RE: Poor Misunderstood Exponential Curve. It Gets Better
Exponential growth is a concept that we often have to communicate in infectious disease control. For me its the concept that makes measles so terrifying. Each disease (under various circumstances) has its own reproduction number, otherwise know as R0 (pronounced R-Nought). This is the number of people on average each infected person will go on to infect. If the number is bigger that 1 the outbreak continues of it is smaller than 1 the outbreak will start to draw to the end.
The Ebola outbreak in 2014/15 had and R0 of 2, this made it similar to the grains of rice on the chess board. Measles on the other hand has an R0 of between 14-18! Measles kills around 1 out of ever couple of children it infects and causes a great deal of suffering for those it doesnt. This is why we care so much about having a measles vaccination rate of 95% if we didn’t it would spread like wild fire.
Here’s hoping the Steemit (a good disease that I’m happy I caught) has a high R0!
I was just thinking it's lucky that the common cold is rarely fatal, since it must have a similar R0 to measles. But then I guess there must have been super virulent strains that killed off entire populations, with that strain also going extinct due to lack of hosts!
It's actually pretty low (in comparision) at only a 2-4 from what I've heard in the past. There's just nothing stopping it. Not a cold but that spanish flu (1918) was a bit of a shitter. It's best not to think about this in the context of weaponized smallpox (not that you we're, sorry for bringing it up).
That gives me an idea just how fast measles can spread. Weaponized diseases are definitely super scary. I guess the main reason no one uses them is because the bugs don’t know they’re only supposed to attack people from the other country
:)))