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China Medicine

People Fleeing Coronavirus Head To a New Safe Haven: China (wsj.com) 141

When the coronavirus pandemic started worsening in the U.K. last week, Jennie Lan knew where she would feel safest: China. From a report: The graduate student at University College London was worried Brits weren't taking precautions, such as wearing face masks. "People here didn't attach a great significance to the coronavirus," Ms. Lan said. On Tuesday, she will fly to China to stay with her parents, who live in a district with no reported infections. "The local government controlled it well," she said. Weeks ago, people fled China to dodge the new coronavirus. Now it has flipped. People are headed to China because they believe it is the safest place in the world. Apple has reopened all stores in its Chinese market, but said Friday it would close those everywhere else for two weeks.

A Chinese soccer-league team from Wuhan, where the virus was discovered, planned to leave its temporary base in Spain because of worsening conditions there to return to China. Jack Ma, billionaire founder of Chinese online-retail giant Alibaba, recently pledged to donate 1 million masks and 500,000 virus test kits -- to the U.S. Previously focused on people within the country as potential virus carriers, China's National Health Commission said Monday that preventing imported cases is now a priority. Beijing's municipal government said Sunday that people coming into the city from abroad must quarantine at designated hotels and sites for 14 days, its latest step to protect the capital.

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People Fleeing Coronavirus Head To a New Safe Haven: China

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  • and is the government reporting the real numbers?

    • Apple Computers certainly thinks so...

  • Elon Musk just declared that due to the Terran coronavirus pandemic, Mars is now closed to all non-Martians.
    • Will Marvin be subject to mandatory quarantine when he comes home, or can he self-quarantine in his spaceship?

      • Mandatory local quarantine. His ship will need to be nuked in orbit. Only way to be sure.

        All that Illudium Q-36 on his ship won't really make a Kaboom!, but it should be a lovely lightshow.

    • Elon Musk just declared that due to the Terran coronavirus pandemic, Mars is now closed to all non-Martians.

      Well, sure. They remember what happened to their invasion force back in 1900.

  • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Monday March 16, 2020 @02:45PM (#59837168)

    Then you're potentially stuck in China.

    We have a large number of Chinese graduate students in our engineering department. From what I've seen historically, after living in the US for a few years a large percentage of them will do whatever they can to stay here (or in other western countries) after they've graduated.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      Live wherever you want - the more countries that don't suck to live in the better. It's not a BAD thing.

      And China's rise doesn't mean America sucks tomorrow. America only sucks tomorrow because we closed all of our ski resorts, hopefully we don't suck again in a weeks time. Otherwise, it's generally a great place to live (outside of all the pessimistic doomers).

      Britain has been in decline for *some time* (I'm American, so obviously I don't know) - and it still doesn't suck to live there, don't know why e

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • n/t
  • Info (Score:5, Informative)

    by Maxo-Texas ( 864189 ) on Monday March 16, 2020 @03:03PM (#59837250)

    Worldometer.
    https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info]
    Counts by country, helpful charts and graphs. Comprehensive textual information.

    John Hopkin's
    https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis... [arcgis.com]
    This has failed under load a few times. It reports a publicly available data source on Github.

    Doctor John Campbell
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
    Covering this since January. Rational, factual, evidence based.

    MedCram
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
    This is a bit more "technical and wonky"

    I do not follow the CDC. It has often severely under reported actual cases in the united states and I'm afraid it's been compromised politically. If it says something useful, it's generally going to appear on the other sources immediately.

    • That John Hopkin's map is pretty cool, but damn near useless without % of population.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Maxo-Texas ( 864189 )

        Easy to calculate.

        After a while you know Belgium is about 8 million, UK is about 67 milllion, Italy is about 60 million, U.S. is 330 million, and so on tho.
        But frankly- I care more about the exponent of growth of new cases. It's *horrible* in the U.S. Highest in the world last friday. If it continued, you could literally infect every person in the U.S. by the end of April.*

        I've been following this since January. Finished all my preparations on feb 10th. Bought a freezer.. have 6 months food. *Reasonab

        • I've been crunching the numbers as well. The exponential growth is a thing the human mind doesn't deal well with, I think we're built for following linear extrapolation. So I know intellectually that it says 10K confirmed infected by such-and such a date and 100K by the next week, but it's hard to really conceive.

