Looks like no Worlds this year unless FFG makes alternate plans.

https://www.adepticon.org/2020/03/12/adepticon-2020-has-been-cancelled/

Looks like they have cancelled worlds, at least according to this post from the FFG Organised Play page on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/ffgorganizedplay/

Obviously that's a bummer in general as well as Worlds in particular for the folks it matters to, but to go slightly off topic here, what really has my mind racing with questions is what GW will be doing now with the literal hours worth of miniature/game, book, and TV content they were planning to reveal there. Live-stream?

Coronavirus season will be over in a few weeks when all these quarantine efforts will magically start working and people will be labeled heroes for stopping a virus that structurally doesn't work in warmer temperatures. At that time people will forget all about the cold until next winter and all the later conventions will happen so people can get their convention cough from some other virus and all the cancelled events will be rescheduled to the later cons.

48 minutes ago, Mep said:

Coronavirus season will be over in a few weeks when all these quarantine efforts will magically start working and people will be labeled heroes for stopping a virus that structurally doesn't work in warmer temperatures.

It’s spring in China and Iran.

Yep, the season goes through March and ends in April. Varies by location of course. Then we get into norovirus season in the summer. The news media generally ignores that one even if it is more wide spread and deadly.

3 hours ago, twincast said:

Obviously that's a bummer in general as well as Worlds in particular for the folks it matters to, but to go slightly off topic here, what really has my mind racing with questions is what GW will be doing now with the literal hours worth of miniature/game, book, and TV content they were planning to reveal there. Live-stream?

I’m gonna assume (hope) that they just dump a couple large articles on their website and maybe like a twitch stream or something. GW product lines are usually a long time in the making so they’re not exactly flexible. I hope they figure something out cause I want my primaris bikers

10 minutes ago, Mep said:

Yep, the season goes through March and ends in April. Varies by location of course. Then we get into norovirus season in the summer. The news media generally ignores that one even if it is more wide spread and deadly.

This isn't completely accurate. While it is somewhat common for instances of viruses to recede in warmer seasons, it's equally common for them to return when it cools down (the flu does it literally every year). While such a reduction in cases will help give researchers time to develop and deloy vaccines and stockpile medical supplies in case of return, it shouldn't be treated as a solution or proof that what happened was nothing to worry about.

Oh, no, infectious diseases are a major cause of death. People should have always been washing their hands like their mothers taught them. This is always going on. It's just never a news story for whatever reason. Viruses are however largely seasonal and there is a virus for every season and they are always killing someone. Just people generally don't pay attention. It's just odd that out of the blue people decided to pay attention to the cold this year when they are generally happy to ignore it all.

15 minutes ago, Mep said:

Oh, no, infectious diseases are a major cause of death. People should have always been washing their hands like their mothers taught them. This is always going on. It's just never a news story for whatever reason. Viruses are however largely seasonal and there is a virus for every season and they are always killing someone. Just people generally don't pay attention. It's just odd that out of the blue people decided to pay attention to the cold this year when they are generally happy to ignore it all.

It's definitely not the flu. It has some commonality with SARS and MERS (about 80%, enough to kind of know what it does but still leave key differences that make solutions not simply plug and go affairs), but COVID-19 has about 50ish times the mortality rate of the flu and additionally between 10 and 20% of cases require hospitalization (respirators and other equipment). So, the mortality rate is a threat and a far greater one than the flu (if COVID-19 wasn't taken seriously and just ran it's course like the flu without these precautions, the casualties would be in the millions vs. around 20-30 thousand for the flu) but there's also a serious danger that an outbreak at a major city stretches resources to the breaking point which both increases mortality for the virus itself, but also other conditions that can no longer be treated with the attention they need to be survivable. It would represent a cascade failure of healthcare infrastructure.

Please stop using whatever faulty source you are using for information on this and consult information compiled by actual medical professionals (which is what people who are cancelling events like Adepticon are doing). These 2 sites are reliable and updated almost daily, if you live outside the US, most other countries (especially the 116 countries with confirmed cases) also have their medical agencies posting regular updates:

World Health Organization: https://www.who.int/

Center for Disease Control and Prevention: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html

I don't care if you listen to me, but please, listen to the actual medical professionals, zero of which think what is going on is perfectly normal.

