100 million cases of SARS within a year? (Excellent post from Brad Delong's website)

Brad Delong's website ^ | April 24, 2003 | Jonathan King

[Tarsk]

I think some people are missing the message here. If you take the data from the WHO sars page, you can easily find out that:

1) The death rate worldwide is 11% if calculated by the deaths over deaths plus recoveries method, or "only" 5.9% if you calculate it by dividing deaths by total cases.

2) The rate at which cases are growing is currently about 3.5% PER DAY (divide today's reports by yesterday's). That means the number of cases doubles every 20 days or so. Usually, a scary rate like that doesn't persist for very long with a fatal disease. Well, so far we have been almost "spot on" as the British might say for the last 20 days.

3) I agree that media reports are probably making some people outside of Asia feel more panic than they should (so far), but the situation is beginning to look completely horrible within China and Hong Kong. Right now, many people are leaving Beijing for the countryside, and you can almost hear the epidemiologists screaming "No! Don't do that!" If this is a 10% killer for hospitalized victims in major cities, you don't want to think about what it could do in the Chinese countryside.

4) A very valid point can be raised that we don't know how often transmission of the virus leads to full-blown SARS. The data collected in Canada and Hong Kong now are somewhat confusing. The Hong Kong data suggest they can extract the coronavirus from tissue in 90% or more of the SARS patients they have, and from very few people who don't have it. The Canadians have a lower success rate with patients (which is weird), and find 20% or so of non-SARS people who travelled in affected regions have the virus. Something is screwy here, and needs to be resolved.

5) The problem with controlling epidemics is that you have to do it early while you still only have a handful of cases. I actually believe that the Canadians have seen the worst of their current outbreak, but every announcement of "we have it in control" in Hong Kong has so far proven to be over-optimistic. And there is every indication that things are *still* even worse in China than the government there allows.

6) The situation I find most worrisome at the moment is actually in Singapore. The government there does not have a reputation for, um, "mildness" or lack of control, but their growth rate in cases this month has been about 3% PER DAY. That is better than 3.5% (especially when compounding), but does not qualify as "control" in the big picture.

7) I said that Canada my have the situation in hand, but if I'm the WHO, I look and see that their growth rate in cases has been the same as the world average, and has doubled in the last 20 days. 140 cases in all, the vast majority started from a single chain of transmission in a single individual. In other words, with aggressive quarantine, modern facilities, a hyper-cooperative population, and every advantage really, that's what it has taken to control this.

8) Another point is that it is not unlikely that the current outbreak will be arrested within several weeks. But then, next fall and winter, there is no reason to believe it could not come roaring back.

9) Exponential growth is just plain deadly. At a 3.5% daily growth rate in cumulative cases, do you know how many cases you *could* get in a year? If you had one case to start, that would be 283,941. If you had 4439 cases to start (like we do today), that's over 1 billion cases.

Now, if aggressive control measures could bring that down to a 1.5% daily growth rate, then you're only talking about a horrific but manageable 100,000 cases in year from our current position. So 10,000 people might die, rather than 100 million.

That is why I don't think the media is really over-playing SARS.

Posted by: Jonathan King on April 24, 2003 03:09 PM

[Betty Jo]

I do not believe in a god and I am perfectly OK.I also know that this current life is the only life I will ever have.

[Judith Anne]

LOL! BJ, at one time or another, all those things have happened to me while taking care of patients, with the exception of the last one. You DID leave out "Don't throw up on me."

[LizardQueen]

What I want to know is what is the trigger that causes some cases to progress into full-blown SARS, while others just fizzle out like a bad case of the flu?

There has got to be something that's triggering this "fork" into fatality, either an individual characteristic, different strain of the virus, whatever.

I wish I could find some detailed demographic data on who got better and who died.

LQ

[Betty Jo]

Another snake oil salesman! Look at the PRODUCTS he is pushing.

He is a Dentist.

He is mostly full of BS.

He has been on Art Bell a lot in the past.

A virus expert he aint!

[TaxRelief]

Excellent question, the one most actively pursued. Most diseases manage to overpower an immune system if something else has already compromised it. A good percentage of the early cases (some of the most virulent) tested positive for chlamydia or a paramyxovirus. Several deaths of young women involved pregnant women, (who have suppressed immune systems, except in this country where they take megadoses of prenatal vitamins).

[Brian Allen]

I am with you 100%.

Plus!

For I would long ago -- about two years, max, into the execrable Trudeau's prime ministership -- have begun to treat Canada as the hostile state it has been from that time until now. [Check its UN voting record]

And, similarly, the Mexican state and the Peking based pack of psychopathological looters, liars and mass-murderering hesperophobics that calls itself "china."

Best ones -- B A

[Jim Noble]

I agree that the Canadian and Mexican States in their present form are a danger to the United States and should be reformed or abolished.

China is a different matter, being on the other side of the world and also being the seat of an ancient and very different civilization.

We should certainly cease all commercial intercourse with such an implacably hostile people, but as far as regime change goes-I'd just cut them off from contact with our civilization and let the chips fall where they may.

[Trickyguy]

Since early this morning, the temperature had gone up by three degree outside my house. If it keep rising at this rate, we will all be dead within a few days.

Even worse, the way I gain weight over Thanksgiving, if it kept up, I'd way several hundred thousand pounds in a few months!

[Brian Allen]

<< China is a different matter, being on the other side of the world and also being the seat of an ancient and very different civilization.

We should certainly cease all commercial intercourse with such an implacably hostile people, but as far as regime change goes-I'd just cut them off from contact with our civilization and let the chips fall where they may. >>

The "china" gang, especially since the traitor Carter gave it America's Canal in Panama, it bought control of all of the Canadian subsidiaries of America's most sensitive companies and corporations, it moved into Central and South America and the Carribean -- and having had its own hand-picked crew in what passed for an "administration" during the KKKli'tong years -- is every-bit-as-much in our neighborhood as are Mexico and Canada.

And makes each of those two states a thousand times more dangerous than they could ever have been on their own.

As for its much-vaunted "civilization?" It is mostly communist-tyrant-created fiction.

During its entire history every one of its contributions to science and art do not add up to the equivillent of any of a hundred years of Medieval Europe's achievement -- or those of any American decade!

"China" is a myth and will not begin to be other than a metasticizing cancer, spreadingits Evil upon the Earth until long long after its Peoples figure out how to even form a government among and of themselves.

[Bearing in mind that all one point three billion of them are conquered people and are enslaved -- not only those inhabitants of the more than two and a half million square miles ciminally-invaded, colonized and murderously ethnically cleaned by Peking's tyrants!]

Its so-called "history" is fantasy -- but like that of the Earth's other metasticizing manifestation of Evil, islamofascism -- "china's" sinister ability to divide, disrupt and to destroy is very very real.

And relentless.

[Domestic Church]

I think it could be aerosol. I also think it is possible some are shedding the virus once the kidneys start acting up to the point of uremic frost(which isn't always apparent.)

[InterceptPoint]

we know little about the disease apart from its being caused by a coronavirus pathogen

How do we know this?

Does anyone have a link to an article where there is some proof for this claim. Tying a disease to a specific virus is not a trivial thing to do and I for one would like to see the scientific basis for declaring the coronavirus the cause of SARS.

[Domestic Church]

Koch's postulates have been completed so the global scientific community says it's SARS...meanwhile Winnipeg has some interesting statistics that indicate something else might be involved. Here's a previous thread that might help you:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/894412/posts

[Judith Anne]

The news that SARS is affecting other organs is discouraging.

Fox News just said that infected number is approaching 5000. I think 80% are in China...