SARS is much worse than is being reported

Personal American friends living in Hong Kong | CometBaby

[CometBaby]

My American friends living in Hong Kong called last night. The SARS in Hong Kong is much worse than has been reported. China has been fudging on the number of cases. He said that the number of new infections have been DOUBLING DAILY. It's spreading like wildfire. It's more contageous than has been admitted and there is no cure. The schools have all closed and many workplaces are not requiring employees to come in. They expect the Airport to CLOSE .. nobody knows exactly when, and people are scrambling to get out of the country before it does. The hospitals are all full and they plan to begin to quaranteen people in their homes.

He said that walking in Hong Kong is absolutely surreal .. everyone is wearing masks. And another thing .. they are running out of masks. It's really bad.

[urodoc]

SARS is a problem. Mortality rate is about 4%. The mortality rate of our present Iraq war for our troops is not even close to this and hopefully will never reach this level.

My best advise is to fit yourself for a N95 respirator and pray we devlop a vaccine. These are made by Moldex and are intended to prevent spread of TB but should work very well to stop airborne spread of SARS.

[per loin]

Hong Kong SARS Cases

DAY	DATE	TOTAL CASES	DAILY INCREASE	WEEK INCREASE
wed	03/19	150
thu	03/20	173	15.33%
Fri	03/21	203	17.34%
Sat	03/22	222	9.36%
Sun	03/23	247	11.26%
Mon	03/24	260	5.26%
Tue	03/25	286	10.00%
Wed	03/26	316	10.49%	110.67%
Thu	03/27	367	16.14%	112.14%
Fri	03/28	425	15.80%	109.36%
Sat	03/29
AVERAGES			11.90%	111.40%

[TaxRelief]

We are almost at the end of flu season. That makes a big difference.

[friendly]

Health Canada and the US INS are sick jokes.

Tens of thousands of North Americans are going to needlessly die because these evil, incompetent bureaucrats refuse to use simple public health measures to stop this completely preventable disease NOW.

And I predict a massive blow to our economy when this disease becomes endemic, once a critical mass of cases is allowed to exist. Our cities and workplaces will be ghost towns for months!

[Textide]

I was taught in a gradeschool History class that "Orientals" were the people from China, Japan, etc. and "Occidentals" were people not from these areas. Never understood how it was offensive to call Asians "Orientals".

Anyone know the origin of the offense?

[Wilhelm Tell]

Hong Kong is full of hardworking Chinese people. If HK gets shut down by the disease, most likely the leftists will gloat that an important center of commerce was closed. Hong Kong represents a mixture of some of the best things in Asian and Western culture. AIDS was the perfect politically-correct disease ironically because it made victims of people doing what the left sanctions (the gay lifestyle and promiscuity in general, and the drug culture--some of the most self-destructive elements in our society). It will be hard to make a "victim class" out of people who share the trait of happening to breathe air. Maybe the left will argue that SARS is a good thing because of overpopulation--the left seems to welcome disasters as long as they affect "those people" on the other side of the globe. The flu pandemic of 1918 claimed millions of lives. Today people are much more mobile. We don't even know how long someone can be infected with SARS before symptoms appear. It will be interesting to see what political fallout will happen if this disease is man-made. It reminds me of a line in the movie "The Great Dictator," "I have just discovered the most wonderful weapon--it will kill EVERYBODY!"

[Judith Anne]

I don't mean to sound gloomy, but often the flu that the far east has in the spring is the flu the US has in the fall.

[per loin]

By Tay Han Nee and Jacqueline Wong

HONG KONG/SINGAPORE, March 29 (Reuters) - Hong Kong and Singapore reported more cases on Saturday of a fast-spreading pneumonia that has killed 54 people worldwide as the United States urged Americans to postpone travel to parts of Asia.

But Vietnam played down the threat from the deadly virus and said the country was safe for visitors.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome or SARS has infected about 1,500 people globally. The World Health Organisation believes the disease, which has flu-like symptoms, started in China's Guangdong province last November.

As the number of cases grew, a Hong Kong health official said the infection could transmitted by air. "We've never ruled out the possibility that the disease might be airborne," said Director of Health Margaret Chan. An airborne virus will spread quicker than one carried by droplets.

Scientists say the virus is a new strain from the family of coronaviruses, which is the second leading cause of the common cold. For weeks now, they have said the virus is passed through droplets, such as in sneezing or coughing.

The Bank of China (Hong Kong) Ltd became the latest financial institution in the territory to announce it had shut a branch for two days from Saturday after an employee contracted the disease.

Hong Kong's Social Welfare Department also shut a floor at one of its district offices on Saturday for disinfection after one of its workers fell ill.

