Why are there so many people here who claim the coronavirus isn’t an issue?

Case in point:

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1235676297310990350

Dollars before safety.

wetfoot wrote:

I'm not saying CV is a hoax - I'm just saying that the fear is overcooked in many quarters. It's very real and it will kill a lot of people.

Where exactly is it overcooked?

People are saying:

1) Wash hands

2) Avoid travel to areas of outbreak

3) Avoid large gatherings in areas of outbreaks

4) Stay at home if you are ill

It is overcooked because they are

- walking around in surgical masks

- doomsday prepping

- spending all their time posting misinformation online

- scared

- ignorant of how probability works.

When you point out that COVID-19 sickened only 1 in 17,000 Chinese, they become

- racist

Bad Wigins wrote:

It is overcooked because they are

- walking around in surgical masks

- doomsday prepping

- spending all their time posting misinformation online

- scared

- ignorant of how probability works.

Nobody here has done any of that. You're just creative writing.

"Why are there so many people here who claim the coronavirus isn’t an issue?"

Could it be they are parroting the words of Donald Trump?

He is so smart and has the best words.

From today's news: A former CDC disease detective said that 140,000 people had been tested for the disease so far in South Korea. By comparison, CDC figures had the total number of US tests so far at around 1,500. Inept leadership sticking their heads in the sand.

Jamesengle6 wrote:

Why? Well, that's variable, but I'm finding a parallel between this particular denial to other kinds of denial of "issues" deemed "hoaxes" by the Republican reactionaries, ie. Trumpers.

Science and cautionary practices are considered "liberal conspiracies to take money out of your pockets and control your rights."

Common sense "abundance of caution" practices when it comes to our health, the health of the Earth, and the future for our children on a relatively safe Earth are considered foolish and costly by those who value political power and finances over health and safety. Rather spend energy and money on walls, war, guns and patriarchal white national power.

Extreme non reactions to extreme overreactions. The age old battle for sanity and reason.

What can I do? I already wash my hands compulsively, stay home from work when I'm even slightly sick. I live in a metro area of 8 million people and....1 person has come down with it in the wild. I would be worried if my grandparents were around the virus, and I'm sure nursing facilities are taking the necessary precautions.

Some people don't need to be worried about it.

case count is starting to rise sharply

today is the biggest since the china group

still, the good news is that it stopped in china.

iran is a hoary mess tho. That's going to get very bad.

https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/685d0ace521648f8a5beeeee1b9125cd

Seems like a pretty standard 'boy who cried wolf' situation. People are used to the media overyhyping and using click bait to sell the news that people are losing trust.

This is good news, from a doctor.

He thinks the data from the cruise ship indicate a mortality rate of below 1% and only old people.

============

But the most straightforward and compelling evidence that the true case fatality rate of SARS-CoV-2 is well under 1 percent comes not from statistical trends and methodological massage, but from data from the Diamond Princess cruise outbreak and subsequent quarantine off the coast of Japan.

A quarantined boat is an ideal—if unfortunate—natural laboratory to study a virus. Many variables normally impossible to control are controlled. We know that all but one patient boarded the boat without the virus. We know that the other passengers were healthy enough to travel. We know their whereabouts and exposures. While the numbers coming out of China are scary, we don’t know how many of those patients were already ill for other reasons. How many were already hospitalized for another life-threatening illness and then caught the virus? How many were completely healthy, caught the virus, and developed a critical illness? In the real world, we just don’t know.

Here’s the problem with looking at mortality numbers in a general setting: In China, 9 million people die per year, which comes out to 25,000 people every single day, or around 1.5 million people over the past two months alone. A significant fraction of these deaths results from diseases like emphysema/COPD, lower respiratory infections, and cancers of the lung and airway whose symptoms are clinically indistinguishable from the nonspecific symptoms seen in severe COVID-19 cases. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the death rate from COVID-19 in China spiked precisely among the same age groups in which these chronic diseases first become common. During the peak of the outbreak in China in January and early February, around 25 patients per day were dying with SARS-CoV-2. Most were older patients in whom the chronic diseases listed above are prevalent. Most deaths occurred in Hubei province, an area in which lung cancer and emphysema/COPD are significantly higher than national averages in China, a country where half of all men smoke. How were doctors supposed to sort out which of those 25 out of 25,000 daily deaths were solely due to coronavirus, and which were more complicated? What we need to know is how many excess deaths this virus causes.

