5 ms·

How the hell are people going to even catch measles right now? I would expect that the social distancing measures are going to do more than the vaccines ever wo

How the hell are people going to even catch measles right now? I would expect that the social distancing measures are going to do more than the vaccines ever would.

nostromo 6y ago
Measles is much, much more contagious than Covid-19.
isoprophlex 6y ago
Without any social distancing, other measures etc, covid has a basic reproduction number of 2-ish... measles has R0 of 15.
- ouid 6y ago
  Initially, deaths had a doubling time of 3 days, and the infectious period for covid is weeks. I haven't seen a reasonable calculation of R_0 that was less than 3.5.
  - isoprophlex 6y ago
    Yeah it's difficult to estimate, very dependent on what environment you study. Nevertheless, measles is clearly different from covid, IIRC because it survives so much better outside it's hosts. About R0 values, here's some data from that cruise ship, early on in the pandemic: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971220300916 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197122... • The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pneumonia has caused 355 confirmed cases on the Diamond Princess cruise ship as of February 16, 2020. • We estimated that the Maximum-Likelihood (ML) value of reproductive number (R0) was 2.28 for COVID-19 outbreak at the early stage on the ship
    - ouid 6y ago
      The diamond princess is a truly terrible place to try to get an estimate for R_0. A cruise ship outbreak is likely to be A) many times more infectious, and B) the countermeasures applied are likely to be many times more intense. For instance, the R_0 of covid on the cruise ship was estimated to be around 15 in a paper published less than 2 weeks later. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7107563/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7107563/ Ultimately, a cruise ship is a bad place to look for estimates on R_0 in more broadly applicable contexts, and trying to calculate R_0 so early, when the number of people actually infected is not well known, is a task doomed to failure. Furthermore, I trust big studies with large confidence intervals done by national laboratories https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article, more than I trust studies done by people whose methods section is "we plugged it into R".
Florin_Andrei 6y ago
Social distancing is very sketchily done in a lot of places. Plus, measles is far more infectious than COVID.
jandrewrogers 6y ago
Measles is one of the most contagious diseases known. Despite extensive vaccination and humans being the only reservoir for the virus, it has proven to be difficult to eradicate. It is very effective at spreading through the air even when there are few susceptible hosts.

How the hell are people going to even catch measles right now? I would expect that the social distancing measures are going to do more than the vaccines ever would.

nostromo 6y ago

Measles is much, much more contagious than Covid-19.

isoprophlex 6y ago

Without any social distancing, other measures etc, covid has a basic reproduction number of 2-ish... measles has R0 of 15.

ouid 6y ago
Initially, deaths had a doubling time of 3 days, and the infectious period for covid is weeks. I haven't seen a reasonable calculation of R_0 that was less than 3.5.
- isoprophlex 6y ago
  Yeah it's difficult to estimate, very dependent on what environment you study. Nevertheless, measles is clearly different from covid, IIRC because it survives so much better outside it's hosts. About R0 values, here's some data from that cruise ship, early on in the pandemic: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971220300916 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197122... • The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pneumonia has caused 355 confirmed cases on the Diamond Princess cruise ship as of February 16, 2020. • We estimated that the Maximum-Likelihood (ML) value of reproductive number (R0) was 2.28 for COVID-19 outbreak at the early stage on the ship
  - ouid 6y ago
    The diamond princess is a truly terrible place to try to get an estimate for R_0. A cruise ship outbreak is likely to be A) many times more infectious, and B) the countermeasures applied are likely to be many times more intense. For instance, the R_0 of covid on the cruise ship was estimated to be around 15 in a paper published less than 2 weeks later. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7107563/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7107563/ Ultimately, a cruise ship is a bad place to look for estimates on R_0 in more broadly applicable contexts, and trying to calculate R_0 so early, when the number of people actually infected is not well known, is a task doomed to failure. Furthermore, I trust big studies with large confidence intervals done by national laboratories https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article, more than I trust studies done by people whose methods section is "we plugged it into R".

Florin_Andrei 6y ago

Social distancing is very sketchily done in a lot of places. Plus, measles is far more infectious than COVID.

jandrewrogers 6y ago

Measles is one of the most contagious diseases known. Despite extensive vaccination and humans being the only reservoir for the virus, it has proven to be difficult to eradicate. It is very effective at spreading through the air even when there are few susceptible hosts.