4 ms·

>considering the nature of exponentials. That’s the thing that makes this analysis nonsensical. You are looking at the first 2 months of an exponential and tre

>considering the nature of exponentials. That’s the thing that makes this analysis nonsensical. You are looking at the first 2 months of an exponential and treating it like a fixed rate. You should treat it as an exponential and extrapolate another 10 months with number of cases doubling every 4-6 days and then use that number as the deaths per year. I’m honestly blown away that Musk is saying this.

smaccona 7y ago
To put this in perspective, especially since it’s difficult for humans to intuitively appreciate exponential growth, and assuming the conservative 6 days doubling rate, and starting with today’s US death count of 61 (2020-MAR-15): - on 8 Apr US will be just under 1000 deaths. Scary, but that’s almost a month away - on 2 May, deaths will be ~15,000 - on 20 May, deaths will be ~125,000 - on 7 June, deaths will be ~1,000,000 - on 1 July, deaths will be ~16,000,000 - on 19 July, deaths will be ~128,000,000 - by end of 2020, deaths would be over 17,000 trillion if the US population was infinite and mitigating factors such as herd immunity didn’t kick in, but you get the general idea This is all presuming the existing political/societal response and herd immunity not kicking in (which it won’t in the US until around the 200MM mark). Social distancing will lessen this massively, which is why it’s so important.