Fortunately, the coronavirus is not as bad as it could be; certainly it’s nowhere in the league of SARS or the 1911 swine flu. Which is a good thing, because it does not seem as though humanity’s response to the virus has been super effective.
Humanity’s response to SARS was not super effective, either. In order to protect the tourism industry, governments played down the outbreak, allowing people to move around and spread the infection.
I’m not a public health expert or a virologist, but I was pretty freaked out by the movie Outbreak. Mostly, I admit, because of the humanity-loathing brought on by the character played by Jude Law. [Minor Spoiler:] He’s a sort of combination of Andrew Wakefield and the Great Goop Lady Herself, Gwyneth Paltrow – selling nostrums in the face of a serious medical crisis. Surely nobody would really be so loathsome as to do something like that. Except, ironically, Gwyneth Paltrow.
The idea of being on a cruise ship is bad enough for someone antisocial, but being on a cruise ship during a viral outbreak? That sucks. It reminds me of the stories great grandpa told me about the “coffin ships” that sailed during the 1911 swine flu outbreak – the ship would leave port with a full complement and arrive with half of the people who originally departed gone. I don’t know what experience great grandpa actually had during the outbreak but he lived through it and obviously it was memorable. The folks on that cruise ship have to be hoping the booze holds out because the only way that cruise would get worse is if an incompetent captain drove the ship into a gale, which has also happened (just not simultaneously). To someone antisocial like me, the idea of being trapped on a ship full of people with nothing but booze and food to console me; perhaps that’d be another cruise ship movie plot: passenger decides to see how many other passengers they can heave overboard before someone figures out what’s going on.
There’s an iPad game that sort-of simulates an outbreak, Plague Inc. [wik]
Honestly, it’s not very good. But the publishers of the game, in a brilliant fit of marketing, said “don’t use our game’s animations for your TV show ‘outbreak’ splash screens.” I played it, when it first came out, and I have to admit the pictures were pretty – though I believe the public health models behind it were pretty poor. [Minor Spoiler:] By the way, the way to “win” any such game for real is to get the infection to Jeddah. People from all around the world meet and mix in the airport there. The second time I went through Jeddah airport I didn’t go through the VIP side, in an excess of republican liberalism, and managed to get 2 different colds simultaneously.
I’ve been generally bemused by the reporting surrounding the outbreak. For one thing, most media outlets fail to mention that this thing is not as big a deal as the flu, if only because the flu is out there and pretty much everyone will be exposed to it. That cruise ship may not have anyone infected with the new coronavirus, but it almost certainly has someone with some variant of the flu. (Someone needs to sell a T-shirt reading: “I took a cruise and all I got was the flu and this T-shirt” where the passengers disembark. Maybe an “I took a cruise and all I got was the shits and a hangover” too) There is definitely some disproportional worrying going on.
Also, those face masks people are wearing don’t do anything against a virus – a virus is way too small to be caught by those filters. Meanwhile, the media wonders “if all these people are wearing masks, will there be enough masks for emergency responders?” Arrrgh, you clueless gits, the masks don’t work! Emergency responders wear much better stuff – stuff that’s maybe 50% – 90% effective against a virus. Imagine what it was like during the swine flu epidemic, when doctors were just starting to figure these things out, and the best they could offer was “soak a cloth in carbolic acid and breathe through that.” Bleach! Bleach is the thing! I’m surprised Goop isn’t telling people to gargle with the stuff. (also cures halitosis!)
If anything, people might try something like wearing nitrile gloves and not touching anything – oh, and, stay off cruise ships.
The masks certainly don’t do much to stop you catching anything, but perhaps they do help to stop you spreading it, by stopping you touching your mouth/nose so much, and catching virus-laden water droplets when you sneeze?
“Whilst traveling through Afghanistan, we lost our corkscrew. Had to live on food and water for several days.” – W.C. Fields
Paul@1 My sister is immuno-compromised, and used to get sick basically all the time.
She claims that the biggest single change in her health resulted from training herself to stop touching her own face. We’re constantly poking our eyes, picking our noses, chewing on fingernails, constantly transferring biological assays of the environment onto our mucus membranes.
Masks, she thinks, and it certainly make sense, mainly stop people from poking themselves in the membranes, and as such are pretty helpful.
@1 Paul Durrant
Apparently yes.
Disposable Respirators vs. Medical Masks
Interesting article on masks. Despite low risk of coronavirus outbreak in Canada, face masks in high demand
Apparently the Canadian Gov’t recommends (disposable?) respirators for health care people. So something like an N95 particulate respirator would be useful. IIRC I saw a picture of a woman walking down a street in Wuhan wearing one.
Of course, if I went for a mask I would need to shave and I may not remember how.
We have a number of university students in town wearing masks but that is usual most winters as there quite a few students from China at the uni and the mask wearing started in early December. There may be more now.
One thing with the flu is it is not a virgin field disease. Some people will have immunity, either from the vaccine or from exposure to similar strains earlier in their life.
