(02-25-2020 04:38 PM)Attackcoog Wrote:  

(02-25-2020 04:09 PM)Hambone10 Wrote:  80 million would be about 130% of the number of people who died last year globally from all causes.

Pandemics dont care. Pretty sure 1917 deaths were well below 1918 deaths. That said---I dont think we will hit those numbers because we will take actions like they did in China. You'll see shutdowns and a massive decrease in discretionary human interaction/activities.

As far as human immune activity---improvement happens after contact---not before (thats what a vaccine does). Now one positive thing could happen is that the virus itself might mutate to something less dangerous. But, by that token--- it could do the opposite as well (become more dangerous).

I'll try and be more clear....

Many people are already affected and asymptomatic. They are developing immunities to the disease. They are infecting others, many/most of whom will similarly be asymptomatic and develop immunities. We don't know how many those are. The disease seems easily transmitted, but it really isn't any more dangerous than any other 'new' strain of flu. If you are already compromised, it is a big issue. If you are not, your biggest concern is passing it to someone who is. It's certainly not remotely Ebola. More below

(02-25-2020 11:14 PM)Fort Bend Owl Wrote:  The one area the Democrats really did an effective job of blasting Trump in the debate tonight was talking about how he's done such a poor job in handling this crisis. A couple of days ago, Trump tweeted the virus will be gone by April, but today his administration was taking a completely different stand on the severity of the situation.

It also doesn't help that Trump has continued to cut funding for the CDC, NIH and other scientific organizations (in 2018, Trump under the direction of John Bolton shut down the entire global health security unit, and also the infectious epidemic team within the DHS - neither group has been replaced since).

It's also worth noting that Monday's request of $2.5 billion from Congress to fight the virus is well less than the $6 billion the Obama administration asked for in 2014 to combat the Ebola virus (they received $5.4 billion in funding).

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/...virus.html

While it clearly was effective with you...

People like me ask... did we NEED $5.4byn? I bought 'Ebola Kits' for all of my urgent care centers including special suits and modified some of our centers to accommodate isolation. Could we have used $20byn? How about $4byn? If rather than $5.4, we had spent $20byn... Would that have made us any safer? Or is more EVER just more? Said differently... Had we spent $20byn, would that be the baseline that we now feel compelled to spend close to that for this to 'show how serious we are' about it?

Corona and Ebola are as comparable in my mind as the flu and Ebola. The death rate of one is in the low single digits... the death rate of the other was almost 60%.

Yeah, I think we ought to spend a lot more on the one with a 60% mortality rate than on the one with the low single digit rate (and probably much lower).... and because of things like Swine flu and Avian flu etc etc etc, many of the protocols that we spent money on for those equally apply to this one. When a 'new' version of Ebola comes out, most of us (99+% of whom never needed the kits initially) can pull out the kits we purchased for the 2014 outbreak, make some minor tweaks and have done as much as we could without having to start from square one.