@domkle - Thanks, I hope some of it is helpful.  Obviously I'm not an ultimate expert - there are people that do this for a living, and I'm not one of them.  But since I've had some - pardon the expression - exposure, I try to add what I can. I try to listen to people who are authoritative, like Dr. Anthony Fauci, who's been running the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease at the US National Institutes of Health for 36 years, almost from the beginning of the HIV epidemic.

Good question about SARS.  It was both very similar to and very different from COVID-19.  They're genetically similar, but they behave differently.  SARS initially caused alarm because it was so severe, with a very high fatality rate.  But that wound up working against its ability to spread - it killed off a high percentage of its hosts.  COVID-19, by contrast, causes a much higher number of mild cases, and people stay asymptomatic for some period of time - perhaps as much as two weeks.  That enables it to spread very widely and establish a deep reservoir.  It's one of those cases where the less-alarming virus turns out to be more dangerous.  Also, in the case of SARS, public health measures got traction a lot sooner.  But again, that was easier because of the smaller case load.  Good article here that compares the two. 

There've been some excellent posts in this thread that provide a lot of good information, so some of what follows is redundant.  But just to bring it together in one place - there are four basic numbers to track if you want to see how an epidemic is behaving:

1. The percentage of the population that's infected.  Almost impossible to gauge right now in COVID-19 because of the number of asymptomatic cases and because, to be blunt, the testing regime is such a mess.  People are looking at wide ranges of estimates.  The estimates are, of course, much lower than for seasonal flu because this is a new virus that's just getting its foothold.

2. The case fatality rate or case fatality ratio - CFR for short.  This tells you how many infected people die of the disease.  This number (or this range of estimated numbers) is getting bandied around a lot.  The numbers are estimates because of the problem with item 1 - we don't know the number of infected people.  High-end estimates, for example out of China, show a CFR for COVID-19 of 3.4 percent.  That's higher than the 1918-19 flu pandemic, which clocked in at 2.6 percent.  It's probably an excessively high estimate, both because of skews in the affected population and reporting problems.  An emergency physician at Brigham and Women's in Boston (he also teaches at Harvard) did an interesting study in which he used the Grand Princess cruise ship population as a closed model, and came up with an estimate of 0.85 percent.  Some estimates are even lower - Dr. Fauci is currently projecting 0.5 percent in the US.  But the important thing to remember is that all those numbers, even the lowest ones, are dramatically higher than the CFR for seasonal flu, which is 0.1 percent.  In other words, Dr. Fauci estimates that COVID-19 is five times more fatal than seasonal flu.  People like to cite the much higher raw death numbers for seasonal flu but forget to point out that they're drawn from a vastly larger population. CFR lets you make apples-to-apples comparisons.  The additional thing to note about CFR is that full-population figures only tell you so much - you have to look at the numbers for different age cohorts. CFR for COVID-19 starts shooting way up for people over 60. 

3. The basic reproduction number, rendered as R₀ ("R-zero" or "R-naught" - the number that tells you how many new infections are produced by each individual infection.  Best current estimate for COVID-19 is about 2.5, which is pretty high - and of course which becomes more significant the more people are infected.  The reproduction number is the indicator of how contagious the disease is.

4. Doubling time - the amount of time it takes for the number of cases to double.  That gives you the picture of how fast the disease is spreading in a population.  Hospital planners need to watch it to account for capacity - which is a major issue.  In Lombardy, the rapid doubling, and the number of severe cases, has outrun the number of available bed, physicians, respiratory therapists and respirators.  And to put that in perspective, Lombardy has a higher physician-to-population and bed-to-population ratio than the US. 

If you take those four numbers into account, you'll have a handle - maybe a rough one, but still a handle - on how many people are infected, how many will die (and how sick the rest will get), how contagious COVID-19 is, and how fast it's spreading.  And you'll be inoculated (sorry!) from bad numbers - like the people who want to say that seasonal flu is much worse because it kills more people.  Yes it does, but that's not the relevant issue.  What matters is how quickly COVID-19 is getting out of hand.

