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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"

#141

Post by craftinator »

potiuper wrote: post #102
mantap wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, I always cancel thousands of dollars worth of travel plans when I start coming down with something. I also always check my temperature right before entering an airport, so I can be sure to cancel my plans.

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

#142

Post by Shank »

Shank wrote: post #55
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 r…

Replying to my own comment because the author has retroactively added citations. Cheers!

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

#143

Post by microcolonel »

carterehsmith wrote: post #127
microcolonel wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

The current figure provided by the WHO is 3.4%, typical figures for seasonal influenza being about 0.1.

3.4 / 0.1 = 34.

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

#144

Post by masonic »

molmalo wrote: post #88
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 SA…

I didn't downvote, but this question came immediately to my mind: why no source link from WHO itself?

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

#145

Post by molmalo »

masonic wrote: post #144
molmalo wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 SA…

I didn't downvote, but this question came immediately to my mind: why no source link from WHO itself?

For [1], you are right, and here you have it:

>> "Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died. By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1% of those infected." https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-...

For [2] I believe this page is making a good work at aggregating the data, and they have been linking their sources for the stuff they add, and for [3] in particular, they do link to WHO ([4][5]), but also summarize information from other sources.

[4] https://www.who.int/csr/sars/archive/2003_04_14/en/

[5] https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/119464)

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

#146

Post by kalleboo »

potiuper wrote: post #102
mantap wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As long as airlines (and hotels, resorts, etc) don't let you reschedule for free or cancel for a full refund if you are sick people will keep flying sick.

The same as as long as people don't get unlimited paid sick days and protection from being fired, they will keep going to work sick.

These things need to be legislated if we want to reduce deaths and lost productivity from infections diseases (including the yearly flu)

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

#147

Post by dang »

knzhou wrote: post #115
pezo1919 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could not find the exact reference, but here are some other bullshit from that time: https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1178015.shtml That "transparency" and "openness" were quoted a lot but it was not the case at all. Many chinese doctors and journalists were shut down.

A month ago I took a lot of flak for saying that China's numbers were probably faithfully reported, as accurately as their logistics permitted. This was a claim that literally nobody could make anywhere on the Western internet without being downvoted to hell and called a shill. Everybody agreed that all numbers were completely made up, because somebody was able to fit a quadratic curve through 3 of their data points.…

> jacking off on nationalism

Please don't comment like this here, regardless of how frustrating you find some other comments.

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

#148

Post by knzhou »

dang wrote: post #147
knzhou wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A month ago I took a lot of flak for saying that China's numbers were probably faithfully reported, as accurately as their logistics permitted. This was a claim that literally nobody could make anywhere on the Western internet without being downvoted to hell and called a shill. Everybody agreed that all numbers were completely made up, because somebody was able to fit a quadratic curve through 3 of their data points.…

> jacking off on nationalism Please don't comment like this here, regardless of how frustrating you find some other comments.

Are you agreeing with me that people shouldn't do that? Or are you saying that calling out people that do that is the real problem?

I'm outnumbered 100:1 here by users that flood almost all of these threads and never say anything actually correct, following blind nationalistic instinct.

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

#149

Post by Scarblac »

eric-hu wrote: post #135
Barrin92 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This isn't an accurate representation of how the number got to 700. The numbers were low when the ship docked. I recall in the single digits. Everyone was put on cabin quarantine, though people could leave their rooms for a window of time each day. It was quarantine and they were testing symptomatic people. I was watching mostly HK and Taiwanese news sources on it multiple times every day. That makes me very skeptica…

They all got served food by the ship's crew, who still shared bunk beds and weren't really quarantined.

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

#150

Post by blackrock »

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…

China’s authorities, nor the WHO, never claimed that China could contain the virus.

China’s goal with the Wuhan lockdown, then Hubei, then all of China, was to slow down the spread of the virus. In order to give themselves, and humanity, a chance to fight it. And to understand it, and devise a cure or vaccine for it.

The escape of the virus was inevitable. This was a known fact. To believe otherwise is naive.

The only thing you can buy with the lockdown, is time.

And to make matters worse, the governments of the world, flew all their citizens out of Wuhan and China. Then, they screwed up the decontamination and quarantine process. The incompetence of the American CDC shipped out faulty test kits all over the world. Then they released someone infected into San Antonio, before their quarantine was over, and before the positive test results came back. Then, news came out that the flight attendants and pilots flying the chartered planes, weren’t even properly protected from airborne transmissions of the virus. Then, the Princess cruise ship quarantine was a disaster, which is entirely the fault of the Western governments.

So now, the responsibility of the spread of the virus outside of China, lays in the respective governments, and their inability to monitor and contain it. So the blame goes all around. It really is illogical to blame the China government for a virus that arose out of nature.

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