Global Adventurer

You can buy hand sanitizer in many middle eastern countries. You can buy alcohol (liquor) too if you're not a Muslim. In the UAE there are liquor stores for tourists. And hotels serve alcohol, including duty free purchases.

Loren Pechtel

No--Iran doesn't have 5k ICU beds.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3481771/

iahphx

There sure is a lot of worry and fear-mongering in this thread today. Did anyone bother to look at the Chinese statistics? Outside of Hubei province, there are only a HANDFUL of new corona cases. That's incredibly good news. And you guys are learning how to make your own hand sanitizer?

It's going to be OK. Yes, more people are going to get this virus, including many more in Europe. We'll probably see some transmission in the USA before it's all over. But people die of infectious diseases every day. You don't spend your days worrying about influenza. In the entire world outside of China, only about 50 people (out of more than 6 BILLION) have died from coronavirus, and the vast majority of these were very elderly and/or with other serious health issues. That's chump change compared to regular flu. So perhaps some perspective would be in order?

MSPeconomist

A lot depends on local laws and also requirements that resident foreigners have alcohol permits. I'd worry about traveling by vehicle in parts of the UAE with alcohol-based hand sanitizer.

OTOH, in many places alcohol not for human consumption is altered so that one cannot drink it, such as "de-natured" rubbing alcohol or the alcohol in (chemistry etc.) laboratories, which might be methanol instead of ethanol, where alcoholic beverages are normally ethanol but moonshine often is methanol. [I recall an incident where methanol was added to Austrian wine and killed some people. Also, some of the widely publicized Mexico resort problems might be counterfeit alcohol contaminated with methanol.]

tauphi

Ditto Australia. The numbers in Korea only really exploded after they started testing everyone instead of just the ones with known contact/travel history.

tauphi

The Chinese are not testing everyone with cold/flu symptoms. They're only testing people with a Hubei (or other relevant areas) travel/contact history.

doctoravios

I agree and my apologies if any of my previous posts have seemed alarmist - definitely not how I would want them to be perceived. Yes, we absolutely should put things into perspective and it is going to be unhelpful for everyone if we start fear-mongering and panic and being calm and pragmatic is a much better approach. It will be OK in the end!

But I think it is important people realise that we can no longer avoid the issue. No amount of travel restrictions/quarantine will stop global spread at this stage and the chances are significant numbers of people will get infected and die. Perhaps a small proportion in relative terms compared to world population but a large number in absolute terms and so we should still do everything we can to mitigate adverse outcomes where possible.

Re: hand sanitiser, yes, if you have it available then use it but I wouldn't go out of your way to buy it at inflated costs or try to make your own and do not use it at the exclusion of hand washing with water and soap (i.e. you should use hand sanitiser in addition to, not instead of water/soap handwashing). And masks, just forget them. They won't help unless you are already infected in which case you are helping others by wearing one, although much better to simply isolate yourself where possible.

And good point about other infectious diseases - it's important not to forget preventative strategies for those while we are caught up in coronavirus (so mosquito avoidance/vaccination/food preparation safety etc).

notquiteaff

That may be true if the numbers are accurate, but it didn’t come for free.

(and for the record, I am not home brewing hand sanitizer or knitting face masks; what I bought is roughly what we would use over the course of two years of travel or hiking... and I am still expecting to get on an airplane in a few days and fly through three airports)

When it first started in Wuhan, there were also only a few cases, and few people died. Then it got out of control. I am not convinced that the same couldn’t happen elsewhere. It doesn’t take much to overwhelm the healthcare system because it isn’t necessarily designed for a sudden increase of patients on top of existing flu load.

Oh... and the vast majority of the dead being older is comforting because I am not yet in that category, but let me see what my 80+ year-old parents think about that :/

helvetic

[mod edit]

People are not worried about the current "50 outside China" number of dead, they're worried about the inevitable future dead.

In a couple days, this will have killed more people than 9/11 [mod edit]

A few weeks ago, 50 was the number of dead in China.

nk15

From the WHO press conference on Monday:

"Secondly, many of our health systems even in the most developed countries, in fact, very often in the most developed countries are operating at nearly 100% efficiency or impact all the time. You don’t see many extra beds in hospitals in Europe so the problem for the European countries and other countries in the developed world is that the health systems may come under a lot of extra pressure. We see that with the seasonal influenza every winter. But slowing down the virus, even now slowing down the virus spreading in Europe in order for the flu season to end will free up significant capacity in the health system. Even Slowing down the virus by a month or six week will have a massive positive benefit to the system."

https://www.worldometers.info/corona...ndemic-feb-24/

That's consistent with the assessment in the US that this is now peak flu season.

azepine00

every year flu kills tens of thousands americans.. this one appears somewhat nastier but with reasonable control and some disruptions it can be managed untill the season is over

nk15

Health insurance COVID-19 screening story, I don't know how exactly this will work out, but people might be scared of the bills....At least in the UK, Japan, and Canada you don't have to worry about stuff like that.

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/hea...240476806.html

GadgetFreak

We don’t know that it has a season. And we don’t know that it can be controlled or managed. It also isn’t “somewhat nastier” but it may be 20 or so times likelier to kill someone than flu. Lots of people die from malaria too. That doesn’t mean that people dying from something else is good, or even acceptable in a case like this.

notquiteaff

Long article about the lack of testing in the US (426 compared to 35,000 in South Korea, about 7k in UK) and how local/state labs are frustrated with the need to send specimens to the CDC due to faulty test kits. Seems several labs are trying to develop their own tests independently and get them approved by the FDA, and Hawaii wants to use test kits from Japan.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/healt...onavirus-test/

Locally we now have the first suspected case (symptoms and travel history). Samples have been sent off for testing.

GadgetFreak

They may only have a week or two at most to fix that. I think they can do it but they need to be developing higher throughput testing, not going backwards.