Silvaire wrote:
Fast, local, tactical action by the involved. Preferably I think on a county by county level.
That’s pretty much what’s happening here in SoCal,as the federal government is obviously totally incompetent. We’ll see how it all pans out, but I have to say it feels a bit weird being a guinea pig.
At that rate, it will overtake the H1N1 total death toll in about three weeks:
Just for clarity, at that rate it will exceed the H1N1 total death toll in about three weeks, every day.
Now, I used to be good at maths but I’m a bit rusty and can’t even remember how to integrate any more. So tell me if my maths is wrong:
1.32^21*130 = 44K deaths each day after 21 days.
if we bracket a bit as we can’t be quite sure of the exponent:
1.2^21*130 = 6K a day.
1.4^21*130 = 150K deaths a day.
If I put the figures into this more sophisticated calculator with 332 million Americans I get rather lower figures of 123 deaths a day on day 101 and 1540 a day on day 122. Either way, it seems likely that the end figures will be considerably more than 12000.
I won’t disclose our local figures save to say that in the worst case scenario we are likely to overwhelm our hospital many times over. A target of 12K for the USA is likely to be several orders of magnitude too low.
As Silvaire says, it may well be that the measures in New York and elsewhere will be starting to have an effect so hopefully it won’t be quite as cataclysmic. Also network effects mean that the growth isn’t truly exponential. However I think it’s fairly clear that there are likely to be more than 12K deaths in the USA overall. And within the next few weeks.
I have some sympathy for the ‘just get it over with’ approach, but only if you have the honesty to face the numbers. It’s true that epidemiology and biology in general are messy and full of uncertainty, but you have to be feeling awfully lucky to dismiss the predictions.
It also depends on whether you believe in the power of medicine to deal with the pandemic should it hit us all more slowly. There are treatments that sound reasonably promising so more time would buy an opportunity for further testing and manufacture, for example.
What troubles me is that as I half expected, this is turning out not to be just a disease of the ancient and frail. That is not to say that I don’t care about the ancient and frail, but that I recognise that they often don’t have a long life expectancy.
Surprised nobody has posted a link to Mark Handley’s analysis:
http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/ (though it seems a bit broken at the moment).
Off_Field wrote:
That’s very positive MedEwok, do you think it is the calm before the storm or hopefully that measures are being effective in your local area.?
I’m not sure yet. It feels like a calm before the storm, but if the number of patients doesn’t pick up soon then I think the measures are already effective. The number of social interactions where the virus can spread has already been drastically reduced.
Airborne_Again wrote:
Is it an artifact of the calculations?
Yes. For last point I cannot use central differences (for obvious reasons 
), so I used a second order backward difference. It’s not “medical” since it suggests that people can be revived from the death, but it is mathematically correct. I could have put an IF statement there, or used first order backward difference, but I am just looking at the numbers anyway, the trends. The numerical derivation of the last number just have to be some “guesswork”, simply because you cannot know the future, and a negative trend is what the 3 last numbers suggests from a mathematical point of view using second order backward differences.
If I was trying to predict the future based on the numbers, then I would have put an IF statement there, because a negative trend can never be part of the solution space. Almost anything can happen in the future, but not that For me it doesn’t matter in this case, I just interpret it as a potential. or the tendency in the numbers, and it will be gone the next day anyway, when the yesterday’s future is known for sure.
That PDF local copy is dated 23/3/2020 so appears current.
Notably hotels and B&Bs are shut, which means you have to sleep in your car if you have to go somewhere essential and it’s a long way.
If the govt shut down all B2B activity that would be most of the economy finished, and the govt would end up paying 80% of the wages of most of the country. They probably don’t want to do that, just yet… Also the UK would end up losing a lot of business permanently. Let’s say a firm in Brazil wants to buy an electric motor from a UK company, which is shut. They will buy it from Siemens in Germany which is not shut, and they will probably never come back (once on an approved vendor list, etc…). This is going to be a massive long term economic hit for any country which shuts down its manufacturing industry while other similar countries do not.
I don’t know if Italy shut down manufacturing. We see photos of Rome and the pope etc on the news but Italy has a huge industrial base. A lot of plastics and chemicals are made there.
So, like so many have said, number of infections is meaningless, it looks like the virus is just about everywhere. A big part of the population is carrying it without kwnowing, and tests only confirm that.
Since most of us started to worry only after Italy’s numbers, I want to ask; where else in Europe are we seeing excess mortality from respiratory diseases?
Not in Germany, not in Austria, not in Switzerland which was supposed to be just days behind Italy, not in the Netherlands, where yesterday’s number where lower and only one region is reporting Hospitals to have more patients than normal.
Japan, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/03/20/national/coronavirus-explosion-expected-japan/ has no lockdown and no cases. Everybody says ‘masks’ but their trains continue to be packed. If masks work that well, we could all just do that instead of shutdowns.
Another question. Many of us laughed at China’s measures, and commented that those would never be possible in a western democracy…. Now we are all copying it.
Where is the actual hard science to say that lockdowns like this make any difference at all? Where was the experiment done, whit a control group and all that science stuff?
But my first question is more pressing? Where, outside Italy, are all the excess deaths?
A big part of the population is carrying it without kwnowing, and tests only confirm that.
I think if you take the trends, together with the incubation time, it looks like around 0.1% to 1% of the population is carrying it right now, on average. In big cities e.g. London it will be nearer the upper end.
But it is going up steadily.
Of course that means that if you go into a supermarket, touch the trolley handle (virus survival time up to 3 days or so) with bare hands, and stick a finger up your nose you are very likely to get it.
The problem is that most people don’t “get it”. Sit in a cafe and watch how people deal with basic stuff like touching toilet door handles. Nearly all have totally zero concept that the toilet door handle is likely to be generously covered in sh*t. The population gets away with it because most of us have immune systems which can deal with “sh*t”.
I was not asking about infections, but about excessive deaths….
hmng wrote:
Now we are all copying it.
I certainly hope we’re not, we are letting people out for food. China barricaded people in their houses and let them starve to death.
