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Why are you completely ignoring the exponential nature of coronavirus? The amount of deaths have doubled fairly quickly and are now at 10k worldwide. The number
by dwaltrip 7y ago
Why are you completely ignoring the exponential nature of coronavirus? The amount of deaths have doubled fairly quickly and are now at 10k worldwide. The number of cases worldwide continues to grow exponentially.
7 more doublings, which could happen as soon as 5 weeks from now (I believe the doubling rate is around ~5 days) would bring us to 1 million deaths. And there is no particular reason it would stop there.
My understanding is that it is not unlikely for something like half of the world to get infected if we can't contain it effectively. If the death rate is 1% -- which could easily be higher if the medical systems are overwhelmed -- then we are looking at 35 million dead.
- downerending 7y agoAlso, it's important to realize that a lot of our data is "old". The tests for "cases" were probably queued for many days, and even when there is a result, might take a day or two to show up in the official stats. Beyond that, the infected individual has probably already been infectious for a week or two (or more?) prior to the test. Put all of that together, and a lot of our stats are stuck weeks in the past. Since the phenomenon itself is exponential and apparently has a fairly short doubling time (two to five days maybe), that delay is huge. We could be flying into the side of a mountain, and we probably wouldn't even know it. Given that, it'd be difficult to "overreact".