Yes, completely daft.  I commented on this earlier - it's a medieval attitude and perhaps not surprising for a country run by a bunch of religious zealots.

I refer you to my recent post:

https://www.theweatheroutlook.com/twocommunity/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1181823#post1181823

Mumbo jumbo trumps science.

Surely one of the most ludicrous photos of all time. 

If you think that's bad try watching the video.

Christ it's everywhere in Europe tonight. Cases coming in by the hour. Another one in Madrid now.

OK going to attempt to list where all the non-Italian European cases came from. Hopefully try to shed some light on this.

Croatian case: Young man who stayed in Milan, Italy, from 19th-21st February.

Two Austrian cases: Two 24 YOs, one from Lombardy, Italy. Case in Tyrol on the Italian border.

Switzerland case: One 70 year old Male who contracted it from Milan, Italy on February 15th

First spanish mailand case: Young women who had travelled from Italy on the 22nd February

2nd Spanish case: 38 YO italian that travelled to barcelona on the 12th February

3rd Spanish case: Italian originating from Venice

The good news is that we may already seem to have finished the exponential phase in Italy. This will likely be because the measures put in place in Italy have worked. Need a few more days of data before we can be sure.

Bruce Aylward said in a WHO press conference that he found no evidence of widespread mild cases of COVID in China.

The resolved CFR is currently 9%. The 2% figure would assume the lag of the naive CFR is roughly cancelled out by mild cases. If this is not the case then the mortality could be higher than 2% though it will not be higher than 9%.

We won't get the data but I dread to think how that graph would look for Iran.

CDC is warning that the disruption to everyday lives in America could be big and urges people to start preparing.

Iran will still be in the exponential phase because it has done nothing to try and control it.

In the exponential phase the number of cases doubles about every 3 days.

After 2 weeks that's 15000+ people infected.

After 3 weeks we are talking millions.

Of course even without any measures the exponential phase will not sustain indefinitely because people will naturally self isolate.

So we are probably talking tens of thousands rather than millions at this point.

Friday prayers will most likely make things worse.

I feel sorry for the ordinary people in Iran: a country led by absolute muppets.

It will likely be far worse than even Hubei.

You literally had the godamned health minister spluttering on live television infecting everyone around him.

FFS you cannot make this crap up. If it really does take off I would be concerned about civil unrest in Iran. Especially after the mess in December with the Ukrainan airline.

Looking at the other side of this Singapore definitely deserves an A+ grade for managing to stop the disease in it's path before it became an epidemic.

I thought it was rather reminiscent of Comical Ali doing a TV interview and denying that US troops were closing in whilst the tanks rolled past in the background.  Here we had the health minister clearly suffering from a bad fever claiming that there was just a very slight problem in the country.

Look on the bright side, maybe the entire regime might be wiped out by it.  Every cloud and all that.....

There's already civil unrest but the regime is well entrenched.

Incidentally Europe needs to be on high alert right now. Italy is right on our doorstep and the next few days will be critical as people from the affected region will start to show symptoms. So far the majority of countries with cases have not turned into regional centres. However we cannot afford for there to be another Italy on our doorstep.

This is the sort of thing you can imagine could collapse a regime, North korea might be at risk too (although there was prior pressure on Iran before now). It's always a double edged sword though. If the regime collapses there will be untold human misery in the short term.

Maybe you understand now why I got rather irritated with the nonsense about it being out of control.  Singapore is a very well managed first-world country with a good healthcare system.

It was close to being out of control, Singapore thankfully stopped it. South Korea and Italy also deserve praise for their rapid response even though they did not manage to contain it.

Oh hell another in Germany.

thanks goodness the Black Death or the Spanish Flu, the Internet and Quantum didn't all exist at the same time

Sorry, that's simply not true - repeat, NOT true.  It was never ever out of control.  With respect, I was there and have rather better knowledge of Singapore than you.

That thought has gone through my mind several times.

How many times can you cry wolf and then claim what you actually saw was a poodle?