Corona / Covid-19 Virus - General Discussion (politics go to the Off Topic / Politics thread)

This is really bad.

Some factories are going back this coming week. They have to go back sometime, otherwise the Chinese economy will collapse. Already huge damage has been done because so many 1st World “supply chains” (I am using the currently fashionable terminology; got to squeeze in “frictionless trade” and “sustainable” somewhere ) are totally buggered.

Big firms operate a concept called “just in time”. This doesn’t physically exist; it is merely a euphemism for a big company using its power to bully its suppliers into maintaining a buffer stock, at no charge And those who extended this principle all the way out to China (most of them) have just learnt that nasty truth. The other day I got an email, CCd by mistake to lots of companies, from a large German company basically saying they have no product at all to ship – they were making everything in China.

For sure a lot of firms will move processes back home, and perhaps use China only for the primitive stuff which is cheap and can be heavily stocked. My business got lucky in that we had stock (of Chinese bits) for maybe a year when this happened; most others are not so lucky.

And a lot of Chinese students are coming back to Europe, after spending their holidays in China! They were asked to not go back there but most did. The educational establishments here would collapse without them… So there will likely be a lot more cases.

The really curious thing is how few cases there have been outside China.

The combination of the Chinese govenrment’s behaviour and their own people I don’t think has helped things. Chinese spitting on lift buttons is pretty terrible.

The business impact will be really interesting. I wonder if it will lead to things coming back over time.

There has been some scary stuff out. They found HIV sequences in it and this drove theories that it was genetically engineered. However the original paper has been withdrawn because it turns out these sequences are present in lots of fly viruses.

There’s a lot of hysteria and speculation, especially on social media.

Here’s an article in the LA Times which wraps up the current status of knowledge pretty well:

https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-02-11/how-deadly-is-coronavirus-fatality-rate

Essentially even the 2% mortality rate seems much too high. It comes from calculating deaths as a static percentage of known infected patients a given day. In reality though, these are much higher because a) the rather long incubation period and b) the cases which aren’t being treated because the symptoms are too weak. Since the only really known data is deaths, it tends to be higher in epidemics which are still growing than in those which have come to rest.

It isn’t possible to draw conclusions because while the number infected has no doubt been vastly under-reported, so has the number of deaths in China because that’s exactly what they do – lie – given half a chance.

Also it seems that quite a lot of the survivors, including those outside China where things are a lot more reliably reported, got some intensive medical care. So this doesn’t look like a normal flu where nearly everybody who gets it just stays at home for a week.

The chinese are also disinfecting banknotes. Either this is them being really silly, or this virus survives on inert surfaces like none other, in which case one needs to be careful with goods coming in from China, too.

The cat is out of the bag, and all we can do is perhaps delay it until we have some tried and tested treatments, and perhaps spread it out so that we have enough spaces in intensive care for those who become seriously ill.

For SARS, I remember an anaesthetist telling me that the contingency plans were for all the doctors to go home. Any hospital that stayed open to treat a large pandemic would run out of oxygen within a day or two. Without oxygen, nobody would be able to do much to help. So you might as well send all the doctors and nurses home so that you have somebody to provide medical care post-apocalypse. Except that I think they would all have been lynched.

As Peter says, this does sound more serious than the usual ‘flu. One question is what proportion of people will survive if they don’t have medical care. If the numbers become overwhelming, a 2% death rate in treated patients may become a much higher rate in untreated patients. My siblings and I all work in healthcare, and are talking about sending our kids up to our parents and living together for the duration of the epidemic, if things are looking bad.

Am I panicking? No, but I do expect major personal & economic impact. If it does kill 2% of people we will all know a fair number of people who will die, including some from this forum. Will house prices plummet if a percent or two of houses suddenly become available? How will China and other countries react to the economic damage?

I have some circuitboards on order from China. I am curious as to when they will arrive, but hope nobody dies to fulfil my order.

Let’s not over exaggerate this. It’s not the zombie apocalypse and it isn’t an evil plan by Mr. Soros. Maybe the Chinese are lying, but they’re not burning dead people in their houses as one of the twitter sagas suggested.

What do you think of the suggestion that it came accidentally from the nearby research facility? I think I read it’s been suggested by a paper from a south china university as the probable origin of the outbreak.

I don’t think they tend to burn people in their houses. They do burn live pigs in trenches though. I’d be astonished if some of the people barred in don’t die of starvation or similar.

My wife (used to work in pharmaceuticals and flu vaccins) told me just “normal flu” in the US is a problem: 1m catch it, 200k required medical emergency and 10k died, she beleives Coronva virus spread this winter is no different but with lack of vaccination on early season that would make a big spike before the numbers go down later in the year

I was really surprised “normal flu” is that problematic but the scale is 50m worldwide, UK numbers are about 1/10 of those in the US