Why don’t you think it’s not going to spread in the US?
Its going to be contained in china?
It won’t reach several other poorer countries? Or if So, it will be contained?
What are your assumptions here about how this plays out?
The virus has been extant for two months, there are no serious outbreaks in developed countries, and cases of human-to-human transmission outside of China are low. I don’t think this is compatible with a theory that the virus is highly infectious in the incubation stage. There’s likely to be a “super-spreader” phenomenon going on:
Fisman notes that in several cases one infected person has transmitted the virus to far more than two people – one infected 14, many of them health workers. Such “super-spreader” events are typical of both SARS and MERS, said Neil Ferguson at Imperial College London earlier this week.
“It means scary events happen, with large clusters of cases,” says Fisman. “But these are likely to attract attention and a public health response”, with everyone exposed quarantined.
By contrast, many cases may not spread. To get an average R0 of under 4, the super-spreaders must be balanced by cases with very low R0. So individual transmissions, which are harder to spot, may also be dead ends for the virus, which hasn’t yet adapted to humans and is mutating slowly.
“Contrast that with something like flu, where everyone is spreading and any case can spark an epidemic,” he says. “Super-spreader events suggest this can be controlled.”
Like I said much earlier in the thread, what’s relevant is not the baseline R0, but the R0 once medical attention is focused on an outbreak. Think about what the R0 looks like so far for cases outside of China.
Okay. Seems reasonable. Cases outside of China, in developed countries, seem well contained.
I’m more worried by the facts that
a) there have been no identified cases in many countries with high number of Chinese, and
b) the number of cases found in poorer Asian countries seems lower than you could expect.
Think of two metrics
First is “cases per 1000 Chinese travellers” call it cT
The second is “identified cases per 1000 Chinese travellers” call it icT
You would expect cT to be similar in every country, right?
Yet my guess is that icT is very different. 0 in a lot of African countries and much lower in Thailand, Philippines etc than in Australia and US
A reasonable explanation for that is that there are a lot of cases going under the radar in some heavily populated developing world countries.
1 Like
Adding. R being low in Australia etc is good, but if R is much higher in Nairobi, Delhi and Manila and it’s not being tracked, then the epidemic is going to play out very differently to SARS
I think we are likely to see a kind of two tier pandemic for a while. Isolated cases in the developed world, but major outbreaks in the developing world.
How the two then interact with each other 4 months down the line is anyone’s guess, but I can’t see Australia suspending flights to 50 plus countries?
How can you possibly know what the R0 is for cases outside of China? It hasn’t been long enough and your sample size is way too small.
1 Like
Does anyone know where I can get ahold of some forsythia?
1 Like
I played a poker tourney last week - kind of obsessed about germs the whole time.
I think I may sit out live poker for a while until this blows over. Running godawful also helps in that regard.
1 Like
Right, outbreaks in the developing world are a lot more likely, which is why I phrased everything in terms of personal concern for people here and in the US. I think Australia will suspend flights to anywhere with major outbreaks, yes. China is our biggest trading partner, it’s already a big deal to suspend flights to there. I think people will slip through the cracks and there will be minor outbreaks here and there, but the authorities will be hyper-vigilant and quickly putting out fires.
It’s possible that in the long term these measures won’t be sufficient, but I’m a very long way from coming to that conclusion.
Like, there are people here who have been hospitalised and already discharged, having apparently infected nobody else. These are guys flying and going through airports, wandering around major cities etc. I think I’m on firmer ground looking at that and saying “looks good for worries about infectiousness” than you are going “oh no, very bad” about the n=1 case of patient doctor transmission in France etc. I can’t make any firm declarations about anything but on the evidence so far, the probability of being able to contain infections looks high.
Can you wait until mid April?
Gotta hand it to the Communist Chinese, they may be horrendous human-rights abusers, but I don’t think anyone else could have pulled this off in 8 days: Inside China's coronavirus hospital: 1,000-bed Wuhan unit that will be open for patients tomorrow | Daily Mail Online
1 Like
Calling a country with barely any welfare state Communist is well wide of the mark.
5 Likes
What about the case in Germany? 1 person appears to have infected 6 people in the same workplace, and one of the 6 has infected his child.
I just assumed for now that we have no idea how many are getting infected by travelers because of the potentially long incubation period. I think in a week or two we will know a lot more, but your post gives me at least some moderate amount of hope that this can possibly be contained with some diligence.
Fair. What would you call it then, though? It’s not a Western-style democracy, parliamentary or otherwise. It’s not an Oligarchy. It’s not a Monarchy, constitutional or otherwise. It’s creeping towards the NK-style cult of personality dictatorship, but certainly isn’t anywhere near that yet either, and it isn’t a Middle-Eastern style theocracy.
Totalitarian capitalism I guess.
Soviet-style single party state
1 Like
Those seem like mutually incompatible words.
A capitalist society in which you can’t google “Nba Protest”?
I think capitalism and authoritarianism go together remarkably well.
10 Likes
Capitalism is concerned with profit, not freedom.
Freedom just happens to be useful to it in some ways (eg competition to keep wages down).
goddamn anachronistic is pure AIDS Zika 2019-nCoV
3 Likes