This is where the Diamond Princess data provides important insight. Of the 3,711 people on board, at least 705 have tested positive for the virus (which, considering the confines, conditions, and how contagious this virus appears to be, is surprisingly low). Of those, more than half are asymptomatic, while very few asymptomatic people were detected in China. This alone suggests a halving of the virus’s true fatality rate.

On the Diamond Princess, six deaths have occurred among the passengers, constituting a case fatality rate of 0.85 percent. Unlike the data from China and elsewhere, where sorting out why a patient died is extremely difficult, we can assume that these are excess fatalities—they wouldn’t have occurred but for SARS-CoV-2. The most important insight is that all six fatalities occurred in patients who are more than 70 years old. Not a single Diamond Princess patient under age 70 has died. If the numbers from reports out of China had held, the expected number of deaths in those under 70 should have been around four.

https://slate.com/technology/2020/03/coronavirus-mortality-rate-lower-than-we-think.html

People think it's overhyped because the mainstream media has lost all credibility. The coronavirus is basically the outrage of the day used to blame Trump or his administration, in order to get a Democrat back into the WH.

40,000 a year die of the flu and all you hear is "get a flu shot."

grumpyoldman wrote:

People think it's overhyped because the mainstream media has lost all credibility. The coronavirus is basically the outrage of the day used to blame Trump or his administration, in order to get a Democrat back into the WH.

40,000 a year die of the flu and all you hear is "get a flu shot."

The media has only substantively lost creditability since the formerly fair and balanced revenue generator started painting that picture, touting themselves as the only alternative. And you ate it up.

They believe anything a certain politician tells them because they think they are "winning". The message the politician is giving is really about spreading distrust of the free press and any entity that may know more than him. He is trying to build himself as the only credible source of all information, including things about which he knows very little. Ignorant people eat it up.

To the OP, because they don't know about this.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UDY5COg2P2c&t=940s

So 705 have tested positive for the virus and 6 died. That's roughly 1%. Have all 705 run the full course of the virus? If not it might be higher in the next week or two. Did the age distribution on board match the general population?

I'm told there have been 233 cases and 14 deaths in the US. If the death rate is roughly 1%, that suggests there should be 1400 cases, which means most of those infected haven't been tested.

I've also been told that over 3000 physicians have been infected in China and 22 have died.

ledi wrote:

It is highly contagious, has a long incubation period, and is much more lethal than the flu.

So my real question is - what drives people to rabidly deny the POTENTIAL of this virus, and other similar problems? How are their brains wired to the point they reverse panic and basically try to will it out of existence instead of heeding the simple guidance of the CDC and WHO?

Because your first statement is completely false and not logical.

First of all, I have never known ANYONE who has died from the flu. None of my friends or relatives, and none of their friends have ever died from the flu, nor had any serious complications from the flu.

The only people I've known of who have had constant issues with sickness have been people who have constantly gone to doctors, undergone all kinds of various treatments, injections and so forth, usually recommended by agencies like the ones you mentioned, the WHO and the CDC.

Besides that, I have never known of anyone who has followed a healthy lifestyle who has died from the flu, nor from anything like the flu.

Why would I change my mind at this point? Everything that I see going on from this nonsensical corona-virus hysteria is following EXACTLY my experience through my life.

Therefore, I plan to keep on the same path, and to not start jumping off of cliffs like the people who are buying into the bogus disinformation campaigns.

The flu has a 0.1% mortality rate. COVID is 20-40x as lethal (2-4%). That's the difference.

Awesome wrote:

Because thousands of people die daily in the US from heart disease, preventable cancer, and drug addictions. Thousands. Every single day.

I have no idea where COVID-19 is going and I tend to be very optimistic that the death rate will be low, but this is a dumb analogy. I can't contract heart disease, cancer, or a drug addiction from you, but you could certainly pass along the coronavirus to me.