3 ms·
> "Cursory research tells me that this sort of cycle is super uncommon." No, this is common. Look at measles: https://wiekvoet.blogspot.com/2014/03/looking-at-
by nonbel 7y ago
> "Cursory research tells me that this sort of cycle is super uncommon."
No, this is common. Look at measles: https://wiekvoet.blogspot.com/2014/03/looking-at-measles-data-in-project-tycho.html https://wiekvoet.blogspot.com/2014/03/looking-at-measles-dat...
You can see two things:
1) It is very seasonal, peaking in the late spring. My personal guess is it has to do with the relative humidity.
2) It is not uncommon to have 1-2 skipped years between large outbreaks. This is because the susceptible people accumulate until there is an outbreak. See SIR models: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidemiology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidem...
If we are seeing that in this case, that means the virus is infecting many more kids than the few being detected due to these symptoms. Basically the virus is circulating freely but this is a rare complication.
- seventytwo 7y agoMy first thought was some kind of two year life cycle of an organism... there are some strange life cycles out there, like cicadas (or similar) that have 17 year life cycles. Perhaps this is something similar? Maybe a mosquito-borne parasite with a two year cycle?
- nonbel 7y agoThere really is no need for that. All you need is for the growth in number of susceptible people (usually roughly birthrate) be slow enough that the threshold for an outbreak isn't reached for a couple years. One reason for this could be a previous large outbreak so the growth is starting from a low baseline.