WHO says Covid-19 pandemic is 'one big wave', not seasonal

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who/who-says-covid-19-pandemic-is-one-big-wave-not-seasonal-idUSKCN24T16U

by stx • 6 years ago

51 136 6 years ago

reuters.com

wintorez• 6 years ago

We can't possibly have enough data, and even enough time since the start of the pandemic to come to this conclusion. To know if something is seasonal, we must first let a couple of years pass and measure and compare the numbers with previous years, no?

Disclaimer: I am not an expert. I believe in science, and its conclusions. All I wanted to know is if there's enough data points to plot a long-term trend.

SketchySeaBeast4• 6 years ago

You're right, we won't know if this is an nadir or not in the whole thing, but she seems to be warning against the idea that this is the off season and we don't have to worry about it.

I can't figure out who the target audience is for - the people who have written off COVID also seem to have written off the WHO, and those who haven't see that there's still a major ongoing problem.

stx4• 6 years ago

I don't trust the WHO but I have certainly not written off COVID. I think the WHO has too much China influence but I think they may still have some accurate information.

I don't know if its seasonal or not yet although I could see experts could start making predictions already. To me though it is not one big wave. Watching the numbers in the USA and other countries it appears that as restrictions are lifted cases rise. When they rise we add restrictions and they go down at a much slower rate. Its many smaller waves.

throwaway_kufu• 6 years ago

I think there is enough information/data to be gained from the virus itself to determine if it has the same or similar characteristics of other corona viruses (like influenza) to support seasonality or season-less continuity.

sveme• 6 years ago

Influenza is no Corona virus.

kn0where• 6 years ago

It’s well into summer in the northern hemisphere and the virus is still spreading as rapidly as ever, so that would be pretty good reason to think it’s not seasonal like the flu, which dies down a lot in the summer.

icedchai2• 6 years ago

Maybe this is "died down"... That is scary to think. It could get worse in the winter. We just don't know.

iso163113• 6 years ago

virus has died down in Europe and Asia, although may be upticking in Europe again.

Seems clear it's not heat related though - In Europe when people socially distanced there were few cases. As people are more blasé about it cases start to tick back up.

xiphias22• 6 years ago

In summertime many people can go to their vacation homes with gardens far from the cities, and work remotely, so it's much harder to keep distance in the cold winter.

I expect the winter being worse for the countries that weren't hit that hard in the summer.

covid20194• 6 years ago

It wasn’t on westerners radars until February in any serious way.

It spread through Winter 2019, Spring 2020, and is spreading during Summer 2020 when trying to “re-open.”

Pretty sure measurable science to support the idea exists. Oh sure that trend may change, but come on, RIGHT NOW it’s literally showing no signs of fading away if we “live normally.”

Why do you need 18 more months of plotting data to decide on what’s literally happening right before your eyes?

glofish3• 6 years ago

As counter intuitive as it sounds there is reason to believe that currently the penetration of the disease is much lower than in March.

The modeling from IMHE claims that in March the number of daily new infections were above 250K whereas today are about 120K.

https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america

see the tab called Infections and Testing

It just that we were measuring a lot many more people now. But it is true that in June there were fewer cases than today, but by far the most cases were in the Winter.

How else would be in the situation where 10% of population is already seropostive and at least as many don't develop antibodies since their symptoms are mild, thus we are probably over 20% of people having had the disease.

pier252• 6 years ago

It wasn’t on westerners radars until February in any serious way.

I'm no scientist but that was the end of Winter and there were very few people with it at the time.

Isn't it possible that it is indeed seasonal and it's now in its "weak phase"?

SV_BubbleTime2• 6 years ago

We can't possibly have enough data, and even enough time since the start of the pandemic to come to this conclusion.

For, Pro, Against, Anti, WHO, CDC, vaccine, masks, orders... etc etc etc... I’ve been thinking this same thing since March. I’m absolutely fine being cautious and doing the right thing, but I think everyone pretends “the science is settled” on these things and it changes weekly - and it should because a lot of it is new - but now that’s used as a weapon by everyone invoked. Kinda sick of it.

It should be totally OK to say “we don’t know, so we won’t guess”.

iso163113• 6 years ago

We don't know, we won't guess, but we have to have a policy, and that policy is based on what we do know. If what we do know changes, we change the policy.

