A lot of these researchers arent in private industry. So I think it’s more about being willing to pass on being first to publish, etc.
Still a sign of the urgency this is being given tho
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More alarming is that the rate of infection increased from 40 10 days ago to 1400 now, by my reckoning a doubling every 3 days.
With Wuhan on shutdown and reliable reports of people in major Chinese cities being told by their employers not to go to work and staying indoors (witness the freakishly empty streets of Shanghai), hopefully it will be contained long enough for a vaccine to be developed and tested.
Also, the mortality rate appears to be 3-5% so it’s not exactly the Black Death.
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I dont see the scenarios working out like that.
Its either.
- This is contained and dies out. Similar to SARS.
- It keeps increasing exponentially and goes global.
A vaccine will help in 12 months at the earliest. It’s not going to prevent a global pandemic.
If it is 2. It’s just a question of infection rates, fatality rates and impact on otherwise healthy people.
Our range seems to sit somewhere between “a worse than usual flu season” and 200 to 500 million dead.
Scientists working on it are saying that thanks to collaboration across the net they hope to have a testable vaccine in 3 months (with a public rollout following success testing), which at least is 9 months faster than the SARS vaccine.
My money’s on your 1 because it’s clear the Chinese government has realised it was too slow to shut down Wuhan and others will presumably (!) not make the same mistake.
It is deeply worrying, though, no doubt about that. I have family in Shanghai which is where my info comes from.
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Scientific researchers don’t keep their research private before publication because they want to patent their technique to make millions (maybe a lucky 1% of them do), they keep it private because they don’t want to get scooped when they publish. Publishing earns them no money, but builds their credibility for future grants. And that’s pretty much the game for professional scientists. That being said, any biosci research convention is going to feature tons of unpublished unpatented work in progress and very rarely does a well-funded lab swoop in and try to finish someone else’s project before they do.
rn they’re being more open and collaborative so there aren’t multiple labs all doing the same thing at the same time. Lots of labs are going to jump at this problem because there’s wide interest in the topic and their article might actually get read by more than 50 people in the world. Coordination preserves their individual ability to publish original findings, and also happens to help the overall effort be more efficient, which is cool, but kind of a side effect.
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Regarding mortality rates, a few things.
- 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.
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You seem well versed in this area. May I ask if this is your job?
Lol. No. I’ve just been reading about it.
This has been big news in Asian media for a little longer
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.
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Some of you guys need to play Plague Inc.
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I dont think the transmission mode from animals to human is necessarily relevent to mortality rates. I certainly havent read anything about it.
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.
Im doubtful that it will be contained.
This map shows cases outside of china. (There’s also been a couple in other developed countries further afield.)
The countries on this list are either.
- close to China
- with a highly developed and effective medical system
Where are the cases in Kenya? Tanzania? India? Brazil?
We know it is travelling. It would be a hell of a coincedence if it was only travelling to countries that were well equipped to identify it.
Just following along and want to wish the best for you and your family.
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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.