2 hours ago, Mep said:

Oh, no, infectious diseases are a major cause of death. People should have always been washing their hands like their mothers taught them. This is always going on. It's just never a news story for whatever reason. Viruses are however largely seasonal and there is a virus for every season and they are always killing someone. Just people generally don't pay attention. It's just odd that out of the blue people decided to pay attention to the cold this year when they are generally happy to ignore it all.

Trust me, i'm italian: this ain't your garden variety flu. We're all in very deep ####, and soon the rest of europe will follow.

2 hours ago, Mep said:

Oh, no, infectious diseases are a major cause of death. People should have always been washing their hands like their mothers taught them. This is always going on. It's just never a news story for whatever reason. Viruses are however largely seasonal and there is a virus for every season and they are always killing someone. Just people generally don't pay attention. It's just odd that out of the blue people decided to pay attention to the cold this year when they are generally happy to ignore it all.

And the world is flat, vaccines are useless and men come from Adam and Eve.

16 minutes ago, Tubb said:

And the world is flat, vaccines are useless and men come from Adam and Eve.

You leave anti vaxxers out of this, in the next few years they are going to become the solution to human population sustainability...

6 hours ago, Rogue Three said:

Trust me, i'm italian: this ain't your garden variety flu. We're all in very deep ####, and soon the rest of europe will follow.

Yeah this is pretty messed up. Personally, my whole family is asymptomatic and we'd like to keep it that way. So we're basically planning on not leaving our property for 2 weeks. Maybe as many as 8 weeks. I have enough stuff to last us that long and have planned ahead for celebrating Easter and the kids' birthdays normally so as to keep morale up. We bought a bunch of lumber so they will remember this as the spring we built a tree house, not the spring we were hiding from the apocalypse. If it goes on that long, I also plan this to be the birthday my daughter gets to switch from chunky Playskool SW figures to 3.75" action figures, and the birthday my son gets to switch from DUPLO to LEGO. At their age, that will be what sticks out in their minds when they look back.

10 hours ago, Mep said:

Oh, no, infectious diseases are a major cause of death. People should have always been washing their hands like their mothers taught them. This is always going on. It's just never a news story for whatever reason. Viruses are however largely seasonal and there is a virus for every season and they are always killing someone. Just people generally don't pay attention. It's just odd that out of the blue people decided to pay attention to the cold this year when they are generally happy to ignore it all.

This is a really weird take.

8 hours ago, Rogue Three said:

Trust me, i'm italian: this ain't your garden variety flu. We're all in very deep ####, and soon the rest of europe will follow.

I don't recall him calling it the flu, he was merely saying the panic caused by a new virus typically greatly exceeds the actual danger in comparison to other infectious agents we experience every year. over 80% of cases are mild. Now should we be trying to stop the spread for the other 20% absolutely but are we all in very deep SH#$. No, but hysteria will only make matters worse. What people should be more bothered about is why did we not try to stop the spread from China 3+ months ago. We waited till it is on every continent and virtually every country before doing large efforts to contain the disease.

39 minutes ago, TheHoosh said:

I don't recall him calling it the flu, he was merely saying the panic caused by a new virus typically greatly exceeds the actual danger in comparison to other infectious agents we experience every year. over 80% of cases are mild. Now should we be trying to stop the spread for the other 20% absolutely but are we all in very deep SH#$. No, but hysteria will only make matters worse. What people should be more bothered about is why did we not try to stop the spread from China 3+ months ago. We waited till it is on every continent and virtually every country before doing large efforts to contain the disease.

Maybe all the people pronouncing that it's not a huge deal and we shouldn't be hysterical and diseases happen all the time etc etc had something to do with it? It's almost as if politicians are fundamentally self-interested and will normally only take drastic action that will inconvenience the public if the public themselves will respond positively - or at least, not negatively - and the general "no big deal" mentality meant that condition wasn't fulfilled until now.

Not to minimise the role that was doubtless played "behind the scenes" by corporate interests who wanted time to prep and rich buddies who wanted time to free up liquidity to buy up shares during the slump, but sometimes a wee bit of panic is necessary to get the ball rolling.

