Andy49

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The figures from Iran depend on source, 210 deaths if you believe this story https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-51673053
I read last week that there were most likely many thousands of people infected in Iran which would explain their high death rate.
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behuman

I praise your concern about the planet, especially on a forum where members do things like "mileage runs" - aberrant indeed (I never did this).

Regarding the "hotspot" question, yours (or any) country might be closer of being such a "hotspot" than one might think. It will spread rapidly around Europe and the US for sure and in Italy we have so many cases because of the thorough testing and the elderly population (resulting sadly in many death).

BearX220

This seems like news: LH canceling up to 25% of short- and medium-haul operations and grounding 23 long-haul aircraft:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/lufth...210307902.html

hugolover

That’s very significant. 25% system wide SH. That’s a lot more than just some flights to Italy.

Would be claimable under EC261 as it’s operational.

yurtripper

A virus that puts 345 people in hospital (64 in an ICU) out of 886 cases diagnosed is probably bad enough to worry about (Figures for Italy from Reuters as of 24 hours ago).

The risk of quarantine is probably a bigger deal from a traveller's perspective though. Being stuck for 14 days in an isolation centre in a foreign country doesn't sound like a picnic, and all it might take is catching the normal flu, or even a heavy cold, for you to end up there.

The other thing is that an ever longer list of countries is starting to exclude people who have been to certain hot spots (or countries containing hot spots) recently. Still wanna tough it out and take that trip to S. Korea? Fine, just as long as you're happy to abandon going to TLV, etc. for the foreseeable future.

BTW, the number of cases in Iran has been estimated by Canadian virologists as around 20,000.

sophialite

1 patient out of every 2 in that small Italian town is in the hospital. Very serious.

Never mind. we can all cherry pick data.

yurtripper

One of the scientific papers I was reading via Arxiv on how SARS-COV-2 actually works was v. interesting. It's affinity to binding to human host cells is orders of magnitude higher than for SARS (100-1000x). Unfortunately, I can't find the original paper, which went into great deal about the role of furin and cleavage sites and had some excellent molecular visualisation of the viral structure, but the upshot is that a mutation in SARS-COV-2 gives the virus a dual attack mode. Normal CoV binds to ACE2 receptors, but the ACE2 protein is not so abundant in healthy people and this is why SARS had relatively low R0 (transmissibility). The mutation in SARS-COV-2 gives the virus a secondary attack mode that utilises the enzyme furin to target cells. Furin is an enzyme that essentially works as a protein activator, by cutting normally dormant protein sequences at various points called cleavage sites.

There's a couple of papers which look to be saying essentially the same thing, one from Chinaxiv.org (the CAS version of Arxiv so pre peer-review) and another from European researchers.
ChinaXiv.org ??????????????
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32057769

A good top-level curated resource for finding articles related to SARS-COV-2 (also known as 2019-nCov) is here: https://www.isar-icar.com/Coronavirus
Some of them might be a little hard to interpret if you don't have a scientific background though.

sophialite

I love science. And I’d be happy to read the papers you posted. I’m a voracious consumer of all information.

The CFR is still unclear, but probably around 1% or less. The number of people in hospitals is concerning, for sure. But I’m not sure what that means really means: ICU numbers definitely are concerning. Still around 7% and a lot lower than that if you consider that there are probably well over 2,000 with the virus in Italy.

yurtripper

This paper gives a well-presented and informative overview of some of the concepts I mentioned above: The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 - nCoV-2019 Evolutionary History - Virological

yurtripper

Bear in mind that the CFR is averaged and the rates climb dramatically once you go above 50 (I'm certainly legacy enough to be worried!).

What's interesting is that children seem to be unaffected, even when they are infected. There are no known cases of fatalities in children below 9, which is remarkable if you consider that there are now getting on for 100K cases and you compare it to normal influenza (small children are at greater risk than most age groups apart from the elderly and chronically sick).

Hardy

Lufthansa News on Twitter:
Lufthansa Group continues to suspend flights to China and Iran: Flights to mainland China are suspended until 24 April, to Tehran until 30 April. Frequencies to Italy, Seoul and Hong Kong are also reduced. https://newsroom.lufthansagroup.com

Mozart0815

I still have a mileage booking out of PVG on April 29. Even with the new deadline, which is now only 5 days away from my flight, the Senator hotline just refused to let me cancel this flight without paying the €50 fee. They really know a thing or two about how to really annoy their most frequent customers.

whiskey_sk

time to update the topic title, isn't it?

dtbe

Noticed today on LH site that they now offer ex-TLV tickets with free cancellation to some destinations (book by March 10, travel by Nov 20). Maybe that's true for other routes too.
Seems like a good way to sense the market sentiment for the rest of the year and register some sales at this time..

Hardy

OP cannot change it, probably only the mods can.