Originally Posted by
slats11
I suspect that you are well informed about R and R0. But my point was that other readers may be falsely reassured by the fact measles is not out of control despite its R0 of 14, and the explanation for this is immunisation.
OK. Lets revisit this debate in a week
Sure. But that hasn't worked this time has it?
2019-nCoV has already infected far more people in a little over a month than did SARS in 7 months.
Cities were not locked down and borders closed for SARS.
In
the city of Huanggang, people are housebound and 1 family member is allowed outside even 2nd day to get necessities. That didn't happen with SARS.
But if it makes you happier to say it is SARS...... then that's fine.
Estimates of SARS death rates revised upward | CIDRAP
The point is the mortality rate appears to increases over time due to the lag between getting sick and dying.
The final SARS mortality is still disputed due to concerns about the completeness of the mainland Chinese dataset. Maybe it was 10%, maybe 12, maybe 14. It was almost certainly between the range of 10-14% anyway.
MERS was accepted to be 35%
This is the 3rd recent coronavirus outbreak. To accept the current 2% figure is very optimistic. Especially when the data from Wuhan (where the epidemic has been unfolding longer) suggests a mortality of 5.5% (and this too will go up).
Umm, do you add a zero? Is that right?
So MERS was perhaps 2,494 (858 deaths, fatality 35%)
It is estimated that the number of infected in Wuhan alone could be greater than 75,000. That was the calculation on Tuesday - with continued exponential growth in the 4 days since then.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/arti...hubei-province
Thats just Wuhan city. What about the rest of the province? What about the rest of China?
You realise they have run out of test kits in Wuhan
You realise Indonesia doesn't have a reported case - because it currently has no testing.
So Mick, by what order of magnitude do you believe 2019-nCoV exceeds MERS? Because I suspect it is close to 2.
That 2003 article on SARS mortality rate is well and truly trumped by the final WHO stats - 8,098 cases, 774 deaths. Your point on mortality rates is not lost on me; they invariably move over the onset period and not always up. One of the issues is that people tend to pull data from all sorts of places. The WHO is reference authority (unless you're a tinfoil hatter, and you don't strike me as such).
And yes, regarding orders of magnitude, you add a zero on the right or move the decimal place left. So 200,000 is two orders of magnitude higher than 2,000. We're not there yet by any stretch of the imagination.
The WHO Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Control puts the total infections for Wuhan at less than 5,000. The Northeastern University's Laboratory for the Modeling of Biological and Socio-technical Systems predicts Wuhan might be as high as 25,000. WHO CCIDEC puts total infections elsewhere in China at less than 10,000. The total China figure outside of Wuhan might be higher but not by the same factor as Wuhan so maybe 30,000.
It's early days but we haven't seen any deaths outside of China yet. So, glass half full. And China being China, and having previously dealt with SARS, is probably the only country in the world outside of maybe North Korea that can apply extraordinarily stringent public health measures and restrictions. So, we'll see.
A wild card is seasonality. We don't have any real feel for whether 2019-nCoV has a seasonality component.
Any old how, let's just revisit this in a week and see where we stand. And let's stick to WHO confirmed cases and deaths.
Oh, and as an addendum, while we're wringing out hands over this, 2019/2020 seasonal influenza in the US has killed about 8,000 people (at the rate of 250 people dying of it per day for the week between 16 - 22 January).