The Hong Kong University says each sick person will infect another 1,024 within one month. It is predicted that there will be one million victims in Hong Kong alone. Meanwhile, China has acknowledged a second death.
Beijing (AsiaNews/Scmp) - Each Sars patient was responsible for infecting 27 people in 30 days. Every bird flu infection will cause 1,024 others in a month.
That's 38 times as fast a spread of disease. It is one of the frightening assumptions underlying a disease model that experts hope will help prepare for a H5N1 pandemic. With a worst-case scenario as gloomy as that - it is based on the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed 50 million people - the experts say, not surprisingly, that the first two weeks will be key to containing a bird flu outbreak.
The Centre for Health Protection's disease modelling committee is assuming the first wave of a bird flu pandemic will last three to four months.
Under its worst-case scenario, the disease-modelling team from the University of Hong Kong assumes each flu patient will infect two others every three days. "According to this formula, each index patient will infect 1,024 people in 30 days," said the committee's chairman Gabriel Leung, HKU associate professor of community medicine.
In 2003, Sars infected 1,755 people in Hong Kong, of whom 299 died. Dr Leung said based on the current bird flu outbreak in Southeast Asia, in which more than half the 120-plus people infected have died, the first two to three weeks would be crucial to putting a lid on the spread of the virus.
Dr Leung said his team would work with the Centre for Health Protection around the clock if there is a pandemic.
"We will update the situation in our modelling to get a real-time projection of the number of infected, hospital admissions and mortality rate. The projection will give us an idea when and how to act - for example, the right time to quarantine the infected or distribute [antiviral drug] Tamiflu to the health-care workers."
Dr Leung said the government had to weigh the costs and benefits of the measures it took.
"For example, quarantine and contact tracing are standard procedures, but when we have tens of thousands of cases, are there enough holiday camps to quarantine so many people? And do we have manpower for so much contact tracing?" The centre estimates a flu pandemic would attack a million people in Hong Kong.
China. The mainland last night reported its second human death from bird flu. The 35-year-old woman, a farmer from Anhui province, died on Tuesday after developing a fever and pneumonia following contact with sick and dead poultry, the Ministry of Health said.
Recombinomics Commentary
November 24, 2005
A resident of northern Israel may have contracted bird flu, the Health Ministry has reported. The man underwent a blood test, after a previous test indicated "further tests" were necessary to clarify his condition.
The man has recovered from the illness he was suffering from and released to his home, but preliminary tests reveal he may still be suffering from bird flu.
The above comments suggest that the patient has tested positive for H5N1 bird flu. These results are cause for concern. Although prior boxun reports suggeste the H5N1 wild bird flu at Qinghai Lake could cause human cases and fatalities, human cases were not reported in Russia. Kazakhstan, Mongolia, or European countries reporting H5N1 wild bird flu.
However recently China has confirmed H5N1 in patients in Anhui and Hunan and a case in Liaoning is under investigation. Moreover, recent boxun reports cite 77 H5N1 human fatalities in Liaoning.
The Middle East is of considerable concern because of the large number of migratory birds that pass through the Middle East when migrating from Europe to Africa. Although Israel has not report confirmed cases of H5N1, they have reported Newcastle Disease, as have many other countries in the Middle East and Europe. In the past, reports of Newcastle Disease have preceeded H5N1 reports in many counries in Asia. There have been many reports of bird deaths in the Middle East and Europe (see map) The Middle East is also of concern because of indiginous H9N2. Those isolates contain doner sequences for the HA polymorphism S227N which could be formed via recombination with H5N1 wild bird flu and H9N2 found in Israel. There details on the possible Israeli case would be of interest, including the HA sequence of H5N1 in the region.
Extraordinary post.
However, they got their own math wrong (they don't understand exponential growth).
Under their assumptions, 1 index patient does not turn into 1024 patients at the end of 30 days, rather, 1 index patient turns into 59,049 patients. The e-folding time is 2.73 days.
Assuming that everyone on the planet could possibly catch this bug in one form or another, then we reach a 100% infection rate (assuming 7 billion people), in 62 days!!!! That, of course, is a ridiculous number. What would happen in reality is what is known as non-linear saturation, which is a fancy term to mean that the linear relationship would no longer hold and the exponential would also no longer hold. But what we do learn from this, is that if these numbers are correct, this thing will hit the world essentially instantaneously.
The prior models have assumed multiple waves over 1 to 2 years. Assuming these data are correct (I cannot emphasize that enough), we learn that this thing will essentially hit the world instantaneously.
Make sure you are prepared. You won't have much warning. Assuming these data are correct.