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Should we be comparing this in a per capital manner? USA population is five times Italy's.
by andrewmutz 7y ago
Should we be comparing this in a per capital manner? USA population is five times Italy's.
- fabian2k 7y agoAt the beginning of the epidemic and the exponential growth the size of the population doesn't really matter, the number of available people isn't the limiting factor. The structure of the population probably matters quite a bit, but the total number of people in a somewhat arbitrary region probably doesn't. Unless containment measures prevent it, at the beginning you'll always have exponential growth no matter the size of the country. I'm certainly not an expert, but I would assume that the individual, isolated outbreaks would be the most interesting numbers. Below a certain level they can be potentially contained by targeted measures, above a certain number of infected people you can't do any contact tracing or similar stuff anymore. And hospital resources are location-bound, there is only a limited amount of resource sharing you can do across the country.
- dr_kiszonka 7y agoI agree with your points. I am still a little surprised that the US outpaces Italy, because the social distance there is traditionally much shorter than in the US, e.g., people kiss each other on the cheeks, and give each other hugs more frequently than what I observed in the US.
- asveikau 7y agoThe bay area shelter in place area had 467 cases yesterday and 107 on March 11. On that day New York had about 200 cases and today, 9 days later, it has close to 4000. Does it really matter if we have 5x more people if we grow that fast? We can catch up on that 5x in a pretty short time.