We're Safe From the Latest SARS-Like Disease...For the Moment

KentuckyFC writes "Back in 2002, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome or SARS killed about 10 per cent of the 8,000 people it infected in southern China and Hong Kong. The severity of the disease and its high death rate triggered panic in many countries where health agencies worked feverishly to prevent its further spread, largely successfully. Then in September 2012, a virologist working in Saudi Arabia noticed a similar virus in a patient suffering from acute pneumonia and renal failure. Since then, so-called Middle East Respiratory Syndrome or MERS has also begun to spread. The World Health Organization says it knows of 63 deaths from only 149 cases, a death rate that seems to dwarf that of SARS. So how worried should we be? Now epidemiologists who have modeled how the disease spreads have some reassuring news. They say MERS is unlikely to cause a global pandemic. But with Saudi Arabia expecting the imminent arrival of millions of pilgrims for the 2013 Hajj, there are still good reasons to be concerned."

Comments

I remember sars

[AlphaWolf_HK]

That disease everybody was so panicked over because you had only a 97% chance of survival.

Re:I remember sars

[vux984]

3% mortality is horrific; if 20% (typical "bad" flu infection rate) of the USA population got the disease, and 97% survived... that would still be 1.8million corpses in the USA alone.

That's more dead American's in one go than all American casualties of war since (and including) the revolution.

World War I & II, the Civil War, the Revolution, Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the little ones combined is only 1.3M dead, (with another 1.5M wounded).

1.8M dead is pretty horrific.

Yes, its not civilization crushing levels of horrific like a new black plague would be, but it's still pretty horrifying.

Re:I remember sars

[vux984]

A lot of people die every year, and flu death are not random. The people most likely to die anyway are the typical fatalities. I'm not saying everything is hunky dory, but just cranking out the raw numbers distorts the story.

Sure, any disease culls the weak and sick first. But a typical bad flu season is less than 50,000. So if we subtract that number out of the 1.8 million... well... its still 1.8 million since that figure wasn't precise enough to meaningfully subtract ~50,000 from it.

Re:Can you smell my sarcasm or should I spell it o

[ChromaticDragon]

Not sure how this actually affects the statistics these days...

But HOW it causes discrepancies is incredibly straightforward.

The issue is not counting lives at all if they don't reach a particular point. If country A and B have identical birth rates and identical death rates (not just rates - the full blown distributions of such, etc.) but country A counts lives from birth and country B starts lives from 3 weeks after birth, this means country B has completely removed from consideration every infant that died prior to age 3 weeks. You can imagine this would lead to different "life expectancies".

Indeed, this works in different ways. This is one reason the ancient world had life expectancies that were really low and yet had quite a few old geezers around. The fact was that it was HARD to live to ten. But for those who did, living as long as fold do today wasn't so strange.