Also good real-time chart: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h... tracks confirmed cases and recoveries too.
Anyone know what APIs is the map hooked onto?
WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency
91–100 of 465 posts
Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, o…
I thought flu vaccine efficacy varies year to year and is frequently not that great.
You're correct. See [1]. It's usually less than 50% effective, and as low as 19%. A troubling fact is that effectiveness has been on a downward trend the last 4 years.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/effectiveness-studies....
Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Have you never seen a bureaucracy in a hurry? It is not, to borrow a word, agile.
Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
>This can mean The difference between multiple cities being ravaged by a disease instead of smaller groups of infected individuals. That sounds nice in theory, but there's no literature backing this up.
On the other hand, there simply cannot be literature to back it up unless it is tried systematically. These two things are in direct opposition. In any other experiment, we wouldn't treat the presently available level of evidence as indicative of the final state of knowledge on the matter.
Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency
#95This is (imo) the right course of action to (at minimum) alert countries wrt the gravity of this outbreak; however, I was disappointed to see the tiptoeing around potentially offending China. From the press conference, it seemed that Dr. Tedros made it painfully (maybe even unnecessarily) clear that this action wasn't faulting China for their handling of this situation. It's just weird to see that global politics is…
It's not just politics. This is matter of trying to placate China so that they don't hide numbers from international/outside health organizations to save face. My understanding is that China was less than forthcoming about actual infection/death rates when SARS was making it's rounds. Disclaimer: I do not have a source for this. This is heresay from the hubub around the current crisis so take it with a grain of salt.
I was surprised by an NPR blurb yesterday talking about how China may have to put off its annual Communist party planning meeting, and how that would be an embarrassing concession by the Chinese.
I was so disappointed in them. How should it be embarrassing to take a deadly and contagious pneumonia outbreak seriously? Do you want them to feel they should hide it?
(You being NPR). I know you don't mean anything bad by it.
Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency
#96Running the official numbers, mortality rate is less than 3%. If we plug in estimative models claiming 25000+ unrecorded infections, mortality is less than 1%. Unless you are in a sensitive age group or have other health problems, data suggests you're most likely to get over it as a regular flu. It's not all perfect and is worse than a regular flu, but especially now after the announcement some people may way over-st…
> If we plug in estimative models claiming 25000+ unrecorded infections Shouldn't you also plug in estimated unreported fatalities too?
Are you aware of any such estimates?
Death is more difficult to hide than fever.
Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency
#97Apart from more people falling sick (as bad as that is), is there a more fundamental concern that if it runs wild in a less developed country, it'll mutate into something more dangerous? As infections climb, the coronavirus (based on less stable RNA) gets more chances to mutate into something even more virulent or deadly?
Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency
#98Apart from more people falling sick (as bad as that is), is there a more fundamental concern that if it runs wild in a less developed country, it'll mutate into something more dangerous? As infections climb, the coronavirus (based on less stable RNA) gets more chances to mutate into something even more virulent or deadly?
Flu viruses get less dangerous over time. The more deadly strains literally kill off their hosts, making those strains less likely to spread.
Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency
#99Stupid question: is it possible that hygiene practices contribute to outbreaks like this?
I remember reading or hearing that one input to recent wildfires was the fact that decades of controlled burns to limit the spread of wildfires left a lot of available fuel that otherwise would have burned naturally.
So in that vein, do we have humans with compromised immunity thriving but susceptible to inter-species mutations like this novel coronavirus?
Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency
#100This is (imo) the right course of action to (at minimum) alert countries wrt the gravity of this outbreak; however, I was disappointed to see the tiptoeing around potentially offending China. From the press conference, it seemed that Dr. Tedros made it painfully (maybe even unnecessarily) clear that this action wasn't faulting China for their handling of this situation. It's just weird to see that global politics is…
Unfortunately global politics has always crept into global public health decisions. There's no avoiding it.