The problem with that is that policy changing every week is not something that western populations can deal with, so policy changes have to be dampened somewhat.

fractal618• 6 years ago

The more they say the less credibility they have

gizmo3• 6 years ago

Covid-19 hardly mutates and people who were exposed to SARS 17 years ago have immunity to covid today. So yes, it’s pretty safe to say there won’t be a second wave of any significance. This was known since Februari and I don’t understand why you would think this disease will be seasonal when it isn’t anything like the seasonal viruses we know that mutate and don’t trigger good immune responses.

(It is seasonal in the sense that the R0 is higher in the winter when people are cooped together, but once you've got sufficient exposure in the community a second wave won't happen regardless)

mynegation• 6 years ago

Covid-19 hardly mutates and people who were exposed to SARS 17 years ago have immunity to covid today.

Citation, please. Any credible sources that I could find say that protection correlation with SARS is not clearly established and antibody levels to SARS fall off between 2-3 years after infection.

there won’t be a second wave of any significance

There will or will not be but certainly not for the reasons you mention. Unlike flu and older coronaviruses, SARS-Cov-2 R_t seems to be driven exclusively by containment measures, not by seasonality, at least not at the present.

once you've got sufficient exposure in the community a second wave won't happen regardless

We are nowhere near the "sufficient exposure" and it is already the most impactful pandemic in the last 100 years.

coronadisaster2• 6 years ago

They probably have more data than you do.

xiphias22• 6 years ago

They had more data in January as well, it didn't stop WHO from lying.

haunter• 6 years ago

So it's seasonal then

nonamenoslogan• 6 years ago

Hmm, is it not a bit early to determine that?

jb775• 6 years ago

Can anyone trust anything coming from the WHO anymore?

iso163113• 6 years ago

It's amazing how well brainwashing works

hinkley6• 6 years ago

Pull over. License and registration please.

We have to stop this narrative that we aren't going to listen to people until they are infallible. That's not how crisis management works. Or war, football, basketball, card games...

Hedging your bets is the act of wasting resources constructively, so that if your worst case scenario happens, you aren't doomed. Faulting people for hedging their bets is going to get us all killed.

It's been happening to scientists (first climate, now everybody) for years, and 'getting us all killed' was more figurative. Now we're doing it to doctors, and people are in fact dying. Of Covid (655k so far). Of measles (140k in 2018).

Do you want a dark age? Because this is how you get a dark age.

lbeltrame7• 6 years ago

I don't agree with your statement. The matter has become so polarized that both sides are actually lying about the data.

Just a few weeks ago, the Guardian quoted a study on Nature saying that asymptomatics were more infectious than symptomatic people. Except that the paper did not state anything like that, and even warned against using the results for policy reasons.

On the same camp, a Wired article saying that "the press must watch on science" to avoid pushing untested vaccines on the population, yet omitting the fact that some side effects of the Moderna vaccine were on a dose no longer used for trials.

And on the other side, we have conspiracy theorists and "skeptics" which only quote part of the studies which benefit their agenda, such as reporting only the more optimistic bound for the infection fatality rate. Or those who only quote negative bits about vaccines.

And scientists (I'm one of them) are to blame, too. A lot of those reporting to the media gave predictions, talked in absolutes (at least speaking for my country). Few actually said "we don't know". I'm not aware of anyone saying "we got something wrong".

gridlockd8• 6 years ago

We haven't even had one full season, so not calling it seasonal is premature, isn't it?

Look at the numbers:

We see that deaths are down and that illnesses are less severe (ICUs are not overwhelmed), even though daily infections are at all-time-highs in some regions. Coincidence, or perhaps due to seasonality?

We also see that the virus can not be brought under control without permanent lockdowns. As soon as you open up, the virus starts spreading again. Countries that now have the virus "under control" have had a significant amount of uncontrolled spread beforehand.

I've read several headlines along the lines of "resurgence of cases after opening up" or "second wave under way" in Europe. Then I look at the graphs and it's just not true. Cases are stable, you just have some daily variance.

jxramos• 6 years ago

I've wondered about the deaths being down and whether or not all the low hanging easy to pick off fruit from the virus' perspective is eaten up. The virus will then work its way through a healthier populace and not result in so many deaths.

