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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

#161

Post by ehsankia »

mrtksn wrote: post #109
michalu wrote: post #79

Also good real-time chart: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h... tracks confirmed cases and recoveries too.

>Last Update: Jan 30, 2020 11 am EST. It is not a real-time map, I find it bizarre that people believe that we can track the population's wellbeing in real-time. Are you ready to be hooked up to such a system?

That's being overly pedantic.

About the update rate: It's updated regularly. If you want to go down this rabbit hole, is 1m update real-time? Is 1s update realtime? Where do you draw the line? For most people, anything less than 12h, in the case of tracking confirmed cases, is perfectly fine described as "real-time"

About the data: Obviously it's showing confirmed cases and not actual health of people. The UI makes that pretty clear, it says "Confirmed cases" in big font. No one expects the latter...

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#162

Post by munificent »

goblin89 wrote: post #96
munificent wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No, but in the absence of that, it seems strange to unpin the denominator while leaving the numerator fixed and then presume that that tells you anything useful.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#163

Post by mrb »

mrtksn wrote: post #129
hanniabu wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any idea what the rates are for the corona virus?

People mistakenly calculate %2 and %50 simultaneously because they assume that when a case is confirmed the death or cured status is also determined at that moment. In reality, though, people who are going to die don't die at the moment of infection confirmation and people who are going to live do lag in the log because it takes time to confirm if someone has recovered and virus-free. Some will suggest to simply comp…

«assume that when a case is confirmed the death or cured status is also determined at that moment»

This is why epidemiologists (ref: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ebf2/48c9fc0a1a23d1778b9408... or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22195827 for my comment on the paper) prefer instead this formula which only counts patients for which the eventual outcome is already known:

deaths / (deaths + recoveries)

With this formula, there is no need to guess the "patient timeline". If you do the math right now for the largest case study known to date (published yesterday: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... covering 99 patients, 11 dead, 31 recovered) you get:

11 / (11 + 31) = 26% case fatality rate

If you do the math on ALL data from mainland China (170 deads, 124 recovered as of 2020-01-29 http://www.nhc.gov.cn/xcs/yqtb/202001/e71bd2e7a0824ca69f87bb... or in english: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%932...), you get:

170 / (170 + 124) = 58% case fatality rate

This formula gives a pretty good estimate of the eventual observed CFR according to the paper I referenced above. Of course, there are caveats, for one deaths or recoveries may not be properly tracked: there could be many patients with mild cases that are not even detected/confirmed and end up recovering on their own.

PS: I am not stating the lower bound CFR is 26%! Another method I applied (described in twitter thread https://twitter.com/zorinaq/status/1222427708723879936) suggest it could be as low as 9%.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#164

Post by csomar »

treis wrote: post #60
mrb wrote: post #35

It's about time... All early characteristics of the novel coronavirus indicate it's far more dangerous than SARS/MERS/seasonal flu (which kills 30-60k/year in the US) so, unless a cure is found soon, we should expect it to kill more people than these other diseases combined : https://mobile.twitter.com/zorinaq/status/122263149332482867...

Viruses tend to become less deadly as they spread because dead people don't spread disease. Typically it mutates slightly into a less deadly strain. Then that strain spreads more quickly and gives the population some level of immunity against the more deadly one.

Not if this Coronavirus is asymptomatic for two weeks. These are still China claims and the west is still suspicious. But if this is true then holy cows.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#165

Post by threatripper »

hanniabu wrote: post #59
cheeseblubber wrote: post #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...

Any idea what the rates are for the corona virus?

We don't know.

We don't know how many people are infected. We only have numbers of confirmed cases and those numbers are heavily skewed because 1) people don't know they are sick 2) stay at home or 3) are not diagnosed properly. Those diagnosed in China are probably severe cases with a multiple not being diagnosed. Also, it is unclear how good the reporting is.

We don't know how many of those who are infected will die and how many will recover. We only know of deaths of confirmed patients in the hospital. Of roughly 10000 confirmed cases 200 are dead, 200 are recovered and 9600 are yet to be determined. From that you could deduce 2% or 50%, less than 2% or more than 50% or anything else. Right now we don't have good data. Also we don't know how long it takes to die or to recover and on most patients we will probably lose track.

Since the infection takes about 2 weeks, we have to wait a few weeks until the smoke starts clearing.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#166

Post by throwanem »

staticautomatic wrote: post #154
throwanem wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a strong prior for large bureaucracies, especially at their interfaces with one another, not being sluggish? If so, how do you come by it? If not, whence comes the doubt whose benefit you seem so anxious to give?

My comment is rooted in a general reluctance to make assumptions about things that have empirical or theoretically provable answers, particularly ones that could be obtained without much effort. Some people call it "science."

Oh, well. Shouldn't you be citing me into silence, then? This mere unsupported assertion ill befits a man of science, after all.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#167

Post by csomar »

splittingTimes wrote: post #13

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

It's not, for now. The problem is that you'll never know if the virus is serious or not until it's too late.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#168

Post by jansan »

twelvechairs wrote: post #70
hanniabu wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any idea what the rates are for the corona virus?

The official figures in China are 8,163 cases 171 deaths which is 2% right now, but take these with a big grain of salt. They could go up (some of those confirmed cases will be very recent and may get worse) or down (more cases might have happened but be unreported). Its really hard to tell what it will look like in a month or two.

On April 1st 2003, when SARS was in full swing, the WHO reported 1622 cases and 58 deaths. That is a rate of 3.5%. In June 2003 (at the end of the SARS outbreak) the official figure was almost ten percent. From this comparison you can expect the mortality rate of the new corona virus to be at around 6 to 8%.

Source: https://www.who.int/csr/sars/press2003_04_01/en/ (search for "deaths")

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#169

Post by mrtksn »

mrb wrote: post #163
mrtksn wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People mistakenly calculate %2 and %50 simultaneously because they assume that when a case is confirmed the death or cured status is also determined at that moment. In reality, though, people who are going to die don't die at the moment of infection confirmation and people who are going to live do lag in the log because it takes time to confirm if someone has recovered and virus-free. Some will suggest to simply comp…

« assume that when a case is confirmed the death or cured status is also determined at that moment » This is why epidemiologists (ref: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ebf2/48c9fc0a1a23d1778b9408... or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22195827 for my comment on the paper) prefer instead this formula which only counts patients for which the eventual outcome is already known: deaths / (deaths + recoveries) With thi…

What exactly a margin of %9 to %56 tells us anyway?

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#170

Post by jansan »

therealmarv wrote: post #124
hanniabu wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any idea what the rates are for the corona virus?

NCOV (new corona) 2%, SARS (2012) around 10%, yearly normal flu around 0.01%-0.05% and Ebola 50-90%

During the SARS outbreak in April 2003 the reported rate was around 3.5% (58 deaths on 1622 "probable cases").

Source: https://www.who.int/csr/sars/press2003_04_01/en/

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