Oh I know what exponential growth is, it is a basic mathematical concept and I'm quite good at math. The thing is, extrapolating the growth rate of new phenomena is not logical. If this isn't intuitive, think of it this way: I have $1 today. I earn $100 and by tomorrow I have $101. I sell my car and the day after tomorrow I have $10,101. Would it make sense to continue projecting my increased asset accumulation at the rate of 10,000% daily for the next 10 years? Of course not, it would mean I would have more assets than exist in the world. Growth rates are higher when numbers are lower and lower when numbers are higher. It's the nature of change in any finite data set.
> roughly 10x worse
According to the WHO Corona virus has a 3% mortality rate, your estimate of 'at least 10x' would mean 500,000 american dead by the end of year, which would require 150,000,000 to be infected this year, or basically, 48%~ of the population getting infected this year.
I'm not saying your wrong, but can you provide a link to a reputable site such as CDC/WHO that supports your claim?
The CDC/WHO are still trying to push for containment, so I'm unaware of any concrete predictions they are taking with regards to the final infection rate.
More generally, the more I've been binge studying epidemiology (not claiming to be an authority), the more I'm learning that, as a field, it has difficulty with long-run predictions. That's not super surprising, I work in the statsy/ML forecasting world, and these types of unstable, unknown processes are very hard to forecast accurately.
What we do know though is that there is good reason to believe it's parameters governing infection (e.g. secondary infection distribution) are more infectious that diseases such as H1N1, which went on to infect ~20% of the world. We do know that the mortality is 1-3%, depending on ICU saturation. There are reasonable base rate scenarios to view this as a likely outcome.
We need to do our best to contain this and keep it as a slow burn, or we will be dealing with hundreds of thousands of Americans dead, and millions hospitalized.
To be a little more specific, the deaths given a functioning health system are less concerning to me. It's the fact that this has a very high hospitalization rate of 5-20%. That's why we need to keep spread slow, so the hospitals can manage.
Isn't Marc Lipsitch the same guy who had dire predictions for SARS and MERS? While the Atlantic is a good publication, I'd rather take my medical advice from the CDC and WHO, who have not published such dire predictions.
BTW, I completely agree that Corona Virus is an issue that needs to be addressed. I'm simply saying the reaction is out of proportion to the reality of the threat.
Is he? It sounds like you might know more about him than I do. Having said that, I do worry sometimes that people who make dire predictions about unconstrained infection, which then don't materialize because people take it seriously, get an unfair track record.
Otherwise I think you're insisting on an unreasonable burden of evidence, in that unless the CDC or WHO specifically make a prediction, then its not justified. The best known parameters on secondary infection distributions are strongly suggestive that this spreads more readily than the flu, and the flu infects ~20% of the population a year. Those are good priors to start with, given that we don't have enough realized empirical evidence to know the truth.
It basically says and I quote:
"The most effective preventive measures in the community include:
performing hand hygiene frequently with an
alcohol-based hand rub if your hands are not visibly
dirty or with soap and water if hands are dirty;
avoiding touching your eyes, nose and mouth;
practicing respiratory hygiene by coughing or
sneezing into a bent elbow or tissue and then
immediately disposing of the tissue;
wearing a medical mask if you have respiratory
symptoms and performing hand hygiene after
disposing of the mask;
maintaining social distance (a minimum of 1 m)
from individuals with respiratory symptoms. "
Notice how these are basically the same precautions people should keep always, regardless of Corona Virus being there. That's why I said, what I do now is exactly what I'd do last year to avoid dying from a virus. Nothing has changed for me.
Also notice how the list of precautions doesn't include: 'horde face masks when not sick, stay indoors and cancel all travel plans'. Those actions actually hurt.
Read my original post. It never said Corona virus isn't an issue. My point was people's reaction is probably the main issue. And I tried to illustrate how illogical it is based on the risks people take when it comes to things that are currently proven to be deadly, not maybe deadly. The other day someone complained to me about the dangers of Corona Virus WHILE smoking a cigarette! (blew my mind, though I didn't say anything)
The overreaction is perfectly illustrated in the Atlantic article where they estimate 70% of the world population will have Corona Virus before the years end. At 7 billion, and with 3% death rate, it would mean 147,000,000 million dead by the year's end.
Given that you mentioned modeling on other diseases, you should be able to recognize this as wildly exaggerated fear mongering. Even if it was 10x as deadly as the flu we'd still be talking about 3 to 6 million dead world wide (high no doubt, but still less than tobacco deaths which stand at 7 million/year) And that's a pretty grim outcome since it would be 10x worse than any virus we know. This basic back of the envelop math makes me think the figure of 147,000,000 dead (the logical implication to the Atlantic's estimates) is pure quackery. There seems to be a feedback loop: the more people get scared, the more the media sells fear. The more the media sells fear, the more scared they become.
Again, I can't stress this enough, Corona Virus is real, it needs to be addressed, our leaders need to make it a priority. But also true is people need to stop fretting over things they can't control and the media needs to stop whipping them into a frenzy with fear mongering tactics. Overreactions can be just as bad as under reactions and humans have a long history of mass hysteria that only make things worse.
> And that's a pretty grim outcome since it would be 10x worse than any virus we know. This basic back of the envelop math makes me think the figure of 147,000,000 dead (the logical implication to the Atlantic's estimates) is pure quackery.
You seem to be unfamiliar with the Spanish Flu, which killed almost 200k Americans in October 1918 alone, and travel has gotten much easier since then. SARS was contained, and COVID-19 looks like it won't be, so it is grossly misleading to pretend the total deaths will be in the same ballpark.
Yes, the 500k number is what will happen if we don’t enact emergency measures to slow down the spread of the disease. That you have not seen numbers approaching that is only because countries like China and South Korea and Italy have already done so.
> I sell my car and the day after tomorrow I have $10,101.
That doesn't change your net worth, so it's a nonsensical example.
> I'm not saying your wrong, but can you provide a link to a reputable site such as CDC/WHO that supports your claim?
How does that need much of a "reputable site"?! It's an infectious disease with long incubation, infectiousness for a bit while not having symptoms, no vaccine and no cure ... what do you think would happen if we didn't do anything to prevent spreading?
Current R0 estimates seem to be around 3, so you would need 66% immunity to drop that below 1, currently the only likely way to get immunity is through infection and survival, so that's 200 million americans infected before infected cases shrink naturally.
Oh I know what exponential growth is, it is a basic mathematical concept and I'm quite good at math. The thing is, extrapolating the growth rate of new phenomena is not logical. If this isn't intuitive, think of it this way: I have $1 today. I earn $100 and by tomorrow I have $101. I sell my car and the day after tomorrow I have $10,101. Would it make sense to continue projecting my increased asset accumulation at the rate of 10,000% daily for the next 10 years? Of course not, it would mean I would have more assets than exist in the world. Growth rates are higher when numbers are lower and lower when numbers are higher. It's the nature of change in any finite data set.
> roughly 10x worse
According to the WHO Corona virus has a 3% mortality rate, your estimate of 'at least 10x' would mean 500,000 american dead by the end of year, which would require 150,000,000 to be infected this year, or basically, 48%~ of the population getting infected this year.
I'm not saying your wrong, but can you provide a link to a reputable site such as CDC/WHO that supports your claim?