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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

#331

Post by Gustomaximus »

cyphar wrote: post #191
akiselev wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're remembering the fire bit backwards. A lack of controlled burns due to discontinuation of indigenous practices and budget cuts combined with increased fire fighting (preventing natural burns) caused fuel to build up in forests that would have burned away in smaller fires. Many plants in Australia are actually adapted to frequent fires like the eucalyptus tree whose oils ignite during fires to wipe out a…

In Australia, a larger factor is that cotton farmers have literally been stealing water from the Murray-Darling catchment system, resulting in the entire bush becoming much drier for the past decade.

Do you have any source for that? Cotton farms have taken significant flow and effected the river itself. But I've not seen anything that links these farms to the bush around the region.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#332

Post by Double_a_92 »

koheripbal wrote: post #263
bart_spoon wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well there is something to be said for both potential biases in those counts. First of all, those being hospitalized are obviously among the most severe cases. And presumably people with the mildest cases will potentially not even be diagnosed, so the mortality rates would be skewed higher. And secondly, that more people have died than have recovered doesn't say much other than that it takes longer to recover than to…

The numbers we're getting out of China are a mess and almost entirely useless. There are reports of hospitals turning people away unless they a very sick, and also not testing every ill patient because they're overwhelmed. I've see death certificates posted online with "viral pneumonia" because they aren't able to test everyone - and certainly don't bother testing those who have already died. The errors are both ways…

> I've see death certificates posted online with "viral pneumonia"

Would that not be a proper reason for a corona virus caused death? Or does it have to be specific if the exact cause is known?

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#333

Post by topmonk »

linsomniac wrote: post #318
topmonk wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were incorrect. Your daughter said “The W.H.O.” where as you only said “Who”

Sooo... You're asserting initialism vs acronym and I'm asserting comedy? Sorry if I took you away from fact checking open mic night. :-D

I'm not asserting initialism vs acronyms. I'm talking about the grammar of "Who did".

If you actually meant the World Health Organization, you'd have to interpret that as "World Health Organization did". This is obvious incorrect, and rather should be "The World Health Organization did". So there is no way for your daughter to have interpreted what you said as talking about the World Health Organization, whether initialism or acronym.

> Sorry if I took you away from fact checking open mic night. :-D

No, I wasn't distracted at all. Thanks for the concern, though.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#334

Post by Double_a_92 »

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…

> deaths / (deaths + recoveries)

How does that produce a meaningful number? If you got 1000s of infected people, and 1 dies... The formula would be 1 / (1 + 0) = 100%. What does that mean?

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#335

Post by benji_is_me »

Anon84 wrote: post #10
pastor_elm wrote: post #7

Any good models that predict the peak of this?

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.

Coincidentally I was just looking at gleamviz the other day (I was googling around for accurate modeling programs). Sadly when I tried the linux version, it segfaults after some Qt error.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#336

Post by cyphar »

Gustomaximus wrote: post #331
cyphar wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Australia, a larger factor is that cotton farmers have literally been stealing water from the Murray-Darling catchment system, resulting in the entire bush becoming much drier for the past decade.

Do you have any source for that? Cotton farms have taken significant flow and effected the river itself. But I've not seen anything that links these farms to the bush around the region.

The Murray-Darling river system covers most of NSW and Victoria, so it's not hard to intuit that a drier river system will result in drier conditions in NSW and Victoria. I don't have a source which says "the fires were predominantly caused by the drying of the river system", but given the geography it seems more unlikely (at least to me) that it didn't have a significant impact.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#337

Post by snnn »

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...

In 2018, China had 600k flu cases and 153 deaths. So the new virus has caused 10 times more deaths in this Jan. Is it serve?

See: http://www.nhc.gov.cn/jkj/s3578/201904/050427ff32704a5db64f4...

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#338

Post by headmelted »

baobrain wrote: post #293
headmelted wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness though, the containment ship has sailed for nCOV. It’s scary to see it so close to home. I’m in Northern Ireland and saw two hazmat ambulances gunning it into the center of Belfast today. I’ve never seen a hazmat ambulance in this country - wouldn’t have even known we had them or what they looked like. I suspect we’ll get outbreaks in many more regions over the next few days.

It's highly unlikely that those ambulances are related to the virus. There are 0 confirmed cases in Northern Ireland, and if it was a suspected case the government and media would be all over it to find people who were potentially infected.

I’m afraid you have more faith than I do in local government.

I wouldn’t expect them to try to “cover it up” but I’d very much expect them to act slowly in notifying and not take it as seriously as they should.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#339

Post by abj »

pier25 wrote: post #289
Roritharr wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend everyone to watch this on-site commentary from the chinese human rights lawyer Chen Qiushi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AI3R41dGnU Any numbers we've seen so far seem very tame to me, compared to the pictures out of Wuhan.

Totally off topic but... Chinese seems like a very efficient language. The guy doesn't seem to be speaking so fast but the subtitles are conveying a lot of information really fast.

Here's [1] a paper on information density vs speed of speech, done by the University of Lyon. I am not sure how accurate their methods are, but they seem to believe that some languages convey more information per syllable and for 5 out of 7 languages, that ones with lower information density are spoken faster. Note that the sample size was only 59 and only compared how fast 20 different texts were read out, all silences that lasted longer than 150 ms were edited out as well.

[1] http://www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegri...

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#340

Post by peteretep »

explore wrote: post #326
sliken wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scary part is that of the official 8,200 or so people that have been confirmed to have the virus there's been 171 deaths, and 143 recoveries. So more people dead than recovered, does make one wonder about the 8,200. Seems few believe the official numbers, people visit numerous hospitals without being able to seen, and even those that get seen have problems getting tested, and people who posts about the situation…

New data, based on "all confirmed cases of 2019-nCoV in Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital from Jan 1 to Jan 20, 2020": 11% "died of multiple organ failure" and 23% are in intensive care unit https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Interesting, however:

> Most patients were men, with a mean age of 55·5 years (SD 13·1; table 1). 50 (51%) patients had chronic diseases, including cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, endocrine system disease [and some others]

The findings conclude:

> In general, the characteristics of patients who died were in line with the early warning model for predicting mortality in viral pneumonia

Also the group was self-selecting of people who went to hospital before Jan 20th.

In summary: old men with pre-existing health conditions are going to have a rough ride. Am yet to see this play out in 2020 Presidential Election odds though.

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