Wuhan Virus Watch: Global Panic Over Coronavirus is “Unproductive and Unwarranted”
Experts worry about undue panic, as most patients make full recoveries.
As of today, 9912 cases of the Wuhan Coronavirus have been reported, including new cases in Great Britain and Russia.
*We will update this post as further information comes out.
The death toll currently stands at 213, with 22 nations or administrative regions reporting patients infected with the potentially deadly virus. So far, all the deaths have occurred in China, with the elderly and those with underlying medical conditions hardest hit.
Most of the patients with coronavirus have already made full recoveries. According to Chinese officials, the virus hits the elderly or who have other ailments that compromise their immune systems the hardest.
The Wuhan Coronavirus virus does not seem to be as deadly as the virus causing Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which killed 774 people from 2002 to 2003. However, between social media and click-bait news reports, public health officials are now becoming concerned about the spread of panic related to the new virus.
Experts say that for the most part, global panic over the Wuhan coronavirus is unproductive and unwarranted: The public should take precautions to avoid getting sick, but the most effective preventative measures are everyday actions like increased handwashing and not touching your face.
An expert also said fear would not stop the spread of the virus and could cause negative social impacts.
“There’s the spread of infectious disease, then there’s the spread of panic,” Amira Roess, a professor of global health and epidemiology at George Mason University, told Business Insider. “They have very different mechanisms.”
The spread of the virus is starting to have an economic impact, as firms are closing locations and reducing services to avoid creating environments promoting further infections.
Apple, McDonalds and Starbucks are among the major U.S. companies that have closed locations or reduced service in China amid the spread of the novel coronavirus that’s killed at least 170 people and infected more than 7,700.
The outbreak is causing economic “uncertainties,” Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said, posing a potentially significant threat to the world economy.
“There is likely to be some disruption to activity in China and globally,” Powell said Wednesday, according to The Associated Press. “We are very carefully monitoring the situation.”
The virus has hit the travel industry hard. For example, over 6,000 people are quarantined on a cruise ship off the coast of Italy because one woman is suspected of having the Wuhan Coronavirus.
About 5,023 passengers and 1,628 crew aboard Costa Cruises’ Costa Smeralda ship were being held in an Italian port after a passenger from Macau, China, came down with flu-like symptoms on Wednesday night amid the ongoing coronavirus outbreak.
A Costa Cruises spokesperson confirmed to Fox News on Thursday that sanitary protocol has been activated after a 54-year-old woman fell ill aboard the Smeralda ship, which had sailed from Mallorca, Spain, to Civitavecchia on a weeklong Mediterranean cruise.
Meanwhile, the Chinese Embassy to Denmark wants the newspaper Jyllands-Posten to apologize for publishing a drawing that depicts China’s flag with virus symbols instead of five stars.
“We express our strong indignation and demand that Jyllands-Posten and [cartoonist] Niels Bo Bojesen reproach themselves for their mistake and publicly apologize to the Chinese people,” the embassy said in a statement posted on its website.
When asked to comment, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen avoided any direct reference to Jyllands-Posten’s cartoon.
“I have nothing to say on the matter other than [to note that] we have a very strong tradition in Denmark not just for freedom of speech but also for freedom of satire, and we’ll continue to have that in the future,” she said, according to multiple news media including Politiken.
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Comments
I wouldn’t trust the officially reported statistics on deaths. China is not prone to be honest. That being said this does seem to be like every other outbreak scare during my life: A whole lot of nothing.
The Chinese are building a Flu hospital with 100,000 beds.
Sure. But what if I stay home and suffer through the flu like I usually do? What is the mortality rate for this virus? I do not trust China’s numbers at all, but of the diagnosed cases outside China no deaths yet. Also, who is dying? The old? The young? The already ill?
so far it looks like approx 2 to 3 percent
Remember that’s
“Communist China” dictatorship
that’s already killed hundreds of millions according to accounts….
Don’t trust the Chinese at all.
Anand Ranganathan
@ARanganathan72
· 1h
Replying to @ARanganathan72
Oh my god. Indian scientists have just found HIV (AIDS) virus-like insertions in the 2019-nCov virus that are not found in any other coronavirus. They hint at the possibility that this Chinese virus was designed [“not fortuitous’]. Scary if true. https://biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1.full.pdf
They are hiding the true death rate by dividing deaths by current infections. That is not correct.
