Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Old Rule Of Thumb Was That Pandemics Happen 3 Times Per Century. 20 Years In, We've Had At Least 7 Scares
The rapid and global spread of the deadly new coronavirus caught households, business leaders, investors and policy makers off guard, but health experts and economists who study pandemics say it shouldnt have come as a surprise at all. Epidemics of infectious diseases have become a regular part of the global landscape in the past quarter-century, thanks in part to economic trends including urbanization, globalization and increased human consumption of animal proteins as society becomes more prosperous, these experts say. (Hilsenrath, 3/6)
Researchers at Harvard and Imperial College London estimate that, on average, only one-third of the illnesses exported from China have been observed, a calculation that is still likely to be incomplete. Its not accounting for those who are asymptomatic, said James Hay, a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The number including those without symptoms or with mild symptoms is likely to be higher than that. The estimate is based on assessments of how many infected people traveled to other countries from Wuhan before movement was restricted. (McGinty, 3/6)
Adam Kucharski studies how diseases spread, but hes not handling viruses in the lab or treating sick people in the hospital. Hes a mathematician at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and he uses math to understand outbreaks of diseases like Ebola, SARS, influenza and now Covid-19. His goal is to design better ways to control outbreaks. In an eerie coincidence, he wrote a book called The Rules of Contagion, before the current outbreak, which has been published in Britain and will be released in September in the United States. In it he talks about the math of contagion involving not only physical diseases, but also ideas, rumors and even financial crises. (Gorman, 3/5)
The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) made a startling pronouncementthis week when he estimated the global mortality rate of the coronavirus to be3.4 percent much higher than the seasonal flu. Experts warn that the figure from WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus comes full of caveats and is likely tochangeas more people get tested and undergo treatment for the virus. (Weixel, 3/6)
