She has allergies and was assuring me that it was not the Wuhan virus. Also, I'm in Texas and she had a heavy Russian accent, so I guess she assumed we could bond over racism.
Don't even have to be Chinese to have people freak out. It's been pretty eye-opening to see how people react when you say you live in China. At least I have the privilege of self-identifying instead of simply looking a certain way. People really suck when they don't understand something. Also, there's some fuckery happening with the numbers the last couple days. The confirmed cases were leveling off, but today there was a huge jump. No bueno. Fortunately, the deaths are staying relatively consistent. Edit: A decent explanation for the spike...numbers are likely to be pretty rough the next few days, but hopefully it's just a day or two of spiking with the new classification.
In case anyone misses it, this is mostly due to a course correction to normalize what "counts" as a confirmed case. By the previous standard, the trend hasn't really changed and is continuing to plateau a bit. Thanks for posting that graph, shaolin5 Essentially, you can spread that last bar over the bars dating back to the start of February to account for the clinically diagnosed cases (not confirmed via diagnostic test).
Probably a little bit of that for sure, as it's not simple to determine this time of the year with other causes of death in play from "normal" maladies. The exponential trend isn't all that unexpected in an outbreak like this.
answering my own question https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/...k-estimated-peak-wuhan-mid-late-february-2020
Yeah, I edited my post above with details on what changed. The number of new cases using the same method as before is "only" 1508.
More like "anti-Chinese" than "anti-China". Which pisses me off. Any excuse to use racism will work for a racist.
Interesting development...coronavirus study group suggesting it should be called SARS-2 and isn't all that novel of a virus, but also suggests there's a lot more to know and study (obviously): https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.07.937862v1.full.pdf
the old lady next to me on the airport shuttle last night looked pretty concerned at my violent coughing reality was I had a sunflower seed halfway lodged in my throat
it is over. nothing to see here California lab says it discovered coronavirus vaccine in 3 hours foxbusiness.com/techno...
Spoiler My boss just told me that there have been over 20,000 MDs dispatched to Hubei province to date. That is a wild number.
Downside of working for a worldwide company is getting coronavirus updates my heart skips a beat for a second when I read the subject line but only refers to mainland China activities
Guess it's all good since it's not impacting you in Britain directly. (Sorry, I'm a bit testy tonight)
County health systems are doing self-quarantines in the U.S. My colleague who flew through Wuhan on Jan 10 had to quarantine in China for 14 days and then self-quarantine stateside once her and her husband returned ~10 days ago.
Spoiler: Article When an infection erupts the way coronavirus has exploded in Wuhan, China, and elsewhere in the world, public-health experts try to gauge the potential for an epidemic—or, worse, a pandemic—by calculating the pathogen’s basic reproduction number. The figure, generally written as R0 and pronounced “R naught,” is an estimate of how many healthy people one contagious person will infect. Because viruses spread exponentially, a few cases can quickly blow up to an overwhelming number. An R0 of two suggests a single infection will, on average, become two, then four, then eight. Until the infection is contained or runs its course, the doubling will continue. But a pathogen’s basic reproduction number assumes everyone is susceptible to infection. Thanks to vaccines and other conditions, that often isn’t the case, and the effective reproduction number is lower. When the new strain of coronavirus began to infect humans, there was nothing to slow its progression. From One to Many Minor differences in R0, or transmission rates, for viruses can lead to drastic differences in the number of overall infections. The new coronavirus outbreak has an R0 of 1.5 to 3.5 according to an estimate made in late January. If four people were infected with the new coronavirus... ...with an R0 rate of 1.5, they would infect six more... ...who would infect nine more and so on. But