Death rates
http://classicalvalues.com/2020/01/death-rates/
Time to break out your MacKay,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds
I see there’s finally something that North Korea’s hermit status finally helps with.
Unless a transvestite child abused by their sicko mother approves the chi comm numbers, don’t believe them. Right fauxchaontas?
Clever!
I’m more worried about the panic than the bug itself.
The Stock market is dropping not because they think we are all going to die, but because they are afraid we will all stay home.
I think there will be a lot of companies who will reconsider their supply chains and adjust how much is produced in each country. There may be opportunities to increase manufacturing of many things in the US because of this health “crisis”.
“Just in time” inventory concept is not always the best way to run your business.
It’s dropping because they are greedy and are making millions shorting stocks or some such…..
I hate greedy people. People who operate at a continuous loss are the only one’s you can trust.
But Zombies Walk the Earth!!!
Yes. They’re called Democrats in these modern times,
and the vote multiple times all around the world in even a single day.
Bob Hope thought so.
https://youtu.be/5SgW9yNaz9k
213 deaths in 9912 confirmed cases currently gives Coronavirus a fatality rate of 0.021%. That is only slightly above average for flu pandemics, and only 2/3rds the rate of the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic.
Basically it looks like it’s fairly contagious, but relatively average in terms of mortality. by comparison the 1918 flu pandemic, had a mortality rate of 2.0%-3.0%, mostly elevated because it occurred during World War I and was treated with 1918 medical knowledge.
Reminds me of swine flu craze
Your math is wrong. You forgot to multiply by 100 to get your percentage.
Do the math correctly. The percentage of people that have died from this Chinese engineered coronavirus is 2.14%. And that puts it right in the middle of the percentages that died in the 1918 flu epidemic.And you can be guaranteed that it’s only going to get worse as the world governments fail to prevent 2019-nCoV from spreading.
you need to work on your arithmetic.
It seems that Common Core Math has infected more Americans than the virus.
You are not computing the Death Rate correctly.
Death rates
http://classicalvalues.com/2020/01/death-rates/
I have no sick days left due to a wonderful vacation in the sun so I am pleased that precautions are being put in place.
Remember when we had an opportunity to quarantine the AIDS virus but couldn’t due to civil liberties? HAHAHAHAHAHA Good luck out there. They really do hate you.
When I saw the first “virus spreading” headline from China, I thought they meant Communism.
Well…….. http://www.jackbenny.org/media/ringtones/well.mp3
That too!
I certainly hope it’s not as bad as feared. However, I’m still concerned about whether the Communists are reporting honest numbers.
The good news may be that perhaps the panic will stress an already faltering Communist totalitarian regime. As I do for Iran, and even more so, I pray for its collapse and replacement with something less diabolical.
Of course it’s worse than the Chinese government is admitting and no the communists most likely aren’t even reporting a fraction of those infected and/or dead from 2019-nCoV. And don’t expect them ever to come clean on the matter.
Good news is that most likely the elite of the Chinese government are already vaccinated against 2019-nCoV and won’t be affected at all by the outbreak of this disease.
All you need to know is this.
It was already bad enough for days and days that the Communist Government CANCELLED the equivalent of our Christmas and New Year celebrations.
All you need to know is this. You ain’t seen nothing yet from China. This is just the start. It’ll get much, much worse in the near future.
But don’t worry. The upper echelons of the Chinese government are probably already vaccinated against 2019-nCoV so they’ll be surviving. The vulgar, lower classes not so much.
Oh, yeah? Just wait until the dead start coming back to life and biting people. 😉
Aren’t they called Democrats?
Bob Hope Says Democrats Are Zombies
https://youtu.be/5SgW9yNaz9k
Justified concern is not “panic,” it’s just good sense.
Mortality figures are far from the whole story. A disease can cause annoying things, like, say, permanent blindness, but still have a tiny mortality rate. No thank you, I’d prefer to avoid them all; I have my quota of health problems without lining up to get more.
And nobody with a lick of sense would trust any numbers coming out of China. In a culture where truth can cause one to suffer the greatest of all calamities—”losing face”—matters of mere life or death are relatively trivial.
