Life in the Time of Wuhan

American Thinker:

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, Lauren Ancel Meyer, my young friend and a scientist, 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.

Speed of containment is of the essence, and the good news is that while the development of any vaccine against it requires more time, there are existing pharmaceuticals, some of which are readily available and not terribly expensive, that seem to be efficacious.  more

h/t forcibly rearranged