https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971219303285
The horrible numbers from Italy are not that different from years past. 68000 deaths between 2013 and 2016.
It’s not a normal year for sure, but as other countries have (still?) low numbers I’m really starting to wonder if the complete destruction of the world economy, meaning our way of life, is an adequate response. Next week it might look different, but for now I’m a bit sceptic.
I flew at Inverness EGPE this afternoon. It was busy with airliner, Coastguard, and Flying School traffic. Pre-maintenance I was flying off the fuel in the rear tank.
I was unable to complete this as the Airport had to close due to shortage of controllers – mandatory rest period.
Easyjet was told to expect an hour delay in departure unless someone turned up.
Security didn’t take my pass and swipe it, as they usually do. I was told to swipe it myself.
hmng wrote:
but as other countries have (still?) low numbers I’m really starting to wonder if the complete destruction of the world economy, meaning our way of life, is an adequate response. Next week it might look different, but for now I’m a bit sceptic.
The key word here is “still.” Also, the study that you quote is a statistical analysis based correlating influenza presence with death rates and while probably accurate (0.04% of the population, a bit higher than the US numbers but same magnitude) it is NOT what is measured for Coronavirus, which is “people who died in hospital and were tested for Coronavirus”.
They also measure an ENTIRE season, and if you look at the graph
You can see that in the first 4 weeks after the first deaths, only maybe 5% of the deaths occur, 95% occur later. Italy at this point is 3.5 weeks after the 10th death.
As has already been well reported, the financial support package broadcast today in the UK is indeed unprecedented.
There are two parts, this is the business section and there is another part (follow the link) for self emloyed.
There are some terrifc initiatives which appear to be free of the usual beaucracy.
For those to whom this is relevant if you havent yet caught up, it may well be of interest.
While closing cafes and restaurants, they have allowed takeaway food, so this is what many of them will move into.
Since 93.5% of the 1st World cannot prepare food from first principles, this extremely cunning concession preserves society from a certain disintegration.
My local pub (which we almost never visit, not wishing a triple bypass) took about an hour to work this out, and will be doing takeaway pizzas, thus ensuring that there isn’t a collapse in used Aston Martin prices due to all the cardiologists selling up.
And I leave you with a very sobering thought. With an incubation period of 7 days on average, and 7 – 14 days between getting ill an dying, and deaths increasing by 10x per week, the UK is already looking at 200,000 dead, all in the next three to four weeks, even if the death rate flattens a bit.
That is clearly a worst-case scenario, but rapid exponential growth is a b*tch.
BTW – the governments’ reasonable worst case is, IIRC, over 300,000 dead in total.
“it is NOT what is measured for Coronavirus, which is “people who died in hospital and were tested for Coronavirus”.”
Yes, somehow mixing conditional probability and correlations, for the former we have no idea yet, for the latter as for now there is no correlation yet between excess of deaths and corona virus infections, but for a whole season we don’t know the answer yet? Maybe 20k maybe 10million
But correlation exercise on flu is still meaningful to get sense of aggregate sensitivity of healthcare system and average individual health to any epedemic in general…
If looking at the past along Cobalt graphs does not suffice, here is a tool to look in the future:
http://gabgoh.github.io/COVID/index.html
You can set own parameters and get a good idea of the overall impact, the only reassuring thing is that the incubation period average now is 5 days, first estimates were 20 days (e.g. means all earth will get it in next year)
Morgues set up instead of containment
I fear devastating development in the UK and given the lackluster decision making in Germany – we are #3 behind Italy – I fear similar development here
