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Facebook Cancels May F8 Developer Conference Due to Coronavirus: What Does That Mean for WWDC?
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The problem is that nobody really knows how bad it is. (except perhaps China who is very secretive about it).
Until we know all the information (lethality, transmission, etc) we need to treat it as a very dangerous virus and I think that Facebook did the right thing.
Nobody is afraid of the flu anymore since everything about it is generally known.
I think that Covid-19 will eventually be treated the same as another common health concern.
Close to 3,000 deaths worldwide in a span of a few weeks. Cases are already popping up in Italy, Brazil, and the US, to name a few. It’s funny how you don’t care about that, yet as soon as it happens in your neighborhood, you’ll be the first to complain how you’re not getting assistance to handle this crisis.
You all need to use your thinking caps for a second. The flu is already here and has been spreading all winter. It has a 0.1% mortality rate. Coronavirus is not yet spreading in the wild in the U.S., but it has a fatality rate that is by all estimates significantly higher.
Mortality rate of typical seasonal flu is 0.1% or less (this season, the figure stands at 0.05%). Covid-19 is about 2%, or 20 to 40 times higher risk.
Also significant is hospitalization rate. For typical seasonal flu, hospitalization rate is about 1%, meaning 1% develops symptom severe enough to require hospital treatment. For Covid-19, about 20% of the patients develops severe symptoms, 20 times higher than seasonal flu.
And this is just within the last 2 months. The final figure could be much worse. The final figure would be lower if the medical community better understand and can better treat the patients.
You are right about media sensationalism, but you should not downplay the risk either.
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Here's some accurate information for all the confused people here. The best data out of China (a very large study recently completed) estimated a 2.3% fatality rate for Covid-19. That is cases that were brought to the attention of health authorities and ended in death. The rate inside Hubei province, where the outbreak began, is much higher, possibly due to the chaos of the health system there currently. In other provinces of China, the fatality rate has been 0.4% of cases brought to the attention of health authorites. That percentage could be even lower when you take into account all the "silent" cases -- people who stayed home and just recovered from a mild illness on their own. Therefore the fatality rate in the West is likely to be 0.4% or less. This is still a higher fatality rate than an average seasonal flu, which usually has a fatality rate of something less than 0.1%. However, there's no vaccine for coronavirus and most people won't have any immunity, so it's likely to spread more widely than seasonal flu.
There, now you're up to date.
There, now you're up to date.
A lot of people get the flu, a few die in comparison.
The proportion infected people dying because of the Corona Virus is much higher.
It seems like you got misled by some ignorant leader's speech.
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Fortunately, there is such a thing as a Flu vaccine. There is NONE for Coronavirus.
This year’s bad flu is about 0.05% mortality.
Best estimates of nCov-2019 (now named SARS-Cov2) mortality is around 5%.
Most places reporting mortality are calculating it incorrectly. They are dividing deaths by all cases. But some of those active cases will go on to die. You actually have to calculate using only people for whom the disease has run its course:
Mortality = Deaths / (Deaths + Recovered)
Best evidence (from some perhaps whitewashed numbers out of China) is a mortality around 5%.
That’s 1 in 20 of us.
Not the 1 in 2000 of this year’s bad flu.
Needless to say a bug that spreads as easily as the flu but has 100x higher mortality is nothing to sneeze at (ha!).
And it’s not just mortality, these other issues should curl your toes a bit:
1. SARS-Cov2 (Coronavirus 2019) has a significantly higher incidence of serious hospitalization. So we are going to run out of hospital beds QUICK.
2. Not everybody who survived SARS came through unscathed. Many have suffered permanent health effects (likely due to the organ damage).
3. We aren’t super prepared as a society for major disruption in food or medicine delivery or other essential services. And not everybody is going to put up with being told they can’t have what they need to keep their family healthy.
Like I said, not Contagion-level end-times, but things are gonna get a bit dark.
COVID-19 IS more serious than the version of Flu that is prevalent this year.
It isn't as serious as the strain thay has appeared in other years
It’s far more serious than the flu. What are you talking about? 2 percent lethality and as contagious as a cold. The flu is only 0.05 percent lethal, more or less.
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In an average year, lethality rate of the flu is two orders of magnitude less than covid 19.
it has been a long time since we have had a year where 1 of every 20 or 1 of every 50 people who get the flu has died.
The flu changes every year and the flu shots are produced to counter the top three predicted variants.
Often, they are wrong and the flu shot gives marginal protection at best.
Likewise, when they guess correctly, the flu shots are effective.
The main difference between the flu and Covid-19 is that more people have some protection versus the flu since they had it before.
Covid-19 is a new virus to everyone so people are more at risk until they develop their immune system against it (i.e. until they get it and recover or get a vaccine).
And nobody knows if the virus could remain dormant on a 'cured' person for an unknown period of time and then wake up mutated and stronger than before, while in the meantime infecting other people?
That would be chaotic.
So until we know how this virus works, we better take all the precautions we can.
Two things you’re missing:
1. Even if you believe China’s figures, despite evidence showing some of them have been blatantly fudged, you are still repeating incorrect mortality calculations.
You don’t use deaths per infection, you use deaths per patient for whom the disease is finished.
With some people taking 3-6 weeks to die or recover, we KNOW that most of the worldwide infected have not yet fully recovered.
With around 20% of cases hospitalized severely wit pneumonia, we expect a significant number of the current infected to die. Especially as hospital beds and available care get COMPLETELY overwhelmed.
Mortality rate of people who have has the disease run its course is around 5%, compared to this year’s flu of 0.05%.
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2. You cannot compare reported flu cases against reported and ‘silent’ SARS-Cov2 (Coronavirus 2019) cases.
Either you include the millions more flu cases that go unreported, or you take the reported figures of both.
Whichever you do, the mortality of our new contagion is still about two orders of magnitude higher than the flu.
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COVID-19 is only scary/being hyped because it’s new. Since it’s new, we don’t have a formula established already for how to treat it. Thus, it’s scarier than the flu, for which we have an established vaccine.
I'm using the best most recent data out of China, where the disease has been spreading since December. Even if that information may be incomplete, it's simply the best information currently available. Everything else is speculation.
The Chinese data show that case fatality rate (the relevant metric here) is 0.4% outside of Hubei province. That's still worse than an average seasonal flu, but it's not the 2.3% figure everyone has been quoting. 2.3% is the case fatality rate for China as a whole, a number that appears to have been skewed by the very bad situation in Hubei, where the healthcare system basically collapsed in the face of an unexpected (and at first denied) outbreak. The situation elsewhere is more likely to be much more like the situation in other Chinese provinces, where case fatality rate has been 0.4%.
That was my first guess if they did go the route of cancelling WWDC.
Have a subdued “keynote” in the Steve Jobs Theater with press and employees, and then have employees record the sessions they’d give. It’d be mostly the same for the overwhelming majority of WWDC viewers who never set foot in the conference building; it’d only impact the people who go there to get one-on-one help from Apple engineers. I’m sure there’s a workaround for that too, though, if people are willing to pony up for it.
No, it is scary because it is as contagious as the common cold and 100x more deadly than the flu.
The yearly flu varies in terms of strains. The vaccine for 2020 is ~45% effective.
the common flu kills way more people every year than this virus. Overhype is more dangerous than the virus is.