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WHO Director: "Covid-19 does not transmit as efficiently as influenza"

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Re: WHO Director: "Covid-19 does not transmit as efficiently as influenza"

#51

Post by jcadam »

Barrin92 wrote: post #34
thorum wrote: post #22

Keep in mind that almost 20% of the Diamond Princess cruise ship's passengers and crew (700+ of 3711) were infected with the coronavirus. However its infection rate compares with the seasonal flu (which is a much less dangerous illness overall), it clearly has the potential to infect a large number of people in the coming months.

Given that there are probably very few places that are worse for a disease outbreak than a cruise ship where everyone eats and drinks all day and touches everything and uses the same toilets I'll actually take the 20% as an encouraging number.

I've heard it said that you have an almost 50% of catching something if you go on a cruise.

Re: WHO Director: "Covid-19 does not transmit as efficiently as influenza"

#52

Post by allovernow »

ardit33 wrote: post #42

1. I would not trust anything coming out of WHO at this point. Even Germany called it a pandemic, yet they are not willing to call it such (perhaps due to political influence/pressure, or just incompetence). This looks more like a 'panic containment' type of statement than the truth. 2. The R0 of seasonal flu, is about 1.5, Covid-19 has a R0 between 2.6 and 3.5*. (yet to be determined), which is much more contagious…

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/pandemic-bon...

> The [class a] bonds default if pandemic-related deaths reach 2,500 in a single nation with an additional 20 or more deaths confirmed in an overseas country, according to the bank's prospectus.

> The [class b] bonds pay 11.5% annually, but reach default after 250 deaths. The bonds' payout rate scales with the number of additional countries that experience than 20 confirmed deaths.

Well? Why are they dragging their feet? Even the official numbers have seen more than 2.5k die in China and more than 20 in Iran. The only question now is whether this is incompetence or maliciousness.

Re: WHO Director: "Covid-19 does not transmit as efficiently as influenza"

#53

Post by ThomPete »

droithomme wrote: post #21
knzhou wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of things that make calculating a straightforward percentage hard: - not all cases detected - deaths are a laggy indicator - recoveries are an extremely laggy indicator - impact of demographics, healthcare quality - sizes of effects of all 4 previous things depends on the country and the time This has led to internet commentators coming up with wild numbers, ranging from 0.1% to 20%. At the risk of so…

> defer to the expert numbers (2-3%) Latest expert estimate of global mortality rate, as published by WHO, is 3.4% as reported here: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/WHO-global-mortality-... And also as reported in OP's link. https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-... > "Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died."

Does that include those still not fully recovered?

Re: WHO Director: "Covid-19 does not transmit as efficiently as influenza"

#54

Post by cyphar »

pezo1919 wrote: post #43

To me it seems WHO was downplaying it the whole time. First lie is China will be able to contain it and now they don't even call it a pandemic. Also R0 is much higher then for flu. I really hope the new idea about transmissability is true but if it is I don't get why China treats it as they do. Wuhan is locked for 40+ days. I can't trust WHO now related to Covid-19, especially after what happened to stock. Of course…

> I can't trust WHO now related to Covid-19, especially after what happened to stock.

The stock market is an indicator of investor confidence. How investors feel about a particular event is not necessarily accurate, and has basically no direct relation to the WHO.

Re: WHO Director: "Covid-19 does not transmit as efficiently as influenza"

#55

Post by Shank »

allovernow wrote: post #37

Just a reminder that this is coming from an organization that 1. Receives part of it's funding from China 2. Has been using China's clearly manufactured numbers since day 1 3. Has yet to officially call this a pandemic though it has met the criteria for weeks ($425MM in pandemic bonds would default) [0] 4. Is led by a man (the very director being quoted) who was accused by the NYT of covering up no less than 3 choler…

> The WHO and CDC are lying to you. You can verify all of this for yourself.

In a case like this, where you're basically saying that two massive government organizations are broken, and one of which is an international organization which is _designed_ to transcend national borders (and thus includes different member countries, including China), the burden of proof lies with the person making the claim.

