obvert
Posts: 14050
Joined: 1/17/2011 From: PDX (and now) London, UK Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Chickenboy quote:
ORIGINAL: cantona2 quote:
ORIGINAL: Canoerebel The Forum is a repository of smart, well-reasoned folks, and some of them might offer informed opinions about the Corona virus outbreak and how it might play out. Chickenboy comes to mind, given his background, and there may be others. I hope you'll chime in, as your thoughts should be very interested to those of us who are laymen and have no clue what's going on. To be perfectly honest the media is not helping one bit. News of people getting ill in a certain region are largely exaggerated, for example headline Coronavirus spreads to Southern Italy - one reported case!!! Look at the screenshot below from a local paper. Look at the thicknesses of the fonts and the colours for each piece of information! I do not understand the mass hysteria on evidence when one reads a little deeper into the matter. I gave my maths group in school the task to work out the % of the world's population that has died (well published figures that is) using an estimated figure of 8 billion. I think it worked out at 0.0000000009% death rate. Social media is not helping either with this being constantly thrust in peoples faces and lives every second of the day. I mostly agree. Fear-mongering and jostling for the limelight are running amok. In the hysteria attached to 'bird flu' (remember that?) from about 2004-2007, I spent part of my lectures with veterinary students reviewing comparative risks of humans dying from H5N1 avian influenza to other commonplace and not so commonplace diseases. You are and were significantly more likely to die from bubonic plague (BLACK DEATH-remember that?) globally than you were from bird flu. As in the linked article from the LA Times, the scary part of this one is that it isn't as much a killer as a replicator. Mortality rates are not incredibly high per case, but it has the potential to proliferate and infect larger segments of the population, as well as hindering economic activity around the globe as industries close down to prevent spread of the disease. Economic downturns are also dangerous, and this disease is causing a major market correction from recent gains, as much in some recent trading as during the 2008-09 financial crisis if these numbers hold or worsen. Pandemics, if this is one, are very expensive. If this does prove to be a disease without season, if it can exist and transfer just as easily in warm climates/seasons, it could be a continuing threat, which would make it's potential danger much greater. No one, really, is afraid to catch a common cold. What if the common cold suddenly had a 2% mortality rate? And everybody caught it once or twice a year? To me that is the danger of a disease that seems more able to survive outside a host for longer periods of time, in most atmospheric conditions, and which may have a long gestation period, combined with very light symptoms in some, giving lots of opportunity in which to transfer to new hosts. I've also read it has proven to reappear in several cases after a patient has seemed to recover and been released from treatment. This seems similar to Dan's example of the 1918 flu. That flu also had a fairly low mortality rate of 2.5% as I understand it. But 20+ million died.
< Message edited by obvert -- 2/28/2020 8:53:35 AM >
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"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm." - Winston Churchill
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