SARS and its impact on my hometown

[[CAKE]anonymity]

As you can tell by the topic title this thread is about SARS, i'm sure we all know about it by now. For those who don't know, i live in toronto one of the hot beds for SARS and i just to know if you live in toronto and fear it/don't fear it and why, or if u don't live in toronto, do you think it would detour you from coming to our exellent city (best in my opinion, possible bias though, you'll have to decide for yourself).

I know the world health orginization put a warning on toronto basically saying don't come to toronto because of sars, and i just like to say that its easy to say that when your on the other side of the planet. <_<

The last thing i've heard was that the health officals belive that the first cases happenen it a hospital that is like a 15 min walk from where i live (15 tops) and i know one person that was in quartine for it, in our neighbourhood (didn't know him personally).

any feed back u can give would be greatful, thanks.

[jabbahunt]

I don't know, how many people have had the flu since then?

[Scrye]

well, from what i know is that the health officials had it under control. has it changed?
oh btw, for the people that don`t know what it is:

Severe Acute Respiratory System = SARS

i`m not al sure what it is but all i know is that you have a really hard time breathing.
but i live about 4 hours from there and i don`t really worry about it. And my Gf has been there in the middle of it all and she didn`t get it.

well, from what i know. only about 200 people have been infected and that isn`t all that much considering how many people live there, what is it? 2 000 000?

from what i have learned from the news: the Sars virus can be living on any inanimate object for 24 hours. (thats why people were in the frenzy to wash their hands all the time)

[Guest]

It's basically a restriction of chest movement that causes you to find it extremely hard to breathe. However, contra to what the hype in the news might suggest, the ratio of people actually dying from it, isn't as great as those infected...

[Guest]

'For those of you who may have been hesitating due to SARS, I'd like to let you know that the SARS issue has been completely brought under control now in Toronto. Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones are playing a concert in Toronto at the end of this month in support of getting visitors back to Toronto. Lindsay, the location of the Retreat about 100 miles north-east of Toronto, has never been affected.'

As sent in an email to me:)

[[CAKE]anonymity]

thats good to hear net. The world health orginzation does have it under control, but they said that before and then there were a bunch of new cases were discovered and those spread. i was mainly wondering if people in other areas of the world were concerned about it, guess the debates section was the best place to post this, and wondering on the media coverage of this in places like the states.

[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.

[Guest]

83.2698% of statistics are made up on the spot.

[PIX]

You are 100% in that fact Net. Do an actual poll on the people affected by AIDS in the world and you will
find a huge difference in the numbers posted by the media.

Screw SARS....I'm sweating West Nile Virus down here. I could find it easier to hide from people than from
millions of little skeeters. HEY JABBA....you got dem skeeters over there on the other side of the state too???

[jabbahunt]

yea,"cough,cough"yea dude. man must be muggy out here, getting "cough"hard to breath.

[Scrye]

what? your not the only one who has a threat of the West Nile Virus!!
we constantly hear on the news about that crap over here too.
i call that a "double whammy" :lol:

[[CAKE]anonymity]

if you've ever been in norhern ontario aka the canadian sheild:Pduring may (black fly season) you'd kill for west nile mosquitos

[kermit]

i plan to make a living as a statistician. i think it really depends on how you select your data and, more importantly, why u selected that data for your sample. it's easy to "lie" w/ statistics especially in regression models which attempt to forcast data. some statisticians, especially for law firms, get paid handsomely to "lie". if the statistician has no domain knowledge of what he/she is sampling, then i wouldn't trust the stats too much. my econometrics professor always said that the theory must come before the testing and analysis.

[g-boy]

There have been much worse epidemics, and in fact I'd barely call SARS an epidemic. When it first started going on, I was listening to Loveline and Dr. Drew said it wasn't a big deal, as long as they treated it as they would any dangerous disease, it would be easily controlled. By the way, there doesn't seem to be much of a specific "SARS" virus. I don't feel like looking it up, but I heard something about the percentages of people with reported "SARS" having the same virus cause it were dropping like even below 20%. At some point, you gotta just think it's a respiratory problem that people blow out of proportion. Don't worry... death rates aren't high, there is no epidemic. Doesn't mean don't be careful... but really, you could get worse.

[FreeFall]

ppfff, i remember when SARS first became present and everyone was freakin' out... some plague of the millenium this turned out to be<_<

the Sars virus can be living on any inanimate object for 24 hours

I thought the SARS virus could only survive on counter-tops etc. for 3 hours . . .meh whatever, If I catch it I CATCH IT!:D
*Cough, cough....thump

[[CAKE]anonymity]

I've heard that it can live on surfaces for 24 hours, although i don't know how reliable the sources are, the doctors don't seem to have much of an idea what it is, i think thats why there makeing such a big deal of it

[Wha?]

The reason the percentage death rate is high in Canada is because it was localized almost entirely in a couple hospitals in Toronto. I don't know about wacky foreign hospitals, but ours are full of people with health problems.

SARS is caused by a specific coronavirus which was isolated in China, but diseases are like food; most food tastes like chicken, and most disease is flu-like.

[[CAKE]anonymity]

Apperantly this so called epidemic is almost at an end, but i wouldn't be surprised to see quite a few new cases spring up again, or someone slapping a "toronto is an unsafe town" or something, devastating our economy further.