re: Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) ***W.H.O. DECLARES A GLOBAL PANDEMIC***

All I’ve ever said is it can slow the spread enough to buy us time to get a plan together. I guess you think the economic losses from restricting travel are worse than being caught off guard. I just disagree

Brooking Institute

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Given the high potential benefits associated with air travel restrictions, and their relatively minimal cost to the U.S. economy, policymakers should not be too quick to rule out their implementation, especially in conjunction with vaccinations, in certain pandemic situations.

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LINK

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International air travel restrictions may provide a small but important delay in the spread of a pandemic, especially if other disease control measures are implemented during the afforded time. However, if other measures are not instituted, delays may worsen regional epidemics by pushing the outbreak into high epidemic season. This important interaction between policy and seasonality is only evident with a global-scale model. Since the benefit of travel restrictions can be substantial while their costs are minimal, dismissal of travel restrictions as an aid in dealing with a global pandemic seems premature.

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Ban bet time?

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I'm sober and feel pretty good about this one. Let's do it.

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All I’ve ever said is it can slow the spread enough to buy us time to get a plan together.

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I don't think that's the belief most have in this thread, but I won't argue that point.

The problem is by the time you know what something is, it's almost universally too late from a travel standpoint. People have to understand that first world countries aren't going to stop international travel with 40 novel pneumonia cases, and that's the only hope you have of them being effective.

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There was a lot more smoke with this virus. If China is shutting down cities with 11 million people I think that’s a pretty good sign that something serious is going on.

There is no data to suggest 40 cases is some kind of cutoff

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The data works around confirmed cases. Think of a pandemic as a recession - by the time you know you've had one, it's over. Similarly, by the time you know a new and relatively contagious virus is causing these problems, stopping travel in the public is too late to stop the spread. It may delay it, but it won't stop it.

For travel bans to stop the spread of a virus, they have to be instituted so early in the process that they're impractical. They also have to be worldwide. Stopping direct travel doesn't matter if you can't move through other countries.

Once again, I'm not suggesting people should just fly back and forth to Wuhan, I'm just pointing out why travel bans at this point are a feel good measure more than anything else.

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1. That is at the extreme high end of any 'estimates'

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Call it 100,000 then. Point still stands.

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2. What did we think swine flu deaths were at this point in time of our monitoring it?

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Hard to find daily information, but from 4/24-6/30, there were 17,335 confirmed cases and 115 confirmed deaths. That's pretty close to where we are in the timeline right now (late November, 1st of December start, two full months now at this point). By the first week of August, there were 208k confirmed cases and over 8k confirmed deaths.

In the analysis after the 2009 season, the CDC estimated worldwide deaths of 151k to 575k, and US deaths of 8k-18k.

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Lets assume your 500k is right, wouldn't that mean that any actions taken during the swine flu outbreak should be assessed not defended.

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I'm not defending the actions in 2009 - I'm using them as a baseline. Swine flu was the biggest global pandemic to hit the US in 50 years, yet it's barely remembered here. I bring it up for perspective more than anything.

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slackster

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What do you think will happen here?

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this is exactly how China would react. They would know the danger, but wouldn't come out and tell the World, "my bad, we had a weaponized virus escape".

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If it's an escaped engineered virus that they know how dangerous it is, why did they try to avoid ANY measure and problems at first?

They would have mobilized faster because they KNOW the danger.

If they want to look like they don't have ANOTHER infectious disease outbreak like SARS, they try to downplay it.

Logically, it seems more like it's a virus that they didn't want to acknowledge/worry about after what happened with SARS and Bird flu. It makes them look bad, especially after it keeps happening in China.

EDIT:
Just refreshed the John Hopkins tracker SITE:
14,637 confirmed
305 deaths
443 recovered

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What do you think will happen here?

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I've been wrong before, so let's start there.

Probably somewhere between SARS and swine flu from a global deaths standpoint, and closer to SARS (<1,000 confirmed) than the swine flu (nearly 9,000 confirmed). In the US, I'd be shocked if there are more than 10 confirmed deaths. Swine flu killed 2,000 confirmed and an estimated 8,800-18,000.

Something that will be interesting to see is the "excess deaths" estimate when this settles. Excess deaths is basically the people who died from swine flu above and beyond what would typically be expected from pneumonia in a given time period. For the 2009 season, swine flu is estimated to have killed 2,400 "extra" people.

Excess deaths has its flaws - it doesn't and can't account for people who would have died from other causes within the year - but it's a reasonable measure of the new/true impact of a virus. It also doesn't account for age (to my understanding), and swine flu deaths had a far greater impact on younger populations than the seasonal flu typically does.

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I've been wrong before, so let's start there.

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I totally understand but opinions can be helpful.

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In the US, I'd be shocked if there are more than 10 confirmed deaths.

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Cheers to that outcome. That's what I'm hoping happens.

Have you seen this research?

It's not peer-reviewed and far too small a sample but it MIGHT help explain why this is so severe in China vs the rest of the world (and possibly why men might be more affected). Lot of caveats but

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We further compared the characteristics of the donors and their ACE2 expressing patterns. No association was detected between the ACE2-expressing cell number and the age or smoking status of donors. Of note, the 2 male donors have a higher ACE2-expressing cell ratio than all other 6 female donors (1.66% vs. 0.41% of all cells, P value=0.07, Mann Whitney Test). In addition, the distribution of ACE2 is also more widespread in male donors than females: at least 5 different types of cells in male lung express this receptor, while only 2~4 types of cells in female lung express the receptor. This result is highly consistent with the epidemic investigation showing that most of the confirmed 2019-nCov infected patients were men (30 vs. 11, by Jan 2, 2020).

We also noticed that the only Asian donor (male) has a much higher ACE2-expressing cell ratio than white and African American donors (2.50% vs. 0.47% of all cells). This might explain the observation that the new Coronavirus pandemic and previous SARS-Cov pandemic are concentrated in the Asian area.

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Most of it is gibberish to me but I can read the regular speak. Hopefully it's something that can help develop treatment and possibly a vaccine.

Ain’t no way in hell im injecting myself with HIV drugs. Not a chance especially with a Thai needle