As a general response: of course the WHO is going to use China's numbers. If you don't establish some baseline for reporting then what are you going to do? Guess? The WHO does not have people to drop into China and start testing everyone. If China is under-reporting numbers then that's a great shame the world needs to deal with, but in typical situations involving bad data, you exclude the bad data entirely. Are we to exclude all of the numbers reported by China? Multiply by a scale factor to adjust? Pick a random number?

There are many problems in the world and the WHO is not free of problems. Every director of every organization has some random set of things people don't like about them. In cases like this, again, it's important to provide evidence to support your claims (even if that's just basic links to overviews by reputable sources). From there, people can make informed decisions and judgement calls. I don't particularly think you're lying or telling the truth, I just think that not making evidence backed decisions is dangerous, especially in times like these.

Re: WHO Director: "Covid-19 does not transmit as efficiently as influenza"

#56

Post by rolph »

knzhou wrote: post #6

This is important, because lots of internet commentators are just going with the most alarming possible statements: 28 day incubation periods, people can get infected twice, airborne transmission, asymptomatic transmission. These assertions are all based on outlier cases, sometimes even single cases, observed during the fog of war. Even if these accounts are correct, they aren't the typical case, which is what actual…

perhaps its just coincidence but could the "28 day incubation period" somehow resonate with the movie "28 days later" ?

it seems like a way to take advantage of priming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)

Re: WHO Director: "Covid-19 does not transmit as efficiently as influenza"

#57

Post by cyphar »

chaostheory wrote: post #35
mc32 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t a cruise ship a special case because it’s all self contained and there is almost no way to avoid contact with other infected people? Unless they had access to disposable Kevlar jumpsuits, masks, gloves and disinfectant, they’d be hard pressed to slow its spread in cramped conditions.

The way ship HVAC systems are designed, it helps limit costs while simultaneously increasing infections from anything that's airborne. In regard to Diamond Princess though, there were no safety protocols that were followed, so we don't know if it was the ship or the failure to follow pathogen related protocols.

This virus isn't airborne. It's spread through respiratory droplets.

Re: WHO Director: "Covid-19 does not transmit as efficiently as influenza"

#58

Post by fspeech »

knzhou wrote: post #6

This is important, because lots of internet commentators are just going with the most alarming possible statements: 28 day incubation periods, people can get infected twice, airborne transmission, asymptomatic transmission. These assertions are all based on outlier cases, sometimes even single cases, observed during the fog of war. Even if these accounts are correct, they aren't the typical case, which is what actual…

Analysis shows there might be two subtypes from the very early days: https://academic.oup.com/nsr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/nsr...

If the theory is correct, the L type is more aggressive and may be causing explosive outbreaks as in Wuhan, while the S type is less aggressive but harder to block from transmission. Interestingly, the S type is the ancestor. It would be interesting to see what is more prevalent in the outbreaks of South Korea, Italy and Iran.

Re: WHO Director: "Covid-19 does not transmit as efficiently as influenza"

#59

Post by victorlin »

Please don't trust WHO, obviously they got heavily influence from Chinese government.

Remember when COVID-19 out-broken in China, the WHO told us

"The Committee does not recommend any travel or trade restriction based on the current information available. "

https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/30-01-2020-statement-on...

Then we saw China locked down all major city themselves. Now you tell me it's fine not to ban flights from China?

And they also keep mentioning it's not a big deal. Obviously they don't want to hurt Chinese economy. I won't trust anything they say, as their interest is China government's interest, not people's health.

Re: WHO Director: "Covid-19 does not transmit as efficiently as influenza"

#60

Post by microcolonel »

thorum wrote: post #22

Keep in mind that almost 20% of the Diamond Princess cruise ship's passengers and crew (700+ of 3711) were infected with the coronavirus. However its infection rate compares with the seasonal flu (which is a much less dangerous illness overall), it clearly has the potential to infect a large number of people in the coming months.

The case fatality rate is in the tens of times higher for the novel coronavirus, when compared with common seasonal influenza.
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