Posted on 02/01/2020 5:10:17 PM PST by BenLurkin
The thing about R0 values is that they are averages. And to explain why that makes a difference, we need to talk about Coronaviruses. Before 2019-nCoV, the most notorious Coronaviruses were MERS and SARS. MERS, or Middle East respiratory syndrome, has had several small outbreaks since it was first discovered in 2012, and while very severe in terms of mortality (the case fatality rate is around 30 to 40 percent), the virus’s R0 is very low.
And then there’s SARS. Because while SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, caused a huge uproar in its heyday of 2002-3, good old fashioned quarantining ultimately went a long way, and the virus is now considered functionally extinct.
While you’d have a better chance of surviving SARS than MERS (the case fatality rate of the latter was somewhere between 9 and 16 percent) it was considerably more adept at spreading person-to-person. At least, kinda. The weird thing about SARS was it displayed a pattern of “super-spreaders” — a select group of individuals, for reasons scientists don’t fully understand, were incredibly contagious.
Most people infected with SARS did not infect anybody; a select bunch infected dozens. At least one super-spreader infected over 100. It’s a weird quirk, but not unheard of. So the original projected R0 for SARS was between 2 and 4, and everybody panicked. One research team that later went back and factored out super-spreaders found that in their absence the R0 was more like 0.4, so containing SARS proved to be a matter of identifying and isolating super-spreaders as quickly as possible, which is a far more manageable task than a scenario where R0 is around 2 and all infected individuals prove more or less equally contagious — the maximum difficulty scenario that Contagion runs with.
(Excerpt) Read more at filmschoolrejects.com ...
It’s not a mistake to do some kind of preparation, just in case. If nothing happens, then you’re only out a few bucks for supplies.
LOL. Give me your address. I've got some Y2K supplies I would like to send you. I'm sure they're fine.
“Chinese Academy of Sciences study “
Study? This thing hasn’t been out long enough for a study.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.27.20018952v1
Yes, a study has been made (look at the PDF). As far as the viability of the study, as I said, if true.
You missed the point. I don’t care if someone calls it a study. This variant of Coronavirus hasn’t been around long enough to create a study. Someone writing something and calling it a study doesn’t make it one.
They weren’t trying to determine what it is, where it came, or how to cure it. The study was just looking at the rate at which one individual gave to it other individuals from the cases they’ve actually seen. The R0 rate.
30,000-40,000 die every year from the regular flu and it does not even make the paper. Wake me up when a few thousand die in the US of corona virus.
Oh shut your self-righteous pie hole, smart ass.
Hey, wake up, it is past time!
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