Kalitta flies US evacuees back from China

NickH said:
They declared Polio a global emergency in 2014. Zika in 2016. It's a method of spurring research, but isn't actually related to the severity of the illness.
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A public health emergency (the condition that requires the governor to declare a state of public health emergency) is defined as "an occurrence or imminent threat of an illness or health condition, caused by bio terrorism, epidemic or pandemic disease, or (a) novel and highly fatal infectious agent or biological toxin, that poses a substantial risk of a significant number of human facilities or incidents or permanent or long-term disability (WHO/DCD, 2001). The declaration of a state of public health emergency permits the governor to suspend state regulations, change the functions of state agencies.
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WHO | Definitions: emergencies

Definitions terms used in emergency settings
www.who.int www.who.int
 
NickH said:
They declared Polio a global emergency in 2014. Zika in 2016. It's a method of spurring research, but isn't actually related to the severity of the illness.
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Zika virus has been identified since the 1940s, and polio since the 19th century. The need for research seems a strange reason to declare health emergencies in those cases.

In one of those instances, a virus that can remain completely hidden until it destroys brain tissue of fetuses in utero was becoming epidemic in the country hosting the Summer Olympics. In another, a former worldwide epidemic that was almost completely eradicated, and for which most modern humans have no vaccine or natural immunity, appeared resurgent. In both cases, the problems were dealt with before the situation reached anything approaching predicted worst-case scenarios. You seem to be conflating a successful emergency response with a lack of need for an emergency response in the first place.

A WHO Grade One Emergency declaration is not an invitation to sandbag your front door and make doomsday predictions on Facebook. It is a specific epidemiology protocol that generates a targeted response from local and worldwide medical professionals. If those people do their jobs right, body counts stay low and people in unaffected areas remain completely safe. I earnestly hope they do the same with NCoV, so pilots on a message board can go back to calling them a bunch of pisspants for doing their job right.
 
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Screaming_Emu said:
ABOLISH THE WHO! Bunch of pansies and their science.

My favorite part is a bunch of guys I work with who gave no problem being sloppy fifths on a Wan Chai hooker suddenly being all “I’m sorry, I can’t go to China...”
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Now hang on, that Emminence Front song is great. And anyway if it's science that you have a problem with it's probably Queen you're mad at...
 
Casual disregard for the danger of pandemics seems just hugging-yourself nuts to me. We are wildly overpopulated and overly mobile for the traditional defenses to be effective. This may not be The One, but The One is on the way. And sure, if you want to paint a tin-foil hat on me, have at it, but while tin-foil hats may or may not protect against lizard person brain-signals, they *definitely* don't protect against viruses. My fear is that this is another shot across the bow which will be roundly ignored. *closes hatch on bunker*.
 
Boris Badenov said:
Casual disregard for the danger of pandemics seems just hugging-yourself nuts to me. We are wildly overpopulated and overly mobile for the traditional defenses to be effective. This may not be The One, but The One is on the way. And sure, if you want to paint a tin-foil hat on me, have at it, but while tin-foil hats may or may not protect against lizard person brain-signals, they *definitely* don't protect against viruses. My fear is that this is another shot across the bow which will be roundly ignored. *closes hatch on bunker*.
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I'm heading for Madagascar...
 
What's the over/under on a severe pandemic happening before we get smacked with a large piece of space rock?

We'll probably blow ourselves up long before any of that happens.
 
Fixtur said:
What's the over/under on a severe pandemic happening before we get smacked with a large piece of space rock?

We'll probably blow ourselves up long before any of that happens.
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See, this is the thing about relatively long odds...people's eyes glaze over once you reach 1/1000 or something like that. As far as they're emotionally involved, 1/1000 is about the same as 1/1,000,000,000. This is how Casinos stay in business. But (imho, afaict, etc etc) a global pandemic which decimates (literally, or worse) humanity is orders of magnitude more likely than nukular winter or a plucky group of suspiciously good-looking miners getting rocketed in to space to stop the planet-killing rock. I am pleased to be jocose, but it's not all that funny...as in it seems likely enough to get past all the Prepper jokes and be something which we should be thinking about rather seriously. *shrug*
 
Boris Badenov said:
See, this is the thing about relatively long odds...people's eyes glaze over once you reach 1/1000 or something like that. As far as they're emotionally involved, 1/1000 is about the same as 1/1,000,000,000. This is how Casinos stay in business. But (imho, afaict, etc etc) a global pandemic which decimates (literally, or worse) humanity is orders of magnitude more likely than nukular winter or a plucky group of suspiciously good-looking miners getting rocketed in to space to stop the planet-killing rock. I am pleased to be jocose, but it's not all that funny...as in it seems likely enough to get past all the Prepper jokes and be something which we should be thinking about rather seriously. *shrug*
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I mean, you're a pilot, you'll likely be first up against the wall.
 
