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Worldometers shows CA with 1060 cases and 19 deaths. Where does ~8000 come from. If 8 weeks is 56 days and cases go up 20% a day as they have been then 1.2^56 *

Worldometers shows CA with 1060 cases and 19 deaths. Where does ~8000 come from. If 8 weeks is 56 days and cases go up 20% a day as they have been then 1.2^56 * 1060 = 28.8 million cases.

JCharante 7y ago
It is from my understanding that 19 * 400 ~= 8000. The OP suggested that for every 1 reported death there are 400 cases.
kurthr 7y ago
That's not 1060 cases, it's 1060 tested positive. You can't even get a test unless you're a celebrity or high risk... if you're a nurse and your wife is positive, they won't give you a test. We're under tested so there are a lot more than 1000 cases right now. It's true though that they aren't using the highest rate they could (the 20% per day we got before social distancing). I hope that closing the schools helps... and the ICUs don't overflow immediately.
- unishark 7y ago
  I do agree that people have a bad tendency to trust any numbers they can get over logic and common sense. And in this case the numbers are obviously a lower bound creating a big bias towards underestimating things. But information on testing numbers is also lagging and incomplete. The CDC was doing over 5k tests per day a week ago when the number of new cases was around 500 per day. And the number of tests were exponentially increasing too. Does anyone have any better info about how much we have ramped up testing since then? It's a big country, and there's huge "publication bias" in the media where stories about a location or person running into testing issues get the attention and stories where things are working do not. I really don't trust anyone's ability to assess the situation at the resolution of 24 hours and make anything like an accurate prediction. I would like to see them just do full-on statistical sampling by testing people at random in different cities.
- blackrock 7y ago
  If I recall, China had about 500 cases confirmed positive, when they shut down Wuhan on January 23. And by that point, the confirmed infection count ballooned up to 80,000; even after they aggressively mandated their national lockdown. And this was during the early days, when nobody knew anything about the virus. And early test kits gave a lot of false negatives. With California at 1060, then I can only imagine where the final number will land. And New York has 5712 infected, and yet, they still haven’t shut down the state. ==== Now, the following is likely incorrect, but this may give an general idea of the magnitude. But doing a basic extrapolation, China had a 160x multiplier, from the initial lockdown point, to get to 80,000 infected. If we use that, then at this point, California might register about 169,000 infected. And New York, if they lock down now, might register 914,000 infected. Sobering numbers indeed.. But these numbers are highly dependent on population density, mass transportation patterns, and social congregation scenarios. Wuhan has high speed trains, but California has Southwest planes. Car travel and ride sharing usage might be similar. So it’s unlikely the numbers are similar to compute. At some point, the medical system will fail, and everyone will just give up, and we are now left to our own fate.
atoav 7y ago
Remember that scene from the Chernobyl series where they messure the radiaton and say it is only 3.6 roentgen — which oddly happens to be around the maximum their device can messure? This is the situation with tested cases now. You can assume that there is no nation on earthq where the number of tested cases is an accurate representation of what is really going on. Deaths are far more accurate but lag behind ehat is going on by two weeks. And two weeks is a long time with something that grows exponentially. The bad thing about this is, that this logic is flipped on it's head at times: my girlfriend had all the symptoms just like 6 of her alumni — not a single of them could get tested. And while they where still in bed their university proudly issued a press statement stating they have zero cases of Corona. Yeah — if you are not testing you will have zero confirmed cases, that is the way it is. The dangerous thing here isn't the current number of cases, but the insecurity about it. If you have a huge number of people starting to get ill today your hospitals will fall apart in two weeks time. Doctors will have to send people home to die, like in Italy visitora can no longer be handled, people no lomger be burried — this is not a joke.
jbritton 7y ago
I wanted to clarify something. The parent poster wanted to know how the 25 million case number was arrived at. I just provided an example of how such a number might be arrived at. It is far too simplistic of a model though. I have also read there is confusion over the term “case”, as to whether it’s a hospital case vs total cases in general population.

