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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

#181

Post by mrb »

svara wrote: post #82
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...

I think it would be more helpful to cite actual epidemiology research and public health professionals rather than people who seem to use people's fears to garner attention. Edit: In order to make this a little less dismissive, the actual argument in that Twitter post is that due to lag between first symptoms appearing and death, you can't divide fatalities by total cases to get the mortality rate, and should instead…

«cases that get reported are biased towards people who get more sick»

True, the data is biased.

«the 20-56% mortality rate claimed based on guessing N=6 is inconsistent with the mortality rates outside of China, where no one has died so far»

It's not statistically inconsistent. When China had 100 cases confirmed, they had reported only 2 deaths. Now there are 100 cases outside China, so statistically we should expect 2. 0 actual vs 2 expected is statistically insignificant. Also the rest of the world is so much more prepared after the wake-up alarm call from China that out of the 100 confirmed outside China, they are probably receiving superior healthcare than overwhelmed Chinese hospitals. I would expect the mortality rate outside China to be slightly inferior.

It also means though, that the first death outside China should happen soon. I predict in the next week.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#182

Post by mrb »

goblin89 wrote: post #177
mrb wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, when using the "deaths / (deaths + recoveries)" formula, recoveries being under-reported is possible and would skew the CFR upward. But also, if deaths are under-reported in the same proportion as recoveries, then it would not affect the CFR. I suppose one way to reduce uncertainty is to examine a cohort of patients and follow it meticulously. To do that, we can look at the 99-patient case study published in…

Assigning 50% chance of death to any patient remaining in the hospital when calculating mortality rate would be nuts, I can only thank the epidemiologists for not publishing the number.

Not 50%, you misunderstand me. I edited my comment to clarify. What I meant is out of those who came out of the hospital (either dead or recovered), 26% died. So those remaining in the hospital are assumed to have a 26% chance of dying.

Another way of looking at probabilities, out of the 57 patients left in the hospital:

If 0 die (ie. all recover), the CFR is 11% (11 deads, 88 recovered)

If 15 die (26% of 57 still hospitalized), the CFR is 26% (11+15=26 deads, 73 recovered)

If 57 die, the CFR is 69% (11+57=68 deads, 31 recovered)

So the CFR bounds are 11-69% and if the trend on remaining patients continue it should be 26%.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#183

Post by wolco »

parliament32 wrote: post #174
ehsankia wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

No and no. "Realtime" has an actual definition, as in "data is immediately available".

No information is available real time. There will always be a lag even with stock trading. Determining what is acceptable for real time depends on the context. A few seconds would be unacceptable for stock information but would be more than enough for a 911 real time notification system to first responders. 12 hours for global viral outbreak stats seems acceptable for real time status.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#184

Post by themagician »

mrb wrote: post #135
themagician wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop spreading misinformation and getting your information from Twitter, and when you do—try reading it first. Even when compared to SARS in that chart it looks like it has a lower R0 value and about the same fatality rate, minus some odd outliers and what it likely fake news (it doesn't have a fatality rate of 56%). And the citation for that 56% number is a link another link to Twitter… that is self referential. And…

Yes I made the table, but which part of this table is misinformation? All data is valid. Twitter is not a good format to present a bunch of data, hence the convoluted link to a link to a link... However, for your information, the 56% case fatality ratio is calculated according to an epidemiological method known to produce a good estimate. See https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ebf2/48c9fc0a1a23d1778b9408... , section S…

All the data is not valid. You give no citations for half your numbers and half the cells are empty. It's 100% bogus garbage.

You are creating and spreading fake news. You might not be a bad person, but right now you are being a bad person.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#185

Post by akiselev »

mrtksn wrote: post #169
mrb wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

« 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?

Nothing conclusive but if a new disease emerges has a mortality rate even approaching 9% and a basic reproduction number (R0) of 1 or greater, it's a significant cause for concern. Combined with the incubation period, asymptomatic transmission, and the population density in which the outbreaks occurred, in this case it's enough to declare a global public health emergency.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#186

Post by parliament32 »

wolco wrote: post #183
parliament32 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No and no. "Realtime" has an actual definition, as in "data is immediately available".

No information is available real time. There will always be a lag even with stock trading. Determining what is acceptable for real time depends on the context. A few seconds would be unacceptable for stock information but would be more than enough for a 911 real time notification system to first responders. 12 hours for global viral outbreak stats seems acceptable for real time status.

There's a difference between latency and delay.

If I "touch a.txt" then run "ls", and see "a.txt", I'd consider my filesystem realtime. There's no point in being pedantic about "but there's a 50ms delay when I hit enter after typing ls so it's not realtime!!!".

"Realtime virus outbreak" implies that the site is somehow automatically identifying where the virus is and updating it's stats, rather than waiting for a human to update it.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#187

Post by Geee »

wyldfire wrote: post #99

Stupid 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…

Somewhat. However, the virus is a novel mutation, which means that even if we exposed ourselves to other similar viruses at younger age, it wouldn't help. At least that's my understanding.

On evolutionary timescales, it's better to expose whole population from time to time, so that we don't lose the immune system response against these altogether.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#188

Post by TurkishPoptart »

abhisuri97 wrote: post #18

This 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…

[flagged]

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#189

Post by svara »

mrb wrote: post #181
svara wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would be more helpful to cite actual epidemiology research and public health professionals rather than people who seem to use people's fears to garner attention. Edit: In order to make this a little less dismissive, the actual argument in that Twitter post is that due to lag between first symptoms appearing and death, you can't divide fatalities by total cases to get the mortality rate, and should instead…

« cases that get reported are biased towards people who get more sick » True, the data is biased. « the 20-56% mortality rate claimed based on guessing N=6 is inconsistent with the mortality rates outside of China, where no one has died so far » It's not statistically inconsistent. When China had 100 cases confirmed, they had reported only 2 deaths. Now there are 100 cases outside China, so statistically we should ex…

> It's not statistically inconsistent. When China had 100 cases confirmed, they had reported only 2 deaths. Now there are 100 cases outside China, so statistically we should expect 2. 0 actual vs 2 expected is statistically insignificant.

My point here was that the China data is probably biased because the medical system there is overtaxed, but outside of China it isn't. Therefore, estimating mortality based on non-China data seems safer, and no one outside of China has died so far.

If I take your low end mortality estimate, 20%, and apply that to the number of non-China cases 6 days ago (12), you get only a 6% probability of all of these people surviving. Note that this already contains a lot of assumptions (going back 6 days, taking your lowest mortality estimate) that work in favor of your alarmism.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#190

Post by peteretep »

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...

> All early characteristics of the novel coronavirus indicate it's far more dangerous than SARS

Would you consider fucking off?

This is your third or fourth bullshit post on this thread combining a sensationalist falsehood with a link to your Twitter feed.

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