Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

who.int

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 168 posts

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

#71

Post by notahacker »

cyphar wrote: post #54
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…

> I can't trust WHO now related to Covid-19, especially after what happened to stock. The stock market is an indicator of investor confidence. How investors feel about a particular event is not necessarily accurate, and has basically no direct relation to the WHO.

Also, even a perfectly successful way of containing Covid-19 would depress stock values [against a benchmark of the virus not existing] if it involved containment actions such as isolating significant numbers of people and cancelling events and flights.

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

#72

Post by learc83 »

droithomme wrote: post #21
knzhou wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of things that make calculating a straightforward percentage hard: - not all cases detected - deaths are a laggy indicator - recoveries are an extremely laggy indicator - impact of demographics, healthcare quality - sizes of effects of all 4 previous things depends on the country and the time This has led to internet commentators coming up with wild numbers, ranging from 0.1% to 20%. At the risk of so…

> defer to the expert numbers (2-3%) Latest expert estimate of global mortality rate, as published by WHO, is 3.4% as reported here: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/WHO-global-mortality-... And also as reported in OP's link. https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-... > "Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died."

That's just them reporting the number of deaths/confirmed cases it's not an attempt at estimating the actual mortality rate among the general population.

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

#73

Post by [deleted] »

droithomme wrote: post #21
knzhou wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of things that make calculating a straightforward percentage hard: - not all cases detected - deaths are a laggy indicator - recoveries are an extremely laggy indicator - impact of demographics, healthcare quality - sizes of effects of all 4 previous things depends on the country and the time This has led to internet commentators coming up with wild numbers, ranging from 0.1% to 20%. At the risk of so…

> defer to the expert numbers (2-3%) Latest expert estimate of global mortality rate, as published by WHO, is 3.4% as reported here: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/WHO-global-mortality-... And also as reported in OP's link. https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-... > "Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died."

[deleted]

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

#74

Post by AnimalMuppet »

jcadam wrote: post #51
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.

I've heard it said that you have an almost 50% of catching something if you go on a cruise.

(AnimalMuppet surreptitiously crosses "take a cruise" off of his bucket list...)

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

#75

Post by [deleted] »

cbsks wrote: post #31

This paper has more information: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/pdfs/mm6909e1-H.pdf TLDR: "Since February 28, an increasing number of newly diagnosed confirmed and presumptive COVID-19 cases have been in patients with neither a relevant travel history nor clear epidemiologic links to other confirmed COVID-19 patients. However, despite intensive follow-up, no sustained person-to-person transmission of symptoma…

[deleted]

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

#76

Post by FabHK »

victorlin wrote: post #59

Please don't trust WHO, obviously they got heavily influence from Chinese government. Remember when COVID-19 out-broken in China, the WHO told us "The Committee does not recommend any travel or trade restriction based on the current information available. " https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/30-01-2020-statement-on... Then we saw China locked down all major city themselves. Now you tell me it's fine not to ban flig…

Hindsight. At the time, nobody had travel restrictions. Were they all influenced by China? No, with the then current information travel or trade restrictions didn’t make sense.

This is the same lazy argument as with the 737 MAX - why wasn’t it immediately grounded? Well, you can’t just shut down the world at any sign of trouble. You have to make an informed judgement call with the information you have at the time. Sometimes, ex post, it will turn out to have been the wrong call. Doesn’t mean you need to revise or impugn the decision procedure.

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

#77

Post by omarhaneef »

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…

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 rate would shoot up to the high end of the estimate and the r0 would plummet. It hardly spread at all, but if a patient gets it, it is more fatal.

On the other hand assume that almost everyone has it but we only tested a tiny fraction. Now the r0 sky rockets and the fatality rate plummets.

Put another way, there is a trade off between the two and it is unlikely to be on the upper end of the estimates for both.

What this author is saying is that it hardly spreads at all but the fatality rate is high. I.e we tested many of the cases.

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

#78

Post by rsynnott »

fractal618 wrote: post #9

They're trying to avoid a panic, so I'm just looking at the data from now on.... Numbers from https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/02/the-latest-coronavirus... As of March 4th. 6:22 pm eastern standard In China: Deaths: 2,981 recoveries : 49,856 Death/recovery : 5.98% Outside of China... Deaths: 272 Recoveries : 1205 Deaths/recoveries : 22.6%

Death/recovery probably isn’t a useful stat at this point, as most sufferers haven’t had it long enough to recover, so death is the only early exit stage.

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

#79

Post by mantap »

tylerhou wrote: post #44
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.

Bypassing airport temperature tests is an incredibly low bar because it rarely catches other diseases. Anecdotally, I've travelled multiple times with people who have had fevers and entered countries with routine temperature screening and haven't been stopped. Human body temperature is also so variable that a small fever is masked by the margin of error.

It's a low bar for many of the common and less deadly illnesses that we are used to. But relative to the mortality rate, it's more notable. People with SARS tended to get too sick to even go to the airport.

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

#80

Post by allovernow »

function_seven wrote: post #66
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…

Regarding your #3: Wouldn't WHO gain that $425MM if they triggered the default on those bonds? > If certain criteria are met, the bonds' principal is transferred to the World Bank's Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF) to fund containment and relief efforts. To me, that seems like quite the incentive to declare this a pandemic. If doing so would unlock that funding. But, there's details. Just declaring "pandem…

They have clearly been met. Read the article. People stand to lose money in default conditions. The question is who?

As I posted elsewhere, the first class of bonds default after 2500 deaths in one country and at least 20 in another. China and Iran have long met that condition. So what's going on?

Post reply on HN