Worldometers shows CA with 1060 cases and 19 deaths. Where does ~8000 come from. If 8 weeks is 56 days and cases go up 20% a day as they have been then 1.2^56 * 1060 = 28.8 million cases.

JCharante 7y ago

It is from my understanding that 19 * 400 ~= 8000. The OP suggested that for every 1 reported death there are 400 cases.

kurthr 7y ago

That's not 1060 cases, it's 1060 tested positive. You can't even get a test unless you're a celebrity or high risk... if you're a nurse and your wife is positive, they won't give you a test. We're under tested so there are a lot more than 1000 cases right now. It's true though that they aren't using the highest rate they could (the 20% per day we got before social distancing). I hope that closing the schools helps... and the ICUs don't overflow immediately.

unishark 7y ago
I do agree that people have a bad tendency to trust any numbers they can get over logic and common sense. And in this case the numbers are obviously a lower bound creating a big bias towards underestimating things. But information on testing numbers is also lagging and incomplete. The CDC was doing over 5k tests per day a week ago when the number of new cases was around 500 per day. And the number of tests were exponentially increasing too. Does anyone have any better info about how much we have ramped up testing since then? It's a big country, and there's huge "publication bias" in the media where stories about a location or person running into testing issues get the attention and stories where things are working do not. I really don't trust anyone's ability to assess the situation at the resolution of 24 hours and make anything like an accurate prediction. I would like to see them just do full-on statistical sampling by testing people at random in different cities.
blackrock 7y ago
If I recall, China had about 500 cases confirmed positive, when they shut down Wuhan on January 23. And by that point, the confirmed infection count ballooned up to 80,000; even after they aggressively mandated their national lockdown. And this was during the early days, when nobody knew anything about the virus. And early test kits gave a lot of false negatives. With California at 1060, then I can only imagine where the final number will land. And New York has 5712 infected, and yet, they still haven’t shut down the state. ==== Now, the following is likely incorrect, but this may give an general idea of the magnitude. But doing a basic extrapolation, China had a 160x multiplier, from the initial lockdown point, to get to 80,000 infected. If we use that, then at this point, California might register about 169,000 infected. And New York, if they lock down now, might register 914,000 infected. Sobering numbers indeed.. But these numbers are highly dependent on population density, mass transportation patterns, and social congregation scenarios. Wuhan has high speed trains, but California has Southwest planes. Car travel and ride sharing usage might be similar. So it’s unlikely the numbers are similar to compute. At some point, the medical system will fail, and everyone will just give up, and we are now left to our own fate.

atoav 7y ago

Remember that scene from the Chernobyl series where they messure the radiaton and say it is only 3.6 roentgen — which oddly happens to be around the maximum their device can messure? This is the situation with tested cases now. You can assume that there is no nation on earthq where the number of tested cases is an accurate representation of what is really going on. Deaths are far more accurate but lag behind ehat is going on by two weeks. And two weeks is a long time with something that grows exponentially. The bad thing about this is, that this logic is flipped on it's head at times: my girlfriend had all the symptoms just like 6 of her alumni — not a single of them could get tested. And while they where still in bed their university proudly issued a press statement stating they have zero cases of Corona. Yeah — if you are not testing you will have zero confirmed cases, that is the way it is. The dangerous thing here isn't the current number of cases, but the insecurity about it. If you have a huge number of people starting to get ill today your hospitals will fall apart in two weeks time. Doctors will have to send people home to die, like in Italy visitora can no longer be handled, people no lomger be burried — this is not a joke.

jbritton 7y ago

I wanted to clarify something. The parent poster wanted to know how the 25 million case number was arrived at. I just provided an example of how such a number might be arrived at. It is far too simplistic of a model though. I have also read there is confusion over the term “case”, as to whether it’s a hospital case vs total cases in general population.