2 minutes ago, Yodhrin said:

Maybe all the people pronouncing that it's not a huge deal and we shouldn't be hysterical and diseases happen all the time etc etc had something to do with it? It's almost as if politicians are fundamentally self-interested and will normally only take drastic action that will inconvenience the public if the public themselves will respond positively - or at least, not negatively - and the general "no big deal" mentality meant that condition wasn't fulfilled until now.

Not to minimise the role that was doubtless played "behind the scenes" by corporate interests who wanted time to prep and rich buddies who wanted time to free up liquidity to buy up shares during the slump, but sometimes a wee bit of panic is necessary to get the ball rolling.

This is beyond a wee bit of panic, this is more hysteria than I've ever seen. People are stocking up like this is a nuclear fallout. You sure have politicians pegged completely right though. No sense of forethought for the public.

10 hours ago, MasterShake2 said:

Please stop using whatever faulty source you are using for information on this and consult information compiled by actual medical professionals (which is what people who are cancelling events like Adepticon are doing). These 2 sites are reliable and updated almost daily, if you live outside the US, most other countries (especially the 116 countries with confirmed cases) also have their medical agencies posting regular updates:

Actually I am a medical professional. As to the actual data on mortality rates, it is all over the place. Calculating the mortality rate is pretty simple, number of deaths divided by the number of confirmed cases. That confirmed cases part is a real hard number to get. You need testing kits to do that, which aren't widely available and you need people to actually come in and be tested. For mild and asymptomatic cases, people wouldn't even know that they should be tested. The best data so far comes from South Korean where they have been able to do extensive testing. They are finding a 0.6% mortality rate, pretty par for the course. The mortality rate of respiratory infections in vulnerable populations are always bad. When a care home for the elderly gets hit with a respiratory virus of any kind they lose a lot of customers. That is always true, even when the news isn't reporting on it.

If you want to see the types of number a really bad virus brings on, look no further than the norovirus I mention earlier. The Gates foundation has been going hard on this one, trying to get clean water for the developing world. From the CDC https://www.cdc.gov/norovirus/downloads/global-burden-report.pdf

Quote

The burden of norovirus - is there a need for a norovirus vaccine?

Much progress had been made in the fight against diarrheal diseases. Global deaths have declined dramatically, from 2.6 million annually in 1990 to 1.3 million in 2013. Recently, rotavirus vaccination has offered a biomedical tool for further reducing child diarrheal deaths. Despite this progress, diarrheal disease remains the fourth most common cause of mortality and second most common cause of morbid­ ity worldwide in children under the age of 5 years. Norovirus is ubiquitous, associated with 18% (95% CI: 17-20%) of diarrheal disease globally , with similar proportions of disease in high- middle- and low- income settings. Norovirus is estimated to cause approxi­ mately 200,000 deaths annually worldwide, with 70,000 or more among children in developing countries . The entire age range is affected, with children experiencing the highest incidence. Severe outcomes, including hospitalization and deaths, are common among children and the elderly. In both high- and middle-income countries with mature rotavirus vaccination programs, norovirus is being unmasked as the most common cause of pediatric gastroenteritis requiring medical care.

You can google the number of confirmed deaths of COVID-19 and compare it to the number of deaths each year from norovirus. So yes, the big difference between COVID 19 and other viral infections has been news coverage. Sadly it isn't concern for people's safety from infectious diseases that is driving this response. Infectious diseases are always a problem, but rather liability. People are afraid they will get sued if they host a public event and what that liability would look like if several people died from the cold if it the infection can be traced back to their event. These are business decisions not health safety decisions. Health safety decisions aren't normally lets shut down the world's economy. It centers around vaccinations and supportive care for the sick and sometimes effective treatments that counter infectious diseases when it economically makes sense to develop those treatments.

