Subj : Re: Pandemic
To : Dan Cross
From : Ryan Fantus
Date : Mon Mar 16 2020 06:58 pm
DC> World-wide cases just topped 182,000 cases. In the US, we've
DC> topped 4,200 and are doubling roughly every three days. Since
DC> we do not have wide-scale testing, because Trump turned down
DC> tests from the WHO, we have no idea whether the social distancing
DC> measures put into place over the last week and a half are
DC> working, let alone sufficient.
Nice write-up. Yeah, we're screwed.
I tried the math from a different direction. I know firsthand how hard it is
to get a test, because my girlfriend has COVID and it took us a week of
begging and basically lying to providers to finally get the test. "Confirmed
Cases" is in no way an indication of how many people are infected.
So let's start with the number of people dead from the virus in the US, which
(last I checked) is 69. The virus kills at a rate of 1% of infected people.
The incubation period is typically two-ish weeks before people are
symptomatic, so let's use 14 days as our assumed "infected person" -> "dead
person" metric (which is very conservative, actually). That means, if we
pretend that everyone that died of coronavirus in the US died TODAY (false),
that two weeks ago these people were all infected. 1% death rate means start
two weeks ago with 6900 infected persons in the US. Now multiply by 1.4 (rate
of daily infection) by 14 days and...we've got at least 135k infected people
in the US. We're hosed.