        • by Aczlan ( 636310 )

          But frankly- I care more about the exponent of growth of new cases. It's *horrible* in the U.S. Highest in the world last friday. If it continued, you could literally infect every person in the U.S. by the end of April.*

          Is the US growth actually exponential, or is it just the true number of infected people are coming to light (given the lack of testing in the US until the last couple of weeks)?

          Aaron Z

    • by jrumney ( 197329 )

      It's not so much that the CDC are under reporting, it's that they are slow reporting. They update their published figures once per day, at midday. But those figures they are publishing are the figures as of 4pm the previous day. They also only update on weekdays, so at 11am Monday, you are still seeing figures for 4pm Thursday on CDC's site, while others like John Hopkins are updating in real time.

  • On Tuesday, she will fly to China to stay with her parents...

    Great, she'll be there for the next outbreak, whatever that is.

    • Likely SARS-CoV-2, again. It's a coronavirus, so it will eventually infect most everyone, just like every other cold virus. She's not going to be "safe" from the novel coronavirus in China, but she may well be safe from overrun hospitals and lack of care when she does get it, provided China keeps its guard up.

  • This is not sustainable.

  • by Maxo-Texas ( 864189 ) on Monday March 16, 2020 @03:23PM (#59837358)

    It's going to be 12-18 months until covid-19 has a safe, effective vaccine. It could *easily* be longer. It took years to develop the MERS vaccine and while they never developed a SARS vaccine, that primarily due to lack of financial incentive after it was suppressed successfully.

    Covid-19 is going to eventually infect 40% to 70% of the world population per epidemiologists.

    A *ROUGH* approximation of the infection level is 1-(1/R0). So if R0 is 2.0 then herd immunity would stop it at ~50%. If R0 is 4.0 then herd immunity would stop it at ~75%. It's more complicated at that but that equation catches the gist of it.

    Testing is *NOT* useless. Even when infections are widespread. Korea has suppressed their epidemic by *FREE*, *Easily available* testing. China has ended their epidemic the same way.

    There are people at every building checking temperatures. If you have a tempurature you are sent to a special testing facility. You get an immediate, *FREE* bacterial test- if that is negative- you get a lung Cat Scan. If that shows clouding of the lungs, you get a *FREE* Covid19 test. You are not allowed to go home until the results come back (so you don't infect your family).

    But... if people resume any kind of normal life (even working in crowds in a factory) then the epidemic will start up again. If you get sick, it's important to have a support network to deliver you food and check up on you.

    And I have to say.. the UK approach is going to get a lot of people needlessly killed. They need to remove Boris ASAP and put in someone who isn't comfortable a eugenics genocide. Boris's plan will make the situation in UK worse than that in Italy. Which is a tragedy.

    Young people need to get over the idea they are immune. If you read the italian stories, there are many young people in the hospital in coma's on oxygen. And each one of them is causing another person to die who would have been treated but they took the slot because they are young. They'll also be left with organ damage and impaired health because too many got too sick too fast because they were out celebrating sport at the bar instead of self quarantining.

    This is growing *nasty* fast in the U.S.

    Last three fridays
    62 to 329 to 2284 cases.
    At that rate, next friday will see over 16,000 cases.
    At that rate, the following friday would see over 110,000 cases.
    And those cases are really already baked in. We can't avoid them. They were holding a 100,000 person rodeo in Houston which we now know at least one covid19 person was at. That's comparable to the 40,000 person neighborhood pot luck festival in China which lead that neighborhood to have to the highest case and death rate in Wuhan province.

    The question is can we limit the following friday to 200,000 cases or will it be 800,000 cases?
    It's doubling faster than ever 3 days in the united states.

    I think it's great this person went back closer to family and a solid support network in a province with no infections. But as soon as china starts back up their economy, it's going to start spreading again. China will have to continue widespread testing to slow the rate. Obviously, the R0 is lower under quarantine and testing than with no testing and no quarantine.

    There is also the concern about the "L" and "S" strains. It may indicate that the virus could mutate into a new independent strain which can infect you roughly every 100,000 cases. If that's true, letting it run rampant in a population might cause multiple strains which do not provide immunity to each other. That's apocalyptic. We need to keep sick people from spreading their own mutated variety (and it mutates in every person- just not enough to become a separate strain).

