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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

#91
post #79
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I've been graphing the exp curve As you can imagine, there's more to epidemiology than this. I'm a big fan of letting the qualified people do their work, while we do ours: shut up and do not spread misinformation. In fact, at the risk of being rude ill even go so far and say that it's quite arrogant to pretend to pontificate about this when your knowledge about this issue is 0, and also when one major problem in com…

Who are these experts you speak of? Are they in US? UK? Italy? Spain?

Some US specific data is at https://covidactnow.org/

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

#92
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't become resistant to antibiotics, bacteria do and resistant bacteria in Italy would just spread to Germany. Anyway Covid-19 is a virus, not a bacterium.

While its true SARS-CoV-2 is a virus, opportunistic bacterial pneumonia is a secondary complication of Covid19 which increases its lethality. So you need decent antibiotics too.

..and it's nasty, my wife only just recovered from it a week ago after a total of 8 weeks in bed.

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

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You’re conflating all-causes death with novel death. It takes the expected death rate of the cohort from 10% to (given full penetration) 30%.

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

#94
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.

3blue1brown did a good video explaining the logistic shape of pandemic curves: https://youtu.be/Kas0tIxDvrg

My key takeaway was that once you see the inflection point, you know that you’ll have roughly 2x the number infections by the time it’s done.

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

#95
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The death curve is also quite steep. Seven days ago we were at 57 total deaths, now it's 276. Daily deaths has gone from eight people seven days ago to 49. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ Here's a good article on estimating current number of cases from number of deaths: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...

The death curve is also deceptive - there were likely many patients who were recorded as dying of the flu, or of influenza-like illness, that actually died of COVID-19, due to a lack of testing. The bottom line is that it’s very difficult to make a conclusive statement based on the data collected prior to widespread testing. As for that Medium article, it’s written by a tech exec with zero education or professional e…

We have plenty of flu tests. Covid-19 is also pretty distinctive on chest CT scans, if it's advanced enough to kill you.

The numbers may be wrong in that article but the math itself seems straightforward. It's certainly true that we need more tests to be sure of the numbers.

Here's a pretty interesting simulation from a research group at the University of Basel: https://neherlab.org/covid19/

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

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

You think there would not be widespread panic if we just let the health system melt down? What do you think a world without a health system would look like? Unemployment is going to be very hard to deal with, but it really feels like the best option out of the very difficult choices we have in front of us. Fact is, shit is seriously bad whichever way you look at it.

If we look at the Spanish flu, which was worse than this, there wasn't much panic and the economy recovered fairly quickly. Here's a random article I found online arguing that we'd get better results (both for public health and the economy) by testing more and isolating the at-risk populations than by quaranting everyone: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/opinion/coronavirus-pande...

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

#97
post #79
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I've been graphing the exp curve As you can imagine, there's more to epidemiology than this. I'm a big fan of letting the qualified people do their work, while we do ours: shut up and do not spread misinformation. In fact, at the risk of being rude ill even go so far and say that it's quite arrogant to pretend to pontificate about this when your knowledge about this issue is 0, and also when one major problem in com…

Who are these experts you speak of? Are they in US? UK? Italy? Spain?

[deleted]

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

#98
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there are a bit north of 1.2M Americans who die of heart disease or cancer every year. That's deaths. With a functioning, advanced health care system. Those numbers don't get better without that.

In America at least, the functioning, advanced health care system is a barely accessible to people who are unemployed, and the government doesn't look like it's going to do anything to change that soon.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_...

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

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, I wrote 'identified infections' and spoke of the general magnitude rather than using the 3.4% from the WHO.

In South Korea, where testing criteria are relatively broad, the death rate for the positive test group is over 1% (100/8700).

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

#100
post #79
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I've been graphing the exp curve As you can imagine, there's more to epidemiology than this. I'm a big fan of letting the qualified people do their work, while we do ours: shut up and do not spread misinformation. In fact, at the risk of being rude ill even go so far and say that it's quite arrogant to pretend to pontificate about this when your knowledge about this issue is 0, and also when one major problem in com…

Who are these experts you speak of? Are they in US? UK? Italy? Spain?

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