I see that the conference hasn’t decided to cancel, but I wonder if any of the salon attendees are.

I'm watching closely, but haven't bailed so far.

The epidemic is continuing to spread through Europe. Porto registered two cases yesterday. I haven't bailed yet, but the trip is looking increasingly unwise.

Kingston-upon-Thames announced a case yesterday but I'm still going into the shops as always.. 😄 I sense hysteria not science in the media... Although maybe underneath the hysteria over what looks like another damp squib is a genuinely bad set of stats that they're keeping secret from us to prevent .. hysteria? Hmm! So let's wait for larger non-Chinese numbers before changing our lives and plans!

You can track it with various sites like wuflu.live. The statistics to date show that China has via drastic self-quarantining of their entire urban population has slowed growth to a crawl, but the long incubation times without showing symptoms means to many experts that it will be all over the world in the next year and is basically unstoppable. The death statistics show old people faring badly, and the danger of this flu is proportional to your age (which is to be expected). Certainly it has bad numbers, and is 10x more dangerous than our typical flu (so far). I also understand that the virus itself evolves and gradually softens. My completely uninformed prediction is that we will have to learn to survive it because this particular virus is very hardy. It may be the end of handshaking as a custom. Invest in Netflix! they are going to win big on this one.

10x more dangerous.. citation?

Thanks for the link Edward. If you look at the # cases outside of China, that's an exponential growth curve, and the number of cases is doubling every 4 days.

Not sure you can compare flu death rate like that, as the circumstances will be different - flu is accepted in the community so most cases aren't monitored. If you look at monitored cases - i.e. hospitalisations, then it could be up to 10% death rate.

@Duncan Cragg COVID-19 death rate is ~2% of infected; everyone using different metrics each keeps coming up with ~2%. Do the numbers have sampling bias? Well, just take a cohort and look at it. Cruise ship: 7 dead so far, so minimum 0.2% if everyone had it, but 1% of those who tested positive. Or the Iranian leadership: they’re dropping like flies. Flu doesn’t do that. Seasonal flu is ~0.1% of infected. So yes, COVID-19 is the big one. At every turn, it’s showing itself to be very contagious. And with the long lag from infection to death, any death represents 50-1500 current cases, depending on the (unknown) rate of spread. So those 9 deaths in Washington State are bad news: easily 1000-10,000 cases that simply haven’t been found.

Spanish flu was made significantly worse by massive over-prescription of aspirin, apparently.

It is in the best interest of a virus to be non-lethal, so as to maximize spread. Viruses are basically bio-software with the minimal packaging, and are very clever. Even the simplest of viruses is a very complex piece of self-modifying code. What makes virus code so hard to read is the DNA is a compressed format, and it decompressed into 3D structures via folding that is almost impossible to predict. I imagine in 100 years we will solve the programming puzzle and be able to understand them totally. I consider the greatest risk to humanity to be some future pissed-off graduate student in genetics, mad at the world, who whips up some concoction that would mix some lethal engineered virus with a mosquito. Anyway HG Wells who invented the Invisible Man, also wrote a story about bioterrorism in 1900 called "The Bacillus". He was one smart guy.

We are starting to discuss contingencies in the event of cancellation. Does anyone have experience with a 50 person Zoom meeting?

We’ve been using large Zoom meetings a lot here at UCSC over the last few weeks due to the strike. It works pretty well with up to a few hundred users, but there’s limitations on the free tier (mostly a 40min length restriction on group meetings) so you’d probably want someone to pay for the next tier up.

Is that "up to a few hundred" people who might speak at any one time? Or just folks watching live? Because if you make the conference virtual, I can imagine there'd be quite a few people (myself, at least) who would love to attend, so to speak, but aren't able to travel.

Zoom doesn’t really distinguish between people who can speak and people who are just there to watch, AFAIK – it’d be good at enabling full participation. We’ve mostly been using it for lectures where the audience can occasionally chime in to ask questions – it has a “raise hand” feature and a few other nice tools for polling/moderation at the first paid tier.

@jonathoda the FabAcademy holds weekly lectures and review meetings in one big zoom call with ~60 connected sites and 150 students total. It works pretty well, the rules are simple: connect 5-10min prior to the start and do a sound-check if you want. Once the 'real call' starts, everyone has to stay muted unless they actively want to talk. People with unmuted noisy mics are either reminded or force-muted by the moderator(s). For questions, comments etc the text chat and the 'raise hand' feature can be used. For the FabAcademy anyone may also speak up / interrupt for questions at any time, but this may be a less appropriate policy for a conference.

@jonathoda we do ~40-45 person company status updates using Zoom, across 13 countries at work

Thanks for the info. Seems like Zoom would work

I just reassessed, and I'm not travelling to Portugal. I now agree with @Brian Hempel this is the big one, based on new graphs at COVID19info.live comparing this pandemic with earlier viral outbreaks (SARS, swine flu). In Europe, the # of infections is growing exponentially, with a doubling time slightly more than every 2 days. In Portugal, there were 2 cases 4 days ago, 5 cases 2 days ago, 9 cases today. At this rate, there could be 8000 confirmed cases in Portugal by Mar 26 unless the authorities start restricting travel and shutting down public meetings.

Yeah, I've been watching it since you pointed it out, @Doug Moen.

Zoom has a conference/power user mode that supports more people