[goldstategop]

You have better odds of being struck by a bolt of lightning or being blown up by a homocide bomber or dying in an auto accident than falling a victim to SARS. It helps to keep it in perspective.

[unspun]

You have better odds of being struck by a bolt of lightning or being blown up by a homocide bomber or dying in an auto accident than falling a victim to SARS. It helps to keep it in perspective.

With all due apologies, that sounds very Cslifornian. Such is the case at the beginning stages of any epidemic.

[null and void]

You have better odds of being struck by a bolt of lightning or being blown up by a homocide bomber or dying in an auto accident than falling a victim to SARS. Right now...

[EternalHope]

You have better odds of being struck by a bolt of lightning or being blown up by a homocide bomber or dying in an auto accident than falling a victim to SARS. It helps to keep it in perspective.

Basic math: It takes the same number of doublings to go from 1 to 1000 as it does to go from 1000 to 1,000,000.

To put it differently, the number of cases of SARS have been increasing by an average of 11% per day. If this kept up it will double every week. That means it will take two months for a single case to grow to 1000. It will then take two more months to grow to 1,000,000. This is just basic math. An actual epidemiological model is much more complex, but the basic concept is the same.

Hence the efforts to stop SARS now. It appears that the steps being taken in some countries to stop this are effective, which means it is still possible to keep this in the box. Let it loose in the general population and you will get to see exponential growth in action.

It appears that steps can be taken that would stop this thing. If those steps are not taken and this disease gets loose, it will be more a failure of political will than a failure of medicine.