Quote (Thor123422 @ Mar 8 2020 02:32pm)

Exactly because Ebola is such a quick acting and lethal disease it limits how fast the disease can spread. We will never see a worldwide Ebola epidemic because it is so easily visible and immediately lethal.

A 90% lethality of 30,000 people is less concerning than a 2% lethality of a billion.

Quote (OverDoSex @ Mar 8 2020 03:36pm)

I think we just got lucky with where ground zero was.

Quote (ofthevoid @ Mar 8 2020 04:17pm)

Many of those people die regardless because of a million other ailments and we just attribute them to 'well they died of old age'.

For example:

But i don't think it would be reasonable to shut down societies even though this above fact is reality. How many old people die because of minor infections? How many die because of some trauma from falling down?

I'm not saying do nothing, but people need to put this into perspective. This isn't the plague or Ebola.

Quote (IceMage @ Mar 8 2020 04:42pm)

Just to be clear, you're arguing that old people can die of other ailments anyway, so we shouldn't be shutting down schools and avoiding crowds to save potentially tens or hundreds of thousands of lives already on their way out?

Quote (ofthevoid @ Mar 8 2020 04:52pm)

Good job at putting words in my mouth. I was purposely vague on what should or shouldn't be done, it depends.

Avoiding crowds is a good idea if your city has a ton of infections, temporarily suspending flights from places like Wuhan or Milan is a good idea. Wholesale shutdowns of cities is a bad idea. Printing garbage like "tens of millions could possibly get infected we need hundreds of thousands of hospital beds like nao!11!!" also shitty idea.

Today i went to the park with my wife, tons of families there. After went to the supermarket, again tons of people shopping and the store is not less busy than any other Sunday. Point is, if you look at all the facts, we don't need to create a panic.

Quote (ofthevoid @ Mar 8 2020 08:57pm)

The mean age of people dying of the corona virus is somewhere between 70-80 years old. This is an already vulnerable population which has increased death rates even for things like the flu or a common cold.

A study has already been done and shows that the risk of people under 40 dying of this stands at around .2 %. For those under 60 it goes up to 1%. Many of the people who already died already had serious other illnesses that compromised their immune systems.

https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-death-age-older-people-higher-risk-2020-2

Secondly, we are getting these rates from people who tested positive for covid. A good portion of people don't go to the doctors/hospitals for flu like symptoms. Maybe because i'm young but I've literally never been to the doctors for the flu nor do i know anyone who's an adult that usually goes to the doctor for things like the flu. People that usually do go are parents with small children or older people or people with preexisting conditions who are sensitive to illnesses . So what this means is that in reality, the reported infections are a fraction of the actually infected people. If you increase the denominator of the actual infections that 3% fatality rate becomes extremely inflated. In China, is it 3000 death out of like 90,000 or 3000 deaths out of like 500,000 but the other 400,000 just sat home and let their immune system beat out the virus?

So the tl;dr? If you aren't in your 70s or 80s and have and okay immune systems you're going to be fine. The sky isn't falling.

Quote (fender @ Mar 8 2020 04:50pm)

as a general observation, i think it's pretty revealing, and frankly rather disheartening that you can frequently tell an american's political affiliation, just by how they talk about covid-19.

in most other countries, this is a largely apolitical issue - at least as far as i'm aware of. people are overwhelmingly listening to the advice of experts and scientists, and generally err on the side of caution. only in a politically so deeply divided nation would you have a significant portion of the population try to downplay the danger, and shame cautious or even just responsible behaviour as 'hysteria', and simultaneously suggest the other side was just using this very real threat as a political tool (the projection is real).

i can't imagine any european country, for example, where voters of the ruling party would not question their leadership for previous actions, that significantly weakened the country's response to a possible pandemic, for continued attempts to marginalise the issue, ignore expert advice, repeatedly lie about easily refutable facts on national tv - and instead twist themselves into pretzels trying to defend such irresponsible behaviour.

Quote (Thor123422 @ Mar 8 2020 09:42pm)

We actually got very unlucky. An ebola ground zero in the United States would have resulted in a dozen infections and then nothing. The only reason why the ebola outbreak lasted so long is because it was in an area with sub-par medical care and quarantine procedures.

Diseases that are highly lethal burn themselves out and are incredibly easy to spot and contain. Diseases with low lethality can spread and infect many people over long periods of time.

Quote (Djunior @ Mar 8 2020 04:18pm)

Ebola is much more lethal than Covid19 but spreads much slower. You cannot compare the two