SARS and its impact on my hometown

[kermit]

i was looking at the numbers and canada does have the highest percentage of those who aquire the disease die from it...even higher than china (of those countries that are actually statistically significant). could be china is not releasing certain information...i dunno. maybe they just had a heads up on the problem.

sars has become the punchline to much politically incorrect humor involving asians around campus and little more. sars is still pretty rare...and jabba made a good point about the flu thing. it's no reason to panic.

here's some sars fatality statistics (death/infected ratio i assume) i pulled off the internet @ http://www.globaldevelopment.org/blog042203.htm

Dr. Niman did us the favor of going through the statistics available and doing the percentages for us. He has been doing them every day for a while, but I'll provide just the latest figures. You're not missing much. The daily statistics are very stable over the ten day period covered so far, with the exception of Canada where they've been falling. You may still be surprised at Canada's percentage.

For April 19th, the results were:

Hong Kong - 18.2%
Canada - 18.2%
Singapore - 13.8%
China - 5.4%

This gives us a better perspective on the problem than the commonly quoted, but inaccurate, figure of 4%. Why is China so much lower? Folks, if you think China has opened up fully on this situation, you're far more trusting of their government than I am. The idea that Canada's rate would be more than triple China's is a little difficult to understand. At the rate that China's reported number of cases and deaths is rising, any statistic right now has to be taken with a large grain of salt.