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The statistics of SARS

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  • The statistics of SARS

    anyway..i dunno i was just thinking..if you really did get sars and you did fight it off..why cant most everyone else? and if its so simple and typical as you say why cant the chinese or anyone else put an end to the epidemic..

    Well, most everyone else does fight it off. You see these death rates hovering about ten to twenty percent, but, like all statistics, it all depends upon how you look at the numbers. And in my opinion, I don't think anyone has really looked at the real numbers in China.

    I mentioned back in March about how many ill people there were walking the streets of Bejing. Well, who knows if all of them had SARS, but, you've got to remember something about medicine in China. Only the really, really sick people end up in their hospitals. Most ill people go to these traditional Chinese medicine clinics, where records are not kept.

    So, if you want to look at numbers, look at these. Let's say that you've got a hundred ill people with some sort of flu in Bejing. Let's say that ten are really really sick, the rest, sick but feeling capable of handling it without going to a hospital. Those ten end up in the hospital, the other ninety go to TCM clinics, where they get teas and stuff, and then go home and suffer. Of the ten that go to the hospital, two die. According to the Chinese government, they only see ten sick people with the flu; the ones that go to TCM clinics don't get counted because no accurate records of their visits are really taken or kept. With these numbers, you get a twenty percent death rate for this flu, even though, in reality, the death rate is only two percent.

    Now, what the actual numbers of SARS cases truly are in China is beyond me, and everybody else for that matter. No one really knows. There's no way of finding out. Too many people get their health care at these clinics; it's not like here in the US, where state and national medical societies might require the reporting of certain diseases to the US government. We can create fairly accurate statistics of disease states here in the US because of our record keeping and reporting ability. I don't see China's health system having the same capability.

    I will say this though, the SARS thing is far more prevalent in China than what anyone is saying. And it is still an issue. I spoke with one of my friends over there, who basically told me that tourism is completely shot, business is hurting because of the lack of international travel and dealings, and security checkpoints are located in various transportation locales. The whole idea of taking a train when you have a simple cough is purely anathema at this point. You just don't do it.

    It's hard to put an end to an epidemic of this nature when you're dealing with a virus that is highly communicative, in a society that is large and in close quarters. Generally, if you have a small society with a highly infectious agent, if you take the few people that are ill, and quarantine them, they will either get better or die; either way, the virus is (most of the time) destroyed in the process. It's kind of hard to quarantine infected people in a country that is as over-populated as China is, that is as closely packed as the Chinese people are, and that has infected people running around that are hard to discover or find. It's just not a good scenario from an epidmiological standpoint. It's just gonna have to burn it's way through the general population before it goes away.
    Experienced Community organizer. Yeah, let's choose him to run the free world. It will be historic. What could possibly go wrong...

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