4 ms·

It simply must be much more dangerous than the flu for the simple reason that comparatively few people have it and it is overwhelming hospitals.

bsaul 7y ago
i wonder if it's really true that "few people" have it. We do observe a huge amount of people going to the hospital in italy, but that could very well be because we reached the peak of the epidemie, where almost all of the population have been infected and remain asymptomatic. in this hypothesis, you implement a lockdown and see number drops over two week but what you're really seing is a population reaching herd immunity.
- trashtester 7y ago
  When we are getting close to the peak of the epidemic, the growth will no longer be exponential, but close to linear. A logistic curve looks exponential for about the first 3rd, close to linear for the second third, and then approaching the asymptote with a negative exponential growth for the last third. Increasing social distancing will naturally lower the exponential growth rate, but unless the growth becomes linear, there is no reason to believe that herd immunity is anywhere close. In the asian countries, we more or less know that they have been able to contain the virus, instead of waiting for herd immunity. That meanst that they must have found most of the infected cases (or at least quaranteened them). This gives a good indication of how many deaths are caused by a given number of infected. The numbers are not different enough from Italy to think that more than (at most) a couple of hundred thousand in Italy have reached immunity. If so, it means that we have about 2 more orders of magnitude of growth before herd immunity can be reached. That would be hundreds of thousands of dead, if not millions, just in Italy.
  - bsaul 7y ago
    That would be for a homogeneous spread inside a country. However if the epidemic spreads from region to region, you could reach a local herd immunity in the first regions infected way before seing the country-wide curve becoming linear. But thanks, trying to find a counter-argument to your post made me realize a single-curve model probably doesn't make a lot of sense to try and understand accurately the spread of an epidemic.
- empath75 7y ago
  There aren’t large numbers of random people testing positive for it where they’ve done wide spread testing. Korea in particular probably has close to an accurate count, and their mortality rate is still close to 1%

bsaul 7y ago

i wonder if it's really true that "few people" have it. We do observe a huge amount of people going to the hospital in italy, but that could very well be because we reached the peak of the epidemie, where almost all of the population have been infected and remain asymptomatic. in this hypothesis, you implement a lockdown and see number drops over two week but what you're really seing is a population reaching herd immunity.

trashtester 7y ago
When we are getting close to the peak of the epidemic, the growth will no longer be exponential, but close to linear. A logistic curve looks exponential for about the first 3rd, close to linear for the second third, and then approaching the asymptote with a negative exponential growth for the last third. Increasing social distancing will naturally lower the exponential growth rate, but unless the growth becomes linear, there is no reason to believe that herd immunity is anywhere close. In the asian countries, we more or less know that they have been able to contain the virus, instead of waiting for herd immunity. That meanst that they must have found most of the infected cases (or at least quaranteened them). This gives a good indication of how many deaths are caused by a given number of infected. The numbers are not different enough from Italy to think that more than (at most) a couple of hundred thousand in Italy have reached immunity. If so, it means that we have about 2 more orders of magnitude of growth before herd immunity can be reached. That would be hundreds of thousands of dead, if not millions, just in Italy.
- bsaul 7y ago
  That would be for a homogeneous spread inside a country. However if the epidemic spreads from region to region, you could reach a local herd immunity in the first regions infected way before seing the country-wide curve becoming linear. But thanks, trying to find a counter-argument to your post made me realize a single-curve model probably doesn't make a lot of sense to try and understand accurately the spread of an epidemic.
empath75 7y ago
There aren’t large numbers of random people testing positive for it where they’ve done wide spread testing. Korea in particular probably has close to an accurate count, and their mortality rate is still close to 1%