Hear Hear.
The entire population of Wuhan (81 million) is quarantined. They have run out of drugs and even face masks. They are building hospitals everywhere. Delta and American airlines have cancelled all flight to and from China.
“Please disburse! Nothing to see here!”
It may be overreacting for us to be panicking over 3 infections and no deaths but this is clearly a major threat to Asian nations…at least.
Some of what I’ve heard is that the outbreak startes in 2019, and the Chinese government cracked down on reporting it in order to limit the number of official natural disasters they had that year. Apparently it’s considered an ill omen to have more than a certain number in a given year.
Now that they’re reporting it, because they let it spread so long, it’s just looking like it’s far more contagious than it actually is. Further, they’re doing a super crack down on it to head off bad international publicity of the sort they got after SARS.
Honestly, I suspect this is going to be a replay of the SARS outbreak, just less since we have some idea what it actually is this time. The media is going to hyperventilate people will demand Thing Be Done!! and it will burn itself out.
There are also reports that the government is incinerating bodies in Wuhan without identifying them so as to suppress the deaths being reported.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/burning-bodies-secret-new-accounts-wuhan-detail-coronavirus-outbreak
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/im-apocalypse-new-accounts-wuhan-detail-coronavirus-outbreak
Who knows what is true in China. They have closed the state borders in and out of Wuhan and refused foreign aid so who can confirm any of these reports?
If only we could get the entire Media (DNC) Complex to rush over there and cover it…….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lk5XkhUKMDM&feature=emb_title
serpentza YouTube Channel
My Chinese doctor friends have reached out, things are changing rapidly day to day, hour to hour, I would like to bring you up to date on everything I know with inside information that I’m getting from medical teams on the ground in China and all the significant developments. I will be hosting a live discussion tomorrow the 24th of January at 1pm Pacific Time, I will be joined by fellow China watcher, Laowhy86. See you all there, come with questions, leave with answers.
93%+ of Media people (2012 last time they would release the facts I think) and College Professors 95 Times More Likely to Donate to Democrats Than Republicans…..
https://www.theepochtimes.com/college-professors-95-times-more-likely-to-donate-to-democrats-than-republicans-study_3217738.html
Ivy Leaguers are spending big in battleground states to turn Senate blue
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/oct/3/democrats-dominate-colleges-and-universities-facul/
Why that’s Repression without Taxation (on the Oppressors) or Representation.
Oops.
Coronavirus – Doctors Arrested for revealing the truth
It was doctors who first tried to raise the alarm of the spread of the virus and they were detained and forced to sign confessions…
For a deeper dive into China’s Propaganda influence and soft power, watch our liveshow ADVPodcasts: https://www.youtube.com/advpodcasts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HE7Iz7HLpYg
Experts always worry more about causing panic than handling the problem. That is why people with experience in the HIV field had to shake the complacent bastards awake in this country during the Ebola epidemic.
With reference to US procedures, I heard a report on Fox Business about the testing for this virus. The test is not reliable; it can be positive, then negative, then positive, over a period of a week or so. This is the reason for the extreme caution with evacuees, keeping them in quarantine for two weeks, and for excluding any foreigners who have been to China within two weeks. It sounds draconian, but given the uncertainty about the virus, better safe than sorry.
Wow, look at the spread in Australia!
Well, actually, we have 9 confirmed cases, spread over three cities, all, I believe, people of Chinese ethnicity and all recently returned from Wuhan.
Oh, and all stable!
The Wuhan virus is being compared to SARS, the impact of which was mild. For perspective, Google “cdc annual deaths from flu”. “Every year, influenza kills between 12,000 and 49,000 people and can send more than 700,000 people to the hospital, the CDC says.” This is the US figure only, not worldwide.
Ask youself why is CDC, and it’s bit*h WHO, pushing thw storyline that Wuhan virus is the next Spanish Flu? I regard the timing and press as very fishy.
We are not adding 200 cases a day. We are multiplying the cases. Every day. Suppose the rate is 1.25X a day. That is about 5X a week. 500X in 4 weeks.
6 cases today are then 3,000 cases in a month.
1,500,000 cases in 2 months
750,000,000 in 3 months.
Warm weather could intervene.