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The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

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Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#51

This is bad. I've been graphing the exp curve for Italy, UK and USA and the USA curve is fearsomely steep. Italy has more cases now but the USA is growing fastest and looks like it will match Italy's on ~March 28th (looking at the most recent 10 points, see below) The rate of growth in the USA, extrapolated, is just huge. Looking at the whole curve it does not match an exponential well, I think the early part is skew…

Yes - absolute criminal negligence in the US and UK. Possibly Australia too. The problem isn't just that a lot of people will die because the health system is swamped. That's hardly good news, but when you have a high peak you have a lot of people ill at the same time. And that means you run the risk of losing a significant percentage of critical workers in essential services including food, utilities, logistics, and…

>Pushing any country through this is a huge and utterly irresponsible risk.

It's a risk, but the amount of hardship all the people who lose their jobs and business will endure if an indefinite lockdown is implemented is an absolute certainty. Poverty has lasting, lifelong negative health impacts.

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#52
post #35

This is bad. I've been graphing the exp curve for Italy, UK and USA and the USA curve is fearsomely steep. Italy has more cases now but the USA is growing fastest and looks like it will match Italy's on ~March 28th (looking at the most recent 10 points, see below) The rate of growth in the USA, extrapolated, is just huge. Looking at the whole curve it does not match an exponential well, I think the early part is skew…

It is not an exponential, it's a logistic curve, just approximate with the SIS model, it's easier. Yeah I knew by Sunday that tomorrow we're hitting 30,000 cases in Spain. My assumptions worked. And it's just the tip, because I don't know anything about whether there's been randomized sampling, so who knows about the normalization. I just can't believe this. No one listens and this is in-your-face obvious.

> I just can't believe this. No one listens and this is in-your-face obvious

Can you clarify. I can modify the top post (mine) if you're saying I'm overstating things. Happy to be wrong here.

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how much of the US’s growth is due to us finally having some (albeit not enough) testing?

Related, there's also the distinct possibility that many had Covid-19 well before it was in public consciousness. Look for ILI (Influenza-like Illness) stats which were appreciably higher in January. The obvious inference is that many had Covid-19 before it was recognised as such. This might be a good thing.

I think this is underrated. This thing must have been spreading since November here.

I know a person who back in January acquired something like pneumonia and a bad fever, went to the hospital for awhile and tests were negative for flu, etc. doctors just didn’t know what it was. The person has COPD however.

But anecdotally I’ve noticed quite a few more colleagues over the last few months out sick “with the flu or something”. No idea.

They’re still only testing people with symptoms. We need a randomizes test and a test for antibodies to have any idea how much it has already spread.

If it’s as contagious as they say and spreads in asymptotic people then why wouldn’t there be a significant population that has acquired and recovered from this? Many probably with very mild symptoms.

I could just be in denial right now as well.

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#54
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well unfortunately US has much higher rate of obesity, diabetes and other factors that will increase mortality so would be pretty hard.

China has a much higher rate of smokers, poor air quality, and existing respiratory disease. Do you have any statistics pointing to obesity as an increased risk factor for a respritory disease?

High Blood pressure was a big factor from what I read. There is very strong correlation between obesity and hypertension.

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#55
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realise it's actually a sigmoid but an early decent approximation is an exponential, no? (edit: good catch though)

Apparently not with this when you're early. I took it seriously when a third degree polynomial fit worked too well and then suddenly didn't.

OK, looking at this, the curve is upwards without inflection. What would you expect to get if you fitted a D3 poly to it? Why would you even try? Serious Q.

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#56

Corona is killing a negligible % of the population, mostly very old and very sick people (checkout the official data from the Italian health ministary - average age of dead patiences is 79.5 years, all of them with severe background illness, in a part of the country where 29% of the population is at least 60 yeard old. Those are the facts.). If anyting, what we are experiencing is not a corona pandemic but a massive,…

It's killing whole percentage points of the identified infections. If 1 billion people get infected, that's 10 or 20 million people (or more). And so on with larger numbers of infected. That's not 'negligible'.

But how many of those people would have died anyway? Somebody over 80 has around a 10% chance of dying every year. Somebody over 80 with Corona has a 20% chance of dying, so the risk of dying is doubled.

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#57
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is key. We really can't compare countries confirmed case numbers directly because they are operating very different testing programmes. Just look at Germany. More confirmed cases than the USA, but a quarter of the deaths. Germany also has 80% as many cases as Spain, but about 5% as many deaths. All that, without a severe lockdown. Clearly something completely different is going on there than in many other countr…

I think what is going on is a combination of relatively good testing capacity from the beginning and mostly young people infected, which due to the testing were prevented from spreading it to older demographics. See https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/478220a4c454480e823... Also there is the purely anecdotal hypothesis of a cultural difference between for example Italy, Spain and Germany. In the southern countri…

There are also far more old people living with young people in Italy and Spain than in Germany.

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#58

Corona is killing a negligible % of the population, mostly very old and very sick people (checkout the official data from the Italian health ministary - average age of dead patiences is 79.5 years, all of them with severe background illness, in a part of the country where 29% of the population is at least 60 yeard old. Those are the facts.). If anyting, what we are experiencing is not a corona pandemic but a massive,…

You can't argue with the fact that hospitals can't take the pressure even at negligible death rate. Hospitals fucked = lots of other people are screwed as they depend on unrelated treatments. Heath system going out has huge cascading problems for society.

>Heath system going out has huge cascading problems for society.

Worse than the huge cascading problems caused by making a double digit percentage of the population unemployed indefinitely?

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#59

Corona is killing a negligible % of the population, mostly very old and very sick people (checkout the official data from the Italian health ministary - average age of dead patiences is 79.5 years, all of them with severe background illness, in a part of the country where 29% of the population is at least 60 yeard old. Those are the facts.). If anyting, what we are experiencing is not a corona pandemic but a massive,…

It's killing whole percentage points of the identified infections. If 1 billion people get infected, that's 10 or 20 million people (or more). And so on with larger numbers of infected. That's not 'negligible'.

The percentage is from confirmed cases. For many many people, corona infection has none or very mild symptoms, and they aren't even tested. Since we don't know the actual number of sick people (which can only be estimated, with some estimations talking about several times more patiences then confirmed cases), the actual percentage is unknown.

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#60

Corona is killing a negligible % of the population, mostly very old and very sick people (checkout the official data from the Italian health ministary - average age of dead patiences is 79.5 years, all of them with severe background illness, in a part of the country where 29% of the population is at least 60 yeard old. Those are the facts.). If anyting, what we are experiencing is not a corona pandemic but a massive,…

That’s true only when hospitals are functioning. Corona spread saturates hospitals and then mortality goes up to near 10%, from the virus itself as well as other unrelated causes which get no ICU treatment.

Hospitals are saturated, because people are panicking. For almost all people, just staying at home for a few days is enough.
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