Virus May Spread Twice as Fast as Earlier Thought, Study Says

[LiberalArkie]

The new coronavirus raced through China much faster than previously thought, a U.S. research team said, suggesting that extremely widespread vaccination or immunity will be necessary to end the pandemic.

Each person infected early in the epidemic in Wuhan probably passed the virus to an average of 5.7 other people, according to a mathematical analysis from Los Alamos National Laboratory. That’s more than twice what the World Health Organization and other public health authorities reported in February.

The team’s results are specific to the Chinese outbreak. If they hold true elsewhere in the world, the pandemic may be more difficult to control than some authorities had modeled.

At the rate of spread calculated in the study, some 82% of the population would need to be immune, either via a vaccine or because they’d already had the disease, in order to stop the virus from spreading, the Los Alamos team said. Without such protection, high levels of social distancing will be needed if more than one out of five infectious people is undiagnosed, the authors said.

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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-08/virus-may-spread-twice-as-fast-as-earlier-thought-study-says?utm_medium=social&utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business&utm_source=twitter

[SoonerPride]

1. Life as we knew it isn't coming back for at least 18 months

if we are lucky.

and maybe never.