Look FRiend, my apology.
It is the model that is utter nonsense.
And it is.
I gave some examples (eg. an Ebola patient with
opportunistic influenza -or visa versa) where Ro
is much larger.
Also, the additional reservoirs, the additional sexual
transmission after “cure” for months, the fact that
some variants (e.g. Reston) are airborne, and the
fact that there have been only 14,000 cases (and 1/2
in the last month), the fact that individuals are already
violating quarantine, the fact that there is no evidence
that ONLY 21 days is requisite, etc .
makes obvious that the simple model
is not, and could not, be appropriate.
Thank you for your courteous response.
My view on this is that this is not the same as using a climate model to predict a change in climate, because the goal “to predict climate change” is so broad, that so many variables come into play that any model used can (and will) rapidly fall apart in the real world.
But that does not at all mean that all models are useless. If you take a model that has a goal (as I understand the R0 concept does) how rapidly can a particular disease spread relative to another disease, it is not an unreasonable tool.
It is indisputable that a disease which is spread in an airborne fashion, and has a very short period between infection of a host and capability of transmission is comparatively far more likely to infect more people in a shorter amount of time than a disease that is spread via blood or sexual contact and has a longer period between infection of the host and capability of transmission.
That is all the model is used for. It is not an end-all and be-all to describe exactly how an infection is going to proceed in real life.
A person with a highly contagious disease who gets in a car and goes from point A to point B without meeting another person is not going to spread anything at all, and someone who has bloody phlegm who chooses to spit, sneeze and cough on every surface they encounter at a football stadium full of people is going to have a very different effect.
The model doesn’t say how many people an infected person will or won’t infect. It simply illustrates how comparatively fast two different types of infectious diseases might be spread, and real world observations bear it out.
The flu spreads like wildfire every year all over the world and dies out quickly every year when the flu season ends. Ebola slowly appears every few years, stays around for a while, and slowly dies out without spreading very far.
That’s all.