03/17/2020
Today, my epidemiologist colleagues shared this presentation by Xihong Lin, A professor of the Department Biostatistics at Harvard University.
Her team analyzed the data of 26, 000 COVID-19 cases in Wuhan. She showed that the Intervention that stopped the outbreak in Wuhan was centralized quarantine, which means that they moved those who were infected or possibly infected in mobile units and hotels to isolate them.
Self-quarantine reduced the transmission of the virus but was not enough! As family asymptomatic members continued the spread by going out in the community, to get medication or food, during their incubation period.
So get prepared as it is most likely what we are going to face in the big cities like L.A. The number of cases increases daily went from 42 confirmed cases on Friday to 90 today. And this is with the current "old fashion" testing method. The high throughput testing is starting up soon.
Dr. Lin described the different phases they went through in Wuhan (i.e. car ban, self-quarantine, centralized quarantine) and how the healthcare professionals were finally protected from getting infected once they implemented the right protective barriers; face mask (airways protection), eye protection (to reduce transmission to the eyelashes), ear protection (to reduce transmission via ears).
Public health workers went door-to-door to screen the population and detect those who had symptoms, and triage them and send them to centralized quarantine.
In her analysis, she described the demographic of the infected patients. Elderly were more at risks as we know, and there was a difference between elderly males and females but most likely because Chinese males are smokers.
These are from real data! This might be scary or ut hopefully will send a message to all of us to stop going out when we don't need to, stop traveling to other cities. The sooner we act the faster we will stop the outbreak.
So if you are interested to know more, you can listen to the full presentation using this link: https://harvard.zoom.us/…/v8Ytceqqqzs3GNzB4gSDB_59W9TsK6Ks1…
or you can read the pre-print at https://www.medrxiv.org/conte…/10.1101/2020.03.03.20030593v1
Stay healthy, stay home, and kuddos to our healthcare providers who are in the front line to help us all to get through this.
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