Do all pandemics work that way more or less?

gridlockd8• 6 years ago

I would assume so, but that alone doesn't explain why regions that haven't been exposed strongly until summer fare so much better than regions exposed earlier.

hinkley6• 6 years ago

It's hard to have this conversation with people. I believe that the morbidity rate is lower than we have estimated. Sure, we probably have a lot of people who have had the virus and didn't develop symptoms. But we are still on our way to a million dead, so that hardly matters.

The other aspect the lackadaisical are ignoring is that the morbidity rate is only where it is because the number of critical patients is hovering around the carrying capacity of our medical infrastructure. More cases means a dog-leg in deaths because they will have to give up on people to save others. There will be no more heroic actions to save mom or dad once you can fill the ICU entirely with people with far better prognoses. Mom isn't going into the ICU because it's already full of athletes and people under 30. She's going on morphine and you can say goodbye over a phone.

raducu• 6 years ago

Romania is in wave 2, much bigger than wave 1.

hinkley6• 6 years ago

It's frustrating to me that this was all documented with the Spanish Flu and we have learned basically nothing in 100 years.

tensor2• 6 years ago

We also see that the virus can not be brought under control without permanent lockdowns. As soon as you open up, the virus starts spreading again. Countries that now have the virus "under control" have had a significant amount of uncontrolled spread beforehand.

I think this is the point. They are not saying it could get worse in winter months, they are saying that summer is not a "low season" and that it will spread just fine without controls. The data supports that.

gridlockd8• 6 years ago

How do we know that other seasonal viruses don't also "spread fine" during summer, except that the illness is less severe?

ISL2• 6 years ago

I've spent much less time looking at global numbers after ~April, as our focus has turned inward to making things go well locally.

As a matter of experimental practice, however, there should be sufficient information to infer whether or not to expect much seasonal variation in COVID-19 infections. The pandemic emerged at the end of winter in the northern hemisphere. It is now full-on summer. In the southern hemisphere, however, the sign is flipped. It is now full-on winter.

Unfortunately, the Covid pandemic is now a high-statistics event. There are oodles of cases in locations that span the full gamut of humidity and temperature distributions. Societal variations (policy, economics, politics, etc.) complicate the experiment, but the opportunity to make a reasonable quantitative statement on the impact of seasonal climatic variation on Covid transmission is surely there.

gridlockd8• 6 years ago

In the southern hemisphere, however, the sign is flipped. It is now full-on winter.

There isn't really a "full-on winter" in the southern hemisphere except in the southernmost parts of Chile/Argentina/Australia or in New Zealand. That makes it difficult to compare.

thaumaturgy• 6 years ago

We see that deaths are down

This is false. Deaths were down, but they have been climbing again for the last three weeks. Mortality is a lagging indicator to infections, so what we're seeing right now is mortality from the earliest stages of reopening.

illnesses are less severe

This is also false. There may be some factors that are combating more severe symptoms (e.g. greater vitamin D, if that turns out to be a real effect), but the virus hasn't recently become somehow less potent.

ICUs are not overwhelmed

False again. In the current hotspot states -- Florida, Arizona, and Texas -- ICU capacity in many areas is strained or overwhelmed as is the rest of the hospital infrastructure:

"ICU beds, ventilators in use hit new records as Arizona reports 1,357 new COVID-19 cases": https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-health/20...

"Florida coronavirus: 52 hospitals max out ICU capacity as cases increase": https://www.wfla.com/8-on-your-side/investigations/florida-c...

"Texas hospitals are running out of drugs, beds, ventilators and even staff": https://www.texastribune.org/2020/07/14/texas-hospitals-coro...

Note that all of these articles are over a week old. The situation hasn't improved since then.

gizmo3• 6 years ago

I think you are mistaken on two counts. The data is certainly not so self-evident that you can simply assert the parent is wrong.

Deaths are rising in counties that hadn't had significant exposure to covid19 before, and already the trend is heading down across the board. Deaths will be climbing in a couple of hotspots for the next 2 weeks, but total deaths in the entirety of the USA shouldn't exceed 280k.

