The coronavirus epidemic is spreading rapidly around the world but Chinese scientists say the situation could get much worse. Photo: AFP
SCMP: Global coronavirus infections could increase tenfold every 19 days, Chinese study says
* Nation’s leading geneticist Jin Li calls on the world to ‘take strong actions on public health, using experiences learned from China and Singapore’
* Chilling forecast based on simple linear model, though research has yet to be peer-reviewed
The number of coronavirus
cases outside China will increase tenfold every 19 days if no drastic measures are taken to contain its spread, according to a study by a team of Chinese scientists.
The research, headed by leading geneticist Jin Li at Fudan University in Shanghai, also traced the spread of the virus outside China back to just 34 “unobserved carriers”.
Jin, who is known as China’s “DNA hunter”, said some of those carriers might be asymptomatic and have been present before or about the same time as the coronavirus was first detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.
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WNU Editor: Summer is only a few months away where illnesses like the flu and other respiratory diseases taper off. The hope is that this epidemic will come to an end in May/June. This is probably the reason why the UN is also refusing to call this a pandemic .... As virus outbreaks multiply, UN declines to declare pandemic (AP), and why the White House is confident that this outbreak will be controlled. I can only hope that they are right. But here is a little bit of history. The Spanish flu of 1918 stated in the spring of 1918. It tapered off during the summer. But in the winter of 1918 to 1919 it came back in a second wave that infected a third of the world's population and killed 50 million people.
3 comments:
"that infected a third of the world's population"
Do we know that? I would have accepted that as fact some time back.
Did they test those without the flue to see if they were carriers or asymptotic?
They did not have test kits for the flu virus then.
Did they have random samples of the population to judge what the true prevalence of infection was?
Statistics was in its infancy. It was mainly used by agricultural research stations and telephone companies. It was not wide spread.
I would say that 90% to nearly 100% of people caught the flu at that time as in was exposed to it and they had it in their blood stream.
People were starving at in Europe at this time. Agriculture in Europe was destroyed to a significant extent. This helped fuel high prices for agricultural products in the US and helped lead to the Roaring Twenties. In the early twenties European agriculture came back online and prices for American farm produce tanked.
Se we just die in the winter months in the Southern Hemisphere, Africa, South America? Doesn't sound helpful....Here in Chile, they are still in denial...I expect it to explode over the next few weeks and the health system can't deal with just regular infirmity....so probably quarantine at some point.
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