I have read one reason virgin filed diseases can be so deadly is everyone gets sick and the recovering die because there is no one to assure they get food or water.
@ 3 Andrew Molitor
I know a manager for a large food services company who often lectures on food handling safety. One of his trick is, or was, to spray an ultraviolet dye on an object, have the people in the seminar hand it around for inspection and a few minutes later turn off the lights and turn on an ultraviolet light.
Much merriment ensues.
@ Marcus
1911 swine flu?
Never heard of this one. Are you sure that it was not 1917-1918 Spanish flu?`
1911 “flu” is just getting gut-shot with a .45
You’re talking about Contagion (2011, went back into the Netflix top ten this week and I wonder why, stars Jude Law) with Outbreak (1995, not bothered the Netflix chart and I wonder why, stars Dustin Hoffman).
But the droplet of spittle ejected from that bloke next to you at the bar on the cruise ship when he sneezed is definitely NOT too small. Those masks DO work, for a limited definition of “work”. Then again, they’re like condoms in that they require a degree of discipline to use properly and also like condoms the majority of users cannot be trusted to be disciplined enough in the circumstances when they need to be.
The 1957 and 1968 influenza pandemics had a death rate of about 0.1%. Coronavirus, last I looked, was confirmed to have infected fewer than 10,000 people, and to have killed over 200. So – a 2% fatality rate, or 20 times worse than some flu pandemics. Only 10% as deadly as the Spanish flu of 1918, but that’s a not-very-reassuring use of the word “only”, I’d say. The figure that’s vaguely reassuring up to yesterday at least is that no country outside China has even as many as 20 confirmed infections. That will likely change, obvs.
Terrorists seem to be completely lacking in imagination. How hard could it be to get a suicide-bomber type infected and transport such a person to a major western population center?
OK, it would probably be pretty hard. Much easier would be to just SAY you had done so, and trust the resulting freak-out to erode society.
This must be why we went after Osama bin Laden so hard. In terrorist circles, both dedicated fanaticism and money seem to be common commodities — it’s imagination that is rare.
I think right now we’re in the “Maybe they can contain it, maybe they can’t” stage. If it gets into someplace with both a high population density and poor public health care — India or North Africa or South America — there will be no chance of getting it back into the bottle.
I have a neighbor who is a total conspiracy fangirl. She is already telling people that there is documentary proof that a research institute in (where else) Wuhan ordered microbes from the US 6 months ago. Then one of their lab rats escaped and ended up in a bush meat market. The only thing lacking from her story is aerial spreading via chemtrail planes.
13 flexilis
Damn Americans always taking creditfor everything. The real story is that it was smuggled out of Canada. Ah, wait. maybe we don’t want the credit this time.
12 brucegee1962
And I was just watching a Samantha Bee episode where she points out that the CDC has had massive budget cuts for overseas work.
Nice going Donny.
jrkrideau@#7:
1911 swine flu?
Never heard of this one. Are you sure that it was not 1917-1918 Spanish flu?`
I had the date wrong. I suck at dates. That’s the flu I was referring to, though. It was almost certainly a swine flu, and I avoided referring to it as the “Spanish flu” because that was just good old American jingoism in action. The flu appears to have originated in the midwest US and was incubated in army bases, then spread by soldiers heading over to Europe.
brucegee1962@#11:
Terrorists seem to be completely lacking in imagination. How hard could it be to get a suicide-bomber type infected and transport such a person to a major western population center?
They’d do better to breed some antibiotic-resistant bacteria; it’d be a matter of getting some and exposing them to the complete panoply of human antibiotics until you got a strain that could handle it. Or something, maybe.
What’s crazy about the conspiracy theories is there’s a grain of truth to some of this stuff – the US USAAMRID at Ft Detrick did engage in research in bioweapons and vectors, and did experiments with developing new forms of plague, etc.
I think generally any disease that isn’t already widespread would be very difficult to obtain and spread deliberately. You could perhaps wreak havoc by infecting a few people with some scary uncommon disease, but not create an epidemic, especially in countries with good healthcare systems. Mere threats would likely erode trust in YOUR ability to hurt society.
An organization with resources could perhaps develop or obtain a novel bioweapon, but I don’t see how they could ever risk it spreading globally.
AFAIK both viral and bacterial diseases could be easily drug-resistant. It’d be more difficult to get something that kills efficiently, and then you’d have to risk it killing your own people.
You laugh, but I’ve heard from the incredulous (right wing, of course) idiots around here that they are doing exactly this.
What’s really happening is that several rightwing “news” sites are conflating two fairly recent stories (and probably doctoring the footage as well) of China’s use of drones for spraying pesticides (https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2091150/chinas-pesticide-drones-godsend-struggling-farmers-amid-labour) and the use of drones to chastise people in Wuhan to stay inside (https://www.deseret.com/u-s-world/2020/2/3/21120616/china-drones-video-coronavirus-wuhan-virus).