with an R0 rate of 3.5, they would infect 14 more... ...who would infect 49 more and so on. Source: MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at the Imperial College London Because the disease, which experts have named Covid-19, is infecting humans for the first time, there is no conferred immunity from previous exposure or vaccination. Everyone can potentially catch it, and, according to the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London, the virus has an R0 of 1.5 to 3.5. “Right now, coronavirus is much more of a concern than SARS ever was,” said Steven Riley, a professor of infectious-disease dynamics at Imperial College, referring to the global outbreak in 2003, when 8,096 people got sick and 774 died. “The main reason is our estimate of the number of people who are currently infectious is higher than the maximum who were ever infectious at one time with SARS.” Covid-19 and severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, are both caused by coronaviruses, a family of viruses that causes infections ranging from the common cold to severe respiratory illness. So far, China’s national health commission has reported more than 59,000 cases of Covid-19 and at least 1,300 deaths. In addition, at least 447 cases have been confirmed in 24 other countries, according to the World Health Organization, including 15 infections in the U.S. Because many cases go undetected, the actual total is probably far higher. TRACKING THE CORONAVIRUS VIEW IN DEPTH Monitoring in China is likely picking up 10% or less of all infections there, according to Neil Ferguson, director of the MRC Centre. In other countries, it’s probably picking up around 25%. “Where we’ll look next is Hong Kong and Singapore,” Dr. Riley said. “We may see a growth phase there next,” although, he added, researchers haven’t yet seen exponential growth outside of mainland China. To estimate the potential spread, researchers at Imperial College began with two pieces of information: the time when the virus emerged, in December, and the fact that seven travelers who left Wuhan were confirmed to have Covid-19. SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS Which precautions have you been taking to shield yourself from the coronavirus outbreak? Join the conversation below. To extrapolate how many other people were infected, they observed that 19 million people were in the greater Wuhan area, and on average, 3,301 traveled internationally daily. “If you divide 19 million by 3,301, you get the per day probability of international travel,” said Dr. Riley, who was a member of the team that generated the estimate. “That’s approximately a 1 in 5,755 chance of traveling per day.” The researchers next assumed there was a 10-day window in which an infected traveler might be detected. “If we’ve got 10 days to detect, we’ve got 5,755 divided by 10, or a 1-in-576 chance of detecting a case,” Dr. Riley said. “You’re only going to pick up one in every 576 cases.” They multiplied 576 cases by seven, the number of confirmed sick travelers, to come up with an estimate of 4,032 likely cases in Wuhan by Jan. 23, the end of the period they examined. Taking the confidence bounds into account, Dr. Riley said, the figure could have been as low as 1,700 or as high as 7,800. “Often, such a wide range doesn’t have any value,” he said. “But in this case, it’s useful because the lower bound was significantly higher than the reported severe cases.” Based on this information, the researchers estimated the virus’s growth rate and assumed that, like SARS, an average of 8.4 days elapsed between the time one person caught the virus and then infected others—what is known as the generation time. “If you know how fast it’s growing and the average time between generations, you can say what is the average number of offspring each case has,” Dr. Riley said. They concluded the number ranged from 1.5 to 3.5, or a central estimate of 2.6. To control the virus, they estimated that more than 60% of transmissions need to be blocked. At this stage, it’s too soon to tell how well quarantines and other interventions are working, but experts expect the infections will continue to spread. “I think it is likely we’ll see a global pandemic,” said Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “If a pandemic happens, 40% to 70% of people world-wide are likely to be infected in the coming year. What proportion of those will be symptomatic, I can’t give a good number.”
