Delta, American, and Several Other Airlines Worldwide Suspend Flights To and From China Amid Coronavirus Fears (time.com) 59
Delta Air Lines and American Airlines said on Friday that they will suspend all U.S.-China flights for at least several weeks due to the coronavirus outbreak. Delta on Friday said its China service suspension will begin Feb. 6 and last through April 30, but it will continue to operate the service until then to "ensure customers looking to exit China have options to do so." From a report: Dozens of carriers including United, Cathay Pacific, British Airways and others have slashed or suspended service to China because of the outbreak. Delta was the first in the U.S. to suspend service altogether. Large companies spanning industries from technology to packaged food have suspended business trips to the country because of coronavirus, driving down demand for flights to China. Time has a more comprehensive list.
Sure but (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sure but (Score:4, Informative)
Or the US for that matter. We have endemic plague too, just like Madacasar.
In the 1800s up until the 1920s the US had regular plague outbreaks on what would now be an unthinkable scale. In 1924 40 people in Los Angeles died from plague; this was considered a public health success, implementing lessons learned in the San Francisco outbreak of 1904, which killed 119 people.
The plague is still out there. The thing that has changed is we now have a network of public health surveillance and intervention agencies, founded in the wake of WW2 wartime public health efforts. Many people don't realize this, but the US military is one of the largest if not the largest public health operations in the world; disease has killed far more soldiers in history than wounds. The CDC was founded to continue wartime anti-malaria efforts, and many returning servicemen with experience in the field founded or went to work for local public health agencies.
We live in a world where an asymptomatic passenger can hop on a plane and transmit a new infectious agent anywhere in the world in about a day. Nor have older problems like yellow fever or plague disappeared, they've just been effectively controlled. Arguably the single most important thing governments do is disease surveillance and control, but it's a victim of its own success. People think measles is a joke; that SARS is a paper tiger concocted by greedy grant-seeking scientists.
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That's a coincidence. Madagascar had a plague outbreak in 2017 that killed 221 people.
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That's a coincidence. Madagascar had a plague outbreak in 2017 that killed 221 people.
No, he was referencing the game. That's a common phrase because Madagascar is the hardest landmass to infect in the game.
Re: Sure but (Score:3)
You do realize that Madagascar is also a real place?
Re: Sure but (Score:4)
Re: Sure but (Score:2)
I'm not sure why you think it matters, but the first outbreak of plague in Madagascar was 1898. The French invaders brought it to the Island. The real country also has more than one port, although it's not the number of ports that matters IRL, it's your economic dependency on trade.
Madagascar is a hub for international trade in contraband including transshipment of Miiddle Eastern heroin and domestic cannabis exports.These trade links continue even though they are banned outright. As an island it may repre
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Nonsense the science and understanding of effective use of antibiotics happened at the same time during WW2. That plenty well explains all gains alone.
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WHOoooooosh!
Cathay Pacific? (Score:3, Funny)
Dude, maybe Cathay Pacific should change the name of the airline if they're no longer flying to China...
(Cathay is an old name for China)
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Dude, maybe Cathay Pacific should change the name of the airline if they're no longer flying to China...
(Cathay is an old name for China)
The suspension of flights into / out of China is temporary. Once the current crisis is over flights will resume.
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The suspension of flights into / out of China is temporary. Once the current crisis is over flights will resume.
"A new civilization will arise. There will once again be lemon-soaked paper napkins. Until then, there will be a short delay."
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Delay seems dumb (Score:2, Insightful)
It's either a crisis in need of containment, or not. Why wait until Feb 6th?
Re: Delay seems dumb (Score:3)
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No. They want to give ppl time to flee.
Isn't the whole point of a quarantine to keep people from fleeing?
Re: Delay seems dumb (Score:2)
Re: Delay seems dumb (Score:2)
It's probably a bean counter decision.
Flying all those planes empty into China to fly people back just doesn't make enough profit to be worth it.
I wonder what this means for manufacturing (Score:2)
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Ships and whatnot this won't be much of an issue, the virus will die in transport at least in packaged products since it takes ~30 days or so to cross the pacific. So even if someone is sick, it's easy enough to isolate the ship at sea. The stuff in planes on the other hand is a different problem, but should be held in storage for the same amount of time. Crew and Staff are also potential carriers, and of course any surface within the plane.
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the infected people outside China aren't dying at rates that suggest the 2% figure is wrong
Re:I wonder what this means for manufacturing (Score:4, Informative)
Viruses have no problem dormant for 30 days.
