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WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

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201–210 of 465 posts

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#201
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Given you're posting on Twitter, adding the #epitwitter will get you plenty of exposure to ID epidemiologists, myself included.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#202
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...

No infectious disease epidemiologist I know would lump SARs, MERS and seasonal flu together like that, and I'd argue the data very much doesn't support the assertion that this disease is significantly more dangerous.

Serious, yes. But it's quite a hurdle to go from what we're seeing now to "worse than seasonal influenza".

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#203
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The rates for Chinese provinces except for Hubei seem inconsistent with 20-56% mortality too. The ten provinces outside Hubei that have the most confirmed infections are: * Zhejiang: 428 confirmed; 0 deaths; 4 recovered * Guangdong: 354 confirmed; 0 deaths; 10 recovered * Henan: 278 confirmed; 2 deaths; 2 recovered * Hunan: 277 confirmed; 0 deaths; 2 recovered * Anhui: 200 confirmed; 0 deaths; 2 recovered * Chongqing…

That's a very good observation on these 10 provinces. But I would apply caution when interpreting a cherry-picked data subset.

Nitpick: I don't claim "20-56%" death rate, but "9-56%", thus your observation of a 10% CFR is in line with my claim.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#204
apparently science is not working as "how things feel/look like", but about evidence and proof. Same thing applies to gov or org, it's not guided by message on social media, but according to the guidance and standard procedure. This kind of practice are very normal cross every industry, from construction safety guide to medicine testing. According to [1], WHO or CDC will only report phase 2 and take actions when there is no evidence of human-to-human infection, and declare phase 5 or 6 base on the information unveiled. And from [2], declare PHEIC when there is human-to-human infection cross border.

> A PHEIC is defined in the IHR (2005) as, “an extraordinary event which is determined to constitute a public health risk to other States through the international spread of disease and to potentially require a coordinated international response”. This definition implies a situation that is:

* serious, sudden, unusual or unexpected;

* carries implications for public health beyond the affected State’s national border; and

* may require immediate international action.

[1]: https://www.who.int/influenza/resources/documents/pandemic_p...

[2]: https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/what-are-the-intern...

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#205
post #106

Dr. Eric Ding has been tweeting timely and detailed information: https://twitter.com/drericding

No, Eric Ding has been tweeting pretty terrible misinformation, and is being rightly dragged for it by pretty much every epidemiologist I know on Twitter, including myself.

His takes are bad.

He's called this virus's R0 the worst he's seen in his career, which is absurd. He's conflated R0 and attack rate. Familiar errors because no one pays attention to ID epidemiology until there's an outbreak, and then suddenly decides they're an expert.

If one must go to Twitter for ones epidemiology, I'd suggest Tara Smith (@aetiology) or Maia Majumder (@maiamajumder), both of whom are actual ID epidemiologists and science communicators.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#207
post #199
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not statistically inconsistent. When China had 100 cases confirmed, they had reported only 2 deaths. Now there are 100 cases outside China, so statistically we should expect 2. 0 actual vs 2 expected is statistically insignificant. My point here was that the China data is probably biased because the medical system there is overtaxed, but outside of China it isn't. Therefore, estimating mortality based on non-C…

When the WHO declares something a "global health emergency" we have valid reasons to be alarmist :) I think that "going back 6 days" is insufficient, so your conclusion of a 6% probability is unsupported. Given the extreme state of paranoia around the world (eg. authorities testing people coming out of airplanes) it is likely that cases outside China are detected very early after the onset of symptoms. As such, death…

We can speculate all night, it remains speculation. All I've done is use the numbers you suggested to point out inconsistencies. Yet you keep finding reasons for why we are almost literally all going to die (with mortality rates of up to around 50%), when you have no more insight into this than anyone else in this thread.

Everybody is taking this seriously, but playing prophet of doom is really shitty and has all sorts of potential negative consequences in the real world.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The official figures in China are 8,163 cases 171 deaths which is 2% right now, but take these with a big grain of salt. They could go up (some of those confirmed cases will be very recent and may get worse) or down (more cases might have happened but be unreported). Its really hard to tell what it will look like in a month or two.

I recommend everyone to watch this on-site commentary from the chinese human rights lawyer Chen Qiushi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AI3R41dGnU Any numbers we've seen so far seem very tame to me, compared to the pictures out of Wuhan.

TL;DW/DR the subtitles: he saw a lot of chaos in Wuhan's hospitals. Not enough testing kits, not enough government-requisitioned emergency taxis. Taxi drivers were already talking to each other in December saying "avoid the market".

If you don't want to read subtitles for 26 minutes here's all the subtitles copy-pasted from the video: https://pastebin.com/6hJ4h4rm

(You can hit the "..." above the red subscribe button and select "open transcript", but it shows up in a tiny window).

I suppose the WHO saying they're very impressed with how China is handling the situation is because they felt the pressure to save China's face.

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#209
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I made the table, but which part of this table is misinformation? All data is valid. Twitter is not a good format to present a bunch of data, hence the convoluted link to a link to a link... However, for your information, the 56% case fatality ratio is calculated according to an epidemiological method known to produce a good estimate. See https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ebf2/48c9fc0a1a23d1778b9408... , section S…

All the data is not valid. You give no citations for half your numbers and half the cells are empty. It's 100% bogus garbage. You are creating and spreading fake news. You might not be a bad person, but right now you are being a bad person.

«All the data is not valid»

That's a non-answer. My data is valid. I challenge you to point out specific errors.

My data comes from two sources:

1) Initially I replicated the chart by Dr. Melvin Sanicas, a vaccinologist and public health physician, that he posted on twitter (here: https://twitter.com/Vaccinologist/status/1220469109378502658). He had no citations for his numbers. So I performed light fact-checking but didn't bother documenting citations for each number because (a) he is a doctor and (b) his chart got massive reviews on twitter and no one pointed out significant errors.

2) For the rest of the number, I plugged them in myself WHILE adding proper citations to either peer-reviewed papers or to the best estimates available today.

As to empty cells, they are empty when the data is not yet researched, or not known, or because it is irrelevant (eg. for most older diseases that have vaccines available I didn't bother researching if asymptomatic transmission is possible because it is irrelevant: most people in developed countries are vaccinated as such such diseases are no longer prevalent.)

Re: WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency

#210

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

Simply because it has a mortality rate a couple of orders of magnitude greater than the flu's. Something like 8 percent of the world gets the flu in a given year. Millions will die if that happens for this one.
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