Buy my doomsday bucket!

I wonder if a possible "apocalypse" was ever used as a scam to get more business.

In my country a dumb christian TV 'church' (read: scam) said to donate for a cure from god and to save your kids from Corona. So yeah, it is done all the time. Just the same with war, someone is always making money.

@Thanos haha!
@TBest yes, unfortunately there are people out there who use Christianity or the church to serve their own purposes; however, they are a minority compared to the rest of Christians. Unfortunately, because they are different, they get more attention, some people unfortunately extrapolate.
Anyway, this thread is about the Coronavirus, so I won't go into a religious debate about the corruptness of the Christian church. 😉

regarding the panic-buying, Australian supermarkets have now put limits on the number of particular items people can buy.

@LND The only panic buying I've seen is for masks... they've dramatically gone up in price. There was only one (now recovered) person who had the virus in my city.

Of note, panic buying and hoarding is not good for supermarkets, nor for the consumer.

There was an article about this on the Belgian news where it was explained that peaks in buying are good for the sellers when they can be planned, e.g. the Christmas spree or sales, but bad for everyone when sudden spikes appear.

The reasoning:
* empty shelves mean some consumers cannot buy or will go buy elsewhere
* the people who hoard will buy less afterwards leading to a reduction in sales and no net gain in sales overall (and potentially a loss if they lose consumers who go buy elsewhere)
* producers may have to adapt their production to match spikes, which is not easy when it comes by surprise - upping the production of machines (which may mess up maintenance schedules), not allowing workers to get a leave/take holidays, ... And similarly, they have to take into account that production may need to be lowered later - for producers a steady flow is easier and more efficient overall.
* prices may go up as a result of the temporarily increased demand because of the aformentioned production cost - producers will almost always let the consumer pay.

In summary, this is only potentially good for the largest supermarkets (with the largest stocks), although even for them it's typically a breakeven, and typically bad for smaller supermarkets.

Tip for the smart customer, note that it's ideal to buy in the downtime after hoarding has completely halted and everything is "normal" again - due to the decreased demand (hoarders won't buy) but largely unchanged production, there may be a surplus of products and supermarkets may give more (bulk) reductions.

and a man in New Hampshire broke self-quarantine and went to a big event.... people like that should go to jail or get fined if they survive

Edited 3/5/2020 23:37:54

Its not THE Coronavirus, its one kind of Coronavirus. There are many other out there.
The official designation is Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).

none of you know how bad it is in hong kong

Price gouging is moral.

https://www.ksla.com/2020/03/05/panic-buying-blamed-hand-sanitizer-shortage/

don't worry about it. it is basically the flu. Don't wear masks in public; only in Asia, Italy, and Iran you may want to do that. 9 deaths in Washington state, but... all people with underlying health conditions. Those only at serious risk of dying are old people and already really sick people. People my age it will just be a common cold or a little worse than one...

From what I have seen, its ~4 times as deadly as the flu and is more contagious than the flu. Ofc, we won't really know the whole story until the oubreak is all said and done.

There are two possible outcomes at this point that I think are most likely:

1. It becomes endemic. In which case the general population grows a natural resistance to it and any new strains spinning off from it, in which case it just becomes part of the flu/common cold repository and loses its deadliness and potency (ie, spanish flu).

2. It burns itself out and dissapears.

As for now, since our bodies currently don't have any resistance to this pathogen family, if a new strain were to evolve that is much more deadly/contagious, there would be serious problems.

Edited 3/9/2020 00:56:18

don't worry about it. it is basically the flu. Don't wear masks in public; only in Asia, Italy, and Iran you may want to do that. 9 deaths in Washington state, but... all people with underlying health conditions. Those only at serious risk of dying are old people and already really sick people. People my age it will just be a common cold or a little worse than one...

The case fatality rate (SARS-2 is 10-30 times higher than the flu) is only one element that contributes to the severity of an epidemic. The basic reproduction factor of SARS-2 is 4.7-7 compared to 1.4 for seasonal flu. You will never see seasonal flu overfill hospitals and depopulate the labor force the way SARS-2 is doing it, because SARS-2 spreads remarkably efficiently, leading to a lot of active cases in one period of time. People don't get the flu all at the same time to the extent that they all get SARS-2 at the same time. A lot of active cases at one time = overflown hospitals, absent labor force, economic depression. Overflown hospitals and weakened immune systems due to viral infection put otherwise healthy people at risk of severe complications, secondary infections.

No, I have heard that many times it just comes up as a mild common cold so there could be tens of thousands more cases which caused no deaths

fuck corona we drinking modelo in dis bish

The severity of an epidemic isn't measure by the case fatality rate. I have listed several factors that present themselves as a danger and have little to do with the case fatality rate of the virus by itself; you are still fixated on the effect the virus would have on a patient, say, in a laboratory. But you don't live in a laboratory, you live in a global economy with billions of people.

old and weak people should die this is how the world works deal with it ...... lol, anyway i second what aura said about the two most probable outcomes, the thing that concerns me is that if the coronavirus works as what the previous sars would be, you would never be fully recovered (lungs whited out for the rest of your life)

I think a new ebola medicine has successfully cure someone in china, so this virus might have HIV properties in it, and having an HIV-like virus that can actually spread (throw back to the days when HIV people are basically isolated from everywhere), it's a daunting though really

the other thing is weather, when you notice the countries and regions that got community infections from the virus, they all have similar climate (cases in singapore and everything south of china have died down), i'd imagine when summer comes the virus would be far less potent in europe and america

No, I have heard that many times it just comes up as a mild common cold so there could be tens of thousands more cases which caused no deaths.

The thorough vetting of the population of South Korea is by far the most accurate guideline we have. I am pretty sure they are catching the vast majority of their cases.

They report a death rate of 0.5%, which I think is probably close to the realistic deathrate of the virus.

Combining the fact that the death rate of reported flu cases about 0.5%, and I think that at most 1 in 4 flu cases get reported, is why I hold a hypothesis that the death rate of coronavirus is probably about four times as deadly as the flu.

Even if this were not the case, and the virus was "basically the flu", then I think there is still reason to justify a response that we see now, simply because the pathogen family is one that our bodies are completely unfamiliar with, therefore making a potential mutation of the virus all the deadlier.

Ah, I found the CDC Fact Sheet on influenza. They estimate that the probability of death for the illness is 2/100,000, or 0.002%

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/flu.htm

That's quite a bit less than the 0.5% fatality rate currently reported by South Korea.

I think a new ebola medicine has successfully cure someone in china, so this virus might have HIV properties in it, and having an HIV-like virus that can actually spread (throw back to the days when HIV people are basically isolated from everywhere), it's a daunting though really

What does Ebola have to do with HIV?

20% of cases go critical, in italy some hospitals left old guys to day because there are not enough machines for everybody.

The scaring part is that 15% of infected people seems to not show sigma or signs less then flu.

For italy It meant that virus spread unnoticed

Probably meaning the same in the US. Three TSA (airport security- they touch your ID and boarding pass) agents in SJC (one of the Bay Area airports) just got diagnosed with COVID-19.

SJC airport today was practically deserted, running on a skeleton crew of maybe 6-8 TSA agents in each domestic terminals- only 2 security lines. 3 infected TSA is a lot, and at an airport no less (flight was still close to full, so travel is still happening at reduced volume).

For all I know, I am now about to bring Boomer Plague to my destination.

Edited 3/11/2020 10:50:42