How Epidemiologists Understand the Corona virus

latest developments of the coronavirus pandemic, Justin Lessler: an associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Lessler, who has studied outbreaks of influenza, measles, and cholera, is particularly interested in transmission dynamics in a method of controlling the spread of disease. A conversation which has been edited for length and clarity covers the ways in that understanding of the pandemic has improved what they can learn from different governments, responses, and why our age adults seem more at risk of serious illness. They seem in a number of ways. They suspected from sars and other coronaviruses but it were not sure of. they have a much better grasp of what the incubation period is now (an average of five days) and the generation time which is the time between when a person is infected and when they infect somebody else (with in six days). They are starting to learn a lot more about how infectious it is and the context in which it is infectious. There had signals of this a month ago but now it is very clear that the age distribution of death and severe outcomes is stark with older adults having quite high mortality rates and young kids basically not dying at all. But they do now know that kids get infected. It was unclear why there were not cases before but now there are relatively confident that they are getting infected. They just are not getting sick.

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They are pretty sure based on the data from Wuhan’ China’ that about 80% of deaths occur in those aged sixty or over. Whereas less than one in a thousand occurred in children under 20. Its mean there is an extremely stark age distribution, one study there team member did with the C.D.C. found-- and this is not yet peer-reviewed. It is a preprint that rates of infection were similar in young kids who were exposed and in the population over all But of course; they are not seeing kids getting hospitalized and dying so they know they are not symptomatic of getting severe disease. If like this or not you get ill. If you are thinking about it or getting infected with the virus, in this situation anybody can do that. But, if anybody thinking of what it means to get a disease as actually getting ill then it appears that children are at least somewhat protected. It is a very different think that why children are not getting sick and why older are getting sick or dying at higher except younger adults or children. Why children may not be getting sick at all or getting seriously enough ill to ever show up in the data is a little less clear.