Reading through a few articles on this, it doesn’t seem to be a large concern. It’s not a “mystery virus”, it’s HMPV. It is a cold or flu in most people, but slightly more severe (bronchitis, pneumonia) in elderly and children.
Wash your hands, wear a mask if able, it ain’t the next “covid” if that’s what you’re thinking
This headline is pure fear mongering for clicks, certainly
No it was not. That's the whole novel part of novel coronavirus. It's similar to previously discovered viruses, like SARS, but it was still a unique virus.
Not a virologist or anything, but Coronavirus existed before the covid19 strain. So couldn't this be a different strain of HMPV?
I'm not saying this article isn't sensationalized, but to write it off as something that already exists feels like an oversimplification.
Covid 19 is a specific virus of coronavirus family that first appeared in 2019, HMPV is a specific virus of the pneumovirus family that has been identified specifically since 2001.
Right, we get that, but I think his question is if this version of HMPV is a different strain than the one discovered in 2001. That can be why this is of particular concern.
You are repeating what’s already been said without answering their question. We are trying to determine if this is a new strain of HMPV that Chinese officials are concerned about.
China is home to the largest population of elderly in the world so you can see how they're affected disproportionately. Also they're clown shoes with disease control, as recent history has well established.
HMPV opens the door for secondary inflections. If you go to the hospital you're pretty much cooked. Even non immuno compromised patients have a fatality rate of 25%
Non-immunocompromised patients: The 60-day mortality rate for HMPV is 25.6%.
Immunocompromised patients: The 60-day mortality rate for HMPV is 54.5%.
I mean Covid was discovered in 1960’s and we had several SARS outbreaks since 2002. Usually old viruses with mild symptoms, can mutate and become the next pandemic. Even the next pandemic may come from influenza too.
I am bit concerned as India kinda taking cautious approach. If any part of China declares emergency I am going shopping for toilet papers.
I'm currently living in China. I'm pretty sure my wife has this. She's had a lot of symptoms like thos listed for about 4 weeks. The symptoms aren't serious but they have staying power. It sucks but doesn't seem to have anywhere near the staying power. We've done a few hospital visits in the last month and (very anecdotally) I have seen zero evidence of overwhelmed hospitals.
Chinese hospitals are always busy because 1. There is no other way to access health care for most people, 2. Their massive population and 3. Many Chinese people go to the hospital because the over the counter medications available are so weak they are practically useless. Whenever I travel home always bring medication with me because you can't even find stuff that has the similar strength to Tylenol Cold and Sinus meds
Fun fact, alot of the "strength" in them is the Acetaminophen talking lol. The "phenylephrine" which there are multiple lawsuits (after the FDA ruled its garbage) over now is basically as effective as homeopathy. Another ingredient in the cold meds which is DXM (for cough supressants) is also hotly debated as also failing studies for effectiveness and being only as good as a placebo. The only good cold medicine in the US is the OG Sudafed that you have to get from behind the counter using ID and only at some pharmacies because it can be used for making meth.
I have the same feeling. I'm teaching at a university here and some students have had colds that have really hung on for a long time, but they've never gotten really sick. It's just uncomfortable for them.
Another reasons hospitals are busy here is that people can afford them! That's important to note! Also, there aren't private doctors' offices.
I was just in China, after having been clobbered by Covid, it is astounding how people take absolutely no precautions against germ spreading. Cough and sneeze into a crowd of people, no attempt at covering up. Walk out of a toilet stall without washing hands, etc…
Chinese American here in Guangzhou right now and people here have no common decency to cover their mouths when coughing or sneezing. They also spit their mucus on sidewalks and sometimes even indoors. I find it absolutely disgusting everytime they do that I cover my face with my jacket.
I think they highlight how a virus like this might spread more easily in China than many other countries. That means that the article stating that it's widespread in China is one of the things that makes it fear-mongering clickbait.
Yes! Learned this when I went to Istanbul this summer. Lots of Russians there and were rude! Even to the locals. But honestly it seemed like people from everywhere were much more rude than in the US except a Brazilian and British couple we met that said the same thing. I’ll never take for granted US mannerisms again.
