--On Thursday, February 13, 2020 13:07 -0800 Scott Weeks <surfer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >... > https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/diseases/2019- > novel-coronavirus-infection.html > > As of February 8, 2020, 7 cases of 2019 novel coronavirus > (2019-nCoV) have been confirmed in Canada. Areas in Canada > with confirmed cases > > Province Confirmed cases > Ontario 3 > British Columbia 4 > 2016 population = 4,648,055 Scott, With the understanding that I'm not making any recommendation (here or in my earlier note) other than (i) if there is any reasonable possibility that the meeting would be canceled, that should be done earlier rather than later and (ii) that we not pretend that refunding the registration fees of those whose visas are denied covers the potential costs to participants who make arrangements to attend and then are forced to cancel... First, in the interests of statistical accuracy, that population figure is for British Columbia, not all of Canada, and the population of British Columbia last year is estimated at a tad over 5 million about half of whom are in the Vancouver metro area. That obviously strengthens your case if you are trying to make a comment about percentages of the population around Vancouver: even 4 out of 2 1/2 million is a rather small number. On the other hand, the very nature of a significantly contagious and epidemic disease (both of which have been assumed at this point but some experts have claimed neither has been proven) is, in the absence of effective mitigation techniques and almost by definition, exponential. If one made the (silly) assumption that those four people would affect others exponentially for the days between now and the start of the meeting, the entire population of the province would be infected in under 12 days. If one assumes that containment and mitigation are 50% effective, i.e., that only two of those four succeed in infecting others, it takes around 22 days which is still lots of time. Those number are certainly not predictions and they are silly for many reasons, but my point is that "four people confirmed as infected as of February 8 out of a five million population" tells us little or nothing about the likely state of things on March 21. Not good, not bad, just nothing. john
