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posted by martyb on Tuesday January 28 2020, @11:38PM   Printer-friendly
from the clearing-the-air dept.

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/01/27/coronavirus

As the world knows, we face an emerging virus threat in the Wuhan coronavirus (2019-nCoV) outbreak. The problem is, right now there are several important things that we don't know about the situation. The mortality rate, the ease of human-human transmission, the rate of mutation of the virus (and how many strains we might be dealing with – all of these need more clarity. Unfortunately, we've already gone past the MERS outbreak in severity (which until now was the most recent new coronavirus to make the jump into humans). If we're fortunate, though, we'll still have something that will be worrisome, but not as bad as (say) the usual flu numbers (many people don't realize that influenza kills tens of thousands of people in the US each year). The worst case, though, is something like 1918, and we really, really don't need that.

[Ed note: The linked story is by Derek Lowe who writes a "commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry". He is perhaps best known for his "Things I Won't Work With" blog entries which are as hilarious as they are... eye opening. I have found him to be a no-nonsense writer who "tells things as they are", holding no punches. The whole story is worth reading as he clearly explains what a coronavirus is, about the current one that reportedly originated in Wuhan, China, what could be done about it, how long that would likely take, and what can be done for those who have already been infected. --martyb]

Previous Stories Referencing Derek Lowe:

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday January 29 2020, @02:01AM (11 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday January 29 2020, @02:01AM (#950401) Journal

    I think the death toll is probably higher than officially reported, and 3% could be an optimistic death rate. People are just not getting treated, dying, and not being counted. Hence the rapid construction of field hospitals and videos of crowded hospitals.

    https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/china-coronavirus-outbreak-us-plans-wuhan-evacuation-death-toll-number-cases-rises-today-2020-01-28/ [cbsnews.com]

    A resident in Wuhan, the quarantined metropolis at the heart of the fast-spreading coronavirus outbreak, told CBS News Friday that he waited overnight at one of the city's overwhelmed hospitals to get treated for the illness but couldn't access a doctor.

    The man asked not to be identified as Chinese authorities struggle to show they're in control of the outbreak, which has now killed 26 people in China and infected more than 800. He said he was diagnosed with the virus Thursday at the Red Cross Hospital in Wuhan, and that he has passed it to his mother.

    He waited from Thursday night into Friday morning at the hospital for an injection he was told he needed to treat the illness, but never managed to see a doctor to have it administered.

    The man said he saw patients at the rammed hospital on Thursday falling to the ground "one after another," but there was no room for more patients to be admitted. Videos posted to social media have shown patients laying on the floor in Wuhan hospitals, some crying out for help. One, which was removed from China's popular Twitter-like platform Weibo, purportedly showed dead bodies covered with sheets on the floor near other hospital patients.

    The irony could be that uninfected people are crowding into the hospitals and getting infected there.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 29 2020, @02:34AM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 29 2020, @02:34AM (#950414)

    But basically you have to be proposing that it is not the sickest people who are getting tested for the virus.

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday January 29 2020, @02:45AM (5 children)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday January 29 2020, @02:45AM (#950416) Journal

      Just give them vitamin C at the door. That will sort it out.

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      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 29 2020, @02:55AM (4 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 29 2020, @02:55AM (#950421)

        No, I mean you are saying that the Chinese are specifically not testing the patients most likely to die, or are hiding those test results. This is a level of corruption above and beyond what most are proposing.

        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday January 29 2020, @03:11AM (3 children)

          by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday January 29 2020, @03:11AM (#950430) Journal

          I would agree with that conclusion, but I don't have any hard evidence to support it.

          You can find unverified videos floating around on social media of doctors and nurses contradicting official numbers and painting a grimmer picture than ~132 deaths.

          https://www.thedailybeast.com/deadly-coronavirus-throws-china-hospitals-into-chaos [thedailybeast.com]

          Another doctor in Wuhan wrote an open letter to Chinese officials on the message board of state-run publication People’s Daily, calling for an investigation of the Wuhan Health Commission. The doctor said that the commission attempted to cover up the coronavirus outbreak by banning mentions of lung infections in CT scan reports. (The post has been censored.)

          There is undoubtedly heavy censorship on Weibo et al. no matter what the real situation is.

