From: Michael M. Butler (mmb@spies.com)
Date: Sat Mar 29 2003 - 16:59:36 MST
On Sat, 29 Mar 2003 17:23:31 -0500, Karen Rand Smigrodzki
<KarenSmi@adelphia.net> wrote:
>
> If you mean that the stats above (given by the WHO daily) are going to
> change daily, well, yes. California has 12 suspected cases as of March
> 28.
> New York has 8 suspected cases.
I mean that you appear to think you know something about the rate of new
cases, but you talk about the raw number, not the rate or rate of change;
and you seem to think that it's nothing to worry about. I encapsulate that
as "Most of the time nothing happens."
Whereas I wonder if it's too soon to tell, since I don't know anything to
speak of regarding incubation, onset and progress and "too soon to tell" is
an old prudent Chinese saying. And "wash your hands and keep your fingers
out of your mouth!" is old guidance from my upbringing that I've come to
not follow ('cause, hey, I've never *died* from it yet--typical monkey
thinking), and am now promoting. Capsule form: "It ain't the fall that
kills you, it's the sudden acceleration at the end."
> I am wondering about your simple population
> pattern diffusion model. Could you explain to me your model please? Or
> perhaps you only meant to say that infectious diseases are so called
> because
> they are infectious and will spread in a population?
My calling it a "model" was probably a bit grandiose. I'll probably now use
fifty words where ten should do. Epidemiologists probably have a three word
phrase for it. It's a a kind of social mean-free-path notion.
It seems to me that those people with a low value for "degrees of
separation" from Hong Kong and other areas with a high number of reported
cases, and with "frequent flyer" mobility, also have a low value for
"degrees of separation" to menbers of other population centers with large
Asian populations; and thus, those places might evolve as potential
secondary concentrations of cases or become epidemic foci (if that's an
appropriate term). Hong Kong and San Francisco used to be almost sister
cities, and SF and Oakland have a lot of connections, too.
I used the funny wording out of a remanent fear of being called some sort
of bigot. Sorry. There's a lot of namecalling on the list of late.
MM [Am I over my 8 posts yet?] B
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