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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 positiv

by 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.

by kurthr 7y ago

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.