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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"

#101

Post by drewcon »

CyanLite2 wrote: post #20
fractal618 wrote: post #9

They're trying to avoid a panic, so I'm just looking at the data from now on.... Numbers from https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/02/the-latest-coronavirus... As of March 4th. 6:22 pm eastern standard In China: Deaths: 2,981 recoveries : 49,856 Death/recovery : 5.98% Outside of China... Deaths: 272 Recoveries : 1205 Deaths/recoveries : 22.6%

All Countries except for South Korea are NOT counting the mild or asymptomatic cases. When you look at the SK numbers, 5,621 confirmed cases and 35 deaths. That puts the death rate at 0.6% (same as severe influenza season). Everybody just needs to chill.

SK looks like a good back of the envelope proxy for the first world.

Id also add... I’m not sure why we, worried internet lay people, really care so much about “the percent”. (Not accusing you of this, just having a thought after your comment).

The final rates being quoted are global averages. They are basically meaningless if you’re trying to assess how worried and prepared you, as an individual, should be.

Age and access to care (in addition to counting mild cases) seems to be a huge predictor here of severity and outcome. So any given country or community is going have different demographics and health infrastructure compositions that impact the mortality rate reported.

What I really want is a calculator that tells me based on age, pre existing conditions, country, etc what my (or my older loved ones) chances are so I know how to react appropriately.

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

#102

Post by potiuper »

mantap wrote: post #36
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…

I don't share your optimism. The virus has been able to successfully evade e.g. testing people's temperatures in airports. It doesn't really matter if there are asymtomatic carriers or not, it doesn't matter whether people eventually get a high fever. What matters is whether people with non-specific/mild symptoms (a dry cough) can pass on the infection. And the answer is emphatically yes.

If a person has a fever, then he or she should not be at a public airport.

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

#103

Post by lovemenot »

victorlin wrote: post #90
FabHK wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Januar…

Imagine if Israel had taken the opportunity to lock-down West Bank in the name of health, specifically prevention of novel coronavirus.

My artificial example is perhaps not accurate on its face, but I hope you can see the principle. WHO was trying to prevent unnecessary border restrictions in the world, until such time as they became justified for health reasons. In China that was already the case.

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

#104

Post by drewcon »

School-Cotton wrote: post #69
d1zzy wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if COVID-19 fatality rate is _lower_ than the regular flu, if it infects people faster to the point where those very few severe cases cannot get the help they need because of health services being overwhelmed then it will potentially be resulting in a lot more deaths than the flu.

I don't understand people downplaying this by saying it's only as bad as the flu. The flu is really fucking bad! Before widespread flu vaccination, it killed 50 million people in just one outbreak (Spanish flu). That's more than have been killed by HIV/AIDS combined in history. And we have no vaccine against COVID-19. Even nowadays, it still kills tens of thousands of people every year.

To be fair. Seasonal flu usually induces secondary sickness (bacterial pneumonia) that causes mortality in the elderly and very young population.

Spanish flu wiped out the young and elderly but also the middle aged directly with things like cytokine storms. Something we are not seeing with Covid 19.

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

#105

Post by ianburrell »

deveac wrote: post #82

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 f…

R0 is not the only factor in the spread of the disease. R0 is measure of how contagious a disease is, the average number of infections from each case. But other factors matter for the spread and for possibility of containment. For example, the incubation period matters for how fast it spreads, and asymptomatic transmission matters for can be contained.

"With influenza, people who are infected but not yet sick are major drivers of transmission, which does not appear to be the case for COVID-19."

It sounds like the big difference is that most of spread from COVID-19 is when people are sick. With lots of testing, can detect who is sick and isolate them. It also sounds like most of the spread is with close contacts and unlike flu, it is possible to map contacts and isolate them.

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

#106

Post by makomk »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #85
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?

It's flu season. The symptoms of mild Covid-19 which were sufficient reason for the CDC to test close contacts of infected people are also basically just the symptoms of the flu or a cold or probably any number of other things.

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

#107

Post by sveng »

cyphar wrote: post #57
chaostheory wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There have been reports that aerosol spread can occur in limited cases:

https://youtu.be/xWj9OUAfTLQ

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

#108

Post by rpearl »

fspeech wrote: post #68
tylerhou wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bypassing airport temperature tests is an incredibly low bar because it rarely catches other diseases. Anecdotally, I've travelled multiple times with people who have had fevers and entered countries with routine temperature screening and haven't been stopped. Human body temperature is also so variable that a small fever is masked by the margin of error.

You don't need to catch everyone. You just need to bring R0 to below 1. If R0 is a little over 2 in the first place you just need to catch a little over 50% of the infected with all your actions (in addition to temperature checking) to eventually control the epidemic. The better you do the sooner you get it under control.

Not quite... You'd need to catch a bit over half of all cases _before they passed on the virus to anyone else at all_ to bring R0 below 1 in this fashion.

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

#109

Post by ridgeguy »

roywiggins wrote: post #45
jcadam wrote: post #10

"To summarize, COVID-19 spreads less efficiently than flu, transmission does not appear to be driven by people who are not sick, it causes more severe illness than flu, there are not yet any vaccines or therapeutics, and it can be contained – which is why we must do everything we can to contain it. That’s why WHO recommends a comprehensive approach." Ah, so there aren't hordes of asymptomatic carriers out there, whic…

The confusing thing is that the Diamond Princess data points in the other direction: more asymptomatic cases, and a significantly lower case fatality rate, than the WHO numbers. https://slate.com/technology/2020/03/coronavirus-mortality-r... The WHO says they haven't found many asymptomatic cases (despite looking), but apparently lots of the cruise ship cases were. The WHO estimates a mortality rate over 3%, but much…

Perhaps a cruise ship demographic factor was fewer pre-existing health issues than we'd see in a randomly chosen age cohort of similar size?

Co-morbidity of other diseases and COVID-19 seems to correlate with higher case mortality rates. This would predict higher case mortality in assisted living homes, which has been found in the Washington state cluster.

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

#110

Post by knzhou »

deveac wrote: post #82

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 f…

Unfortunately R0 is a bit of a vague thing.

For seasonal flu, you could think of it as being very low, because most people already have immunity. It's already endemic, so there isn't room for exponential growth.

For a new flu (like the 2008 swine flu) it is extremely high, which is why people barely did anything to contain it back then -- it was just impossible.

What we have right now is in between.

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