Actually yes, they do. Even in ideal environments (low temp, low RH, or in water droplets), most can survive and still be infectious for at most a month. SARS-CoV, for example, can go 28 days at 4c and 20%RH. That drops rapidly with increases in temp and RH, and at 20c, you are looking at about 2 days before enough virus dies to make it nonviable for infection. When looking at a viral infection you have to consider viral load. A single viral particle will not cause infection, a minimum number is required to allow the virus to take hold. On a surface the viable viral particle number drops over time starting almost immediately. You also need to transfer enough from the surface to a spot in your body where it can bind. Viruses, including coronaviruses, are pretty specific to the types of cells they can infect. That's one reason common cold coronaviruses are not as dangerous as others (SARS, MERS, Wuhan), they don't bind well to lung tissues, they prefer the upper respiratory tract tissues. That is the difference between runny nose and potentially life threatening viral pneumonia. This is why surface contamination was only considered a concern in health care environments and places patients spent a lot of time in contact with the same surfaces (homes for example), and then only secondary to person-to-person transmission. A factory worker who spends, say, 20 minutes with a smart phone is just not likely, even if infected and not wearing a mask, to transfer enough viral material to that device that it could survive in sufficient numbers to be an issue.
So if you wanted to be completely safe, you would just need to quarantine incoming good for 30 days (honesty, it's really not necessary at all, but if you are going to be paranoid, be really paranoid).
The only goods I would actually have some concern about are meats. A lot of fish processing occurs in China, even for stuff caught in our own waters like Alaska. Anything not canned (canning process will kill the virus, and any other microbes, by design) would be a good environment to allow a virus to survive for a decent amount of time (again though, probably only up to around 28 days at the outside). Workers should already be wearing protective gear (gowns, masks, etc) but, well, it is China.
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" It could be as high as 15%, with up to 100,000,000 fatalities likely in China alone"
We went through this before with SARS and you nutjobs. This won't happen. Get a life. I know you want excitement, but this isn't it.
Re: I wonder what this means for manufacturing (Score:2)
Re: I wonder what this means for manufacturing (Score:2)
Try to pay attention.
Re:I wonder what this means for manufacturing (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of the loading/unloading done at major ports where these ships moor is handled by software controlled machines that don't require much human oversight. If the crew don't leave their ship, there's probably not a lot of risk of spreading infection that way. There's more concern for the items themselves being contaminated, but unless the contagion can live outside of a human or other animal host for the extended period that it would take for the cargo to makes its entire trip, I wouldn't be too concerned about this vector either.
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And yet...
NOONE, but NOONE is complaining about this type of ship putting people out of work! ;-p
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Shipping isn't the problem. It seems that the virus is likely to run its course in China rather than being contained to only a few cities. This will have some effect on production across China. Also, much of China production is for export, and foreigners are not going to be traveling to China to do the things they normally do (make deals, review assembly processes, etc., etc). So this travel hiatus will also delay production.
The severity of this is hard to predict, but there will certainly by some impact.
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They lie continually, about everything. They very happily killed roughly 40 million people just to make their economic plans *look* successful and still mostly deny it. Lying about this is a relative piffle.
These are totalitarians with a "president for life". They have no motivation to do anything but make themselves look better, even temporarily, regardless of the effect it has on anyone or anywhere else. They don't care if they generate a world pandemic, someone over there figures that if only 90% of thei
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Re: Smart (Score:2)
You'd have to be as stupid as a you clearly are to come up with that plan.
If china had access to this virus, which is contagious before symptoms present. And the desire to infect other countries with an epidemic, they would only need to infect a bunch of travellers on their way back home to the target countries.
It would have been trivial to do.
This clearly didn't happen...
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It is obvious that China's government is lying about the situation. When they declared 40 dead, videos were made of hospitals with dead lining halls. They were anxiously in the 100s dead at that point.
The one video I have seen (was on New York Post website) shows 4 of what looks like people covered in sheets, 2 on the floor, one on a cot, and one on a gurney. The one on the gurney might be dead, it looks like they were strapped down, possibly died en route in an ambulance. Same for the cot. For the 2 on the floor, the shapes are more indicative of someone lying on their side sleeping. They could have just pulled sheets/blankets over their heads to block out noise/light. It's hardly what I would call
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Well of course the New York Post won't tell you the truth! That would be like watching anything other than Fox News and expecting fair coverage of President Trump!
You need to look at real media like infowars and Natural News, not the lamestream talking heads paid off by Xi and Soros.
Plenty of videos there if you want to get your head out of the sand. TIP: research "Miracle Mineral Supplement" if you want to survive this one!! That's something CNN won't tell you, and it will also treat autism, herpes, and ca
Re: Smart (Score:2)
Oh, you believe and spread any lie you hear about China. It's your job after all.
