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[Reelya]

Come on

"I'm not sure that half a bag of mouldy Idaho potatoes is a good candidate".
"It's not Trump"
"Lord Potato-face, you have my vote".

[Toady One]

I know things are quite thingful right now (in Washington we are starting to get our portion for sure), but please tone down the "it is good the elderly are going to die" chatter.

[SalmonGod]

Anyone have a link or otherwise decent explanation as to why Covid-19 is deserving of this hysteria, anyway?  It feels exactly the same as the H1N1 panic in 2009, which killed like 1/3 as many people as the normal flu, despite being officially declared a national emergency.  The statistics available as far as I can tell for Covid-19 don't communicate anything to me that's worthy of the attention it's getting.  Not currently from the average person, anyway.  I understand it has the potential to turn into something worse, and that's worthy of attention and management by governments.  But for the moment for the purposes of the common person's individual calculus, what I see is that 1 in 805,000 people in the USA are infected, and there's only been 1 confirmed case in my state.  The chances of me getting it from exposure to a crowd are astronomically low.  Yet my kid tells me that his classmates are wearing masks to school or their parents are forcing them to stay home.  Seems a bit much.  Seems like your typical disaster capitalism and sensationalized fear culture hysteria.

[Reelya]

Anyone have a link or otherwise decent explanation as to why Covid-19 is deserving of this hysteria, anyway?

The disease has the capacity to kill several million Americans. Currently they're stating about 3.5% mortality and while that's a lot lower than some diseases, it's about 30 times the Flu, and this thing spreads fairly easily. The point here is nobody is immune so you'd have to assume just about everyone may get it eventually, and if you did the math at 3% fatalities, that's 10 million deaths in the USA. The hysteria is because we need to be on top of this. Unchecked spread at current estimates would kill about 200 million people worldwide.

If it gets entrenched as a seasonal thing that you just expect to get, then it has the right properties that instead of 20000-60000 deaths a year from flu, it could be hitting 200,000 plus a year. Also, even if it doesn't kill you if you have an elderly relative then it's pretty toxic for them, so your family better look out.

[Quarque]

Anyone have a link or otherwise decent explanation as to why Covid-19 is deserving of this hysteria, anyway?

First off, I agree that you can call it hysteria. Part of it is media hype. But part of it is legitimate worry.

The fear is because Covid-19 has this nasty combination of characteristics:

- hard to detect, because symptoms overlap with flu/cold and often mild
- Can transfer in the same ways as the flu and common cold
- the death rate is not yet known exactly, but most likely above 1%

This combination means it is very hard to stop the disease from spreading to a majority of the population. The number of known cases right now may not look threatening, but it can spread at an exponential rate.
Once that happens, you are looking at a total death toll in the millions, just in the US. Not unlike the Spanish Flu outbreak, over a century ago.

It's outrageous that the most wealthy nation on earth is failing hard to take appropriate measures. Look at South Korea, where anyone at risk is being tested in a matter of hours. In the USA, the real number of infections is certainly much higher already than the number detected.

For more information, I would recommend starting with the WHO.

[Reelya]

Also, the 1 in 805000 thing is clearly completely wrong. That's just the number of people who've been confirmed from testing, and it's acknowledged that they completely dropped the ball on testing. at the point where South Korea had conducted 65,000 tests, America had completed only 450. Of course the figure will be low if you test less than 1% of the amount of people. So another thing is just not knowing since the officials have no idea.

[delphonso]

It's a cool way to draw attention away from more immediate existential threats. Also, almost everyone is easily swayed by charts that show Covid19 as being 700x more infectious than SARS (due to advances in medicine and infrastructure, but you know.)

[SalmonGod]

It's a cool way to draw attention away from more immediate existential threats. Also, almost everyone is easily swayed by charts that show Covid19 as being 700x more infectious than SARS (due to advances in medicine and infrastructure, but you know.)

That's the sense I keep getting.  There was some really unpopular political stuff happening around the time H1N1 was blowing up.  This gives me similar vibes.  I understand that it legitimately has the potential to turn into a horrific pandemic.  But the media and cultural response over the last couple months seems completely disproportionate to the level of threat it poses in an immediate sense to the average person.  Yes, it could pose a much greater threat in the future.  But right now it doesn't.  Right now it doesn't seem like it makes too much sense to be extremely paranoid about crowds in most parts of the world or to wear a mask all the time, and that isn't likely to suddenly change overnight.  This has already been going on for months, after all.  But the hysteria in spite of that when everyone is also pissed off at various political and economic issues feels exactly the same as 2009.

