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Comment by cjbprime | Hacker News Reader

I spent a few minutes on it and it looks like, if Zika did not exist, the Olympics would add 10% of extra total yearly tourism to Rio. Some complications:

* tourism to Rio this year is presumably lower than the baseline I'm using because it is presently the site of a Zika outbreak.

* the tourism into Rio for the Olympics is especially international, so it may be reasonable to be especially concerned about its effect on global transmission of the virus.

I think the people advocating for canceling the Olympics understand that it's only 10% extra tourism, but still think that small percentage of extra tourism is a bad outcome.

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I posted the article. I think the second point is most worrisome. Most visitors to Rio are either:

1. From Latin America, where Zika already is, or 2. From US/Europe, where Zika can't go.

The olmypics will bring a delegation from every country + tourists from more of those countries. So Zika can spread to other regions. And once it spreads anywhere in a large region it will likely spread everywhere.

On the east coast, the mosquitos that carry Zika are found as far north as New York.

This appears to be true: http://www.cdc.gov/zika/vector/range.html

The range shown here includes all of the Southeast and Texas, much of the southern Midwest, and California up to and including the Bay Area.

This is only the range of Aedes aegypti. Whether a particular strain of the mosquito can carry Zika remains to be seen (though quite likely) as Aedes aegypti is very heterogenous.

> From US/Europe, where Zika can't go.

What? There have been Zika cases in the US.

What he meant was that while Zika can be carried anywhere by humans, it won't spread in areas which don't have the right type of mosquitos.

That's what I meant. It's already going to spread through the US regardless because it's physically connected to areas where Zika exists.

I suppose Southern Europe might be able to get it? I'm not sure if the extent of the mosquitos there.

Update: only a very small bit of southern Spain. So not really a concern for Europe or North Africa. Also, they don't have the sort of contiguous area where it would spread across a whole continent.

Map of Aedes Aegyptus: http://m.imgur.com/uCegZHS?r

Except that it is communicable between humans (and, presumably, other hosts).

It can be communicated between humans, but it sounds like the rate at which that occurs is far too low to cause an epidemic.

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