Too little too late (Score:2)
Its already out of china and has made its way to several countries in europe including the UK and germany so if it isn't in the USA yet it soon will be.
Flights should have been stopped immediately, never mind the economic consequences for the airlines, thats irrelevant, and so is getting expats home. You don't pull people out of an area where there's an airborn transmissable disease without quarantining them first.
Idiot politicians.
Re: Too little too late (Score:2)
Its already out of china and has made its way to several countries in europe including the UK and germany so if it isn't in the USA yet it soon will be.
If you're so obviously uninformed on this topic, why do you still feel the need to post?
Not as deadly as SARS or MERS (Score:4, Informative)
Canada had 3 confirmed cases. Two in Toronto, and one in Vancouver (west coast).
The Toronto cases are a couple in their 50s. The husband was hospitalized and under care for some time. The wife later went to hospital, but was sent home to recuperate in self isolation (symptoms not as acute).
Today, the husband was discharged from the hospital [bnnbloomberg.ca].
This confirms that the 2019 Coronavirus is considerably less deadly than either the SARS or MERS strains.
MERS had a 35% fatality rate [globalnews.ca], SARS was around 20%.
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Of course, caution is needed. It is better not to be sick, than sick and recover (or not).
But the point here is that this is not the human civilization altering pandemic that everyone says is inevitable. Nor is it on the scale of the 1919 Spanish Flu epidemic.
SARS and MERS were airborne too.
MERS, the most deadly of the trio, was contained.
So all that is good news.
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The Spanish flu's scale was unbelievable.
It killed more people than the ongoing World War.
Imagine one fifth of the ~ 1.8 Billion people getting sick from it, and 50 million dead!
What would that be in today's 7.5B people? Unimaginable.
On the other hand, healthcare has improved a lot: there are antibiotics to take care of secondary infections, there are quarantine and isolation procedures, there are more accurate tests, and a vaccine on the horizon (summer).
Would air travel and more global movement undermine
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Currently the fatality rate is approximately 2%. That is certainly bad (like Spanish Flu bad), but it's also likely to be an overestimate because it's unambiguous when someone is dead, vs. most people with mild or no symptoms will not be diagnosed. This virus is spreading faster than SARS, which is also bad.
The good news is that the world was alerted very early on and people are aware of it, so we're actively doing things to slow down the spread as well as working on treatment and vaccines - this could be c
If it's like other coronaviruses. (Score:2)
I don't have numbers on this one. But others in the family survive for about three hours on a dry surface, a week in a room temperature liquid. (No doubt much longer in refrigerated liquids. Not sure if freezing kills, preserves, or both.)
So I'd be more concerned about the transport personnel than dry goods like shipping-boxed electronics.
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Coronavirus is actually a very common thing in Humans, the common name is the "common cold" - it's quite common.
It's just one of several families under that name. (Another biggie is rhinovirus.)
What scares me is the US southern border. (Score:2)
What scares me is the US southern border. Air flights from China are not the only way for a virus to arrive, and the US is not the only country with cases.
With illegal border crossings in the hundreds of thousands to millions per year, organizations treating it as a profitable industrial process, those who successfully crossed and weren't intercepted (or were released) in hiding, and the virus incubation period of two weeks (so they don't just fall ill on the way in), there are a lot of opportunities for "
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There are 350 million legal border crossings between Mexico and the US each year. Given that they don't involve a comprehensive health screening that would detect an early stage infection, I'm not going be worried about illegal migrants. This virus is imported to a thousand random locations in the US on planes and automobiles for every case that walks across the border.
I should be reassured? I don't think so. (Score:2)
There are 350 million legal border crossings between Mexico and the US each year. Given that they don't involve a comprehensive health screening that would detect an early stage infection, I'm not going be worried about illegal migrants.
And you think that customs at the land crossings won't be instituting at least the same level of screening as at the airports, now that there's a plague-level threat? Or that those who evade customs, and thus have NO screening, no matter how much screening those at the off
But you have a point. Case seven .... (Score:2)
But you have a valid point.
US case 7 has been living in Vilicon Valley for a week [mercurynews.com].
Living at home in Santa Clara, sick (a mild case) and unsupervised. Making two visits to outpatient clinics while symptomatic, thus exposing an unknown number of other, and infirm, clinic visitors, along with the medical staff members and anyone he encountered on the way, o
Thanks media (Score:3)
Another world event blown completely out of proportion by the news media. Not that we shouldn't be concerned, but come on. The fatality rate is insignificant so far (unless you were one of those who died, I guess).