On Friday, banking giant HSBC Holdings and computer maker Hewlett-Packard shut some of their operations in the territory as an employee in each company was feared to have been infected.

With 11 people dead and 425 infected, Hong Kong on Saturday imposed stricter screenings on all arriving travellers.

The disease has killed 34 in mainland China and infected over 800, although authorities say the situation there is now under control. Four are dead in Vietnam, three in Canada and two in Singapore.

MOTOROLA WORKER INFECTED

The virus did little to dampen the mood at the Hong Kong Rugby Sevens, though the number of attendees on the opening day fell to over 15,000 from more than 24,000 last year.

"It's incredibly unlikely that I'll get it. It's only infected 425 people out of seven million (in Hong Kong)," said British publisher Lawrence Bell, who added he had no qualms about sharing beers with his friends.

In Singapore, mobile phone maker Motorola said one of its workers had been infected, causing it to pull around 530 production staff from the factory floor.

Motorola was informed on Thursday that a night-shift worker had contracted the virus. It asked the night-shift workers not to report to work as a precaution.

"A number of that total will be receiving the (quarantine) order. It's going to be a proportion of that total number," a spokeswoman for Motorola, the world's number two wireless phone maker, told Reuters.

The city-state has nearly doubled the number of people quarantined, ordering 1,514 citizens to stay home. It has shut schools for 10 days.

The number of people infected with the virus in the tiny state rose to 86 on Friday from 78 a day earlier, the government said. Those in serious condition rose to 12 from 11, it said.

Washington urged Americans to put off non-essential travel to mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Hanoi to avoid outbreaks of the disease.

But Vietnam, where the virus has killed four medical workers and infected 62 people in Hanoi, says it is no longer a threat.

Speaking to a Pacific Asia Tourism Association conference, Vietnam Deputy Prime Minister Vu Khoan said the gathering underscored the view that Vietnam was a "safe and friendly destination."

"It's very clear that now this problem has been solved," Khoan told reporters after addressing the first big business meeting since the outbreak of the disease.

Deputy Minister of Health Nguyen Van Thuong said in an interview with state-run Vietnam Television: "The community is clean and there are no more threats."

Tourism is an important revenue earner for Vietnam, which saw 2.6 million foreign visitors last year.

[meyer]

SARS has already proven that it can travel on long international flights; that's how it appeared in Toronto. It is highly contagious.

Once it spreads to hundreds of thousands and tens of thousands die, it may be too late to prevent a general worldwide outbreak.

Another thing to look at: there appears to be about a 30:1 survival rate. That is to say, for every 30 people that have gotten the disease (based on the above numbers), 1 person will die. Think about an outbreak at a local school.

[BluH2o]

... SARS doesn't target politically protected groups like homosexuals.

I'm going to say something not politically correct ... AIDS, which in fact does target the gay community, will make those with the disease, be it active or in some form of remission, extremely vulnerable to SARS. If SARS continues to spread worldwide those stricken with AIDS will get a double whammy ... it will be devastating.

[larrysav]

I think so, too. Think about it--every year here in the USA we have normal flu outbreaks that kills hundreds of people per flu season and it doesn't get the attention that SARS is getting nowadays

But ordinary flu has only a .1% mortality rate. Because it is widespread, quarantines are not feasible for flu outbreaks.

The 1918 Spanish flu had a 2.5% mortality rate. SARS has a 3.7% mortality rate but appears to be less transmissible than flu.

The part of the story that you might be missing is that SARS requires many days on a ventilator for most patients and that many of the survivors will have lung damage and permanent health problems. Look at the discharge numbers. Not that many people with this thing have left the hospital.

Just imagine if this spreads further. How many ventilator beds do we have in this country? The mortality rate of SARS could increase if our medical infrastructure is overwhelmed by patients and sick doctors and nurses.

Toronto, Hong Kong and Singapore's quarantines are long overdue. I don't think they acted quickly enough. Now that we have been warned, it would pay to not underestimate this virus.

[Lloyd227]

Michael Fumento: Super-pneumonia or super scare?

Friday, March 28, 2003

By MICHAEL FUMENTO, Scripps Howard News Service

"It is the worst medical disaster I have ever seen," the dean of medicine at the Chinese University in Hong Kong told a prominent Asian newspaper. This irresistible quote was then shot 'round the world by other media, seeking desperately to hype the "mysterious killer pneumonia" or "super-pneumonia." But a bit of knowledge and perspective will kill this panic.

Start with those scary tags. "Mysterious" in modern medicine usually means we haven't yet quite identified the cause, although it appears we have now done so here. What's been officially named Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) appears to be one or more strains of coronavirus, commonly associated with colds.

"Killer pneumonia" is practically a redundancy, since so many types of pneumonia — there are over 50 — do kill.

