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WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

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21–30 of 465 posts

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#22

How is this worse than your normal influenza cycle with 3-5Mio infections and 290k-650k death to warrant such an emergency?

I haven't heard of the flu shutting down a 11 million habitant city. The flu doesn't kill 290-650k per cycle, its more like 12-60k.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#23

How is this worse than your normal influenza cycle with 3-5Mio infections and 290k-650k death to warrant such an emergency?

The issue isn't absolute numbers. We don't know the deadliness of the current outbreak. Lets take the flu for example. According to CDC https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e.... The death rate is around 0.09% at the worst according the numbers on the cdc estimates (Which is a very pessimistic estimate). If the coronavirus has a mortality rate of 1/100 it would make 10x more deadly than the flu.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#24
Running the official numbers, mortality rate is less than 3%. If we plug in estimative models claiming 25000+ unrecorded infections, mortality is less than 1%.

Unless you are in a sensitive age group or have other health problems, data suggests you're most likely to get over it as a regular flu.

It's not all perfect and is worse than a regular flu, but especially now after the announcement some people may way over-stress themselves which doesn't do good to your immune system.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#25

Can we PLEASE collectively put our manners aside and confront people who are not covering their mouths when they cough? I'm very aggravated that people don't. What is going through the mind of a person who deep coughs, open mouth, without cover, in public transport? It's depressing.

Go for it. See if your action pulls us towards collective action. Do you chastise every person you see breaking this social norm?

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#26
The way all global superpowers and, by extension, their organizations have to babysit China's government has gone from ridiculous to ridiculously dangerous. Politicans pretend not to notice human rights abuses, ignore the fact that the regime is repressive and a danger to its own people, and now try to act like saying 'Hey, the virus originated in this country, hope they contain it' is some horribly offensive thing. It's unjustifiable in my eyes.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#27
post #10

Any good models that predict the peak of this?

You might want to give http://www.gleamviz.org/simulator/ whirl. You can simulate any epidemic model on a real-life datasets of mobility and healthcare access around the world. The tricky part is know exactly what the "correct" epidemic model is: length of latent/infectious/etc periods, etc. Full disclosure: I was once one of the main developers of this epidemic modeling framework.

This is really cool!

Are there any existing models to start with?

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#29

Coronavirus: -5,974 confirmed cases -170 deaths [1]For comparisons the SARS outbreak of 2003: -8,098 people worldwide became sick -774 died [1] https://www.cdc.gov/sars/about/fs-sars.html

Could you add the timeframe of each pandemic? I believe the coronavirus is 1-2 months old, but how long was SARS to get to 774? I feel like the comparaison isn't great without timeline.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#30
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they advise against restriction measures for international travel, which personally boggles the mind. >At some point they vapidly ask "Where is the science behind this?". The science behind this is the discovery of viruses and the impossibility of teleportation. but it's true though. there's limited evidence that travel bans will stop the spread of the infection. the evidence ranges between "no effect at all" to "de…

This doesn't make any sense if I step through it mentally. If you're a carrier of a virus and you have to hoof it to my end of the world, it's going to take you a whole lot longer to get there than if you flew. This is absolute fact. The faster vectors you give to something to transport a thing, that thing will move to its destination that much faster. You don't need science to grok this.

It's vox. Don't look for intellect from such sources.
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