Pirate's Cove

We’ve finally hit the point where one of the biggest news outlets in the world has their editorial board making the link

Here Comes the Coronavirus Pandemic

Back in 2002, when the SARS virus made its fateful leap from bats to civet cats to humans, global health experts warned that the ensuing outbreak was a harbinger of things to come: Climate change and globalization were conspiring with an array of other forces to make it much easier for old animal diseases to morph into new human ones. It was only a matter of time before one of those diseases proved truly catastrophic. The world could avert the worst consequences if it started planning.

Getting beyond the insanity of linking ‘climate change’ when it is winter in the Northern Hemisphere, including China, the NY Times editorial board typically comes out for porous, if not open, borders, as well as taking in every refugee who wants in. Heck, for taking them whether they want to come or not.

In the meantime, this much is not in dispute: SARS-CoV-2 spreads easily — more easily than SARS or seasonal flu — and is tough to detect. It’s the kind of virus that would be extremely difficult to contain even in a best-case scenario, and the world is hardly in a best-case scenario now. Rising nationalism, waning trust and lingering trade wars have undermined cooperation between global superpowers. Rampant misinformation and growing skepticism of science are imperiling public understanding of the crisis and governments’ response to it.

Refer back to Picard. The media makes fun of Trump, or gets in high dudgeon, over him blasting them and Democrats for politicizing Coronavirus, and then they prove Trump right.

Anyhow, the piece meanders around, and includes several points about how dangerous it is, including

Here we are again. In December, another new virus — SARS-CoV-2 — made the leap from animals to humans. It has now infected more than 83,000 people across more than 50 countries. Nearly 3,000 people have died, most of them in China where the outbreak began. Global health experts are once again sounding the alarm. It’s unclear how bad things might get this time around. Covid-19, the disease caused by this new virus, appears to be between seven and 20 times more deadly than seasonal flu, which on average kills between 300,000 and 650,000 people globally each year. But that fatality rate could prove to be much lower, especially if it turns out that many milder cases have evaded detection.

Here’s also the NY Times in the straight news section

On average, seasonal flu strains kill about 0.1 percent of people who become infected. The 1918 flu had an unusually high fatality rate, around 2 percent. Because it was so contagious, that flu killed tens of millions of people.

Early estimates of the coronavirus death rate from Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the outbreak, have been around 2 percent. But a new report on 1,099 cases from many parts of China, published on Friday in The New England Journal of Medicine, finds a lower rate: 1.4 percent.

The coronavirus death rate may be even lower, if — as most experts suspect — there are many mild or symptom-free cases that have not been detected.

Slate notes

Here’s why it would be: Most public health officials now feel that widespread infection outside of the current hot zones like China and South Korea is no longer a matter of if but when. Containing the virus is likely impossible. So the next question is: Just how bad will the cases here be? In China, the death rate has been reported as zero in children under 10 and very low, 0.2 percent, in healthy adults. Unfortunately, the rate is far higher, as high as 14.8 percent, in the sick and elderly (though as is always the case in outbreaks like this, it is hard to know how many of these older and often chronically ill hospitalized patients died with COVID-19, not of COVID-19). The reported overall death rate of 2 percent is essentially a weighted average of these numbers.

This is why most health professionals are recommending that you wash your hands well and don’t touch your eyes and mouth. The US Surgeon General, Jerome M Adams, and the CDC recommend that, and to stop buying masks unless you are already sick. Doctor Adams was rather upset over the purchase of all these masks. And, really, if you’re sick, stay home. Of course, the Washington Post has to fear-monger with a story about the millions killed during the 1918 outbreak. And of course whining about Trump. Notice above, the mortality rate is estimated to be lower, and could seriously be not much above the standard flu. People are much healthier and have better access to health care now than 1918.

Anyhow, ‘climate change’ and globalism. Don’t leftists love globalism?