Reference no: EM133617437
COVID-19 is not too different from SARS regarding the major clinical features. However, it has a case fatality rate of approximately 2.3% (worldwide), lower than that of SARS (9.5%) and much lower than that of MERS (34.4%). The possibility cannot be excluded that because of the less severe clinical picture of COVID-19, it has spread in communities more easily than MERS and SARS. The basic reproduction number, R0, (sounds like row) is defined as the expected number of secondary cases produced by a single (typical) infection in a completely susceptible population. The R0 of COVID-19 (2.0-2.5) is still under discussion, and is slightly higher than the R0 of SARS (1.7-1.9) and higher than that of MERS (<1).
Recent estimates put the economic cost of the 2003 SARS epidemic at more than a billion dollars. Think about how the SARS epidemic would have affected the economy of Epiville, and what about the non-economic costs?
Question 1: How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected the economy of countries and as well as the non-economic impacts? Define your answers.
Question 2: What are the most cost-effective and easily implementable ways of manipulating the parameters of reproductive rate to slow the spread of the SARS epidemic? Which of the parameters do you expect would be the most difficult to alter? What if the disease in question was not SARS but HIV/AIDS?
Question 3: Measures such as the attack rate and the case-fatality ratio give us a crude idea of the virulence and mortality of the infectious disease. During an active outbreak, when would the case-fatality ratio be most useful for public health planning and hypothesis testing: at the beginning, middle, or end of the outbreak?
Question 4: Consider the scenario in question 2. When would knowing the attack rate be most useful for stopping the spread of the epidemic? How do changes in the definition of who is at risk affect the calculation of the attack rate, and how might these changes impact public health planning?