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Reading this article actually had the effect of reducing my level of alarm, because it introduced the possibility that some of my household has already caught t

• pbourke 7y ago
  I wouldn't feel too sure about that. They estimate 150 - 1500 total infected right now. There would be substantially fewer even 1 week ago (R0 of 2, roughly 1/2 last week. R0 of 3, roughly 1/3, etc). It's possible the number of infected in the region only broke triple digits a couple of weeks ago. But exponential processes being exponential, there could be many thousands in 1-2 weeks. Edit: Stated another way, from what we know of the course of the disease (14-21 days from infection till fatality) the critical and fatal patients identified this weekend likely entered the disease process 2-3 weeks ago when the total number of infections was small. Edit 2: another confounding factor is that these numbers seem assume that all of the current infected are traceable to the index patient. I think it's very possible that there are other "trees" of infections spreading at the same time from different unidentified index patients. I'm guessing that's true because studies show that airport screening misses >50% of cases. Additional sequences on WA patients will be hugely informative.