I agree the virus hasn't become less potent, but hospitals have gotten much, much better at treatment. Remdesivir in particular makes a big difference. Spread in long term care facilities are now tracked nationwide, with terrific results. So the CFR is down by a lot, even though the virus hasn't changed.

Nobody in the US is being denied care because the ICUs are full. Yes, some hospitals are strained but this is not at all unusual. You'll find similar articles about maxed out ICUs from 2018, 2016, etc. First hit on google from jan 2018: "Hospitals Overwhelmed by Flu Patients Are Treating Them in Tents" (https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...). Moving patients to hospitals with spare capacity isn't that big of a deal. Bear in mind that Hospitals are for profit and ICU beds are extremely expensive. As a consequence hospitals target 85%+ ICU utilization throughout the year, otherwise they're losing money.

Didn't the Texas Tribune just misreport the data? https://twitter.com/VanceGinn/status/1287940050752286721

hinkley6• 6 years ago

There may be some factors that are combating more severe symptoms

Even if we don't have a solid treatment plan, we have more knowledge now than we did before. Triage is about saving as many people as you can by not allocating resources on those who are too far gone, or not far enough. Surely we have better bounds on those conditions now.

We probably also have fewer people suffering from side effects of treatments that have been proven ineffective. Those complications could push some patients from critical condition to dead.

DanBC6• 6 years ago

> illnesses are less severe
This is also false.

I agree it's false. One reason people think it's true is that very much more testing is happening, so we're seeing people with milder symptoms getting tested positive. Before they just wouldn't have been tested.

gridlockd8• 6 years ago

This is false. Deaths were down, but they have been climbing again for the last three weeks.

Deaths relative to cases are down...

Mortality is a lagging indicator to infections, so what we're seeing right now is mortality from the earliest stages of reopening.

...even accounting for lag.

There may be some factors that are combating more severe symptoms (e.g. greater vitamin D, if that turns out to be a real effect), but the virus hasn't recently become somehow less potent.

Then why are deaths down? Why is no other state repeating anything close to what New York went through?

False again. In the current hotspot states -- Florida, Arizona, and Texas -- ICU capacity in many areas is strained or overwhelmed

Nowhere does it say "overwhelmed". At or near capacity is not "overwhelmed". It's better to ring the alarms sooner than later, of course.

president• 6 years ago

Doesn't that put it on par with the flu, of which is also a coronavirus?

stx4• 6 years ago

I don't think flu strains are a type of coronavirus but I think some of the common cold strains are.

ceejayoz4• 6 years ago

Well, you picked a great username to make an incorrect assertion with.

DanBC6• 6 years ago

Flu isn't a coronavirus.

Flu is serious, which is why we have internationally coordinated campaigns to monitor circulating strains, develop vaccines, and get vulnerable people vaccinated.

So far, covid-19 has been more severe than most flu years.

nafizh3• 6 years ago

With all the debacles from WHO including the most disastrous one of trusting Chinese authorities and declaring there is no human to human transmission till January, I think I can be forgiven for not taking anything WHO says seriously anymore.

WHO needs a leadership change at the least for getting back any sort of the authority they used to have.

knzhou2• 6 years ago

This is one of those completely false things that people only believe is true by repetition. Go back and actually read the full set of WHO statements in mid-January. They have a bunch of statements saying that nations should get prepared, one saying that specific studies haven’t yet found hard evidence for person-to-person transmission (because at that point most of the cases they’d managed to find were tied to the market). The WHO never, ever said that it can’t be transmitted, and they absolutely never said that people should do nothing about COVID-19. They were urging nations to act for months before they actually did.

nafizh3• 6 years ago

Tweet on January 14 [0].

"Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China"

0. https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152

LyndsySimon• 6 years ago

I’m in the “WHO is ineffective at best” camp, but I agree with you here.

They have been conservative in their statements. I don’t recall them ever saying “it doesn’t spread person-to-person” - I do recall them saying “there is no conclusive evidence of person-to-person transmission”. At the time, given the evidence they had, that was true. From their perspective saying that it did in fact spread person-to-person and later concluding it didn’t would have been much worse; I assume they take this approach to protect their reputation of being certain before making a public statement.

