Help the Fight Against COVID-19

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According to Cliff himself, S. Korea is the most reliable, most thoroughly tested population we have at the moment. They also have the level of medicine similar to that you will find in the US. They are also using hydroxychloroquine and lopinavir/ritonavir, same as China, and same as we will, once the drugs reach the hospitals en masse. And they did not impose a China-style total lockdown.
 
@plexi59:
Population of South Korea is about 1/7th of the US (if you include the illegals). Their total number of deaths so far is 111. Their total number of cases is 9K. Even if all of the remaining 5700 patients die (very unlikely), that's 5800 dead per 50M, or 113 people per million. If we are in the same conservative ball park, that's 40K dead. I don't see "millions" here.

plexi59 said:
According to Cliff himself, S. Korea is the most reliable, most thoroughly tested population we have at the moment. They also have the level of medicine similar to that you will find in the US. They are also using hydroxychloroquine and lopinavir/ritonavir, same as China, and same as we will, once the drugs reach the hospitals en masse. And they did not impose a China-style total lockdown.

Yep, and that gives me reason for the hope I mentioned at the end of my last post.

The South Korea example could be misleading, though, in two ways:
1. Are we social-distancing and disinfecting as effectively as they are, as early as they are? My guess is not. We are...how to put this? A more unruly lot. (Normally I'm proud of that, but it can have its downsides.)
2. Have they yet started to trend downward, or are they still on the upward spike (exponential) part of their own growth curve? I'm guessing their outbreak started earlier than ours.

Their example can only be illustrative if we're behaving like them AND we're on the same part of the curve, at the same time. I don't think we can be confident of that.

We'll see.
 
Well if that number of infected is true we could seriously revise the casualties ratio to a lower value. I own a Fractal unit, not even the latest, and am perfectly convinced it is the best the world actually offers for guitar players. Still this does not make FAS a biologic expert company; or at least permit me to hope such disastrous predictions will turn out to be wrong.
FAS may not be a biologic expert company. But even with grade-school math, zero variables, and a few conservative assumptions (below), total potential USA deaths from infections accumulated up to today (42,000) and including infections accumulated in the next 7 to 10 days can range from 31,352 to 155,886. That's if zero people got infected after 7-10 days.

That doesn't include transmission rates from the number of people who will NOT exhibit symptoms/get tested...or the number of people who die before they're tested. It would not be unreasonable to add another 20% to the numbers. Any way you crunch it, the numbers get big fast before they change direction, which is why states and cities are issuing stay-at-home orders like falling dominoes.

7 day and 10 day windows with these assumptions:
today's actual infected (remember Cliff's 12-day lag) is 10x today's total reported
infection rate per day ranges from 20% to 30%
case fatality rate (number of reported deaths per number of reported cases) ranges from 2.5% to 3.5%

As Cliff and others have said, we don't have enough data to grasp what the USA end numbers will look like. Attempting to comprehend this is nerve-rattling regardless the outcome.
 
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@solo-act:
7 day and 10 day windows with these assumptions:
actual infected (reported + undetected) is 10x today's total reported
infection rate per day ranges from 20% to 30%
mortality rate ranges from 2.5% to 3.5%
And yet, the mortality rate may be only a tenth of what you've reported there,
precisely because the mortality rate is calculated as a percentage of the known cases (folks tested) which are known to have died.
If the real "actual infected" number is ten times higher than the known cases, then the actual mortality rate is ten times lower.

And in fact, it might even be lower than that. After all, it is mostly only the worst cases that get tested.

What we've been doing is taking a virus and trying to estimate its lethality, not by randomly selecting cases out of the whole set, but by selecting only from the group of cases that arrive at the E.R. already at death's door!

That doesn't mean everything's coming up roses, of course. Things are bad.

But I'm hopeful that, out of all the numbers we're juggling, the mortality rate will turn out to be one that we drastically overstated.
 
President Trump said Monday he hopes to reassess his instructions for people to stay home amid the coronavirus outbreak in the United States.

"We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself. We're not going to let the cure be worse than the problem. At the end of the 15-day period, we'll make a decision as to which way we want to go," he said during the daily coronavirus briefing.

