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posted by martyb on Wednesday March 18 2020, @07:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the resourcefulness++ dept.

31,000 Chinese students arrive in Australia despite coronavirus travel ban

By travelling to a third country and spending two weeks in self-quarantine before coming to Australia, [more than 31,000] students were able to satisfy the Department of Home Affairs' travel restrictions. After two weeks in a third country those who have travelled from China are then able to travel to Australia.

Figures from Department of Home Affairs show 31,196 Chinese students have now arrived in Australia since mid-February. The students have been arriving at a rate of about 1000 a day, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.

[...] A spokesperson for the University of Sydney told news.com.au the institution is supporting their students with counselling services and fee payment plans, and have set up a dedicated hotline to help students through what they called a "challenging time".

[...] "We won't know until census on 31 March how many of our students have been affected but we anticipate it could be up to 12,000."

[...] When the ban on non citizens travelling from China to Australia was announced in early February, 106,000 Chinese students enrolled in Australian universities were overseas.

The local education sector has been hit hard by thousands of full fee paying international students being blocked from entering the country.

In response, some institutions, including the University of Melbourne, University of Adelaide and Western Sydney University have offered grants of up to $7500 to affected students to get around the travel ban.

One Chinese student said she spent nearly $20,000 travelling from China to Thailand to self-quarantine and make it to her classes at the University of Sydney.

[...] Similar travel bans have now been extended to Iran, Italy and the Republic of Korea.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 18 2020, @09:41PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 18 2020, @09:41PM (#972925)

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/graph-theory-suggests-covid-19-might-be-a-small-world-after-all/ [zdnet.com]

    Graph theory suggests COVID-19 might be a ‘small world’ after all

    The media regularly refers to "exponential" growth in the number of cases of COVID-19 respiratory disease, and deaths from the disease, but the numbers suggest something else, a "small world" network that might have power law properties. That would be meaningfully different from the exponential growth path for the disease.

    ...

    Scholars Anna Ziff and Robert Ziff, respectively of Duke University and the University of Michigan, earlier this month posted on the medrXiv pre-print server https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.16.20023820v2 [medrxiv.org] their curve-fitting exercise for COVID-19 confirmed cases and deaths, both in China and in the rest of the world, titled "Fractal kinetics of COVID-19 pandemic."

    As the authors write, "in standard epidemiological analysis, one assumes that the number of cases in diseases like this one grows exponentially, based upon the idea of a fixed reproduction rate."

    But that standard epidemiological view is not born out by the data. They found that while the numbers "display large growth, they do not, in fact, follow exponential behavior." Rather, the authors observed a period of initial exponential growth, followed by what's called a "power law," which is not the same thing.

    Graph theory to the rescue???

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 18 2020, @09:55PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 18 2020, @09:55PM (#972929)

    When I was ignorant on the subject, I assumed the epi curve was exponential too. Once I got a crash course in epidemiology from Wiki, I realized it wasn't. It's basic knowledge in that field that the curve is a hump. So when they say "in standard epidemiological analysis, one assumes that the number of cases in diseases like this one grows exponentially", it doesn't pass the smell test. It's like they confirmed what everybody already knew, and published the results as if it were some kind of epiphany.

    • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday March 18 2020, @10:28PM

      by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Wednesday March 18 2020, @10:28PM (#972937) Homepage

      Even math idiots like me are first taught that the rate of epidemics follow a logistic (S-curve) bounded by an upper limit. The S-curve corresponds to the rate while the bell-like curve corresponds to the number of infections.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 19 2020, @01:48AM (3 children)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 19 2020, @01:48AM (#973016) Journal
      So why is the curve humping out at oh, 80k cases, instead of 300 million cases for China?
      • (Score: 2) by choose another one on Thursday March 19 2020, @02:27AM (2 children)

        by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 19 2020, @02:27AM (#973024)

        Because China changed the population behaviour to get R0 1 so transmission petered out well before it would naturally do so.
        The curve humps naturally due to running out of targets to infect, because all viable ("near" enough) ones are infected already.

        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 19 2020, @02:57AM

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 19 2020, @02:57AM (#973035) Journal

          Because China changed the population behaviour to get R0 1 so transmission petered out well before it would naturally do so.

          Exactly. I think we'll find out with a whole bunch of the present countries, what happens when one doesn't change the model's behavior.

        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 19 2020, @04:40PM

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 19 2020, @04:40PM (#973237) Journal
          As an example, the US's reported number of cases hasn't gone below 24% increase per day for the past 20 days (with the last few days well above, ranging 29-42%). Italy still is growing at 13% a day for the past three days despite very aggressive attempts at delaying the spread of coronavirus.