SARS II: Respiratory Boogaloo

"Cocktail of flu, HIV drugs appears to help fight coronavirus:"

except being China, half an hour later you need another one! Thank you, I'll be here all weak!

Would it be wrong if you caught this thing to go on a trip through the red states with a MAGA hat and coughing on every WASPy redneck you can find?

Asking for a friend.

yes, as they tend not to have health insurance and will hurt the economy. It's all about the economy.

So to put this in context. In a typical year just in this country, millions get the flu, a million are hospitalized, and up to 60,000 die from it. To tucker's point, we have fairly effective flu vaccines but half don't bother.

For your red-state friends, just let them do their thing and the flu will do your work for you.

says the guy who lives in a red state!

I got vaccinated. Did you?

says the guy in the state my friend would be passing through first on his way to the red MAGA meat of the country.

As far as I have heard the thing that has been effective against this virus has been AIDS medications, not the flu vaccinations. Are you telling us you have AIDS? They do not have a vaccine for this one yet.

Also it should be noted people are recovering from this. So be healthy and give your body what it needs to fight illness. If you do get sick take care of yourself and don't do things like smoke or go out in cold weather that might irritate delicate lung tissue and promote pneumonia. Maybe take some airborn or vitamin C as it does help your immune system. Wash your hands and try not to touch places like your eyes and other areas where things can get into your system.

yes I did! I get vaccinated every year as soon as it's available my fellow red state resident!

steve and I live in the same state - so who will your friend try to infect first?

I think steve meant vaccinated with the normal run-of-the-mil flu shot everyone (hopefully) gets annually. That's the one a lot of people never bother to get.

There is also a vaccine for bacterial pneumonia. Coronavirus sufferers may be dying from secondary bacterial infections. Another line of defense if it does spread more.

I think coronavirus is a concern, but probably less than the flu in a normal year.

Cap'n Trips will clear your neck of the woods long before ATL. Besides we already have all the Walking Tall zombies. I mean dead.

The greatness of a truly contagious viral strain is that you just need to get in the area. You do not need to be precise.

Uh, oh.

Xi is missing. https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3870739

Would it be crazy if he had come down with the virus? That I think would really set off a panic.

There's a possible wicked "Who's on first?" routine with Xi, Hu, and Deng, but I'm too lazy to write it.

if he does get the virus it'll be "all Xi wrote" as far as China downplaying the risk.

I've been alerted that Taiwan News is sub-Daily Mail quality. Never mind.

Apparently the death rate is exaggerated because the infection rate is under-reported.

https://news.yahoo.com/data-suggests-virus-infections-under-101338993.html

Not terribly surprising, given the Chinese government's obsession with secrecy. There are also a number of other factors that could be skewing the fatality rate. If you live in a part of China where the air quality is absolute shit, you're probably more likely to die from this than you would be if you lived in someplace like bumfuck, USA.

More deaths than SARS — needs context. Chinese these days are far richer than they were in 2003, and the infrastructure is far better. That makes them more likely to travel and spread the virus. Doesn’t make the virus deadlier necessarily.

Not just that but they're only reporting the confirmed infection counts. Anyone who's being turned away from Wuhan hospitals because their symptoms's aren't severe enough aren't being counted, same with anyone who's being treated without testing, or where the test isn't complete.

Of course the death rate is also underreported, because of a quirk in the Chinese reporting system. There's apparently a joke in epidemiology about how to avoid dying from the flu, you should go to China. That's because there's no comorbidity in reporting; that is, if you die in China, you die of only one thing. Go to the hospital with the flu and heart disease, and die of a heart attack? Well, that's the heart disease. Have the flu and die of pneumonia? That's pneumonia. In the US and most of the rest of the world, that'd be reported as heart disease and flu, and pneumonia and flu, respectively. It's not necessarily insidious; they've apparently always done it this way, but it definitely leads to underreporting.

Just heard on the radio that a Chinese reporting agency reported the true numbers by accident and Taiwan noticed.

Over 100,000 infected. Over 25,000 dead.

But as soon as the mistake was noticed those numbers disappeared and the official numbers came back. (I'm trying to find the source. When I find it I'll post it.)

Rumors are also that the Chinese are burning so many bodies, since they've ordered all dead to be burned and not buried, that the smog in Wuhan is partly from the smoke of the bodies. They are burning hundreds a day in crematoriums.