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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"

#121

Post by isaaafc »

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…

Well said. I don't get why people are so optimistic and keep trusting the WHO, given they have downplayed the situation multiple times, and that China was doing a brilliant job to contain the Wuhan Corona Virus.

Look at the spread of the corona virus in South Korea and Italy now. Then look at Hong Kong and Taiwan, whose people don't trust China for even a bit.

The first thing China did was to detain whistle blowers. One of them died from this virus. What they did was to conceal the outbreak, not tackling it.

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

#122

Post by cm2187 »

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…

The problem is that “worse” can mean anything. It can be marginally worse without being a serious cause of concern or it can be really really bad.

That’s the beauty of journalism: being flexible with the truth. You can print end of the world headlines with the clean conscience that since it is technically worse, you are not pushing fake news. But that may still be a massively over exaggerated and misleading headline.

And I think that is what happening. I don’t see many people claiming it is no worse than the flu. I see people claiming it is marginally worse than the flu.

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

#123

Post by knzhou »

thrav wrote: post #118
Sevrene wrote: post #87

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 h…

There’s also a lot of politics involved. Fox News pundits are insisting the escalating seriousness of the coverage is a plot to make Trump look bad, and shouting about how influenza kills way more people, and it’s no big deal.

It's amusing because when Trump instituted the travel ban early, it was Fox which was playing up the threat and all other news channels which were playing it down. Then a month later, they switched positions. This nonsense is why we have international organizations like the WHO, which are made of actual experts rather than pundits.

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

#124

Post by mrandish »

wahern wrote: post #112
omarhaneef wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fatality rate may be 3.4% and the r0 may be 2.6 to 3.4 but it is unlikely that both are true at the same time. It depends on your assumption of undiagnosed cases. We don’t know how many of those there are. But suppose you assume that all the diagnosed cases are all the cases (impossible but for the sake of the statistical argument). That is to say we tested 100% of the sick people. If that were true the fatality…

Pretty sure the fatality rate is based on the number of patients who present themselves to a doctor. I've seen estimates of influenza fatality rate of 0.2%, which corresponds with the ~61000 deaths over ~20700000 medical visits for the 2017-2018 influenza season documented here: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm The fatality rate would obviously decline with a larger denominator which includes total…

> Pretty sure the fatality rate is based on the number of patients who present themselves to a doctor.

In an ideal world that would be true, however we know that in early Wuhan they were mostly only testing people who were already hospitalized with "pneumonia symptoms" due to having limited kits and staff. Pneumonia symptoms how the most serious cases advance after going through flu symptoms. I read one analysis of the Wuhan data that showed 91% of everyone they tested had pneumonia. This changed later but a lot of the stats we're looking at are from papers with data only through the end of Jan.

Almost every country has different criteria for testing a patient and you can't become a "case" until you have a positive test. The U.S. has changed testing policy three times in the last week.

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

#125

Post by bcrosby95 »

drewcon wrote: post #104
School-Cotton wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Correct. Note that there were multiple waves of the Spanish Flu. First wave was fairly mild and hit the young and elderly. Second wave hit the middle aged and wiped out a chunk of the population.

The third wave was slightly worse than the first but much less deadly than the second - I couldn't find much detail about it when I last tried.

Several theories on why it turned out this way, none of them relevant to the current situation though.

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

#126

Post by the_watcher »

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.

Using the infection rate on a cruise ship (pretty close to a perfect petri dish) is not at all representative.

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

#127

Post by carterehsmith »

microcolonel wrote: post #60
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.

What, where is the source for that? I've read "2x" and "3x" but never "tens of times".

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

#128

Post by furyofantares »

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.

Yeah -- as a result of them all being quarantined on the ship together for nearly a month.

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

#129

Post by deft »

Sevrene wrote: post #87

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 h…

The worry and panic can be viewed as the social mass fever. Possibly a dangerous symptom if it gets out of hand, but actually a strategy to fight the virus.

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

#130

Post by omarhaneef »

wahern wrote: post #112
omarhaneef wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fatality rate may be 3.4% and the r0 may be 2.6 to 3.4 but it is unlikely that both are true at the same time. It depends on your assumption of undiagnosed cases. We don’t know how many of those there are. But suppose you assume that all the diagnosed cases are all the cases (impossible but for the sake of the statistical argument). That is to say we tested 100% of the sick people. If that were true the fatality…

Pretty sure the fatality rate is based on the number of patients who present themselves to a doctor. I've seen estimates of influenza fatality rate of 0.2%, which corresponds with the ~61000 deaths over ~20700000 medical visits for the 2017-2018 influenza season documented here: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm The fatality rate would obviously decline with a larger denominator which includes total…

> Pretty sure the fatality rate is based on the number of patients who present themselves to a doctor.

I don’t think this is right. I believe it’s based on an estimate. Your own numbers bear me out. The flu death rate is estimated to be around 0.1% and we can come to that number by a division here:

“ The overall burden of influenza for the 2017-2018 season was an estimated 45 million influenza illnesses, 21 million influenza-associated medical visits, 810,000 influenza-related hospitalizations, and 61,000 influenza-associated deaths”

So 61/45000 = .14%

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