Subj : Re: Pandemic
To : Ryan Fantus
From : Dan Cross
Date : Wed Mar 18 2020 05:36 am
On 16 Mar 2020 at 06:58p, Ryan Fantus pondered and said...
RF> Nice write-up. Yeah, we're screwed.
Thanks for the compliment; if only the news were better. :-(
RF> I tried the math from a different direction. I know firsthand how hard
RF> it is to get a test, because my girlfriend has COVID and it took us a
RF> week of begging and basically lying to providers to finally get the
RF> test. "Confirmed Cases" is in no way an indication of how many people
RF> are infected.
Oh gosh; was she confirmed? How are you both doing?
RF> So let's start with the number of people dead from the virus in the US,
RF> which (last I checked) is 69. The virus kills at a rate of 1% of
RF> infected people. The incubation period is typically two-ish weeks before
RF> people are symptomatic, so let's use 14 days as our assumed "infected
RF> person" -> "dead person" metric (which is very conservative, actually).
RF> That means, if we pretend that everyone that died of coronavirus in the
RF> US died TODAY (false), that two weeks ago these people were all
RF> infected. 1% death rate means start two weeks ago with 6900 infected
RF> persons in the US. Now multiply by 1.4 (rate of daily infection) by 14
RF> days and...we've got at least 135k infected people in the US. We're
RF> hosed.
Really really interesting analysis, but I'm going to
quibble with your numbers just a tad. In particular,
the 69 deaths were cumulative, not just in one day.
But I think that changes your numbers just by days,
not fundamentally.
