12-23-2015, 06:15 AM
Gypsy: "I have been asking folks in waimea and Kona lately what they thought about the dengue outbreak? Most responded quickly that it was spreading around the resort areas and within popular tourist camping spots like Mackenzie and Ho'o kena beach parks mainly within the tourists though."
Scary if widely true, statistically, the great majority of known cases have been amongst residents.
DOH is now sharing the number of known infectious cases with each announcement. I realize that we don't know how many undiagnosed cases there are, but the low numbers of infectious cases is reassuring. I would have to get bitten by a skeeter that bit an infected person about 5 days ago, so the actual odds of getting infected are pretty low. Ultimately, it is not really a "highly infectious" disease, because the method of infection is pretty inefficient, since it must go through a mosquito, compared to an air born disease like influenza or spread by contact disease like norovirus, you have to be in pretty close proximity to mosquitos that are also in close proximity to infected people who are going outside to infect the mosquitos.
If sick people get tested, and then self quarantine like any responsible person would, then spread to new mosquitos would be limited to the tiny window between being infectious and having symptoms. If Gypsy's friends want to stop the spread in their neighborhood they need to be keeping their sick family members indoors and away from mosquitos, even during the period when they feel better but are still infectious. That is what the family I know who had a family member as one of the first cases did. She stayed indoors with windows closed for 3 weeks, but there have been no new cases where she lives or works. People spread this, not mosquitos, the mosquitos only travel a few hundred yards at most, but people can spread this all over the islands if they do not take responsibility for not spreading the disease to new victims./
Scary if widely true, statistically, the great majority of known cases have been amongst residents.
DOH is now sharing the number of known infectious cases with each announcement. I realize that we don't know how many undiagnosed cases there are, but the low numbers of infectious cases is reassuring. I would have to get bitten by a skeeter that bit an infected person about 5 days ago, so the actual odds of getting infected are pretty low. Ultimately, it is not really a "highly infectious" disease, because the method of infection is pretty inefficient, since it must go through a mosquito, compared to an air born disease like influenza or spread by contact disease like norovirus, you have to be in pretty close proximity to mosquitos that are also in close proximity to infected people who are going outside to infect the mosquitos.
If sick people get tested, and then self quarantine like any responsible person would, then spread to new mosquitos would be limited to the tiny window between being infectious and having symptoms. If Gypsy's friends want to stop the spread in their neighborhood they need to be keeping their sick family members indoors and away from mosquitos, even during the period when they feel better but are still infectious. That is what the family I know who had a family member as one of the first cases did. She stayed indoors with windows closed for 3 weeks, but there have been no new cases where she lives or works. People spread this, not mosquitos, the mosquitos only travel a few hundred yards at most, but people can spread this all over the islands if they do not take responsibility for not spreading the disease to new victims./