Chile Forum

yea, it is fairly well in the country now. This morning's numbers where 300.

I thought I smelled a rat with the big delay in declaring a pandemic by WHO. It seems they are under pressure by various countries not to do it. So far this flue is serious, but people are not dropping like flies in the streets. What happens if we have a really serious outbreak? Can we trust the WHO to tell people in time?

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/s ... enDocument

The numbers can not be trusted. They are mostly meaningless. I even seen one report last week that claimed Chile had the highest number of "confirmed" cases in the World. Which makes for nothing more than headline grabbing statistical B.S.

Take Chile's numbers:
2,000 cases (mas or menos), assuming 16 million people (mas o menos), yields and infection rate of something like 0.0125% (mas o menos). How many people have been tested however? We don't know. I only give any stock to Chile's numbers because it is a fairly centralized small country that can be monitored correctly.

The U.S. quit testing weeks ago, and the estimates where over a 100,000 people at that time. The U.S. is likly well over a million cases by now. Official reported tested numbers where over something like 15,000 cases, but again they quit testing.

How about all the countries that either lack the facilities, are dependent on waiting for other countries such as the U.S. CDC, or are purposely not testing?

What about all the countries that even if they did test, lack the resources to do anything about it. Can anyone seriously believe a country with a population like Brazil or Mexico has less cases?

Mexico claims to be leveling off, which is a good sign. It also does not seem to have had anything to do with anything humans did to stop it. Just nature is running its course.

The big headline when this is all done, if it is done, will be the complete and total breakdown of the global testing and monitoring system.

Testing errors cause a miscount in the U.K.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8098895.stm

What I can not find, and I hope someone else can, are proper reports online with statistical modeling or sampling. There is not much else to go on. The official test results seem to be apples and oranges even within a single country. At what point does the bug reach its saturation rate? That is, at what point has community immunity gotten so widespread that the infection numbers level off?

My big worry is that some situation like this might happen, and a really scary bug is slipping under the radar screen because of the breakdown in the global monitoring system.

The El Mercurio newspaper is reporting 2300 official cases, and estimates are 22,000 cases in the country based on statistical models. The government has bought an additional 1 million flue treatments.

They are blaming the transantigo and teenagers as the prime source. Seems Chile can not rid itself of either one.

Essentially anyone with a fever 38 C / 100 F degrees that goes to doctor, and has two or more of the standard cold symptoms (pains, cough, and so on ) is being prescribed tamiflue or similar before even getting a confirmation on the test back.