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WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

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Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#41

How is this worse than your normal influenza cycle with 3-5Mio infections and 290k-650k death to warrant such an emergency?

People keeps saying things like, "Yeah, well last year way more people died of the flu!"

Yeah, well that was an entire year. This is a few weeks. The goal is to get ahead of things, not to wait until it's too late.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#42

How is this worse than your normal influenza cycle with 3-5Mio infections and 290k-650k death to warrant such an emergency?

If nothing else, it's worse in that there's zero vaccination mitigation available. If the flu vaccine was 0% effective this year, that would also be a health emergency.

On top of that, it seems to have worse mortality rate, transmissibility rate, and asymptomatic contagion -- so a little worse in every way, probably.

As with the flu, you're very unlikely to be personally killed by it unless you're over 65, under 5, or in poor health.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#43
For those who are referencing the flu and it's mortality rate here are estimates from the CDC for 2019

* 15,000,000 – 21,000,000 who had the flu

* 8,200 – 20,000 deaths from the flu

The morality rate ranges from 0.03% to 0.09% or 3/10000 9/10000

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#44

Can we PLEASE collectively put our manners aside and confront people who are not covering their mouths when they cough? I'm very aggravated that people don't. What is going through the mind of a person who deep coughs, open mouth, without cover, in public transport? It's depressing.

Go for it. See if your action pulls us towards collective action. Do you chastise every person you see breaking this social norm?

If I see anyone even trying to go for the bathroom door without washing their hands I'll definitely be shouting at them until they wash their hands and follow them (at a sanitary distance) in order to ruin their day and make sure everyone they come in contact with knows they've got significant amounts of fecal matter on their hands.

I wish I was only joking.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't make any sense if I step through it mentally. If you're a carrier of a virus and you have to hoof it to my end of the world, it's going to take you a whole lot longer to get there than if you flew. This is absolute fact. The faster vectors you give to something to transport a thing, that thing will move to its destination that much faster. You don't need science to grok this.

A few passages from the article: > But the trouble is, they don’t appear to be helpful. At best, travel restrictions, and even airport screenings, delay the spread of disease but don’t impact the number of people who eventually get sick . Instead, they make it harder for international aid and experts to reach communities affected by disease. They are also expensive, resource-intensive, and potentially harmful to the…

How can a ban only on nonessential travel affect aid workers and experts, who are clearly essential?

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#47
post #29

Coronavirus: -5,974 confirmed cases -170 deaths [1]For comparisons the SARS outbreak of 2003: -8,098 people worldwide became sick -774 died [1] https://www.cdc.gov/sars/about/fs-sars.html

Could you add the timeframe of each pandemic? I believe the coronavirus is 1-2 months old, but how long was SARS to get to 774? I feel like the comparaison isn't great without timeline.

Here are some graphs showing exactly that:

https://ncov.r6.no/

It's also worth noting that the ~8k confirmed cases are bottlenecked by how fast China can perform tests. Here's an article guesstimating that there were up to 100k infections a few days ago:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jan/26/coronavirus-...

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#48
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to give http://www.gleamviz.org/simulator/ whirl. You can simulate any epidemic model on a real-life datasets of mobility and healthcare access around the world. The tricky part is know exactly what the "correct" epidemic model is: length of latent/infectious/etc periods, etc. Full disclosure: I was once one of the main developers of this epidemic modeling framework.

This is really cool! Are there any existing models to start with?

I've been disconnected from GLEaM for a while now, so I might be missing something better, but the user manual (http://www.gleamviz.org/simulator/GLEAMviz_client_manual_v7....) guides you thorough an example on Sec 4

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#49
post #20
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they advise against restriction measures for international travel, which personally boggles the mind. >At some point they vapidly ask "Where is the science behind this?". The science behind this is the discovery of viruses and the impossibility of teleportation. but it's true though. there's limited evidence that travel bans will stop the spread of the infection. the evidence ranges between "no effect at all" to "de…

There are many variables when it comes to travel restriction. "Travel restriction" is simply not a binary category which you either have or do not have. Hence, I'm unconvinced by a universal conclusion of "travel restriction does not work" from a few retrospective studies of a few heterogeneous cases of past travel restrictions. I maintain that we should not give in to the conclusion that global spread of infections…

While it's true you cannot prevent with certainty every possibility of the virus coming here, but by implementing travel restrictions you do inhibit and create barriers of it's spread.

This can mean The difference between multiple cities being ravaged by a disease instead of smaller groups of infected individuals.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#50

Coronavirus: -5,974 confirmed cases -170 deaths [1]For comparisons the SARS outbreak of 2003: -8,098 people worldwide became sick -774 died [1] https://www.cdc.gov/sars/about/fs-sars.html

Just to put it in better perspective:

Coronavirus:

-5,974 confirmed cases

-170 deaths

-143 recoveries

-5,661 still sick

SARS:

-8,098 cases

-774 deaths

-7,324 recoveries

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