Post by Dorothy J HeydtPost by Lynn McGuirePost by Jibini Kula Tumbili Kujisalimisha“Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases by the Center for Systems
Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University
(JHU)†on March 17, 2020
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
Worldwide Total Confirmed 190,694, an increase of 11,592 from
179,103 yesterday
Two orders of magnitude lower than the flu in the US this season
(which is mild).
Worldwide Total Deaths 7,519, an increase of 440 from 7,079 yesterday
One orders of magnitude lower than the flu in the US this season
(which is mild).
USA Total Confirmed 5702, an increase of 1,564 from 4,138
yesterday
*Four* orders of magnitude lower than the flu in the US this season
(which is mild).
USA Total Deaths 94, an increase of 23 from 71 yesterday
Three orders of magnitude lower than the flu in the US this season
(which is mild).
While tragic, this just does not look like a pandemic to me. A pandemic
will have lines a mile long trying to get into the ER. An ER doc in
Orange County thinks that they are coming though.
A pandemic is, officially, one that is infecting all the
continents on this planet.
The way they redefined Pluto as not a planet, in spite of our all
having grown up with it as planet nine.
It's all in the terminology.
Atlantis is gone, ma'am. I'm sorry, but there it is.
Or it isn't.
Setting aside the question of /known/ continents,
and people who live on something smaller anyway,
<https://www.sciencenews.org/article/coronavirus-outbreak-who-pandemic>
goes,
"Epidemics are large outbreaks of a new disease
confined to a specific region, such as in the early
days of COVID-19 when cases were largely centered in
China. An epidemic becomes a pandemic when multiple
outbreaks persist on multiple continents, sustained
by widespread human-to-human transmission that can’t
be traced back to the country where the outbreak
began (SN: 2/25/20)."
It stops being just an "outbreak" when there are
people who don't know how they got it. Loosely put.
And they don't always run in one geographical
"country". "Continent" is fairly solid, though.
Basically you can escape an epidemic by going to
somewhere it isn't, but when people who have got it
do that /and/ they aren't caught then it's a pandemic.
That's for a new, growing disease, that is everywhere
but has not yet affected everyone. When it is no longer
growing because essentially it /has/ affected pretty
much everyone, it's "endemic".
Loosely, "pandemic" means "stop worrying about
the disease immigrating; it has", but it can still
be useful to stop more people from bringing it in.
The plan everywhere now seems to be to do what
China did: close down. There is not confidence
that that will work everywhere. A warmer season
may make a difference too, but probably not to
stop it. (It occurs to me that hot countries
where it's going around may have at least some
places with air-conditioning, cool oases of
disease transmission.)
And after it's over, a vaccine?