Life in the Time of Wuhan ...Clarice Feldman

[mystery-ak]

March 22, 2020
Life in the Time of Wuhan
By Clarice Feldman

Crises have a way of sorting out the good people, ideas, and institutions from the bad, and as the Wuhan virus spreads throughout the world, the sorting process is made easier. The decision to close our borders to China, criticized by the WHO, the left, and media as “racist,” has proven to be essential, and the bien pensant governments around the world are now following suit, shutting down their borders to aid in containment.

For those who wonder why this variety of flu depends on our isolating ourselves for a while until we can contain it, my young friend and scientist, Lauren Ancel Meyer, explains: 

    The recent threats of SARS, swine flu, Ebola, and Zika have brought fame to an epidemiological statistic known as R0. It stands for the basic reproduction number and is intended to be an indicator of the contagiousness of infectious agents (it is pronounced R-naught). In short it tells us how many people each new case will infect during the early days of a pandemic on average. An outbreak is expected to continue if R0 has a value >1 and to end if R0 is <1.

    A lot of attention has been paid to recent estimates suggesting that covid-19 has a lower R0 than SARS, roughly two versus three. Clearly, then, R0 is not the whole story. It indicates whether one case will turn into two or three or four, but not how quickly or how silently that will come to pass.

    The level of intervention required to curb an outbreak very much depends on all three factors: its R0 value, speed, and visibility in the community. We should not be fooled by the relatively modest R0 of covid-19 as its speed and stealth make it all the more difficult to contain. Even if each case infects only two others, the number of infections can skyrocket undetected in the absence of early and extensive control measures that limit person-to-person contact.

    Our study highlights the elusiveness of covid-19. Keeping people apart is the only guaranteed way to block infections given the immense challenge of identifying contagious and soon-to-be contagious cases. Whether the policy goal is to stop transmission, protect those at high risk, or "flatten the curve" to ensure that fewer people are sick at any one time, extreme social distancing strategies of the type we have been seeing are strongly recommended.

more
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/03/life_in_the_time_of_wuhan_.html

[TomSea]

A very good overview, it mentions some of the pharmaceuticals, antivirals being used to combat this, so a good rundown of info.

It mentions R0, I was not familiar with this term:

If you want to describe how an infectious disease spreads, one handy number is what epidemiologists call R0 (“R naught”), the disease’s basic reproductive number. Right now, scientists are trying to figure out the R0 for the new coronavirus from Wuhan, China. So far, it seems to be a little bit higher than for the flu, but less than for many other infectious diseases.

What is R0?

R0 is one of the numbers epidemiologists use to describe how an infectious agent spreads through a population. But it’s important to remember that it’s simply a statistic that describes some of the numbers we see. It’s not a rating of how scary a virus is, nor does it dictate how deadly a disease is or how difficult it might be to contain. We need more information for that.

The basic idea is this: the average sick person, in a totally susceptible population, must be able to get at least one other person sick (R0 = 1) for the disease to spread. If a disease spreads to fewer than one person, on average, an outbreak can’t happen.

Read more at:   https://vitals.lifehacker.com/what-is-the-coronaviruss-r0-and-why-does-it-matter-1841264885

Looks like an important term.