that your local supermarket is always going to have a plentiful amount of food on the shelves. We've experienced shortages and famines in many other countries and it could happen in the developed world.

You don't need a years worth of supplies. You probably don't need 3 months worth of supplies.
This is just terrible advice especially since you're completely oblivious of what's actually happening around the world. There's a reason why people have been so long conditioned to make fun of preppers. You're still in that mode probably however all of a sudden to a lot of people preppers don't seem that crazy anymore. If what is being predicted actually happens and it looks like it will, then even a year's worth might not be enough. We're going to have to actually produce our own food.

That's over the top. There's no justification for that and telling everyone to do that is just going to cause food shortages for no good reason..
The people in this forum are gonna cause shortages? I only tell this to my family and close friends but now I'm telling more people because it's time. The ones who will have a MUCH easier time are the ones who will prepare. And I really don't want to say "I told you so" and you're completely fucked I'd rather you at least took enough notice to do some research yourself. For more info watch the channels bolded above. This is literally an issue of survival so before you make a decision you better be damn sure you're right.

I find it so frustrating that I keep having to alternate between people who aren't taking Coronavirus nearly seriously enough, and those that really are blowing it out of all proportion.
Shortages were gonna happen anyway, corona has been a catalyst. Or a convenient excuse to explain the food problems.

So basically I'm accused of being an alarmist and having my head in the sand back and forth.
Yes this is the evil trick that they've pulled. They've got people freaking out about warming (which is beneficial) while the cooling and flooding is decimating our food system. I wish with all of my being that all of these climate protesters were protesting for the right reasons. Unfortunately now they're going to be completely unprepared for what's in store (pun intended)
 
OK right so..

We aren't hearing about food shortages because it'd cause a panic. but also the media is promoting panic everywhere. Probably to take down trump.

How does that track?
Is the media just publishing anything that'll cause a panic?
Or is the media suppressing information so as not to cause a panic.

I feel like "the media" means different things to you or IS different things depending on the context.
 
For some reason there haven't been bananas at the last two groceries I went to. Those are extremely perishable, so it doesn't make a lot of sense that people would be buying them like this. I wonder if it is at some other point in production that they have been slowed... Also, potatoes I noticed are gone--completely from the local store here. Chicken was almost non-existent. Much of the beef-like meats gone, but still a lot. Fish - my choice of meat, is still plentiful. I think people are trying not to panic, too, but they are perceiving anxiety and panic in others (and the media does increase this sense), and that is in-turn causing them to buy up a lot of product/food, so that they don't get left out. I even made sure to buy some more today than usual. I thought about asking the stores if business is good (showing humor). There is still A LOT of food on the shelves, though, but people do seem to be preparing for a series of snow days or something.

I wonder if rationing was something that should have been enacted, before all of this. There should have been a plan, for instance, if there should have been, to temporarily take control of the supply, the warehouses where things are stored, to trickle it at just the right pace to weather a storm, and for stores to force-limit purchases, to stop people from buying everything. Only problem with that is some people could potentially riot if it got bad, perceiving limitation of their freedoms, and stores could in-turn be ransacked. Not thinking it's going to get there, but I don't think we were prepared for this...I think such a "rationing" could be done with good leadership, a calming father-figure of a leader, that people listen to, trust, that the media isn't trying to tear down at every turn. If he explained - rationally, the situation, what we can expect, and that it will be tough, but we're going this way, and it will alright (and this is why...). Trump's not really that guy. His reaction, of seeming outright dismissal at points, of the danger, of his position, only makes people feel like nobody is following any sort of leader/order, and more panicked.

I watched this video - not sure if okay to be posted here, or if it should go into the political videos thread: I don't agree with this guy's language, or words he uses, 100%, but he's right enough or on the mark enough to consider.

Apparently in California, there are children who would otherwise be vulnerable of not getting enough food, like illegal immigrant children that get free lunches at schools, for instance, and this is slowing down the response to close schools; the people are afraid that they won't get fed, if they aren't in school, so they're keeping schools open. This is at least named as a concern for closing schools. There is also the fact that both parents work, in many cases. This is an issue with healthcare workers, too- Most nurses have children, or a good number of them do at least, and they can't exactly not be at work right now...

This person - and many others, uses the current case of pandemic/outbreak to criticize mass immigration, and the way the "left" would take us, with a more open world. Mass immigration drives down wages/devalues the worker (less demand for workers, plenty who will do it for less...) in many instances, and has led to the state we're in where both parents have to work (big tax money loves this...hey funny our census comes with the coronavirus?). In a time like this, or a worse outbreak, it would make total sense to have stuck to the traditional system of mother stays at home and takes care of home and kids. Nationalism makes sense. Enforcement of borders makes sense/having limited channels that one is allowed to move through makes sense. He and others are using this, to call into question, legitimately globalism/globalization, and even in some respect celebrating this as revealing of the vulnerabilities of it.

 
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OK right so..

We aren't hearing about food shortages because it'd cause a panic. but also the media is promoting panic everywhere. Probably to take down trump.

How does that track?
Is the media just publishing anything that'll cause a panic?
Or is the media suppressing information so as not to cause a panic.

I feel like "the media" means different things to you or IS different things depending on the context.

I can't really answer this question because while I do think corona-chan was engineered and came out of the bio-lab, I don't know if it was released on purpose or by accident. Both scenarios have good points but you know the saying "never let a good crisis go to waste". This is good and bad for China. It could also have been an attack against Trump? Who knows look at the timing (election) and Trump was waging serious trade war with China. Now all of a sudden he's shaking hands with someone who was corona-positive.

Meanwhile China had to kill 50-70% of their pigs (hundreds of millions) because African Swine Flu. Then the Chinese people especially before Chinese New Year were getting very angry that pork was getting super expensive and scarce. The govt had to release 20,000 tons of frozen pork from their reserves. So that was a problem for the government but was not any longer after they released the official story of COVID19 coming from a meat source in China. Also the Hong Kong protests were ramping up seriously threatening the CCP and so that problem has been handled.

As for the hysteria I think the media's doing it for clicks and money but the information emanates from governments who are using this as a massive distraction from a lot of rising anti-government sentiment. Basically they're outlawing assembly and any protesting on a global level. Government has now ramped up their control - for our safety of course. Maybe these are sensible decisions considering how contagious the virus is and how we don't know too much about it + it could mutate, but I also see this as a convenient way to explain away what was coming anyway (climate-induced global famine).
 
Yeah, it's so much more likely to be from a biolab and not be the natural pandemic that was ALWAYS inevitable and probably over due.
 
Remember when Jussie committed that attack and everyone believed the official story but it turned out the "conspiracy theory" was actually true? It's probably the same here. China will never admit the virus came from the lab as they'll lose face. It was in their interests to blame it on the food (specifically meat) supply.

 
This why arguing with you is pointless. There's piles of experts saying it couldn't be lab made. But you don't trust them, you trust YouTube randoms. Cause they tell you what you wanna hear.
 
US senators have discussed on open video about the real possibility its come from wuhans virus lab. These lock downs never happened during swine and bird flu at this scale. The real truth is that this virus is bio engineered and it escaped and now the whole world governments are shit scared.
 
US senator says engineered. Expert says no way.

If this were politics I might listen to the senator but it's not. They have no background to make such a claim.

There is zero good evidence it's bio engineered. Just that there happened to be a lab nearby.

While on the other hand such a pandemic was inevitable and was always likely to happen in a place like where it did. With regular human animal contact and lots of people.

But no, people pick the substantially less likely possibility even if you don't believe the experts.

People are already talking like it being engineered is a fact when there's no real evidence for it at all.
 
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