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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"

#81

Post by microcolonel »

roywiggins wrote: post #47
flukus wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TFA addresses this: > Evidence from China is that only 1% of reported cases do not have symptoms, and most of those cases develop symptoms within 2 days. They came up with this number by testing people who didn't have symptoms but were in some contact with someone who had the virus. The big question is how much the lockdown affected this, but there doesn't appear to be large swaths of asymptomatic people.

They tested everyone on the Diamond Princess and seemed to find a lot of asymptomatic cases. I don't know how to reconcile this, but there it is. The mortality rate was worse than seasonal flu but not 3%, either. https://slate.com/technology/2020/03/coronavirus-mortality-r...

What do you mean by "was"? Because as far as I'm aware, 690 of the 706 confirmed diamond princess cases have not concluded (neither dead nor recovered).

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

#82

Post by deveac »

It feels like all of the reporting I've seen from experts (not just mainstream news outlets which are admittedly terrible)has indicated Covid-19's R0 is worse than influenza.

It would have been awfully nice if The WHO tossed us a citation on their claim that this is not the case. It was hard to read the entire piece with that unsupported claim hanging so heavily.

And the containment claim...again...would have loved for them to argue the case, because it is exceedingly easy to argue against the case.

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

#83

Post by bcrosby95 »

rolph wrote: post #56
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)

The specific number isn't widespread. People mention anywhere from 24 up to 30.

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

#84

Post by cbsks »

fspeech wrote: post #58
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…

Thank you for providing a primary source! I'm sick and tired of getting regurgitated information from the media (pun intended).

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

#85

Post by AnimalMuppet »

cbsks wrote: post #31

This paper has more information: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/pdfs/mm6909e1-H.pdf TLDR: "Since February 28, an increasing number of newly diagnosed confirmed and presumptive COVID-19 cases have been in patients with neither a relevant travel history nor clear epidemiologic links to other confirmed COVID-19 patients. However, despite intensive follow-up, no sustained person-to-person transmission of symptoma…

So... what? These people are picking up something that looks like COVID-19, but isn't? The COVID-19 tests are missing something like 90% of the people who have it? Or what?

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

#86

Post by Eliezer »

baddox wrote: post #15
ngngngng wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never had such a steady stream of seemingly conflicting data before.

Are you actually receiving conflicting data , or just conflicting reports about data? It's not clear to me how data itself can "conflict." As a made-up example, if you keep seeing alternating cases where one person had symptoms and another person didn't, that's not "conflicting data." That's just data showing that 50% of people have symptoms.

Well said. There can be conflicting reports but never conflicting realities. That said, sometimes our apparent data is being filtered by different factors, or even altered, across different reports.

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

#87

Post by Sevrene »

I've noticed a trend in the discussion of Covid-19 when talking to people. They tend to either under estimate it; "it's just the flu", or they over estimate it; "This is going to be really bad, time to buy all toilet paper".

There's a lot of confusing mixed messages, not even from just random people, but from the WHO and different governments. They say they are fully prepared and it can be contained yet doctors and health advisors are saying that's just not true. I think there's a bit of play here between the negative effects from the virus, versus the perceived negative effects from panic (I suspect the economy plays a role in government's responses far more than people think).

So to me it seems there is a bit of a management or reaction to an over reaction. Yet, in face of a pandemic, being worried is probably sensible because it will lead you prepare and be conscious of good hygiene practises. Telling people everything is okay in the face of possible emergency or possible disaster is not good.

Are there people out there over reacting and over reaching with their analysis of this? Sure. But that doesn't mean there's nothing worth reacting over. This is a serious health issue, and calling it 'just the flu' could be considered reckless in my opinion.

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

#88

Post by molmalo »

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…

Also, WHO just raised the death rate to 3.4% from the previous value of 2.3% ... [1]

Add to this, the fact that that the outbreak is still expanding, and new cases tend to drive this number downwards. But if we consider only the "closed" cases (recovered/dead), the current number is more like 6% [2].

And it could be worse from the previous experience with SARS [3]:

>> Finally, we shall remember that while the 2003 SARS epidemic was still ongoing, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported a fatality rate of 4% (or as low as 3%), whereas the final case fatality rate ended up being 9.6%.

Of course, this number could also go down, if there's a big number of unreported mild cases.... so the conclusion is that we only know that we have no idea... and that it does indeed sound like this is aimed to reduce panic (which is also a good thing).

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/03/who-says-coronavirus-death-r...

[2] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

[3] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-...

------

PS: I'm giving the sources for the numbers I posted, so, instead of just downvoting, could you explain why you disagree? Thanks :)

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

#89

Post by flukus »

roywiggins wrote: post #47
flukus wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TFA addresses this: > Evidence from China is that only 1% of reported cases do not have symptoms, and most of those cases develop symptoms within 2 days. They came up with this number by testing people who didn't have symptoms but were in some contact with someone who had the virus. The big question is how much the lockdown affected this, but there doesn't appear to be large swaths of asymptomatic people.

They tested everyone on the Diamond Princess and seemed to find a lot of asymptomatic cases. I don't know how to reconcile this, but there it is. The mortality rate was worse than seasonal flu but not 3%, either. https://slate.com/technology/2020/03/coronavirus-mortality-r...

> I don't know how to reconcile this

Multiple strains might explain it along with other conflicting information and differing results between countries: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/04/coronavirus-chinese-scientis...

As you said, we're still looking at it through the fog of war.

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

#90

Post by victorlin »

FabHK wrote: post #76
victorlin wrote: post #59

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 flig…

Hindsight. At the time, nobody had travel restrictions. Were they all influenced by China? No, with the then current information travel or trade restrictions didn’t make sense. This is the same lazy argument as with the 737 MAX - why wasn’t it immediately grounded? Well, you can’t just shut down the world at any sign of trouble. You have to make an informed judgement call with the information you have at the time. So…

Well, allow me to remind you the timeline

> On 23 January 2020, the central government of the People's Republic of China imposed a lockdown in Wuhan and other cities in Hubei province in an effort to quarantine the epicentre of an outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Hubei_lockdowns

What do you mean nobody had travel restrictions? The report from WHO date was on 30 January 2020, when they saw this and yet suggest not to put any restrictions?

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