The real questions are: How lethal, how transmissible and how treatable is this strain? And the answers leave no grounds for excitement, much less panic.

Super? At this writing, SARS appears to have killed 49 people out of 1,323 afflicted according to the World Health Organization, a death rate of less than four percent. In Hong Kong, that alleged "worst medical disaster" has killed 10 people out of 316 known victims. But since this only takes into account those ill enough to seek medical help, the actual ratio of deaths to infections is certainly far less.

In contrast, the 1918-1919 flu pandemic killed approximately a third of the 60 million afflicted.

Further, virtually all of the deaths have been in countries with horrendous health care, primarily mainland China. In the United States, 40 people have been hospitalized with SARS. Deaths? Zero.

Conversely, other forms of pneumonia kill about 40,000 Americans yearly.

Transmissibility? Each year millions of Americans alone contract the flu. Compare that with those 40 SARS cases and, well, you can't compare them. Further evidence that SARS is hard to catch is that health care workers and family members of victims are by far the most likely to become afflicted.

Treatability? "There are few drugs and no vaccines to fight this pathogen," one wire service panted breathlessly. But there are also few drugs to fight any type of viral pneumonia, because we have very few antiviral medicines. Nevertheless, more become available each year and one of the oldest, ribavirin appears effective against SARS.

So why all the fuss over this one strain of pneumonia? First, never ignore the obvious: It does sell papers.

But an added feature to this scare is the cottage industry that's grown up around so-called "emerging infectious diseases." Some diseases truly fit the bill, with AIDS the classic example. Others, like West Nile Virus in North America, are new to a given area.

But there's fame, fortune, and big budgets in sounding the "emerging infection" alarm and warning of our terrible folly in being unprepared. The classic example is Ebola virus, which is terribly hard to catch, remains in Africa where it's always been, is now usually non-fatal, and — despite what reporters love to relate — does not turn the victims' internal organs "into mush."

Yet you'd almost swear that every outbreak of Ebola in Africa is actually taking place in Chicago. Laurie Garrett rode Ebola onto the bestseller list and talk show circuit with her book "The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World out of Balance."

Since then, the U.S. government and various universities have also seen these faux plagues as budget boosters. The CDC publishes a journal called "Emerging Infectious Diseases," though in any given issue it's hard to find an illness that actually fits the definition.

The U.S. Institute of Medicine just issued a report warning that we're grossly unprepared to deal with emerging pathogens. Soothingly, however, it adds that it's nothing that an injection of lots of tax dollars can't cure.

Meanwhile, a disease that emerged eons ago called malaria kills up to 2.7 million people yearly. Another, tuberculosis, kills perhaps 3 million more. Both afflict Americans, albeit at very low rates.

The big money and headlines may be in the so-called "emerging diseases," but the cataclysmic illnesses come from the same old (read: boring) killers. In fact, there may no fatal illness that will cause fewer deaths this year than SARS.

How do our priorities get so twisted? There's your mystery.

 

Michael Fumento is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C.

 

 

 

 
 

[ethical]

If that turns out to be the case liberals will replace AIDS with SARS as the next politically correct disease to expend government funds upon.

Only if you had to engage in sexual promescuity or perversion to get it. If it's airborn, like a cold, well then the person deserved to get it.

[TaxRelief]

We don't know and can't calculate the mortality rate of SARS, because only those with the most serious complication (atypical pneumonia) seek medical care.

[meyer]

Thanks for that post. I'm sitting here with a nasty chest cold so my opinions on SARS might be a little "biased".

[aristeides]

Does anybody have any documentation that the Chinese med professor was working in a bio weapons lab?

[CharlotteVRWC]

When talking about the SARS epidemic, my idiot Teddy Kennedy liberal extremist boss (who is agast at the thought of even 1 casualty in the Iraqi war) said there are too many people in Hong Kong anyway!

I was shocked! I mentioned there were many cases in Canada, and it is was spreading to the US and there have even been cases here in North Carolina. She said... Ohh.. (just shows how extreme the liberal environmentalists are about de-populating the earth)

[aristeides]

Think about an outbreak at a local school.

There hasn't been much reporting of this disease killing the very young. To the extent that the age of the dead has been reported, they seem to be mostly middle-aged and old.

[per loin]

Michael Fumento would be more believable if he flew to Hong Kong and reported from there for a while. I'm sure he could find a cheap apartment in the Amoy Garden, as 100 residents of that complex are now hospitalized with SARS.

[meyer]

There hasn't been much reporting of this disease killing the very young. To the extent that the age of the dead has been reported, they seem to be mostly middle-aged and old.

That's it! I'm doomed!! OK, not really, but this chest cold I have stinks.