Is doing the ineffectual better than just being realistic? — the Wuhan coronavirus

28 January 2020

The inevitable happened with Wuhan's coronavirus

From Gizmodo:

Germany and Japan have reported the first cases of a new SARS-like virus in people who haven’t recently visited China.

The announcements, made on Tuesday, come as the number of confirmed cases of 2019-nCoV worldwide reached 4,587 and the death toll hit 106.

Hong Kong

Hong Kong will (not so immediately) ban mainland Chinese folk from visiting. Effective beginning 30 January.

Presumably:

everybody arriving before then is (magically) not sick

and

no one visiting afterward will have been in contact with someone Wuhan-ish.

For its part, the United States also over and underreacted

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cautioned against "nonessential" travel to China.

This seems to be an (understandable) overreaction.

China is geographically huge and much of its population doesn't travel very far. Statistically speaking, one might be in more danger of catching the Wuhan virus by hanging out at a globally "cosmopolitan" airport in another country. Including the United States.

The CDC admits that the threat to the American public remains low.

Hear that statement in this 27 January CDC audio clip — at approximately the 5:30 minute point.

Consider the absurdity of the CDC's "non-essential" travel caveat

First, CDC seems to assume that hordes of Americans have been intending to go to Wuhan's (Hubei Province) cauldron of brewed and brewing illness just for fun.

And the agency also implicitly presumes that people — who do have "essential" business in Hubei Province and China — will not pick up the bug and invisibly spread it.

In other words, medically speaking, the "essential" travel distinction is arguably nonsensical.

A few tentative facts

In the case of Wuhan's coronavirus, no one yet knows how potentially contagious or deadly it is or will become.

From the CDC:

Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses.

There are several known coronaviruses that infect people and usually only cause mild respiratory disease, such as the common cold.

However, at least two previously identified coronaviruses have caused severe disease — severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus.

Signs and symptoms of this illness include fever, cough, and difficulty breathing.

This novel [Wuhan] coronavirus has the potential to cause severe disease and death. Available information suggests that older adults and people with underlying health conditions or compromised immune systems may be at increased risk of severe disease.

In response to this outbreak, Chinese officials are screening travelers leaving some cities in China. Several countries and territories throughout the world are reported to have implemented health screening of travelers arriving from China.

On arrival to the United States, travelers from China may be asked questions to determine if they need to undergo health screening. Travelers with signs and symptoms of illness (fever, cough, or difficulty breathing) will have an additional health assessment.

Viruses frequently evolve rapidly. Some attenuate in both contagion and/or deadliness. Others go the other way in one or both aspects.

The "what should we do" question is legitimate and has no obvious answers.

You can get a sense of this difficulty by listening to the CDC's 27 January audio clip. The recorded discussion is typical of what happens in medicine and epidemiology, when faced with a previously unseen pathogen.

The detection complication

Not untypically, the Wuhan virus appears to be contagious before human carriers display easily detectible signs of illness, including fever.

A pertinent aside

It is no wonder that some governments are experimenting with coronaviruses as potential weapons.

If you mix globalization's perpetual travel with governments' shared slowness and ineffectuality, you get the desirably "perfect" wave of weaponized infection.

Feel sick yet?

Then, there's the typically hysterical media uproar

The Gizmodo report tags less than five thousand people as being infected with Wuhan's virus.

First, how anyone knows how exactly many people are sick from it beats me, as well as anyone else with a medically and epidemiologically knowledgeable brain.

Second, five thousand infections is a trivial number for a virus of this respiratory type. Just compare five thousand to influenza's routinely hundreds of thousands and millions.

Third, a little over one hundred deaths is also a comparatively low number.

Again, compare that toll — which is also actually unknown, given that no one knows how many people are actually "Wuhan sick" and dying therefrom — to influenza total every year.

Fourth, there is confusion regarding the health characteristics of those who have died.

Evidence so far seems to be that most of them are older (like me) with pre-existing health vulnerabilities. How dangerous is a virus then, if it's predominantly just "knocking off" the already almost dead?

I'm not being disrespectful or uncaring.

Having experienced many of the heightened vulnerabilities and impediments of age myself, I have a developed sense of dark humor regarding the specifics of what is going to eventually get me (and you). One way or another.

The moral? — Is the appearance of doing statistically ineffectual things a human necessity?

In the event of a genuinely deadly pandemic, few governments on the planet would be able, or economically willing, to do anything proactively significant about it.

From corporatism's profits-seeking perspective, let's keep essential business travel going.

And, for political correctness's sake, let us also continue selling wild virus-carrying animals at open markets.

Can't have one set of "advanced" cultures rejecting another's "deplorable" tendency to habitually inject all manner of noxiously novel, animal disease agents into the human pool.

This culturally medical bias, by the way, may be why the CDC produced its blanket warning against nonessential travel to all of China.

Perhaps the scope of the ban expresses understandable irritation with a demonstrably totalitarian state that repeatedly allows avoidable pathogens to threaten lives outside China.

From a broader perspective, isn't it fun to live on this planet — among such an admirably intelligent and perspicacious (Homo sapiens) species?

There are probably mountain gorillas, elephants and polar bears out there hoping that a virus of some kind gets us all.

PeteFree.com

Is doing the ineffectual better than just being realistic? — the Wuhan coronavirus