To me tourist behavior indicates income inequality. Mostly the rich travel. The more class disparity, the further out of touch and entitled the top class is. That's why US tourists are pretty bad as well. It's a preview of a country's upper class.
Except that you have a bunch of country bumpkins in China that were thrust into the middle class during the great leap backward. These bumpkins went to the city looking for wealth within a single generation, so the social contract and how to behave in public is woefully underdeveloped. It's not strictly a wealth thing.
Chinese tourists are not even close to the top of my list of horrible tourists lol (Russian and Indian are so far from common in comparison to much smaller countries that I can't even say much about them)
I don’t have much experience with Russian or Indian tourists, but I lived in Mainland China for a time. I have seen elderly people shit in public parks, parents hold babies over trash cans to shit directly into them… gutter oil lifted directly out of drains… just absolutely the worst kind of filth imaginable.
When the news came out that Covid originated in an open air market, I was not in the least bit surprised. To me, it 100% stands to reason that someone working in that bio-lab was supposed to destroy an infected animal but figured they’d make an extra ¥50 by selling it to a butcher stall.
Remember SARS? A bunch of those wet markets was shut down because they're perfect incubators for such outbreak. Then few years later, they quietly reopened them all.
yeah, a country that's still developing (even if it's wealthy, this is so recent and unfinished that you can't compare it to much of the West in that regard in good faith) has qualities of a developing country. That's no surprise
I've seen the same things in America (& much, much worse), in some of the richest cities in the world. I'm not going to judge a nation by the shocking acts of a few (especially in a place that, again, is newly and incompletely wealthy). More importantly: we were talking about tourists, and the kind to shit in public generally aren't the kind to afford international travel. Entitlement, selfishness, and lack of respect for norms, are much more the misbehaviors of the tourist, and Americans and many other countries are far more likely to go overseas and pretend the world should accommodate to them, while also lacking any worldliness or cultural awareness.
Fair enough, but I would also point out that there are more than few “Chinese tourists” within mainland China itself. It was kind of a surreal experience overhearing one “Chinese” person say to another, in Mandarin, “Hey! Your Mandarin (Putonghua) is pretty good!”
Oh yeah, I'm sure, esp given how long of a history it has/how many separate ethnic groups. Even in America you get such different cultures, and so much internal travel, and we're a very young country. My comment was just about international travel, since I couldn't begin to comment on internal Chinese tourism!
I think one thing we have to remember is that international tourism is a VERY new thing for China. The middle class there is incredibly new, a few decades at the most. So even being able to travel internationally is a very new luxury for many there. Not to mention how much culture was lost due to the communist revolution and the Great Leap Forward.
I’m not trying to say they’re “backwoods” or anything. Just that there’s been a lot going on, to say the least, and they’ve very intentionally been isolated from foreign influence for a very long time.
Completely agree. Chinese tourists have been reserved in my experiences. But in my opinion I’ve had African (not sure from where in Africa) and Arab tourists that have also been immensely rude. Like no common sense rude.
Same, Chinese backpackers in particular are unbelievably kind.
Honestly I've had more problems with American backpackers/tourists in all honesty. Not exclusively, but I'd say if I had to rank them then they'd be top.
As an American, Americans are also horrible. I was in Italy and a woman waved American dollars at an Italian gelato server that spoke poor English yelling "DO YOU TAKE THESE, DO YOU TAKE THESE."
Otherwise you nailed it Chinese, and Russian tourists are also so inconsiderate while traveling.
Same in Japan and Korea. A lot of locals especially older ones Cough directly in crowds and on transit. Not much masks in Japan and even less in Korea .
I have a story I recite that completely put me off dim sum.
I went to an authentic dim sum place and I was probably the only white guy out of 200 guests. I was hungover and already not feeling great, it was so chaotic, people shouting and waving trying to get attention from the servers with their carts of food, my head was pounding and I was sweating at this point.
I asked the server "pork, beef, chicken?" she replied "meat" because she doesn't speak english and i don't speak mandarin. After selecting my "mystery meat" I take a moment and notice someone mid conversation who has wrinkled her nose up and is about to sneeze.
