it’s clear that its more than 1400 infected. They absolutely arent diagnosing everybody. So we may be over stating mortality rate.
with both infections and deaths growing exponentially, you need to look at incubation period to calculate mortality. The people dying now are those who were infected a week or more ago when there was only 300 people infected…
A 4% mortality rate you could be looking at 50 million deaths world wide. That’s a big deal even without the widespread disruption, stress on weak states, economic impact and any political knock on impacts.
3 months to safety testing… There are other types of testing after that, plus the need to scale up and manufacture and administer hundreds of millions of doses.
Any of which could experience problems or fail outright.
Not to mention this is a rapidly mutating virus, so by the time you have a vaccine, it may have moved on.
SARS also started out as a bat virus, which was then transmitted to cats and thence to humans who passed it to other humans. This one seems to have gone straight from bats to humans, and then human to human. I have nfi what this this means in terms of expected mortalities and possible vaccines.
I’m trying not to panic. Just to dispassionately look at the facts.
Here’s where I am.
Literally every doctor working in this field has been warning about exactly this scenario since SARS.
Our understanding of these types of epidemics is pretty straightforward. It really is a numbers game. If this spreads easily, has a moderately high death rate, and impacts healthy adults, then this will be bad.
My understanding of our current political situation is that we are not well equipped to respond, even in developed world countries.
People are really bad at understanding exponential growth. That’s what we are looking at here.
Sure, which is why the point I made about shutdowns is critically important. If you can reduce the exponent it buys time to develop/test/produce/use vaccines.
I’m not downplaying this at all and know about the stern warnings we’ve had for years about mass migrations of populations carrying new viruses.
I’m hoping the worst case will be some city shutdowns and people told to stay indoors and work remotely where possible. That’s still pretty bad because it implies more deaths than we feel comfortable with, to put it brutally.
Probably also scientists are always working on improving what they do and how fast they can sequence genes so that’s part of why they’re making record progress.
I’ve seen some stuff in recent weeks about real impact that AI is having in this area, but I don’t have great recall, so I am not sure if it is going to come into play here. Still, I find a little comfort just in knowing how much different the timeframes are now compared to SARS.
Complete speculation on my part but it seems like there would be a lot more people traveling from China to those places near China, or to some of the bigger western countries?
If I used the word ‘contained’ (I don’t think I did) that was silly because it’s clearly far too late for that when it comes to China.
Taking the UK as an example of your point - 31 people have been tested and all were negative. However, the government is trying to trace 2000 who recently flew to the UK from Hubei province. It’s too early to start rolling out the bunting but we should remain hopeful that it hasn’t spread wider in large numbers yet, and that governments will take drastic steps to contain it via lockdowns if needed.
Yeah. For sure. I figure the number of identified cases in other countries is a function of
number of travelers from Wuhan/chime
Ability to identify cases
There is defnitely travel to a lot more countries than on that list, especially in africa.
1 is non zero for a whole range of countries with limited medical infrastructure. So unless 2 is close to 100% (i.e. we are really good at identifying cases everywhere) then we should be worried.
I wasn’t trying to argue with you. Just using you as a jump off point.
The UK testing and tracing everybody is exactly what I’m talking about. That’s great, and why I would expect the identified cases to be higher in the UK than in kenya. But that doesn’t mean the actual cases is higher.
Sure, I take your point about countries with less than adequate medical facilities. With large numbers of migrant Chinese workers in parts of East and South East Africa, it’s a big worry for people in similar situations.
As if sub-Saharan Africans don’t have enough to worry about with mortality rates from malaria.
sequencing is currently cheap and easy. identifying the function of all the proteins coded by the viral genome is the tough part and unfortunately we’re not close to simulating that shit on a computer yet. the bottleneck in biological science research rn is determining protein function/interaction
