Posted on 04/26/2003 7:26:57 PM PDT by Lessismore
The worldwide SARS death toll continued to climb on Saturday as a leading British expert warned the mortality rate from the mysterious disease could be double that suggested by the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Canada recorded its 20th death, a 77-year-old man from Ontario province, casting doubt on official comments that the outbreak is under control.
Six deaths in Hong Kong and Singapore's 19th fatality were among 15 fatalities in Asia, bringing the global toll to 292.
As US President George W Bush offered to help beat the epidemic in China, where drastic measures are being taken to halt the rampant severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), a British expert on infectious diseases said the mortality rate had reached 10 per cent - double WHO estimates.
"If one looks carefully at the WHO figures on mortality and recovery rates, it is running, unfortunately, at 10 per cent," Professor Roy Anderson of Imperial College said.
WHO, which said on Friday the mortality rate had reached 5-6 per cent, did not confirm Dr Anderson's figures, but said they appeared plausible.
"We have not seen the report so we could not comment except to say that this is a top-class professional and any figure he commits himself to is likely to be as close as possible to accurate," said Dick Thompson, spokesman for the WHO's communicable disease section.
Asian nations earlier vowed to form a united front to halt the spread of the killer virus as the WHO called for a global hunt to track down every case of the disease.
The determined pledge came at the end of a meeting of Asian health ministers and international experts in Kuala Lumpur.
The respiratory illness that first emerged in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong nearly six months ago has now infected nearly 5,000 people in 26 countries.
Several governments have already introduced sweeping emergency measures to curb the spread of the disease, quarantining thousands of people and sealing off entire buildings, hospitals and schools.
The health ministers meeting in Kuala Lumpur ahead of an emergency regional summit in Bangkok next week turned their attention to the problem of preventing the virus from spreading internationally.
In a communiqué issued after the meeting, the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) plus China, Japan and South Korea affirmed the need to bar SARS suspects from going to other countries.
Hope that story's true. I also hope they come up with a treatment pretty quick, it has the potential to kill millions the way it's mutating.
And if this virus is man-made, guess who'll be getting the blame?
You can expect to see a thousand books from the conspiracy nut cases very soon for that answer.
Yes it has. The government has been spreading a weak form of it across the country via condensation trails from aircraft. Now that we have been protected the full virus has been used as a weapon against china.
Hey, it's as good a theory as anything else...
I believe the various areas differ for two main reasons:
| SARS Mortality Rates Based on World Health Organization data (Revised: 4/27am) |
|||||||
| Area | Recoveries to date | Deaths to date | Recent** Death Rate | Active Cases still in Danger | Projected Future Deaths | Projected Final Mortality | |
| Hong Kong | 632 | 121 | 12.9% | 774 | 100 | 14.5% | |
| Singapore | 126 | 21 | 16.1% | 51 | 8 | 14.8% | |
| China | 1285 | 122 | 28.2% | 1346 | 380 | 18.2% | |
| Canada | 77 | 18 | 20.7% | 47 | 10 | 19.5% | |
| World-wide | 2239 | 293 | 18.5% | 2304 | 426 | 14.9% | |
| ** ( Deaths in the last 7 days) / ( Deaths + Recoveries in the last 7 days) | |||||||
| Trend - Active Cases Still in Danger | |||||||
| Date | Hong Kong | Singapore | China | Canada | World-wide | ||
| Apr 19 | 914 | 61 | 307 | 66 | 1616 | ||
| Apr 20 | 893 | 64 | 497 | 66 | 1694 | ||
| Apr 21 (est.) | 872 | 66 | 686 | 66 | 1771 | ||
| Apr 22 | 874 | 60 | 708 | 61 | 1783 | ||
| Apr 23 | 831 | 58 | 968 | 58 | 2005 | ||
| Apr 24 | 812 | 55 | 1058 | 58 | 2059 | ||
| Apr 25 | 781 | 50 | 1209 | 51 | 2169 | ||
| Apr 26 | 774 | 51 | 1346 | 47 | 2304 | ||
| (includes new daily cases... excludes cases resolved by death or recovery) | |||||||
My observations:
If the virus is man-made, Al-Queda would be my first suspect, with possibly even the Chinese government manufacturing it as a weapon, accidently or purposely?? getting out into the general public.
But I give it a month or two before we start hearing in the media about conspiracies the CIA is involved. They always get the blame for all the world's problems.
In about a month that's exactly what first left-wing magazines, then CNN and NPR will be passing off as the truth. I'd bet the farm on it.
That would only be if you actually got the disease... LOL! Otherwise, if it were 68% for all of us the environmentalists would be thrilled as it would help get the world population down to 1 billion where they think it should be!!!
I was assuming a household of 4, living together, who all came down with the disease and each had a probability of 25% of dying from it.
In reality, there is a pretty good chance that if one person in a family living together gets SARS, the other ones will get it as well. It is like flu or measles or chicken pox in that regard. However, it is true that not all would come down.
Age has a big impact as well. If it is a pair of parents in their 30s with two small children, the children are very likely to survive and the parents have only a 1 or 2 percent chance of dying, assuming they aren't immunosupressed or have other medical conditions.
If it is adult children (50s) living with aged parents (70s or 80s), the odds are pretty good that both aged parents die and that at least one of the children dies as well.
Loosed in a senior citizen's home, SARS would empty the place.
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