The problem seems to be that lay people seem to expect WHO to be on the bleeding edge and providing comprehensive information on the latest investigation and data. That’s not what they do. They report the findings, and that’s very different.

kop3165• 6 years ago

Respectfully, Could you link to the documents you were referring to?

I feel like a trend I see is folks say to go out on their own to find some document that proves their point. There are several statements by the WHO on those dates, and I do not know which one you mean.

I have unfortunately seen the trend also where someone does link a source that is very lengthy and same thing. In one case, the source actually contradicted the person citing it.

I am not accusing you of that, merely it makes your argument much more credible when it is easy to see where you cited your sources.

propogandist• 6 years ago

CCP has told WHO to not acknowledge the existence of Taiwan.

Here's what it looks in action, with senior leadership at WHO following the orders from China (video interview)

https://twitter.com/ezracheungtoto/status/124386977441046937...?

ravenstine2• 6 years ago

Just ask them about Taiwan and then you'll know who controls them.

https://youtu.be/UlCYFh8U2xM?t=35

iso163113• 6 years ago

declaring there is no human to human transmission till January

It was first diagnosed in late December and the earliest the WHO became aware was 30th/31st December (depending on timezone). WHO issued a statement saying there had been limited human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus on Jan 14th.

av3csr• 6 years ago

"People are still thinking about seasons. What we all need to get our heads around is this is a new virus and...this one is behaving differently [...] This virus likes all weather." I think the word "seasonal" is used here as a reference to weather rather than as a recurring time period.

DoofusOfDeath2• 6 years ago

Many (most?) places around the world have changed the way they do things so as to limit the spread of coronavirus.

These measures are currently seen as temporary. I wonder how long covid-19 needs to be a major threat before these "temporary" measures become permanent cultural / legal fixtures. E.g., updates to building codes, or conversion of executive emergency orders into permanent law.

For example, modifying building codes for retail/office space to reduce risk of person-to-person transmission via bio-aerosol.

secondcoming• 6 years ago

It can never become permanent. Everyone will eventually be exposed to, and get, this virus. That rate of transmission is what needs to be controlled as much as possible.

alex_young• 6 years ago

See page 5 of daily WHO report for a nice graph of cases since inception: https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...

COVID-19 is pretty clearly not subsiding in any meaningful way.

For US data and projection based on models for each state: https://cv19.report/

caiobegotti• 6 years ago

It's depressing to see rational voices saying they don't trust the WHO or tending to conspiratorial thoughts. The WHO has first-hand details about the pandemic and they update their views and adjust their recommendations accordingly even if we have the feeling they are acting slowly or back-and-forth (e.g. when there was a critical and global shortage of materials for masks to give to health workers and only months later started saying wearing masks was the ideal and people simply bought the "they changed their mind so they must have been wrong all the time" idea). Without WHO the world would effectively be a much worse place for a good chunk of the world population and many contagious diseases would be around right next to some rich nations's borders. If they say it's one big wave it's because this is what the current data and analysis suggest. Can it be seasonal after all? Nobody freaking knows, but this is the best line of thought we have so far so let's act accordingly and not let the guard down please.

zests• 6 years ago

A critical shortage of cloth?

What's depressing is how politicized the virus has become. How someone feels about the job the WHO has done is probably tied more to their political beliefs than to reality.

If we can't say that the WHO dropped the ball with their mask recommendations then we really can't say anything at all.

DanBC6• 6 years ago

If we can't say that the WHO dropped the ball with their mask recommendations

You seem certain of this.

Please post a link to the high quality evidence that you think WHO should have used to recommend mask wearing in the general public.

This should be either a meta-analysis or RCT that shows a clear benefit.

We have plenty of RCTs of masks to prevent spread of respiratory disease.

It should be very easy to find one -- you're so certain you must have already read the research, and if the effect is so clear it'd be obvious to people doing the research.

goodside2• 6 years ago

A critical shortage of cloth?

Not cloth, but melt-blown (and to some extent spun-bond) non-woven polypropylene. This is the fabric used to make surgical masks, surgical gowns, bouffant caps, and disposable bedding for hospitals. All of these things were in shortage in March and April.