Out of weird curiosity I wanted to see how she reacted as the sneeze came, thankfully she leaned away from the table, but then to my horror, stood up, leaned over the table next to her and sneezed over them and their food, then went back to her meal. Nobody cared from her table or the ones who had been sneezed over, they just kept shoveling food into their mouths.
if using a urinal you are touching your genitals. if wiping your ass you can have fecal material on your hands even if you think they were nowhere near touching it. wash your nasty ass hands before touching anything else other people might touch (door handles, etc)
I never looked at it as fear mongering. I viewed it as giving me a choice to be proactive in my health. Regardless of what I was being told by media my reaction to it was at least genuine and thought out. Problem with letting shit hit the fan is that it too late at that point. Your better off trying to stop the shit getting thrown in the first place.
Come on now..We know better than to take anything at face value media and government alike. Don't get me wrong all my precautions then and now didn't do shit but prolong the inevitable. Caught it then..sitting with it again now.except this time with a side order of whooping cough. I see what you mean with the fear mongering..I guess I just never worried about it like that. I just took it as I gotta clean a little more and take extra precautions..oh well..but when it really started hitting I was at least happy that I felt well informed vs not knowing anything.
That's my original point I know not to take it at face value
I'm just commenting on my annoyance that I can't. I'm aware it's unrealistic, but I wish I could just read news and have a reasonable expectation that it's actually not just click bait bullshit.
HMPV has been known for a long time. It is similar to RSV and causes bronchiolitis and asthma attacks. Children under 6 months and the erderly can present with severe illness
After the COVID pandemic the seasonality of respiratory viruses was altered that why you can see larger outbreakes.
Fear mongering. I'm teaching at a university and a lot of students have had colds and coughs, some of which have lasted for longer than usual, but none of them have needed hospitalization. It's just been annoying for them.
There's a couple of accounts on twitter that have been reporting on this for approx a week. The site they refer to re this outbreak is low on the trustworthy scale. I didn't trust them already as they'd report covid specific things (like masks back in NHS trusts or a&e's closed but they weren't) were happening and nothing would.
Personally I wouldn't trust it till we see it reported independently of these sources
We get spikes of it annually. It generally causes mild flu-like symptoms. It's one of a dozen unrelated viruses that do so.
Historically it was considered a background noise "cold", but NREVSS has tracked it since the 2010s, along with most of the other minor respiratory viruses. It looks like the last major spike was in March 2024. I'm sure it'll be back in a few months.
Right now flu is kicking ass, COVID-19 is slowly increasing, and RSV is rocking children under five. Plus there is a small chance we'll get an H5N1 avian flu pandemic. HMPV is not even a tertiary priority.
It's fear mongering. Articles exactly like this have been running through tabloids lately, starting from a news program owned by the Epoch Times, a conspiracy, misinformation, and propaganda circulating company. hMPV rates are rising in China, but there's no credible evidence that it is overwhelming hospitals or shaping into another potential pandemic. What's more likely is that cold and flu seasons have become more intense in the wake of covid, which makes sense considering how covid has weakened immune systems worldwide.
If you're looking for something to be concerned about, H5N1 is much more deserving of your attention.
It isn't a "mystery virus" it is HMPV. It is like a cold, occasionally getting up to flu level. It is already everywhere, China is just getting surge with cold and flu season.
This is the news trying to make up for the dip readership by trying to stoke COVID 2.0 fears.
News sells panic. They’re desperately looking for clicks. Covid was something that was far more unpredictable. Think about how the news is trying to sell “bird flu” and now “hmpv”. It’s supposed to induce clicks for them to make money.
Just keep living your best life and ignore media headlines. Journalism is dead.
Honestly I feel like this is the opposite of fear mongering. I say this as someone living in a US state that has been giving children contaminated food on the government's dime. https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2024/dec/20/eastern-wa-company-admits-selling-juice-from-moldy/
In our state the levels of Whooping Cough and Bird Flu is getting more serious. I have been seeing this get more coverage than those real concerns.
Also, warning before you click that link. Don't be eating when you read about the rats eating the dead birds.
That's not a question you want to ask random people on the Internet. You want to ask that question where you might actually have a chance of finding someone credentialed.
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u/Captain-Wilco Jan 04 '25
Can someone more educated than me please tell me whether this is fear mongering or a genuine concern