That last part about treatments needing to make economic sense is a big one. When talking about anti-virals, they generally need to cost stupid amounts of money to make economic sense from private investment. Those hepatitis cure commercials you always see cost a grand per pill. That 8 billion congress is going to spend on this virus, never mind however many trillions the economic impact may be, would go a long way to funding new antibiotics. Again from the CDC. https://www.cdc.gov/drugresistance/biggest-threats.html

Quote

According to the report, more than 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections occur in the U.S. each year, and more than 35,000 people die as a result. In addition, 223,900 cases of Clostridioides difficile occurred in 2017 and at least 12,800 people died.

That is in the US. You can google the number of US deaths from COVID 19 and compare. The real reason new antibiotics aren't in development is money, they wouldn't make enough of it.

It's great that the news media is making a lot of money on this story. It is sad so many health professionals aren't taking this moment to point out that infectious diseases are always a problem, COVID 19 may be bad but it just isn't particularly special and we should always be concerned about infectious diseases. Instead they are more concerned to go on and on about how we are all going to die from it so no one can sue them.

In a few weeks time when this virus doesn't work so well anymore and simply goes away on its own, there will be much self back patting going on and politicians claiming how great of a job they did while they go back to ignoring all the people that always die of these things.

56 minutes ago, TheHoosh said:

why did we not try to stop the spread from China 3+ months ago. We waited till it is on every continent and virtually every country before doing large efforts to contain the disease.

Clearly someone was smart and didn't upgrade any high severity symptoms until they invested heavily in the transmission tree.

Greenland and Madagascar, man, they're the toughest to infect.

1 minute ago, Darth Sanguis said:

Clearly someone was smart and didn't upgrade any high severity symptoms until they invested heavily in the transmission tree.

Greenland and Madagascar, man, they're the toughest to infect.

Look at the map some super tiny remote islands even have cases, well played COVID-19, well played

https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/685d0ace521648f8a5beeeee1b9125cd

1 minute ago, TheHoosh said:

Look at the map some super tiny remote islands even have cases, well played COVID-19, well played

https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/685d0ace521648f8a5beeeee1b9125cd

They had to have invested in Water I and Water II, it's the only way.

You do realise that the mortality rate of a virus is extremely hard to track while the spread is in progress. The problem is that the figures everyone is quoting which is 1 -2% mortality. The problem is that the percentage calculated by most people is the current amount of deaths with the current amount of reported infection.

This is flawed in itself as the people who are currently dying of the virus were infected at least 10-14 days ago, where the infection rate was much much lower, if you compare the death rates with this figure all of a sudden it's not 1-2% any more. Italy's medical system went from 0 to overwhelmed very suddenly. This also factors into the death rate.

While this also factors into it, this is why the UK is or was trying to delay the onset of the virus so that the hospitals can take on-board the amount of cases. While it's true that influenza as a whole kills more people, if you look at the scale of influenza infection in the areas worst hit with co-vid, then you get a much truer representation, and let me say what you see now is just the tip of the iceberg, for every one who is diagnosed you may have another 10 waiting in the wings that will get diagnosed in the next week.

5 minutes ago, syrath said:

You do realise that the mortality rate of a virus is extremely hard to track while the spread is in progress. The problem is that the figures everyone is quoting which is 1 -2% mortality. The problem is that the percentage calculated by most people is the current amount of deaths with the current amount of reported infection.

This is flawed in itself as the people who are currently dying of the virus were infected at least 10-14 days ago, where the infection rate was much much lower, if you compare the death rates with this figure all of a sudden it's not 1-2% any more. Italy's medical system went from 0 to overwhelmed very suddenly. This also factors into the death rate.

While this also factors into it, this is why the UK is or was trying to delay the onset of the virus so that the hospitals can take on-board the amount of cases. While it's true that influenza as a whole kills more people, if you look at the scale of influenza infection in the areas worst hit with co-vid, then you get a much truer representation, and let me say what you see now is just the tip of the iceberg, for every one who is diagnosed you may have another 10 waiting in the wings that will get diagnosed in the next week.

Or you may have many cases not ever confirmed because they were mild enough. In King County, Washington State (location of Seattle) they won't even test us unless symptoms are severe enough.

This is not a normal cold. This is worth taking drastic measures for.

Just comparing response to total fatalities is not the whole picture.

By comparison to the 200k annual deaths from Norovirus, car crashes kill about 1.3 million people, and tobacco kills around 8 million people.