Coronavirus Death and Illness Stats Update
Mish
For background information including an explanation of the virus, please see China Locks Down 7 Cities as Deadly Virus Spreads.
Comparison to the Flu and Rebuttals
The fact that China has quarantined over 20 million people speaks to the perceived seriousness of the threat.
25 Deaths and 830 Confirmed Cases
WHO Official Via NYT: “Make no mistake. This is an emergency in China, but it has not yet become a global health emergency. It may yet become one.”
Only five global public health emergency declarations have been made in the past. The decisions are fraught, with health authorities wary of causing panic, or of suggesting that governments cannot handle outbreaks on their own.
Collapsing on the Street
City of Taiyuan (4 million people) Hit
Ignore the BS about Trump in the above Tweet. Conspiracy theories of all sorts running rampant now.
Suspected Texa A&M Case
Hospital Runs Out of Beds
WHO Says No Public Health Emergency of International Concern Today
I suspect they will change their tune soon.
This is the Last Place I Would Be
Anyone in line who did not have it before, probably does now
Phase 4
Washington State
Conspiracy Theory of the Day
There are also Tweets blaming the CIA and a person I refuse to name for fear of spreading nonsense.
I scoff at such theories.
US Tests
NJ, CA, TX, WA all testing cases.
Word About Conspiracy Theories
Psychology Today addresses What Makes People Believe in Conspiracy Theories?
Half of the US population believes in at least one political or medical conspiracy theory. So belief in conspiracy theories is far more “normal” than many of us might think.
The popularity of films like JFK, The Manchurian Candidate, and Conspiracy Theory illustrates how many of us can be drawn to a good conspiracy theory. Over the two past years, half of the country has been anxiously expecting that the Mueller report would reveal one of the biggest conspiracy plots in American history, while the other half believes that the conspiracy was the Mueller investigation itself. And of course, occasionally conspiracy theories turn out to be true!
All of us are susceptible to confirmation bias—the tendency to reinforce pre-existing beliefs when we look for information. With the amount of information available online that's tailored to our interests and preferences, we’re now living in an era of “confirmation bias on steroids.”
Understanding the Scale
- The population of Chicago is 2.7 million.
- The Chicago metro area population is 9.5 million.
- The population of New York City is 8.6 million.
- The New York City metro area population is 20.1 million.
- The population of London is 8.8 million
- The London metro area population is 13.7 million.
- The population of Illinois is 12.7 million
“To my knowledge, trying to contain a city of 11 million people is new to science. It has not been tried before as a public-health measure, so we cannot at this stage say it will or will not work,” Gauden Galea, the World Health Organization’s country representative for China, said in an interview.
Tom Inglesby, an expert on epidemics who is director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said “large-scale quarantine efforts in the past have not been successful in changing the outcome of disease outbreaks.”
Because of its key role in domestic transportation, Wuhan is sometimes referred to as "the Chicago of China" by foreign sources.
Mike "Mish" Shedlock
