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I think this is the most frightening plague I've lived to see. Its not too bad in the USA at this point. Almost 450 cases in the USA at this point, but it could get worse. So far I've quit restaurants. I hesitate to go out and do anything. The situation in China is nuts. Apparantly their heavy handed techniques have made progress for now, but it might come back through Korea and down from Russia if that gets going. They were knocking on doors and dragging people away to be put into sick houses. People are encouraged by the government to report sick individuals so they can be hauled off to quarantine. Sounds like a horror movie.

According to this story at The Guardian "Coronavirus closures reveal vast scale of China’s secretive wildlife farm industry", the Chinese government encouraged hunting and breeding bushmeat as a way for rural individuals to get rich.

As for the Factorio problems, The Chinese produce a lot of the world's products and subproducts. They've closed a lot of their factories to prevent the spread of disease so now other factories and stores around the world won't be able to produce and there will be shortages. People everywhere will have less money and more stress and illness as it is in most countries and the whole thing is turning into a cascade of dysfunction that we will hopefully escape when the virus invader dies as a result of warmer weather. The thing is its spreading pretty good in Iran, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia where its quite warm. Some of those places its 80 F in the day and 50F at night.

It's media-fuelled hysteria. More people are killed by cars in one day than will ever be killed by this virus.

@OP :
Regarding the current hysteria, you might find this informative : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dDD2tHWWnU

Mauslag PIngman wrote: ↑

Mon Mar 09, 2020 5:55 am

As for the Factorio problems, The Chinese produce a lot of the world's products and subproducts. They've closed a lot of their factories to prevent the spread of disease so now other factories and stores around the world won't be able to produce and there will be shortages.

This has already begun, at least to some extent. I'm not afraid this will result in the collapse of the human civilization though. Just slow a little the frenetic producing of everything.

Deadlock989 wrote: ↑

Mon Mar 09, 2020 8:31 am

It's media-fuelled hysteria.

That. While comparing numbers is always a bit tricky to get everyone on the same page, at the end of the day its another flu.

If it wasn't for the internet, education, doctors and more enlightened policies this could have been the swine flu again with more than 65 million dead worldwide. In 1918 doctors had little say in how the military should behave. They put people in barracks while they trained for WW1. It was cold and people huddled around the woodstoves. The sick ones were mixed in with the healthy and it spread like crazy. Soldiers were then shipped out on overcrowded boats to the front line even though many of them were ill. The ships were better breeding ground for the virus and the front was flooded with sick soldiers spreading more sickness. And this was the USA's policies. This wasn't some primitive country. If doctors pointed out that these methods were disasterous they were easily silenced by military brass who overruled them. Generals needed so many reinforcements and so they were shipped no matter their condition.

Some policies haven't changed. I think just about every country has been made aware of the virus and has atttempted to track down all the people each infected person has been in contact with. They still don't bother with the possibility that some people might be infected unknowingly and spreading disease without feeling sick which is strategy used by the virus. Its only South Korea that tried to test people in mass. Every other country acts like these sleeper type spreaders don't exist and you can see that the virus is taking advantage of that and spreading, slowly, all around the globe. If warm weather doesn't kill it, we might still be in big trouble but I too think the weather will save us.

As to hysteria. You might be a person about 66 years old and feeling quite well even though you have high blood pressure, a little heart problem and some small lung disease and in a few hours you can be dead. Its quite deadly and it chokes people out. Getting to the hospital fast might save you, but there are limited numbers of beds and its a dangerous job for care providers. If a lot of people like lets say, 30,000 Americans get sick, there won't be any hospitals to go to. They'll be all filled up and the rate of death will quadruple. People won't go to work or school. Shops will be drained of supplies. Survivalists will have their day.

It could get ugly. It probably won't, but it could and it never needed to start. They never should have had those bats and pigs, and pangolins and other stuff squished together and getting chopped up. Those creatures are known to carry nasty bugs that humans aren't designed to deal with and the pigs are just bio mixing machines like the chemical plants in Factorio. Pump the pigs full of bat and bird diseases and the pigs will modify the virus so that humans can catch it.

[Moderated by Koub]

Mauslag PIngman wrote: ↑

Mon Mar 09, 2020 7:41 pm

[Moderated by Koub]

What an ugly, racist thing to say.

Sometimes it really sucks to moderate forums ...

Nah, the Chinese are smart. They know how to control the outbreak, but they also know how to prevent the outbreak or at least most of these outbreaks. This isn't the only one. SARS was also caused by this bushmeat problem and so was Ebola. They don't like to admit their mistakes just like Donald and certain people don't like to admit their mistakes regarding global warming so they pretend it doesn't exist, but the Chinese leadership has shown that they have a deep understanding of how these things spread by containing it with their heavy handed tactics.

They'd have to go 180 degrees on their bushmeat policy which would imply that they're fallible and they hate to admit that.
The massive bushmeat industry in China would lose all it's business which would once again sow discontent.
They'd have to openly state that a lot of the folk remedies don't work, which is about like Trump telling gun owners that they're the problem regarding mass shootings.

So party leadership would rather see a huge worldwide plague than admit errors and lose some business.

But there would be positive gains for the world too. No more bushmeat would also mean no more tiger medicine, medicines made out of endangered animals. They Chinese either don't care or don't believe in the idea of threatened species. In many ways we are quite alike. Many of us don't believe in global warming or easy access to guns causing mass gun violence.

Its not a media fueled hysteria. If it wasn't for the media the military wouldn't have changed it's policies.

Deadlock989 wrote: ↑

Mon Mar 09, 2020 8:31 am

It's media-fuelled hysteria. More people are killed by cars in one day than will ever be killed by this virus.

If this really gets out, if it becomes endemic globally, like the flu is, it'll kill up around a million every year. Modern flu CFR: 0.1%. C19 CFR: ~3%. Spanish flu CFR: ~3%.

We really, really don't want to produce that world. The flu we have kills >50,000 people in a bad year in the U.S. alone.

More people are killed by cars in one day

This is *already* false.

quyxkh wrote: ↑

Mon Mar 09, 2020 10:26 pm

This is *already* false.

Maybe. I confess I can't always be bothered to make my video game forum banter fully statistically rigorous.

But I've lived through four or five of these sniffle scares in my life and don't expect this one to pan out much differently.

[Koub] As long as there there was some loose link to Factorio in the posts, this thread could have some legitimity here. It's now over, locking it.