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          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 29 2020, @03:26AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 29 2020, @03:26AM (#950439)

            There are also a bunch of disturbing videos of people supposedly suddenly fainting/collapsing due to this virus but that is not a symptom according to any authority (WHO/CDC/etc).

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 29 2020, @05:37AM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 29 2020, @05:37AM (#950515)

            If you are going to accept that degree of lying why not assume it is all fake and mean to suppress protests?

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Wednesday January 29 2020, @03:04AM (2 children)

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Wednesday January 29 2020, @03:04AM (#950426) Journal

    He waited from Thursday night into Friday morning at the hospital for an injection he was told he needed to treat the illness

    We don't have a cure so I don't know what that's about.

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    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday January 29 2020, @03:25AM (1 child)

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 29 2020, @03:25AM (#950436) Journal

      We don't have a cure so I don't know what that's about.

      One is right to say chicken soup doesn't actually fights the cold away, yet it's helping.
      Measles - once infection is on its way, it is mostly deadly without proper health care; becomes just a nuisance with supportive treatment [mayoclinic.org].

      Symptom relief treatment may make all the difference on a patient's life or death - just help the body fight the virus better may be all that it takes to survive the infection.

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      • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday January 29 2020, @05:54PM

        by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Wednesday January 29 2020, @05:54PM (#950741) Journal
        He never got the injection, whatever it was, so there was zero palliative or supportive care, and given the overcrowding and the shortage of basic supplies , and the ineffectiveness of masks, if he didn't have the virus he was safer not hanging around, and if he did have the virus others would be safer him not hanging around, since there isn't any cure yet anyway.

        When there's a flu outbreak the last place you want to be is the ER. Unless it turns into pneumonia, everyone is better off if you just stay home in bed.

        So what did they want to inject ? My guess is that it wasn't a doctor telling him this, just someone like a security guard, so no harm done that he didn't get the mystery injection. You don't give antivirals to everyone who walks in the door, so the injection was fake news.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday January 29 2020, @01:00PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 29 2020, @01:00PM (#950600)

    People are just not getting treated, dying, and not being counted.

    You could probably cross out the not getting treated part. The causes of death per wikipedia seem to be:

    pneumonia and kidney failure in severe cases

    The problem is:

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2909231/ [nih.gov]

    Would seem to imply, because China is large, that the government approved low fake number is around 2.5M pneumonia cases per year is normal and 125K pneumonia deaths are normal. A western non-government approved number being thrown around was 21M cases per year mostly in kids.

    Statista claims there's 3.8 million doctors in China. Admittedly a podiatrist or psychiatrist isn't going to see many emergency room pneumonia cases, but its an upper bound, at least.

    So the fake "everything is awesome" government stats imply each doc in China sees one pneumonia case per year and realistic western data implies one pneumonia case per month. Obviously this is ER docs and as a smaller segment of the medical doctor profession the numbers seen are maybe 10 times higher. Figure the fake number for ER docs in china is a couple per week and the real world number is around one sometimes two per day.

    Suddenly, one day, three cases show up; should the ER doc immediately detect its an outbreak and raise alarms and all that?

    There's only been 6000 cases per wikipedia which may be false low stats; however; locally Wuhan has 11M people which is about one percent of China's population, so they should have somewhere around 1653 to 13888 pneumonia cases per month under normal circumstances depending on how fake the government figures usually are. Lets assume all 6000 wikipedia cases are in Wuhan, which they are not, as an extreme upper bound.

    This is the real risk of fake government numbers, because docs on the ground can't assess risk properly. So if the fake government figures are real, normally docs in Wuhan should see 1653 pneumonia cases per year and they have 6000 pneumonia-like coronavirus infections and holy shit thats three times normal and why aren't they in outbreak mode? Or, more realistically, if the western non-propaganda figures are real, they usually see 13888 pneumonia infections per month and an extra unexplained wintertime 6000 pneumonia-like infections is "just another day at the office" random statistical fluctuations that appears to mean nothing.

    This also makes me wonder about legacy media and attention whoring social media reporting megadeaths and hospitals in chaos. Outside "western civilization" hospitals are ALWAYS overcrowded in chaos with dead people, no outbreak needed. I'm sure those hospitals were really busy and crowded a couple months before the outbreak. So whats the real story?