SARS II: Respiratory Boogaloo

China's been hit with a mysterious respiratory virus that turns out to be related to SARS.

These Hong Kong protests are getting out of control.

"Authorities said there has been no obvious evidence of human-to-human transmission, and no healthcare workers have been infected.
Some of the patients were employed at a seafood market in Wuhan. Local media reported the market also sold other live animals, including birds, rabbits and snakes -- sparking concerns that the virus might have been transmitted to humans from animals."

what can possibly go wrong? Millions of people living in crowded conditions and having a cultural affinity for eating a wide variety of crazy ass critters prepared under questionable conditions - I think they'll get a handle on it pretty quickly! Right?

Yeah, I think I have that shit right now.

I blame people who give their dog the tongue and call it a furbaby.

You'd hate San Diego, then. Only the downtown library enforces people leaving pets at home, and that I'm sure is only to curb down on the homeless folks bringing in their pets and staying all day.

Around here every person with a dog cannot leave it at home because they think it will be to lonely. Lonely is code for the dog will piss, shit, and tear up the house the moment you leave because they spoil them and do not train them so they have the temperment of a pissed off two year old. So then they bring their dog everywhere and they cannot leave them in the car because it takes about 10 seconds to reach fission temps when you live two inches from the sun. So everyone who has a dog drags them everywhere because they are all emotional support animals. What is even more mental is the entitled white dog fuckers actually end up fighting with each other because their dogs fight each other and they think their dog is the only one whpo should have permission to be anywhere.

I would love if the homeless would drag their dirty mutt into stores because then the dog owners might keep their dogs at home because they don't want their dogs cavorting with the rif raff dogs. At least most of the dogs are toy dogs and most people with the pit bulls get tossed because no one wants a violent dog that might eat one of the littler ones around. I really don't like the little rat dogs, but people with the pits are the worst.

Anyway, I have been fighting SARS since 2001. I take a lot of cough syrup so I won't spread this and other horrible diseases. It is the sacrifice I make to keep mankind safe.

Captain Trips is here!

I am robotrip. Put down your stand references and get in the choppa.

Thank God. Maybe once you lot are thinned out some, I can enjoy the peace and quiet.

Homeless people? In California? Say it ain't so!!!

I think I've got it.
I thought I had a regular cold, but the respiratory part has hung on for a fucking month now.
If I cough once, it avalanches into a hacking fit.
I have to fight that tickle of the first cough to keep from turning inside out.

I had something like that a few years back that hung in from thanksgiving to february. When I finally saw a doctor he gave me a double dose of amox and told me to use flonase. That wiped it out. Now whenever I start to feel the post nasal drip flare up I hammer it with flonase and cross my fingers I have not gotten sick from alergy season in a couple of years. It used to be all that mucus caused a throat and bronchial infection.

"Downtown Seattle"...

Please let it be the ID (International District - far south end of downtown) and not Belltown (north end of downtown and my current location).

Please be the end of humanity! Please be the end of humanity!

Well there's your problem! The news said it's a corona virus! Damn, it was hiding in plain sight....

They think the virus originated in snakes according to some accounts I’ve read.

One of the accounts wouldn't happen to be Revelations would it?

Snakes on a plane.....?

China has quarantined Wuhan and two other cities, populations 11 million and 8 million combined, respectively. Cut them off the day before Chinese New Year.

By comparison, somewhere in the mid 5 digits of people were quarantined in the SARS outbreak. Either China is massively overreacting to a public health threat, which would be rather out of character, or something Really Bad™ is happening.

oh shit, you know what this means.....wait for it.....another NETFLIX "end of the world" movie! They can really trim the budget if they get there now and get some raw footage of the chaos and devastation!

There is a third possibility, that China is moving quickly because of how this mishandled SARS. If you'll recall, China was very secretive about SARS, concealing the number of people infected, and the number of deaths, for quite some time after the disease escaped the country. That opened them up to considerable international criticism. (At the time, I was on a message board where one of the posters was a nurse who was treating the people infected with SARS in Canada. It was pretty much a horror show.)

If the quarantine is appropriate, that makes this Really Bad™. If it’s not, then it’s an overreaction. The actual third possibility is that it’s another under-reaction, which would put this at way beyond Really Bad™.

Put another way, when's the last time 19 million people were quarantined and it wasn't Really Bad™? A few thousand people were quarantined during MERS. Several tens of thousands for SARS. I don't think 19 million people have ever been quarantined at once.

EDIT: Yep, this is the largest quarantine in history, assuming it's being reported accurately. The 2nd-largest was SARS, at 60,000+.

The problem is, with a society like China, we don't have an idea, and neither do they. The worst thing you can do in such a society is to cause your superior to lose face. In the previous outbreak, they tried to save face by concealing that anything was wrong, and that turned out to be a Really Bad Idea™. With this outbreak, they might very well be overcompensating but considering how difficult it was to clamp down on SARS when it got loose, an excess of caution is perhaps warranted. And the number of people being quarantined isn't necessarily all that big of a deal. The US has a population density of ~92 people per square mile, while China has one of 375 per square mile. Perspective is everything. If there was an outbreak of a disease in the US and you were told that a state capital (Burlington, VT, for example) was quarantined, you might think that it was really serious and a lot of people were impacted. Yet, I know of at least one state capital that has the same population as the spit water town I live in, and if you heard on the news that my town was quarantined, you'd think nothing of it. I should point out that while most people in the capital of Vermont live and work there, most of the people who live in my spit water town work in Nashville, which has a population of almost 700K and is smackdab in the middle of a lot of truck routes, so an outbreak here could easily spread to the rest of the country in a short period of time.

Wuhan is the 6th largest city in China; our 6th-largest one is Philadelphia, though the usual comparison is to Chicago. Wuhan is also a major transit hub, like Nashville (only more passengers, less cargo). The other two cities are (total) population-rank equivalent to San Francisco and Oakland. Not sure how your comparison is supposed to be at all reassuring.