It's really important to underscore the hospital capacity issue, because that's what's driving a lot of the aggressive response.  It's behind the "flatten the curve" graphics you see getting around.  Public health measures can have only a limited impact on the total caseload - to turn things around, we need a vaccine, which won't happen soon.  But by slowing down the rate at which new cases appear, you can lower the demand on the healthcare system to the point where it can cope.  In the 1918-19 St. Louis vs. Philadelphia example, the St. Louis case numbers eventually rose closer to the national average.  But it happened much more slowly, so that hospitals were able to manage.

Again, hope this helps clarify some stuff.

 

1 hour ago, domkle said:

Thank you for your interesting contributions, Alan. Appreciated that you take the time. It is a little blurry in my memory, but I don’t remember that the the 2002/03 SARS epidemy triggered such massive public health measures (quarantines etc.) and panic ? 

One major difference is the rise of social media. Many people are getting worked up because the useful information is getting drowned out by the doom and gloom online. All they see on Facebook et al is more and more predictions of doom and gloom.

 

Around here stores keep running out of toilet paper because some people started panicking about being locked down in quarantine for weeks on end. From there other people started rushing to buy some so they wouldn’t be caught out just for nornmal use. Now it’s a cycle of everyone scrambling to buy before they miss out. Mostly because some ridiculous posts on Facebook.

Edited March 11, 20206 yr by goates

3 minutes ago, goates said:

One major difference is the rise of social media.

Absolutely.

There are different kinds of virus, and that's one of them.

In SARS, there was no such "vector" for panic to spread.

Though I have to say that, putting the insane levels of panic aside, there are some legit reasons to alter buying patterns.  We live in the Washington DC area, and my wife works at a federal agency.  There are now two possible cases there, and everyone has been either told or encouraged (depending on their location in the building) to telework for a few days until the cases can be tracked and the building can be deep-cleaned.  So we've had to alter some of our behavior, including changing the mix in the pantry to account for our new pattern.  I haven't gone to ransack a Costco, and probably won't, but the thing is having its impact.

The Latest from the WHO in last hour.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-51839944

the chinese pneumonia is a pandemia now.

15 hours ago, goates said:

One major difference is the rise of social media. Many people are getting worked up because the useful information is getting drowned out by the doom and gloom online.  

The social media are an accelerator but the MSM have never been shying away from alarmist headlines and contents either. And the fear of penury, of lacking what is considered as essential  (that covers toilet paper now, urbanization !) long predates them.  With some reasons. My own generation's parents have known what penury was during and few years after WW2 and that was decupled when some had to hide themselves. Outside war periods hunger and malnutrition have  ceased to be a scourge only in the 20th century in Europe. Yesterday. Still are  in other parts of the world. The fear of lacking is deeply ingrained in our psyche. And there is not much needed to wake it up.

Edited March 12, 20206 yr by domkle

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/51849163

6 hours ago, G-RFRY said:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/51849163

At least it saves me from getting up in the morning at an ungodly hour.

Edited March 12, 20206 yr by Ron Attwood

1 hour ago, Ron Attwood said:

At least it saves me from getting up in the morning at an ungodly hour.

Yep positives in everything! Apart from when you are trying to release a yoke....

Actually I really was looking forward to this season but I suspect the whole lot will be messed up.

5 hours ago, mp15 said:

MFS is already delayed by Covid-19 and it could also be cancelled as it is a chinese pandemia out of control.

No, it's not delayed and talking about a cancellation is just apocalyptic thinking. MS said they are scaling back on updates in the near future. This might not even refer to Asobo but to the MS PR team in Washington state. Claiming the sim with a supposed release date sometime around fall will be delayed because of fewer public development updates in March/April is quite the stretch.

This is exactly the kind of (social) media fear mongering and spread of false information which has been talked about earlier.

Edited March 12, 20206 yr by threegreen

I have survived all these viruses and never gotten sick. This entire fiasco is perpetrated by the media. People need to calm down. 

3 hours ago, Alan_A said:

DELETED

As you said earlier,  there will be nominations aplenty for the Darwin Awards in 2020

I don't see the problem if MSFS is delayed it`s no big deal you will still get it even if it ends being next year, better that than rush it.

9 minutes ago, strider1 said:

I have business partners in China...

finaly a reasonable source at last.

Over a 1000 family's in Italy don't see it as a hoax or a joke they have lost someone.