obvert
Posts: 14050
Joined: 1/17/2011 From: PDX (and now) London, UK Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Kull quote:
ORIGINAL: HansBolter There simply may be no means of escaping or avoiding exposure. Don't go to an emergency room for one thing. If I'm a betting man, that's where 90% of the Covid-19 transmission in Hubei stemmed from. People arrived with the flu, sat next to a coughing covid-carrier, and acquired it that way. What made it so bad in China at the start is that people didn't know what they were dealing with, so herd behavior helped it disseminate rapidly. Accordingly, people panicking and flocking to doctor's waiting rooms and ERs in the US (and everywhere else) is what's going to drive the spread. They aren't going to get it from shopping cart handles at Wal-Mart. People are going to get it anywhere there are other people! Transmission before symptoms is being seen as the major factor that is still unknown in Covid-19 transmission, and as the Bloomberg article laid out, it may be less than the influenza rate. ... the proportion of transmission occurring prior to symptoms. For SARS, this was less than 11%, probably much less. For influenza, it is between 30% and 50%, making it far harder to control the disease’s spread. With Covid-19, “it seems that it can transmit quite a bit before symptoms occur,” Buckee says. How much is still up in the air. World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has been arguing this week that pre-symptomatic transmission appears to be low enough that Covid-19 can be controlled in ways that the flu cannot. “If this was an influenza epidemic, we would have expected to see widespread community transmission across the globe by now,” he said Monday, “and efforts to slow it down or contain it would not be feasible.” Avoiding hospitals is always a good idea, but it's actually still good to be sending out the message people need to change behaviour to reduce the chances of a worst-case scenario with this disease. Extensive testing and self-isolating with symptoms will go a long way to keeping it from transmitting, especially if asymptomatic transmission is lower.
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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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