The shortage of melt-blown non-woven fabric itself is now mostly over. Still in shortage are N95 respirators, which use melt-blown electret non-wovens — material given an electrostatic charge so that it attracts particles in the air. International N95-equivalent respirators are available to the public at inflated prices, but genuine (American standard) N95 masks are still difficult to find at any price.

The WHO guidance against mask-wearing was a desperate attempt to mitigate N95 shortages. Even when all major health authorities were telling the public not to use masks of any kind, N95 respirators were widely purchased by people who had no idea how to use them. (I've been in NYC throughout the pandemic. It's extremely common to see N95's worn with facial hair, with un-pinched nose strips, or even with the lower head-strap dangling. N95's have little value if not properly sealed.) The WHO believed advising the public to wear any mask at all would exacerbate N95 hoarding and ultimately cost lives by making them unavailable to hospitals.

[Edit:]

Not sure why I'm getting downvotes for this. This isn't controversial information. Dr. Fauci has given this same explanation for why mask guidance changed:

[Fauci] also acknowledged that masks were initially not recommended to the general public so that first responders wouldn’t feel the strain of a shortage of PPE.
He explained that public health experts "were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply.”
[...]
“We wanted to make sure that the people, namely the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected,” Fauci concluded.

See: https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c...

DoofusOfDeath2• 6 years ago

How someone feels about the job the WHO has done is probably tied more to their political beliefs than to reality.

I'm having trouble unpacking this statement.

Are you saying that a person's political ideology influences their judgment about what's objectively true regarding the WHO?

Or are you saying that even when two persons agree on the objective details of WHO's behavior, their different political ideologies lead them to different sentiments regarding how well WHO performed?

Or something else?

lbeltrame7• 6 years ago

An organization that puts out a tweet (on immunity) that was, in the form it was written, totally void of any biological sense, doesn't rank much on my scale of worthiness.

On the seasonality: at a seminar on the epidemiology of this disease at my institution right today, the evidence on the impact of experimental factors was described as "inconsistent" but not enough to rule out one possibility or the other.

Ironically, a WHO staffer in Italy actually made a claim (or so the media said) about a "second wave" just two weeks ago.

I really don't understand why it is hard for many (not necessarily just the WHO) to say "we don't know".

danaris• 6 years ago

There can be multiple waves without the virus itself being seasonal, just due to human behaviour.

In particular, if we close everything down, get infections down to a nice low level, then declare victory and throw away all our masks and precautions, you better bet there'll be a "second wave" that has nothing to do with the weather.

ravenstine2• 6 years ago

By no means am I on the side of the WHO, but I'll try and play devil's advocate here.

How will most people interpret "we don't know"? You and I might understand the wisdom behind admitting to not having enough information, but the average person won't, and the media can easily mock this form of honesty.

Being knowingly wrong or inconsistent seems to be a better strategy since the attention span of the average person is rather short, and appeal to authority is a pretty effective mind trick.

kop3165• 6 years ago

Respectfully, I think there is a lot of mistrust in WHO is because the PRC deliberately withheld information in the 2002-2004 SARS Outbreak:

https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/sars-gives-china-lesson-...

This is where the saying "fool me once shame on you, fool me twice same on me" comes into play. The below source shows the PRC covering up the COVID-19 outbreak:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51364382

I peronsally feel like the WHO should have been a lot more suspicious of the PRC and how they were reporting. However, it appeared like they took information from the PRC at face value in January, where containment could have spared much of this pandemic. Was it political? Much like someone else pointed out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlCYFh8U2xM

A senior WHO offical praises the PRC, even after it is come out the the PRC covered up the initial outbreak. It is very hard to not view that is political.

To me, a lot of the mistrust of the WHO based on these sources are well founded.

vkou• 6 years ago

And yet, three months after getting its first case in this epidemic, the PRC has handled it orders of magnitude better than the US.

You can only blame the PRC's poor response in January and February for some of our failures. Everything that we did wrong in mid-March and onward is squarely on our heads. Unsurprisingly, this failure gets politicized, by the people responsible deflecting their failures on another country.

Vietnam and South Korea and Australia and New Zealand somehow managed to get the epidemic more or less under control - probably because they were actually busy solving the problem, instead of pointing fingers at China and the WHO.