    Try to be kind to others during this. Most will survive. Tho my odds of dying if I get a bad case are about 7%.

    • Point of order about the rodeo and Houston: The rodeo is not a single event, but a 3 week series of events (which was cancelled after one week). The person in question who tested positive went to the Rodeo Cookoff, which is a kickoff event that occurred February 27-29th. If that person caused a mass infection spread here, we would be seeing that already in the infected numbers. The Wuhan outbreak numbers were already in the tens of thousands 2.5 weeks after that potluck, but the entire state of Texas has f

      • things go South quickly

        As one born in the Southern U.S. (Florida to be exact), I must say that this expression is somewhat offensive.

        I have colleagues in Australia; I once asked one if they say "go North" in the same way. He had no idea what I was talking about. So, I wonder, where did the expression "go South" meaning "go bad" originate?

        Thanks for listening :-)
        A Southern Gentleman

    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      It's not clear that a vaccine for COVID-19 is possible. It's an RNA virus and mutates rapidly.

      OTOH, there are several "treatments" that are under rapid development. Some are repurposed drugs already in use for other purposes, so if they turn out to work, they should be available quickly. And they'll probably work against mutant COVID-19 strains that use the same attack vector.

    • by Cederic ( 9623 )

      the UK approach is going to get a lot of people needlessly killed. They need to remove Boris ASAP and put in someone who isn't comfortable a eugenics genocide. Boris's plan will make the situation in UK worse than that in Italy. Which is a tragedy.

      You do realise that Boris isn't creating the plan. Medical professionals and experts in the field are creating the plan. Boris signs it off and helps promote it.

      What, you want fucking cat scans every time someone enters a building? Yeah, that's going to fucking work.

  • And the Tienanmen square massacre never happened, right?
    I'm sure when the CCP says their country is safe, they are totally telling the truth.

    Totally.

    • There are plenty of westerners in China that have reported on the ground, including WHO monitors. Reports from the Chinese government regarding COVID-19 may not be completely accurate in all respects (they certainly weren't at the beginning), but it's pretty easy to confirm without relying on Chinese produced data that the makeshift hospitals are starting to empty out and things are returning to normal.

      • by rldp ( 6381096 )

        there are a lot of ways to empty out a hospital that don't include curing any patients

  • I'll bet that's a pretty safe place to be, viruswise.
    • by fintux ( 798480 )
      It only takes one single person to spread the infection to the whole population. Considering the constant flow of propaganda and the miserable state of affairs in general in the country, I would argue that it will be one of the worst places, even if the epidemic might start a bit late due to the country being very closed (there are tourists, however).
  • by AlanObject ( 3603453 ) on Monday March 16, 2020 @04:39PM (#59837678)

    People are headed to China because they believe it is the safest place in the world.

    According to the map Russia hasn't had any cases to speak of at all for weeks now. So that should be the safest place to go.

    • by fintux ( 798480 )

      People are headed to China because they believe it is the safest place in the world.

      According to the map Russia hasn't had any cases to speak of at all for weeks now. So that should be the safest place to go.

      I'm not sure if this is a sarcastic comment or not. Don't trust anything that Russian official say about anything negative. It is worse than China in this regard (China used to be as bad, but that has changed). Remember Chernobyl? Heard about Majak 1957? How about Majak 2017? It's all lies, cover-ups and propaganda to the root.

      Russia shares 2600 miles of border with China. Doesn't it sound a bit suspicious how few cases there are reported?

  • by Locke2005 ( 849178 ) on Monday March 16, 2020 @05:03PM (#59837788)
    Try the bat soup, I hear it's delicious! That stuff is to die for!
  • by slashmydots ( 2189826 ) on Monday March 16, 2020 @09:21PM (#59838576)
    Islands, guys. Islands. Do you not watch zombie movies? See y'all in Cuba lol.
  • STOP (Score:4, Insightful)

    by beepsky ( 6008348 ) on Tuesday March 17, 2020 @04:16AM (#59839446)
    Please don't legitimize literal Chinese state propaganda by posting it on the front page of Slashdot.
    Retards

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