Coronavirus: China’s fear of mass job losses looms large as Covid-19 takes toll on economy As more people return to work across China following extended holidays or work from home arrangements to combat the coronavirus outbreak, some are now worried the resulting economic slowdown will result in job losses. The coronavirus, which causes the disease now officially known as Covid-19, had led to the death of over 1,300 people in China, while infecting around 60,000. It has wrecked havoc on economic activities across the country, with firms faced with tough decision whether to reduce staff levels and wages to be able to survive. On Monday, when many companies reopened after a longer than usual Lunar New Year break, LvYue Group, a tourism and resort company backed by industry giant trip.com formally known as ctrip, announced it was cutting the working hours and salaries of staff from executive level and above by 30 per cent. The company, which employs thousands of staff to run around 1,900 hotels and hostels globally near popular tourist attractions, many of which have all been forced to close due to coronavirus fears, blamed plunging revenues for the decision. China’s Hubei province reports huge spike in coronavirus cases, rising 10-fold from previous day The letter from CEO Zhang Qiang was partly in response to reports last week that the company planned to start massive lay-offs, with LvYue Group later confirming job cuts due to the deteriorating business conditions would be less than 20 per cent. Zhang did not address the lay-offs in the letter, but said the company would try to stay competitive by “reducing all possible expenses, removing bad business segments, and ending losses and non-quality growth”. Xinchao Media, a large advertising firm, laid off 500 people across 80 cities on Monday, which accounted for around 10 per cent of its total workforce. Chief executive Zhang Jixue said that business decreased 70 per cent in February, with the possibility that the impact of the virus could continue into the second quarter of 2020 weighing on the decision. Last week, a Beijing-based education firm specialising on coding skills also dismissed all its of staff, while a karaoke company in China’s capital city released a plan to lay-off more than 200 employees. At a high-level meeting on Wednesday, President Xi Jinping said local governments must work hard to “ensure the general stability of the job market”, while Premier Li Keqiang made it clear that China must avoid “large-scale job cuts”. The coronavirus outbreak has put millions of people in limbo, particularly those in restaurants, hotels and retail stores, with formal job losses looming if the situation does not start to improve. Liu Qingfeng, who runs a small marketing firm in Beijing, said he could keep his business running as normal for up to two months, but if the virus continued for three months, he would have to consider significant lay-offs. A Shenzhen-based seller of imported wine, who asked not to be identified, said she was not considering lay-offs at the moment and planned to wait out the virus. I want to echo the government’s call for not laying off people. But how? What about March? April? I think the virus will be over in May. I am too tired Shenzhen-based seller of imported wine unemployment figures for January and February not set to be released until March. In December, the official unemployment rate was 5.2 per cent. In 2003, which included the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) outbreak, around 8 million people lost their jobs, according to official Chinese data, although real job losses may have been much higher because government data did not cover most migrant workers. Amid the coronavirus outbreak, China’s statistics agency is asking local staff to carefully conduct unemployment surveys. On Wednesday, the National Bureau of Statistics told local statistics staff that the employment situation had shown “complicated changes never seen before”. “There are few people on the street, and in tourism, catering, entertainment and other industries that have chosen to suspend business, while online education, games, takeaway delivery and other industries have rapidly increased demand,” the bureau said. In response to the outbreak, efforts have been made to expand the range of firms who can receive subsidies for “stabilising employment.” For small and medium enterprises, as long as they do not lay-off 5.5 per cent of their staff – the target for national unemployment rate in 2019 – they can still apply for subsidies. For smaller firms that employ less than 30 people, the ratio has been increased to 20 per cent. E-commerce companies in China offer temporary jobs to thousands amid coronavirus outbreak Local governments have also introduced a slew of policies from reducing rents to encouraging bank to lend money at favourable interest rates, but according to entrepreneur Wu Hai, only few of the incentives will help private, small businesses. Wu, who runs a karaoke chain that could leave 1,500 people without jobs and result in losses of around 400 million yuan (US$57 million) if it went bankrupt, said in a viral online post that addressing labour costs should have the largest benefit since it accounts for 62 per cent of his expenses. But many local government have only asked companies to negotiate wages with employees and delay payment of mandatory social security contributions. “The social security contribution is one of the largest burdens that crush us. The current situation is: the government doesn’t allow my company to operate. But you still have to pay all the money you are supposed to do – just a bit later,” Wu said.
You’ll never believe that the rapist grifter, money launderer, mail fraud, wire fraud, hush money payer had Alan Dershowitz as his lawyer. Served just 5 years after being sentenced to 45 from being convicted of 24 felonies. Can’t wait til guys like him, Falwell, Swaggart, Osteen are all in Hell