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Here's the right math afaik. Over 15% of infected people need a hospital bed with oxygen to survive (that's the important number, not just those who need ventil

Here's the right math afaik. Over 15% of infected people need a hospital bed with oxygen to survive (that's the important number, not just those who need ventilator). Doubling time is a week or less. Hospital stay is two weeks or more. Infections should slow down once half the population is infected. We can mostly ignore the time from infection to hospital, because it's a constant plus a spread that's shorter than hospital stay. So at peak load, 50% of the population have been infected and passed the initial period, 75% of those have passed the initial period within the last two weeks, and 15% of those need a hospital bed to survive. That's 5% of the population or more. Hospital beds are way fewer than that, so most of these people die. The only hope is to slow it with non-medical measures. Check the progression dashboard for your country: https://coronavirus.arik.io/ https://coronavirus.arik.io/ You can see which countries are serious (most of Asia - graph looks linear) and which aren't (US and most of Europe - graph looks like a hockey stick).

bsaul 7y ago
Where did you get that 15% number from ? From my understanding, a huge number of people infected by the virus are asymptomatic and go completely undetected. Given that, any estimation is clearly really hard to make, right ?
- cousin_it 7y ago
  https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-china-joint-mission-on-covid-19-final-report.pdf https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-chi... > Most people infected with COVID-19 virus have mild disease and recover. Approximately 80% of laboratory confirmed patients have had mild to moderate disease, which includes non-pneumonia and pneumonia cases, 13.8% have severe disease (dyspnea, respiratory frequency ≥30/minute, blood oxygen saturation ≤93%, PaO2/FiO2 ratio <300, and/or lung infiltrates >50% of the lung field within 24-48 hours) and 6.1% are critical (respiratory failure, septic shock, and/or multiple organ dysfunction/failure). Asymptomatic infection has been reported, but the majority of the relatively rare cases who are asymptomatic on the date of identification/report went on to develop disease. The proportion of truly asymptomatic infections is unclear but appears to be relatively rare and does not appear to be a major driver of transmission.
  - matwood 7y ago
    The article says 'laboratory confirmed patients'. Because the large majority of cases are mild (this is also why the disease spreads so effectively), it makes sense to assume there are people who went through the disease and were never tested.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]

bsaul 7y ago

Where did you get that 15% number from ? From my understanding, a huge number of people infected by the virus are asymptomatic and go completely undetected. Given that, any estimation is clearly really hard to make, right ?

cousin_it 7y ago
https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-china-joint-mission-on-covid-19-final-report.pdf https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-chi... > Most people infected with COVID-19 virus have mild disease and recover. Approximately 80% of laboratory confirmed patients have had mild to moderate disease, which includes non-pneumonia and pneumonia cases, 13.8% have severe disease (dyspnea, respiratory frequency ≥30/minute, blood oxygen saturation ≤93%, PaO2/FiO2 ratio <300, and/or lung infiltrates >50% of the lung field within 24-48 hours) and 6.1% are critical (respiratory failure, septic shock, and/or multiple organ dysfunction/failure). Asymptomatic infection has been reported, but the majority of the relatively rare cases who are asymptomatic on the date of identification/report went on to develop disease. The proportion of truly asymptomatic infections is unclear but appears to be relatively rare and does not appear to be a major driver of transmission.
- matwood 7y ago
  The article says 'laboratory confirmed patients'. Because the large majority of cases are mild (this is also why the disease spreads so effectively), it makes sense to assume there are people who went through the disease and were never tested.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]