Boris Badenov said:
See, this is the thing about relatively long odds...people's eyes glaze over once you reach 1/1000 or something like that. As far as they're emotionally involved, 1/1000 is about the same as 1/1,000,000,000. This is how Casinos stay in business. But (imho, afaict, etc etc) a global pandemic which decimates (literally, or worse) humanity is orders of magnitude more likely than nukular winter or a plucky group of suspiciously good-looking miners getting rocketed in to space to stop the planet-killing rock. I am pleased to be jocose, but it's not all that funny...as in it seems likely enough to get past all the Prepper jokes and be something which we should be thinking about rather seriously. *shrug*
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Whilst I would obviously never doubt the efficiency of training miners to be astronauts rather than the reverse, the idea of a global pandemic isn't so far fetched. Really bad diseases, like Ebola, could be a real threat were they to spread. But this isn't that. This is a cold.
 
NickH said:
Really bad diseases, like Ebola, could be a real threat were they to spread. But this isn't that. This is a cold.
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See, you keep saying that, but it's not a cold. It's an unusually infectious mutation of a particular subset of viruses. One very recent member of that subset does, in fact, have a mortality rate similar to that of Ebola. The fact that it is not yet killing anybody to whom you are personally attached does not preclude its designation as an emergency.

Or, to put it another way, the NCoV has already killed more people than every V1 cut in the history of aviation. If a CDC doctor with no aviation training showed up on this message board and called us a bunch of blubbering p***ies for treating a V1 cut as an emergency, we would likely have some choice words for him, and of his ignorance of both aviation and statistics.
 
NickH said:
Whilst I would obviously never doubt the efficiency of training miners to be astronauts rather than the reverse, the idea of a global pandemic isn't so far fetched. Really bad diseases, like Ebola, could be a real threat were they to spread. But this isn't that. This is a cold.
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Thank you, Doctor.
 
So, honest question here.

Nearly as I can tell from my limited online expertise, the “common“ and currently widespread flu this season in the US has (quietly) claimed a huge number of lives since in began in October, 2019, resulted in tens of thousands of hospitalizations, and still hasn’t peaked. This in comparison to the coronavirus, which seems to pale by every similar measure.

Why the hype (concern) and media focus/discussion for the one and less-so the other?

I’m able to minimize my exposure these days to many “bugs” with my annual flu shot, limited contact with people outside the home, and fairly decent personal hygiene (hand washing after trips to grocery, etc.), but it seems to me (and I’m willing to be educated otherwise) that influenza poses a more genuine risk than the disease dujour which currently garners so much attention, yet we treat the flu with a “ho-hum” attitude.
 
thepotato232 said:
See, you keep saying that, but it's not a cold. It's an unusually infectious mutation of a particular subset of viruses. One very recent member of that subset does, in fact, have a mortality rate similar to that of Ebola. The fact that it is not yet killing anybody to whom you are personally attached does not preclude its designation as an emergency.

Or, to put it another way, the NCoV has already killed more people than every V1 cut in the history of aviation. If a CDC doctor with no aviation training showed up on this message board and called us a bunch of blubbering p***ies for treating a V1 cut as an emergency, we would likely have some choice words for him, and of his ignorance of both aviation and statistics.
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Coronavirus is a common cold virus. But all aboard the hype train to the end of the world.
 
Bob Ridpath said:
So, honest question here.

Nearly as I can tell from my limited online expertise, the “common“ and currently widespread flu this season in the US has (quietly) claimed a huge number of lives since in began in October, 2019, resulted in tens of thousands of hospitalizations, and still hasn’t peaked. This in comparison to the coronavirus, which seems to pale by every similar measure.

Why the hype (concern) and media focus/discussion for the one and less-so the other?

I’m able to minimize my exposure these days to many “bugs” with my annual flu shot, limited contact with people outside the home, and fairly decent personal hygiene (hand washing after trips to grocery, etc.), but it seems to me (and I’m willing to be educated otherwise) that influenza poses a more genuine risk than the disease dujour which currently garners so much attention, yet we treat the flu with a “ho-hum” attitude.
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The simple answer is that it's new. It's a significant variation of a virus that doesn't see constant variation the the same way that influenza does. The specific cluster that identifies a source for the variation makes it interesting from an epidemiological stand point. But the major reason it's news, despite the incredibly mild symptoms in most people, because of the hype. You can see that on this website. Just look at how freaked out some of these posters are. It's totally disproportionate to the reality.
 
thepotato232 said:
See, you keep saying that, but it's not a cold. It's an unusually infectious mutation of a particular subset of viruses. One very recent member of that subset does, in fact, have a mortality rate similar to that of Ebola. The fact that it is not yet killing anybody to whom you are personally attached does not preclude its designation as an emergency.

Or, to put it another way, the NCoV has already killed more people than every V1 cut in the history of aviation. If a CDC doctor with no aviation training showed up on this message board and called us a bunch of blubbering p***ies for treating a V1 cut as an emergency, we would likely have some choice words for him, and of his ignorance of both aviation and statistics.
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I’m not bemoaning the doctors and researchers from doing their job and issuing their warnings. That’s all well and good. But I will mock any regular Joe who freaks out about this when he is vastly more likely to die in a car crash on his way to the office than he is to even contract coronavirus, let alone die from it.
 
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