The problem here is...the 40,000 total cases are a lot of folks still sick and not yet recovered. More of a concern is that 6,500 cases are listed as severe (requiring hospitalization). That's over 15% of those sick needing medical care. I also have ZERO faith that China is reporting anything close to accurate numbers. Hospitals are capacity constrained and I believe testing is capacity constrained. If you get sick and/or die without a test, you aren't showing up in the statistics.
We'll know much more from the folks on the Plague ship in a few weeks.
Something to think about...
THREE WEEKS AGO:
282 cases and 6 deaths
4 Outside of China
TWO WEEKS AGO:
4593 Cases
976 Severe
106 Deaths
56 cases outside of China
ONE WEEK AGO:
20630 Cases
2788 Severe
425 deaths
159 cases outside of China (1 death)
TODAY:
40552 Cases
6484 Severe
909 Deaths
319 Cases outside of China (1 death)
Numbers taken from WHO Situation reports. https://www.who.int/emergencies/dise...ation-reports/
I really have no faith that this is even close to contained. 2.5% mortality rate would be devastating the way this is spreading.
Plague ship is a Cussler novel. I think there's an opportunity for a cruise-based reboot.
For those not following this particular story, of the 200+ people being held in quarantine at MCAS Miramar (featured in Top Gun) in San Diego, around 5 or so were taken to local hospitals for suspected infection with the new coronavirus.
One was discharged Sunday, only for folks to discover that the patient was infected after all. The patient returned to the hospital on Monday. Basically, hospital staff in San Diego thought that everyone had tested negative, but that was not right. Several of the samples were not tested at all, because they were not labeled just so. Well, one came back positive when it was tested.
Here is the story: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com...-hospital-exit
Carolina delenda est
I have been following everything via the Johns Hopkins map I shared in an earlier post. I want numbers and facts, not the sensationalism that I feel is spun into stories about the virus. I also feel we don't get the complete picture, instead we get the numbers that generate clicks (# infected and # of deaths). When the recovery rate has actually far surpassed the death rate, yet that is rarely mentioned.
Here is the map again, which is a great wealth of information - https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/a...23467b48e9ecf6
If you believe the numbers reported by China and represented in that map are "facts," then I've got some waterfront property to sell you...
And, as pointed out, this could be the worst disease in the history of mankind and still have "recovery rate far surpassing death rate"
Your last sentence is demonstrably not true. Ebola virus disease has a death rate that is generally marginally higher than its recovery rate (in some outbreaks, death rate approached 90%); Marburg virus has about a45% mortality rate, which also is nowhere near a recovery rate that "far surpasses" its death rate.
Good news this morning was that numbers of cases seemed to reach a bit of a plateau, which could be a temporary victory or it could signal the end of the rapid expansion phase of the epidemic.
Still not thinking this is going to end up being a global plague.
"We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world." --M. Proust
Having done some modeling of such situations and really the fatality rate is not a particularly crucial factor. It’s more about the transmissibility of the disease that’s crucial. If only 1% of cases are fatal, but the average person will infect 50 others before recovering, it still ends up being an absolute catastrophe. Meanwhile a disease that’s 90% fatal, but usually only transmits to maybe 2 people before recovery/death doesn’t present nearly the same level of problem. Yeah it sucks to be one who catches it, but hardly anyone will. Whereas in the first example, most of the community will get the disease and even a 1% fatality rate will end up greater. Obviously there’s vast simplifying going on there, but the point still holds.
This really depends on the numbers. Both factors matter. You can have a virus with very low mortality rate that spreads like wildfire. Not a huge problem.
Yes if you restrict fatality rates to 1% or higher then transmission rate becomes the dominant factor. But 1% is very high.
If there is enough transmission to make the disease pandemic or endemic then the fatality rate becomes hugely important.
I would argue the severity rate becomes even more important. How quickly will an areas medical system become overwhelmed and folks that would survive with proper medical care begin to die because adequate medical care is not available. I'm not sure if it's been long enough for the cases outside of China to recover in significant numbers, but the mortality rate outside of China appears to be lower. Either that's because of better reporting (more accurate case count, therefore it's not as lethal) or that the few cases distributed around the world have their country's full medical resources and attention as they work to learn and combat this.
Imagine if you will, 500 people get sick in the Triangle and 20% of them become severe cases needing hospitalization. Are there 100 spare ICU beds in the Triangle? What if 1,000 people get sick and 200 need hospitalization? What is 10,000 get sick and 2,000 need a bed? You can quickly see the problem. It's not how many will this kill with the best medical care, it's how many can this kill with poor to no medical care. This is why I think the world is sleeping on this problem. I'm not trying to fear monger, or spread rumors. I just want folks to think about the risks if this does turn into a pandemic.
Ugh, Hubei (the state? province?) where Wuhan is just added 14,000+ new cases and 250+ deaths today...have they been under reporting and been made to true up the numbers, or did things just blow up?
Not to my knowledge, but there may be features that are suggestive.
In a related example, influenza tends to produce an illness that seems at least somewhat clinically distinguishable from illness produced by rhinovirus, RSV, parainfluenza viruses, and other respiratory viruses that co-circulate with it. Once the flu season is in full force, physicians will often assign the diagnosis of "influenza-like illness" without confirmatory testing. Clinically this approach seems to work pretty well. However, when this has been formally studied, it has been found to fail quite a bit, despite physicians' belief that they can clearly distinguish influenza from the "common cold."
In an outbreak situation like this one, however, broadening the definition to include a clinical description, although not likely to be as accurate, is probably helpful in containing the outbreak, as the new definition of the illness is broader and thus more likely to include more people actually suffering from the disease. It may also identify people who have other illnesses that are not COVID19, but that will only inconvenience the individuals thus falsely identified; it will not have a negative effect on containing the virus. In other words, it is preferable to use a diagnostic rubric that is overly sensitive rather than one that is specific, when trying to contain an outbreak.
"We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world." --M. Proust