Also, the 1 in 805000 thing is clearly completely wrong. That's just the number of people who've been confirmed from testing, and it's acknowledged that they completely dropped the ball on testing.

And I did stipulate that everything I said was based on currently available data.

[Quarque]

It's a cool way to draw attention away from more immediate existential threats.

Well in a more general sense I would agree that there is a sore lack of actual discussion of political issues, when it comes to politics.

So much focus on the latest tweets / insults / BS. Who here can explain, without looking it up, how Biden and Bernie differ on foreign affairs, to name a random policy topic? If you don't know, it is because there is zero discussion about it. Warrens dog got more attention than her policy proposals.

[SalmonGod]

It's a cool way to draw attention away from more immediate existential threats.

Fixed the quote attribution for you there.

Well in a more general sense I would agree that there is a sore lack of actual discussion of political issues, when it comes to politics.

So much focus on the latest tweets / insults / BS. Who here can explain, without looking it up, how Biden and Bernie differ on foreign affairs, to name a random policy topic? If you don't know, it is because there is zero discussion about it. Warrens dog got more attention than her policy proposals.

Without looking it up, I know that Bernie voted against the Iraq War, while Biden was one of the architects of it.  I'm pretty sure Bernie has spoken out against military adventurism, imperialism, and regime change in general.  And Bernie dared to speak in favor of Palestinians deserving human rights, which very few Democrats or Republicans have done.

I know I don't pay attention to politics in the same way the average person does, though.  At the same time, aside from being generally anti-war and wanting a reduction in military spending, foreign policy and global geopolitics aren't subjects I pay close attention to for the most part.

[Quarque]

Fixed the quote attribution for you there.

Ah you're right, sorry about that.

I mentioned foreign policy just as a random issue, but good job on being able to sum up as much. Just a nuance that I think deserves mentioning is that Joe Biden did also recently advocate for Palestinian human rights at the AIPAC, specifically mentioning a return to peace negotiations and a two-state solution.

Bernie Sanders refused to ever show up at the AIPAC in the first place, which says a lot about how they differ on this subject. 

[Max™]

This isn't a situation where people are being hysterical saying it might become a pandemic but probably won't.

This is a pandemic, the transmission rate of normal flu is something around 1.0, this is a bit over 2.5 as I recall, so that's bad.
It is novel so we have no pre-existing immunity, so that's bad.
It stews and incubates for a week or so before anyone really shows symptoms and knows to avoid crowds or seek help, so that's bad.
It can knock you on your ass for weeks to a month so whatever you needed to get done between now and late april might be fucked if people aren't around to do the various infrastructurey tasks which so much we do relies on, so that's bad.
After you start getting better it can apparently reinfect and seems far more dangerous the second time, so that's bad.
We are already low on hospital beds, ventilators, ICU slots, masks, and lots of other things, so that's bad.

Now here's the fun part: Trump started sabotaging the CDC two years ago, and when he started being told that we need to prepare and try to prevent a full blown pandemic he ignored it, when it became impossible to ignore he told people it's fine to go back to work and that they should ignore it while killing the reporting of negative test results/testing of cruise ships to make the number of reported cases look lower to make himself look better, so that's politics and bad.

[Reelya]

The reinfect thing is actually misleading.

https://www.zmescience.com/science/a-startling-number-of-coronavirus-patients-get-reinfected/

"A startling number of coronavirus patients get reinfected"
^ Headline. Ignore this.

Here are the important bits:

a group of patients that had recovered from the virus tested positive again in follow-up controls. ...  14% of the patients that had recovered from the coronavirus showed new signs of it in later check-ups. 

Ok, sounds bad right ? Except:

A total of 13 discharged patients tested positive again but didn’t show renewed symptoms, according to Li Yueping, director of the intensive care unit at the hospital.

Ok, so this so-called "reinfection" doesn't actually have any symptoms! So, what is it? ...

The tests were done from anal swabs, a method not used much in other parts of China. But there’s a reason behind it: the virus was found in fecal samples in research done by Guangzhou Medical University, and since then hospitals in Guandong have started doing anal swab tests.

Righto, so it's still in their poop. That's the actual story here. No evidence whatsoever of "reinfection", unless Stage 2 of the disease is contracted via your butt. Buttception.

The moral to the story is wash your hands well after pooping and don't dig around in sick people's poop.

EDIT: Rather than fearing getting reinfected with the respiratory condition, the more important lesson here isn't being communicated by the media.

[Dunamisdeos]

The moral to the story is wash your hands well after pooping and don't dig around in sick people's poop.

[delphonso]

The moral to the story is wash your hands well after pooping and don't dig around in sick people's poop.

Ugh, first I have to stay inside and now I have to give up my hobbies?!