Posted on 08/07/2014 8:51:23 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
What is the rate of the health care worker deaths over the 38 years of outbreaks?
This seems to be the best info out there:
He’s not qualified to talk about the disease, its pathology, it’s transmissibility, it’s survivability on surfaces and in sunlight, or the efficacy of test kits used to diagnose possibly infected patients.
What HE IS qualified to answer, and the question nobody asked him was the following:
“Dr. Rossi, is the R0 of Ebola Guinea greater than 1 at this point?”
He’s completely qualified to answer that based on his training and his area of expertise.
Nobody asked him that.
Just give me the numbers, not links to articles to read.
“Dr. Rossi, is the R0 of Ebola Guinea greater than 1 at this point?”
Please explain what the R0 of Ebola..... is.
Ping...
Sounds like the type that might just honor-kill his wife or daughter.
R0, or R naught, is a variable in a differential equation that represents an infections ability to reproduce itself.
The equation allows you to generate a timeplot for the infection, showing how many people each day will come down with the illness.
The R0 starts out being a guess, based on reports of the number of cases each day. Then they let a few days go by and see if the number of new cases reported more or less falls on the graph.
At that point, you can kick in another set of equations which will give you a much, much better idea of how and where the disease will propagate, and what the death toll is going to be.
The other way R naught is used is to calculate the number of uninfected people you have to inoculate with vaccine in order to stop the spread of a contagion.
The equation for this (a proportion of the population) is:
(1-1/R0)
So, if R0 is LESS than one, then you can pretty much count on the disease burning itself out. This is what Ebola Zaire did way back when.
However, if it is greater than 1, then you start getting values greater than 0 but less than 1. The higher the R value, the higher the percentage of people you have to inoculate in order to stop the disease.
Let’s say we are dealing with a weaponized and highly contagious form of anthrax. Let’s say I use a boat and a modified crop sprayer to aerosolize it, and I get up early on a Sunday AM and I take this boat down the East River and up the Hudson River - making sure I’ve sprayed a good portion of Manhattan.
Let’s say I do this, gunning for an R0 of 4 or better. If I’m the CDC, I have to provide vaccines sufficient to ensure that 1 - 1/4 or .75 or 75 percent of the uninfected people in the Metro NY area are inoculated against this bioweapon in order to keep it contained within the NY Metro area.
That’s the BEST CASE scenario.
The scenario WE ARE CURRENTLY IN, however, is the one where we have a disease that only require from 1 to 10 individual little virii to infect a patient, and that it incubates over 21 days, and people have no idea when you actually become contagious with it. We don’t know for sure, but it likely spreads as an aerosol, since they said you can find it in saliva. Add to all of that there is no vaccine for it.
Add to that the virus spread to SA, to Jeddah, which is near Mecca, which is full of pilgrims coming to a potential hot zone, and going back to every country on Earth.
Now your R0 value allows you to predict the number of cases, the probable path of the disease over the planet, and based on fatality rate, it will tell you what you have to do in order to ensure other secondary pathogens don’t develop to kill of the survivors.
That would be deciding how many pits you have to dig, what kind of bulldozers you need, and how much gasoline and other accelerants you’ll need to burn the bodies as hot and efficiently as you can to ensure the virus dies in the pit.
So, that’s what R0 means in the context of epidemiology. R0 is also used in zoology - a ratio of births/deaths in a species.
So, getting a guy like Obama and a disease like Ebola Guinea in the same basic moment in history is just about the very worst thing you can imagine.
For example, you allow infected patients back into the US, or you throw the entire 2500 mile southern border of the US wide open to people without medically screening them and then busing and flying them to every state in the country.
The very bottom line:
The only relevant question the press can ask the government at this point is this one:
“What is the R0 of Ebola Guinea at this point?”
The answer to that will break all of the information we aren’t getting at this point down to a single number.
If the answer is ‘less than 1’, and the cases curve keeps tracking on an exponential basis, they are either bad at math or lying.
If the answer is greater than 1, then you know its off the chain, and since there’s no vaccine, it’s not coming back.
The serum they are using IS NOT a vaccine - ZMAPP. The idea is that maybe it will minimize the symptoms and boost the immune system to the point where your chances of surviving it are increased. Maybe you can beat it.
As such, until we find a journalist that knows what question to ask, and actually asks the question in a national broadcast, we really won’t know what we are up against. At this point, its all speculative.
Both.
An excess of caution and a good outcome.
As well as gratitude and admiration for the American medical and research community that this Administration has tried its best to ruin.
“So, getting a guy like Obama and a disease like Ebola Guinea in the same basic moment in history is just about the very worst thing you can imagine.”
Holy crap.
Your explanation of R naught in layman’s terms - excellent information, and thank you for taking the time to post it.
IIRC, only about half of Ebola patients have massive hemorrhage. They die of multiple organ failure, typically.
Post to me or FReep mail to be on/off the Bring Out Your Dead ping list.
The purpose of the “Bring Out Your Dead” ping list (formerly the “Ebola” ping list) is very early warning of emerging pandemics, as such it has a high false positive rate.
So far the false positive rate is 100%.
At some point we may well have a high mortality pandemic, and likely as not the “Bring Out Your Dead” threads will miss the beginning entirely.
*sigh* Such is life, and death...
I think the truth lies in between “no problem” and “panic”.
***
Agreed.
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