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WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

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Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#171

Post by btilly »

underwater wrote: post #155
btilly wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. If they in fact can't transmit, then this is OK. If they can or, even worse, have a long latency period and will show symptoms in 2 weeks, that is very, very scary. Our best tool for diseases like this is contact tracing. And asymptomatic carriers make that very hard. (Useless trivia, the first documented asymptomatic carrier who was infectious was a short order cook named Mary Mallon. She is better known as…

She wasn't a short order cook, she cooked for a number of families.

She was both.

When she was first identified, she cooked for a number of families. The outbreak that got her put away for life was due to working as a cook at Sloane Hospital for Women.

I cannot immediately find record of her being a short order cook specifically. However that is my recollection from https://www.amazon.com/Betrayal-Trust-Collapse-Global-Public...

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#172

Post by mrtksn »

starpilot wrote: post #158
mrtksn wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Last Update: Jan 30, 2020 11 am EST. It is not a real-time map, I find it bizarre that people believe that we can track the population's wellbeing in real-time. Are you ready to be hooked up to such a system?

Nothing is real time due to the finite speed of light.

I would say flightradar24 is real-time plane tracking and wouldn't say that Reddit is a real-time news source. The difference would be that there's a system in place that consistently and automatically updates the information by gathering data from other real-time systems.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#173

Post by mrtksn »

ehsankia wrote: post #161
mrtksn wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Last Update: Jan 30, 2020 11 am EST. It is not a real-time map, I find it bizarre that people believe that we can track the population's wellbeing in real-time. Are you ready to be hooked up to such a system?

That's being overly pedantic. About the update rate: It's updated regularly. If you want to go down this rabbit hole, is 1m update real-time? Is 1s update realtime? Where do you draw the line? For most people, anything less than 12h, in the case of tracking confirmed cases, is perfectly fine described as "real-time" About the data: Obviously it's showing confirmed cases and not actual health of people. The UI makes t…

I don't believe that the data on this website is gathered through automatic means.

Real-time is not all about latency, live TV or a Skype call also has a latency but it is real-time for all means and purposes since it is automatically gathered, transformed and transported without human labour and immediately.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#174

Post by parliament32 »

ehsankia wrote: post #161
mrtksn wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Last Update: Jan 30, 2020 11 am EST. It is not a real-time map, I find it bizarre that people believe that we can track the population's wellbeing in real-time. Are you ready to be hooked up to such a system?

That's being overly pedantic. About the update rate: It's updated regularly. If you want to go down this rabbit hole, is 1m update real-time? Is 1s update realtime? Where do you draw the line? For most people, anything less than 12h, in the case of tracking confirmed cases, is perfectly fine described as "real-time" About the data: Obviously it's showing confirmed cases and not actual health of people. The UI makes t…

No and no. "Realtime" has an actual definition, as in "data is immediately available".

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#175

Post by mrb »

colinmegill wrote: post #126
mrb wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignore the people telling you it's 2-3%. The case fatality ratio is between 9 and 56% according to proper epidemiological methods, such as using the formula "deaths / (deaths + recoveries)": https://mobile.twitter.com/zorinaq/status/122242770872387993... Disclosure: no I'm not an epidemiologist. But for a reference to a paper by actual epidemiologists see https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ebf2/48c9fc0a1a23d1778b9408..…

That's you touting your own feed, and you don't appear to be an epi scientist

I'm just applying the work of epi scientists. I'd love to get feedback from one. Your comment isn't useful.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#176

Post by andrew_n »

svara wrote: post #82
mrb wrote: post #35

It's about time... All early characteristics of the novel coronavirus indicate it's far more dangerous than SARS/MERS/seasonal flu (which kills 30-60k/year in the US) so, unless a cure is found soon, we should expect it to kill more people than these other diseases combined : https://mobile.twitter.com/zorinaq/status/122263149332482867...

I think it would be more helpful to cite actual epidemiology research and public health professionals rather than people who seem to use people's fears to garner attention. Edit: In order to make this a little less dismissive, the actual argument in that Twitter post is that due to lag between first symptoms appearing and death, you can't divide fatalities by total cases to get the mortality rate, and should instead…

Yes, and the medical professionals dealing with this are getting statistics about diagnosis and recovery rates and times by analyzing case histories, not applying estimation formulas to totals.

Data gets aggregated and used in mathematical models that can predict outcomes in various hypothetical scenarios, but given that this is a real-world situation, the professionals are going to be looking at the actual data first to find out what’s happening. They can directly answer questions such as, of the patients diagnosed 1 week ago, what’s their status today?

Anyone looking at only total numbers of cases per day simply doesn’t have the data required to compute the things they’re trying to compute with much accuracy. It’s possible to produce estimates with confidence intervals based on sensitivity analysis, but nobody doing that with any care using aggregate data is going to come out with a number as high as 20% for a lower bound. Given that N=6 is a guess, the range reported should be bounded by plugging in plausible extreme values for your guess of N, not assuming your guess of N=6 is exactly correct.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#177

Post by goblin89 »

mrb wrote: post #152
goblin89 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If hospitals err on safe side and do not report recoveries promptly (they probably have other business to deal with), applying this method at such early stage would not result in correct numbers, even supposing the virus is well-studied enough to tell when a patient has recovered.

Agreed, when using the "deaths / (deaths + recoveries)" formula, recoveries being under-reported is possible and would skew the CFR upward. But also, if deaths are under-reported in the same proportion as recoveries, then it would not affect the CFR. I suppose one way to reduce uncertainty is to examine a cohort of patients and follow it meticulously. To do that, we can look at the 99-patient case study published in…

Assigning 50% chance of death to any patient remaining in the hospital when calculating mortality rate would be nuts, I can only thank the epidemiologists for not publishing the number.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#179

Post by [deleted] »

mrtksn wrote: post #169
mrb wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

« assume that when a case is confirmed the death or cured status is also determined at that moment » This is why epidemiologists (ref: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ebf2/48c9fc0a1a23d1778b9408... or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22195827 for my comment on the paper) prefer instead this formula which only counts patients for which the eventual outcome is already known: deaths / (deaths + recoveries) With thi…

What exactly a margin of %9 to %56 tells us anyway?

[deleted]

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#180

Post by goblin89 »

munificent wrote: post #162
goblin89 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware of any such estimates? Death is more difficult to hide than fever.

No, but in the absence of that, it seems strange to unpin the denominator while leaving the numerator fixed and then presume that that tells you anything useful.

Setting number of infected humans at 30k, there can be as many as 300 deaths for mortality to be limited to 1%.

Unfortunately, both numbers are fluid, but the assumption is that death count is less so. If the number of deaths is underreported by orders of magnitude then my argument would not stand of course.

EDIT: I consider the number of deaths unlikely to be very underreported based on personal communication with folks in China and HK. There is a fair amount of panic on social media, but “someone I knew died, it seems related to the new virus and deaths may be underreported” so far seems not among the things people panic about. Most panic (some of which is being blown out of proportion for hype and metrics by less than scrupulous sources) appears to be fueled by other things: number of people admitted to the hospital, possible hospital staff infections, and others panicking.

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