Trump said he hopes the United States will soon be "open for business."
 
President Trump said Monday he hopes to reassess his instructions for people to stay home amid the coronavirus outbreak in the United States.

"We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself. We're not going to let the cure be worse than the problem. At the end of the 15-day period, we'll make a decision as to which way we want to go," he said during the daily coronavirus briefing.

Trump said he hopes the United States will soon be "open for business."
It's definitely a balancing-act.

We're trying to crush the economy by the least amount possible, while bending the exponential growth-rate of infections downward as low as possible. And those two goals are in tension.

I don't envy those making the decisions...both in D.C. (where the main role is to be cheerleader and inter-state coordinator), and especially in the state governments (where the real decisions about sheltering-in-place and business-closures are being made).
 
It's definitely a balancing-act.

We're trying to crush the economy by the least amount possible, while bending the exponential growth-rate of infections downward as low as possible. And those two goals are in tension.

I don't envy those making the decisions...both in D.C. (where the main role is to be cheerleader and inter-state coordinator), and especially in the state governments (where the real decisions about sheltering-in-place and business-closures are being made).

Well they shut down Mar a Lago so, can’t have that.
 
Too bad betting markets do not accept COVID19 bets. If that were the case, people would be able to put their money where their mouth is. As things are right now, the most prudent course of action is to make the direst, most outlandish predictions possible. If you're even remotely right, you get to say "I told you so". If you're wrong, people will forget you said anything. This is how astrology works as well. One thing for sure: I would not bet against the good ol' US of A. :)
 
@plexi59:
You don't know this, seeing that we started mass-testing just 3 days ago. Also this is not true for individual states, and in particular in WA.
It seems like you were replying, there, to something that @FractalAudio wasn't saying.

If I understood him correctly, he was saying that, of the persons who end up in the hospital with COVID-19, a fair number of them require ICU beds rather than normal hospital beds. My earlier numbers (400K max) were describing normal hospital beds, not ICU beds. He was pointing out that even if we had enough normal beds for all the folk who only needed normal beds, we still might not have enough ICU beds for all those who need ICU beds.

Whether or not we've been mass-testing the general populace for COVID-19, broader testing of folk who don't show up in the E.R. at all doesn't tell us much about whether we have enough I.C.U. beds. So it seems like there was a communications breakdown in that interchange.
 
We haven’t started mass testing.
What do you mean? Almost 300K tests have been performed so far. Most of them in the past few days. This is why you're seeing a ton of "new" cases in NY. Moreover, testing capacity continues to ramp up, new, faster, less invasive tests that do not require the use of protective equipment and can be self-administered will be rolled out this week.

https://covidtracking.com/data/
https://www.politico.com/interactives/2020/coronavirus-testing-by-state-chart-of-new-cases/
 
Too bad betting markets do not accept COVID19 bets. If that were the case, people would be able to put their money where their mouth is. As things are right now, the most prudent course of action is to make the direst, most outlandish predictions possible. If you're even remotely right, you get to say "I told you so". If you're wrong, people will forget you said anything. This is how astrology works as well. One thing for sure: I would not bet against the good ol' US of A. :)
It is a dilemma, politics. And deciding is hard. A heat wave in 2003 caused 20 000 death here, politicians got crucified on the media altar. Covid19 maybe also will cause si much death here; but how many got killed by the sub prime crisis, and how many will get killed by the actual worldwide economic collapse. A disgusting question of course, but ?
 
I noticed the WHO is now recommending that people only view the news once or twice a day in order to maintain mental health. Maybe spending a lot of time in this thread isn't a great idea. Limit exposure, like everywhere right now.
 
Current work unit: Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19 causing virus) receptor binding domain in complex with human receptor ACE2 (alternative structure to 11741)
 
See my comment about the lack of disincentive for dramatic prognostications above. Those people will delete their tweets like nothing happened if we end up like Korea (which we realistically might). An actual published paper can't be deleted though. So in a way I weigh it a little more, because the author now has a tiny bit of skin in the game.

Note also that Ioannidis is a bit of an expert on the topic of scientific horseshit: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124, so he's likely better equipped to sniff it from a mile away than others.
 
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