Manic of a panic is geopolitical

[xilman]

WWII vet raises >£15M

Very impressive!

Nonetheless the NHS is such a big organization that that sum corresponds to less than £10 per employee. The NHS employs roughly 1.7M people. The annual budget is roughly 140 gigaquid, so £15M corresponds to about 1 hour's expenditure.

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by kriesel

Population density seems to be a factor. Andorra at 466 persons/sq mile, 180/sq km is quite high population density compared to American rural areas.

There are two main factors involved with the spread of the virus:

1. How dense the population is.
2. How dense the population is.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

There are two main factors involved with the spread of the virus:

1. How dense the population is.
2. How dense the population is.

No - especially in a non-open-borders context (e.g. islands like Iceland or 'hermit' states like North Korea), you also need to account for inital-seeding effects. An example:

Pick of the coronavirus papers: Ski buffs helped to seed coronavirus in Iceland | Nature

Holidaymakers returning from ski trips to the Alps helped to bring the coronavirus to Iceland.

In late January, Kari Stefansson at deCODE Genetics-Amgen in Reykjavik and his colleagues began testing for SARS-CoV-2 among Iceland residents at high risk of exposure to the virus, such as travellers to China (D. F. Gudbjartsson et al. N. Engl. J. Med. http://doi.org/ggr6wx; 2020). Some 13% of the 9,199 people tested by early April were infected. The team sequenced viral RNA from people who tested positive and found that some of the strains had probably originated in Austria or Italy, which both have Alpine ski resorts.

Tracing one of those links further back, it appears the initial seeding in Northern Italy involved close China links there among its famous garment and fashion industry, which in recent decades has both moved much production to China and also increasingly relied on cheap guest-worker labor from there. And on the ski-buff angle, I recall in 3rd week of February watching TV broadcasts from the 2019-2020-season Biathlon World Cup in the South Tyrolean (officially Northern Italy since end of WW1, but still nearly 100% German-speaking) ski resort of Antholz/Anterselva, so that probably caused a significant spread across the then-still-open northern border to Austria proper.

In the US, the Washington-state regional outbreak has been traced back to a single initial returning traveler from Wuhan.

Again using my (admittedly imperfect) fissile-material analogy, population density is like % enrichment, but even a supercritical lump of U235 or Pu239 needs one or more "Initial seed" neutrons to start the chain reaction. Larger countries with open borders, that is of coures more less guaranteed, but the seeding aspect is still useful in explaining local outbreaks and hotspots.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by kladner

Oops. My bad. What was the intent?

I was thinking of AIDS. WHO doesn't officially call it a pandemic, but a "global epidemic," so my bad.

I have frequently seen it referred to as a "pandemic" in recent years, however. To date, it has killed something like 30 million people worldwide, and around 700,000 people in the US.

Fortunately, it has become relatively manageable. In the early years it was running rampant and had a high mortality rate. In the 1990's it was killing around 50,000 a year in the US. Now it's down to around 12,000.

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

There are two main factors involved with the spread of the virus:

1. How dense the population is.
2. How dense the population is.

Originally Posted by ewmayer

No - especially in a non-open-borders context (e.g. islands like Iceland or 'hermit' states like North Korea), you also need to account for inital-seeding effects.

I stand by my statement. The spread in any given population (of a given contagious substance) happens from a condition that starts it. So, however the population gets it initially, the spread is mainly a factor of the the 2 conditions that I stated. If it comes from Mohamed Lee eating the brains of sea cucumber or is delivery to Johan Garcia nasally by an alien UFO probe, the 2 conditions are the main factors of how it spread in that population, as opposed to a different population.

Your arguments support my point #2.

[kladner]

You make a good point, that AIDS should be (or have been) considered a pandemic.

The 80s were the nightmare years in the Chicago gay community. Most of the friends of my age who contracted HIV probably did so around 1983, before it was really recognized or understood. Many of those friends succumbed. Only one that I know of from that era has survived. Bob was being treated early enough that he has permanent peripheral neuropathy in his legs from AZT. He lost his partner many years back. Whereas Bob is rigid in his medication schedule, Scott did not take his meds. Perhaps he had worse side effects. I can't remember now.

