Apple Closes All Stores, Corporate Offices, and Contact Centers in China Through February 9 Due to Coronavirus Outbreak

The world needs to prepare better for these outbreaks. As long as countries like China allow animal markets to trade live animals taken from the wild for consumption, this will continue to happen regularly.

The world is prepared just fine, including a dedicated international health organization for issues just like this (WHO ('https://www.who.int/')). What's needed is for China to stop worrying about saving face and putting the world at risk by covering up their infectious disease outbreaks. They were actually arresting doctors in Wuhan who were reporting about the disease in their patients. The world has no place for a society which operates like that.

It's interesting how much focus this virus outbreak gets from WHO and the press. There must be a strong political side to this, because: In Germany alone, 20,000 people die --every year!-- of the Influenza virus - also known as "the flu". In the winter of 2018, around 80,000 people died of Influenza in the US (which was higher a toll than the "usual" 56,000 deaths every year). The Influenza virus was first isolated in 1901 -- so we had almost 120 years to study it. It's still constantly changing and killing people.

Can't wait for an equivalent response to the flu given how much more infectious and deadly it is than coronavirus. Or SARS.

The world needs to prepare better for these outbreaks. As long as countries like China allow animal markets to trade live animals taken from the wild for consumption, this will continue to happen regularly.

And as the world has become a village, it spreads like wildfire.

It's interesting how much focus this virus outbreak gets from WHO and the press. There must be a strong political side to this, because: In Germany alone, 20,000 people die --every year!-- of the Influenza virus - also known as "the flu". In the winter of 2018, around 80,000 people died of Influenza in the US (which was higher a toll than the "usual" 56,000 deaths every year). The Influenza virus was first isolated in 1901 -- so we had almost 120 years to study it. It's still constantly changing and killing people.

No, that's not interesting at all, and this has nothing to do with politics. Even though last year was the highest in 40 years, the mortality rate from flu in 2019 in the US was at most 0.15% (about 43 million got sick), and the mortality rate in other years is usually around 0.1%. Only 1.5% of those who catch the flu even get sick enough to be hospitalized.

The current mortality rate from the novel coronavirus, in contrast, is over 2%. Thats ZERO POINT ONE FIVE percent versus TWO percent.

Doing the math from the above numbers, coronavirus currently has at least 13x higher mortality than the flu. The total number of cases has also now surpassed the entire SARS outbreak.

The flu is something that we never had the chance to get under control, because it has been widespread throughout human history. This is very different. With appropriate steps this can be contained just as SARS was.

It's interesting how much focus this virus outbreak gets from WHO and the press. There must be a strong political side to this, because: In Germany alone, 20,000 people die --every year!-- of the Influenza virus - also known as "the flu". In the winter of 2018, around 80,000 people died of Influenza in the US (which was higher a toll than the "usual" 56,000 deaths every year). The Influenza virus was first isolated in 1901 -- so we had almost 120 years to study it. It's still constantly changing and killing people.

I think the main scare of these types of viruses are they are new. Unlike the ones we deal with every winter that still do do a good amount of damage (because a good amount of the population is to stubborn to get a shot), we don’t typically have a good understanding of how the Wuhan Virus will mutate or progress. If it has the ability to mutate rapidly and starts doing major damage to the population there is no defense for it at the moment, that’s what whips the news into a frenzy, if your worried about common winter influenza the solution is simple: a free flu shot.