There won't be many left on HOL then

Nobody knows or can realise how serious this outbreak can be or become because it is a new strain of Coronavirus and subsequently has never been seen to access it's possibilities in humans before.

Every year the World Health Organization gets together to work out between them which flu bugs they need to concentrate on in order to create vaccines to inoculate everyone around the world who will suffer the most with their health conditions if they fall victim to a flu bug, this is the reason for the yearly flu jab that everyone is able to have when the time arises.

The flu injection we receive will therefore include all the very serious strains of flu that the World Health Organization has compiled together to be of much higher risk of causing serious harm to us, meaning by having this injection your chances of becoming ill and dying is approximately halved and in doing so it also reduces the huge cost of looking after sick people.
All viruses can mutate within themselves so not just flu ones, there are over 5,000 species of viruses that have been discovered so far around the world ..they all really want us gone lol.

So when people say it's just a flu bug and people die regardless anyway they are not fully understanding that the bugs actively going around and killing people are the ones deemed to be of much less harm to us ... so as we do not know or understand this new covid 19 virus coming at us now and the only understanding of it we have is from when it first appeared in China to today is the reason for the panic it has and is causing today, we simply don't know how to react to it because it is simply unknown and more because people are dying with it in quite large alarming numbers.

Now is the time,...to vote yourself a 3.1% pay rise plus additional benefits and perks to your staff (mostly family members)

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They snuck that under the radar well.

Partly true.

If there was a running check on global flu infections / deaths each year, there would be a similar level of hysteria, and as you put it, a similarly 'alarming' number of deaths.

The seemingly high 3.4% death rate quoted has already been caveated as it only covers people that have been tested in one country, and those people were all high risk/high level infected. The general scientific concensus is that the rate will end up between 0.5-2%.

Yes, this is several orders of magnitude higher than 'normal' flu, at 0.1% or thereabouts.

Yes, it is a new virus, yes, there should be caution as a result.

However, there is also a responsibility required from those in the media and or society not to over egg the pudding – although, they were always going to do that so moot point.

Also worth noting that as the virus becomes naturalised to the human body, its effectiveness and contagiousness should decrease (according to scientific consensus, again).

It's not ideal, but it's also not worthy of ebola levels of panic, from a health point of view anyway.

I fully understand panic from an economic POV though, especially if you have a job that will not support you if you need to take a 14-28 day layoff. And/or if you work in either the event, tourism or aerospace industries. Layoffs likely the longer this continues.

Edited by SW19 CPFC (06 Mar 2020 2.47pm)