Replies

_Jim has been around long enough to know the basic facts about SARS, but he either chooses to ignore them or they have simply not sunk in. He could be a valuable contributor, but most of the time he chooses to simply heap scorn and ridicule. This does nothing but shut down conversation.

Such behavior is very hard to defend.

Personally, I would appreciate an informed and regular poster who knows the facts about SARS, but is convinced that it is well under control and poses little future risk. I would very much like to hear reasoned arguments supporting this position.

MANY factors will affect how widespread and dangerous SARS actually becomes. Right now we simply do not know. China is transparently lying, but it still seems that we have hit the predicted summer lull. We will not know what to expect until we see what happens in the next cold/flu season.

SARS is NOT certain to become one of the major scourges of mankind. Cholera, for instance, is no real threat except in certain well understood circumstances. Neither is tuberculosis, or many other quite deadly diseases. _Jim (or others) could choose to focus on any number of issues as a productive way to challenge the pandemic potential of SARS.

Since it seems to be too late to put SARS back in the box, these issues will eventually come to the fore. For instance:
> How seasonal is SARS, and why?
> If SARS is seasonal, what should governments be doing NOW to prepare for the next cold/flu season?
> Is there a genetic element to SARS resistance?
> Is immunity permanent?
> Does it have an animal reservoir?
> How does it spread?
> When are people first contagious?
> When does contagion end?
> How do we better protect hospital staff?
> Do we believe China/Taiwan? Do we even believe Canada?
> For that matter, do we even believe the U.S.?
> How badly injured are the survivors?

Some posters are familiar with the math of pandemics. TaxRelief, per loin, and Fl_Engineer are regular posters who come immediately to mind, and we have many others as well. I personally know of some occassional SARS posters with PhD's in relevant areas. Personally, I would find a discussion of the math quite interesting. Although we still do not have enough publicly available info to have confidence in the assumptions used, certain circumstances would lead to a self-limiting outbreak and these can be mathematically modeled.

To your list I'd add the issue of asymptomatic spread. I find it incredible that no large scale testing has been done to find whether or not the virus has entered the community at large in a less virulent manner. Someone should be doing random testing of a few thousand people in Hong Kong to give us some baseline data. Hong Kong, because the epidemic there was wide, seems to have about run its course, and its authorities have set up reasonably transparent accounting of cases.

I have recently been reading histories of international peace conferences. The 1918-19 flu hit the Versailles Peace Conference in the winter of 1918-19, and even killed some of the younger participants. There was a serious flu that hit the people at the Congress of Vienna in the winter of 1814-15. I'm not aware of anybody at that congress that it killed, but it laid most of the participants low for some time. Tsar Alexander, who was young at the time, was apparently very sick.

Does anybody know at what time of year the 1918-19 flu hit the Southern Hemisphere?