I attribute my escape to hangups and inhibitions which kept me from joining the bacchanalia around me wholeheartedly.

The theories that flew about then as to the cause of the illness in gay men included semi-plausible things like the use of poppers (Nitrate inhalants), and more far-fetched things like specific kinds of sex lubricants (mentholated "hot lube".)

I appreciate that you made that observation Dr S. It triggered a realization of how much I have discounted or buried the full impact of HIV/AIDS.

[Uncwilly]

Please read a dictionary and don't trust your gut on pandemic vs. epidemic.
https://www.medicinenet.com/script/m...rticlekey=4751
Or check the CDC
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-res...pandemics.html

[kladner]

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

Please read a dictionary and don't trust your gut on pandemic vs. epidemic.
https://www.medicinenet.com/script/m...rticlekey=4751
Or check the CDC
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-res...pandemics.html

I don't think the links exclude HIV/AIDS. It may have been slower moving, or not immediately identified, but it is worldwide and had a very high death rate before drugs were developed to treat it. It still does for people without access to medication. Being called The Gay Plague greatly suppressed awareness and delayed research, especially in the US where Ronnie Raygun didn't give a tinker's damn about queers, except maybe for some of his Tinsel Town buddies.

The second link is specific to influenza and thereby implies that the only pandemics are from flu.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

Please read a dictionary and don't trust your gut on pandemic vs. epidemic.
https://www.medicinenet.com/script/m...rticlekey=4751
Or check the CDC
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-res...pandemics.html

Firstly, my basic point was, AIDS is definitely a serious disease. And it hadn't been mentioned in this discussion. I thought it merited a place.

IMO it was officially disregarded, at least in the USA, because of political/religious ideology, and so became much worse that it needed to.

In the late 1980's a book by San Francisco Chronicle journalist Randy Shilts entitled And the Band Played On had this theme. The jacket claimed, "the epidemic spread widely because the federal government put budget ahead of the nation's welfare; health authorities placed political expediency before the public health; and scientists were more often more concerned with international prestige than saving lives."

Does that sound familiar?

One public figure who distinguished himself during the Reagan Administration was US Surgeon General C. Everett Koop. He put his public-health duty above religious/political dogma.

Why you would wish to sidetrack my basic point by, apparently, trying to incite a squabble about dictionary definitions is beyond me.

But to address your hairsplitting objection:

I didn't "trust my gut." As I wrote in my post, I'd read AIDS being called a pandemic numerous times in recent years.

Want me to check the CDC? OK, how about this (my emphasis)? The Global HIV/AIDS Pandemic, 2006

Or, how about the New England Journal of Medicine? The HIV–AIDS Pandemic at 25

[Uncwilly]

The WHO calls AIDS/HIV an epidemic.
https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/79079

And it is not listed here, where they still list smallpox (extinct), and MERS, and SARS (which are basically gone).
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/en/

[Dr Sardonicus]

China's virus death toll revised up sharply after review

BEIJING (AP) — China's official death toll from the coronavirus pandemic jumped sharply Friday as the hardest-hit city of Wuhan announced a major revision that added nearly 1,300 fatalities.

The new figures resulted from an in-depth review of deaths during a response that was chaotic in the early days. They raised the official toll in Wuhan by 50% to 3,869 deaths. While China has yet to update its national totals, the revised numbers push up China's total to 4,632 deaths from a previously reported 3,342.

The higher numbers are not a surprise — it is virtually impossible to get an accurate count when health systems are overwhelmed at the height of a crisis — and they confirm suspicions that many more people died than the official figures had showed.

The undercount stemmed from several factors, according to a notification issued by Wuhan's coronavirus response headquarters and published by the official Xinhua News Agency.

The reasons included the deaths of people at home because overwhelmed hospitals had no room for them, mistaken reporting by medical staff focused on saving lives, and deaths at a few medical institutions that weren't linked to the epidemic information network, it said.