April 27, 2003
SARS Fear In Media
Graph of the SARS EpidemicYou've probably all noticed the increase in media coverage about SARS. It's got the front-page headlines on msnbc.com for the last three days straight, and newsweek has an awful cover of a masked woman with eyes widened in fear, devoted to SARS.
Meanwhile, the graphs don't show any increase in exponential growth. The first graph above makes scary predictions of 10 million deaths at some date, but it is making the point that that would only happen if the growth is exponential. The graph shows that the growth is less than exponential, though, so it is not a true epidemic.
Also the Canada graph makes an excellent point about cumulative versus active cases, and shows that the active cases in Canada are actually going down.