Clogs wrote:goeagles wrote:Clogs wrote:JM2K6 wrote:Clogs wrote:Way to miss the obvious sarcastic point.
What is it about exponential growth that you're not getting?
Well there is exponential growth up to a limit. In the ridiculous example I provided, I was trying to show that simply applying exponential growth to this problem is not how it works. If it did then all of America would be dead and 3 Billion more Americans would need intensive care...
Viruses follow logistic growth curves. Logistic curves are very close to exponential growth in early stages, which
we still are in as a very low percentage of people have actually caught the virus.

Are you sure?
The epidemic started in China sometime in November or December. The first confirmed U.S. cases included a person who traveled from Wuhan on Jan. 15, and it is likely that the virus entered before that: Tens of thousands of people traveled from Wuhan to the U.S. in December. Existing evidence suggests that the virus is highly transmissible and that the number of infections doubles roughly every three days. An epidemic seed on Jan. 1 implies that by March 9 about six million people in the U.S. would have been infected. As of March 23, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 499 Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. If our surmise of six million cases is accurate, that’s a mortality rate of 0.01%, assuming a two week lag between infectio
Dr. Bendavid and Dr. Bhattacharya are professors of medicine at Stanford. Neeraj Sood contributed to this article
Some very smart people seem to think the infection rate is actually quite high...
Had a little more time to think this through. Ignore the fact that spread is not evenly distributed (superspreaders make the distribution fat tailed), that their seed 2 weeks prior to first confirmed case is pulled out of thin air (which has a huge impact on their calculations), that growth is logistic not exponential or that the two week lag between initial infection and death is not only pulled out of thin air but doesn't make much sense from what we've heard.
Let's use their same exact methodology for Italy as they've used for the US. The first confirmed case in Italy was on January 31. So let's go back 2 weeks and make the seed case on January 17th. If we double the number of cases every 3 days until March 2nd, we get 32,768 cases. And if we use their 2 week lag between infection and death, we would use the number of deaths on March 16th, which was 2158. If we use their same methodology, even with all of its spurious assumptions, we get a death rate of 6.59%!
You can play around with those numbers and changes in assumptions (date of first seed case, average length from initial infection to death) make huge differences. If you change the average time from death to infection from 14 days to 23 days, you get a death rate of 25.07% in Italy, all else held constant, which is obviously bullshit. So is the death rate 6.59% in Italy and 0.01% in the US using their methodology. It makes no sense.