Why were they not dependent on the PRC and the WHO in making the correct response, but we were?

And before someone mentions that Vietnam, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand are islands (Well... Maybe not Vietnam!), I would also like to point out that Hawaii is an island, and currently has 400 times the per-capita cases of Vietnam... And 4 times the per-capita cases of South Korea - despite us knowing a lot more about how to stop the virus when it had its first case.

goodside2• 6 years ago

The WHO didn't praise the PRC because they believed in them, they did it because they needed the PRC's cooperation to have any information about what's happening in Wuhan. They obviously kowtowed to the PRC in repeating their propaganda, so you should take their pro-Beijing messaging with a grain of salt, but expediency during the Wuhan outbreak doesn't make them puppets either.

The WHO is funded primarily by the United States (despite Trump's recent threats), the United Kingdom, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. China contributes less than a tenth of what the US does. The idea that WHO is permanently beholden to China just doesn't add up. Now that China is no longer the center of the outbreak, WHO's praise of the PRC has (as far as I can tell) completely stopped.

feanaro• 6 years ago

I used to have your opinion, but the behaviour I witnessed from the WHO during this pandemic does not align with the behaviour of a rationally behaving, unbiased, independent entity. I listened to several of their conferences and it was very obvious their behaviour is heavily conditioned with political matters. In one of the early conferences, Tedros spent much more time and energy on praising China than on talking about the actual disease, using flowery language I cannot describe as anything other than propagandist.

napier2• 6 years ago

This is premature at best and a potentially misleading statement by the WHO. Perhaps things haven't improved as much during the summer as we'd like, but seasonality is difficult to disaggregate from non-pharmaceutical countermeasures being lifted as we moved into warmer, sunnier weather in the northern hemisphere.

Based on everything we know about infectious disease transmission and illness severity in general, infection rate indicators and case severity are likely to worsen throughout fall and become particularly nasty during the depths of winter. Seasonal reduction in sunlight exposure suppresses immunity (it's not just an issue of vitamin-D), bacteria and mold exposure upticks dramatically as cool, damp days predominate in much of the northern hemisphere.

Air pollution increases as old weather reduces dispersal rates and people burn more fuel to heat their homes while driving more to avoid trudging through rain and snow in the gloom. And if they're not driving, then they're using public transport, and as we know, buses and trains are petri dishes. Some other infectious diseases are likely to play well with SARS2, as is observed with a variety of bacterial infections and common cold associated coronaviruses.

On top of all this, populations are much more likely to huddle together indoors, often in poorly ventilated spaces which allows bioaerosols to concentrate, making a physical distancing impractical for many and multiplying viral exposure load. This can be mitigated by taking steps to upgrade ventilation, adding air cleaning and sterilization countermeasures, and at an individual level, wearing the best available masks and sealed eye protection while indoors with people outside of your quarantine bubble.

Let's hope for the best while preparing for the worst.

gizmo3• 6 years ago

This just means that the R0 is higher during the winter months, immunity will still accumulate to the point where the virus will be contained to small clusters here and there.

napier2• 6 years ago

Yes, it's an overview of the factors that will likely drive R0 to increase during winter months. R0 is highly context dependant variable, it is not a constant. What evidence are you drawing upon to suggest that immunity will have accumulated by then enough to limit outbreaks to small containable clusters?

s9w4• 6 years ago

The WHO should not be trusted - specifically on covid. I will hold them accountable to their 3,4% claim to the day the people responsible will end up in jail.

DanBC6• 6 years ago

their 3,4% claim

The fact you didn't understand a simple statistic isn't the WHO's fault.

s9w4• 6 years ago

"Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died. By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1% of those infected"."

That is the mother of all misleading comparisons. He, Ferguson and the other quacks must be held responsible. They are the ones who caused all this chaos.

coronadisaster2• 6 years ago

Of course the mortality rate will be higher if you only test the people that are hospitalized.... They should have known that.

bengkoang• 6 years ago

They can't/won't acknowledge that Corona Virus is airborne transmission disease until its 5 month after its worldwide pandemic spread, yet they can predict that this is not seasonal pandemic, without sufficient data to support it.

WHO says Covid-19 pandemic is 'one big wave', not seasonal

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