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You can't possibly be serious thinking that the confirmed cases is nothing more than a lower bound for the actual number of people that have been infected. Do w

You can't possibly be serious thinking that the confirmed cases is nothing more than a lower bound for the actual number of people that have been infected. Do we know the exact multiplier, of course not. But from various studies it seems like 10x is in the ballpark.

navd 6y ago
I think you got downvoted on the basis that what you say is speculation... but I do not disagree and think there should be room for that in this context. Confirmed cases will never be equal to total cases unless the virus affected everyone the same and had 100% mortality with distinctive causes i.e hemorrhaging. The asymptomatic or mild case rate is so high that treating confirmed cases as anything other than a speculative baseline is hard for me to accept.
titzer 6y ago
Please stop with this "10x ballpark" stuff. It just leads to absurd conclusions. For example, 10x 34 million is 340 million, leaving 7.4 billion people yet to be infected, or about 20x more than currently. 20x the number of deaths would be 20 million people. That's horrific. I don't want to even think about that. I absolutely hate this calculus. Instead I want to stop this pandemic from getting worse, and we can and should have been working together to limit the spread of this thing. I'm absolutely tired of having this conversation because it's been 6 months of this throwing around bullshit numbers (only .1% die! no only 1% die! no only 2% die! oh look it's back to 1.5%!) and people arguing from what is basically a completely selfish point of view where nothing changes, nothing impacts their lives. When in reality every time we have this conversation the absolute numbers have another zero on them. Even back when it was only 50,000 cases worldwide, experts were warning of potentially millions of worldwide deaths. And idiots were arguing not to shut things down and not to wear masks because it was overblown. Goddamn. God damn. Now there are literally one thousand times as many cases. Now 1 million people are dead. And the conversation is still the same. We'll have this argument again and again and forever and the millions of dead will keep ticking by because so many people are completely unserious about dealing with this. It is absolutely disgraceful so many people putting their own money and entertainment above the lives of others and don't even have the decency to wear goddamn masks. Sickening. Sorry, I don't mean to unload on you personally because your comment wasn't the above, but goddamn I am so tired of this throwing around numbers game. Can we just fucking fight this virus already?
- nradov 6y ago
  By the time there were 50000 cases we had already lost any realistic chance of eradicating the virus. That's unfortunate but we can't change the past and have to deal with reality. At this point shutting things down causes more harm than good. Wearing masks in close contact settings may be fine for a few months but it's obviously not sustainable indefinitely. Most likely this pandemic will play out much like the HCoV-OC43 pandemic did in 1889.
  - titzer 6y ago
    > By the time there were 50000 cases we had already lost any realistic chance of eradicating the virus. Disagree strongly. I am currently in Australia, which shut down early and has been serious about fighting this from the beginning, despite repeated outbreaks from international travel, most recently in Victoria, which prompted a hard and long shutdown...that worked. 27,000 total cases over the course of the entire pandemic. Less than 1,000 deaths. And all of the worst of that has been lapses in vigilance and mistakes. Those 50,000 worldwide cases were the seeds of the 34 million that have been confirmed. Every one of those hotspots could have been and should have been isolated and quarantined. We'd be through this if we had responded simultaneously, fast and hard. But no one was really prepared for what that shutdown meant or looked like. But now we are stuck with a persistent infection that just keeps getting worse. > At this point shutting things down causes more harm than good. And people then were saying that a shutdown would do more harm than good. I think a 3-4 week hard simultaneous worldwide lockdown would have stopped this in its tracks, but the logistics and necessity of that were absolutely not clear. Instead we were constantly one step behind, enacting half measures and wishful thinking based on past pandemics. Incredible that people said almost exactly the same thing 6 months ago and look how screwed we are. Now we are three steps behind and there is no putting this thing back in the bottle. We're boned. Millions more deaths are coming and the only hope of even remotely normal life now is a vaccine.
    - timr 6y ago
      "Disagree strongly. I am currently in Australia, which shut down early and has been serious about fighting this from the beginning, despite repeated outbreaks from international travel, most recently in Victoria, which prompted a hard and long shutdown...that worked." Except that it didn't work. You did it once, and it came back. So now you're doing it again. And you'll keep doing it again and again, unless you plan on keeping Australia isolated from the world until a vaccine has been administered to some huge percentage of the world population. Even if you do keep Australia isolated, it's clearly not a cure, either: the current outbreak happened in spite of your country's travel ban. Reasonable people can certainly disagree about the trade-offs involved here, but you have to start from facts.

navd 6y ago

I think you got downvoted on the basis that what you say is speculation... but I do not disagree and think there should be room for that in this context. Confirmed cases will never be equal to total cases unless the virus affected everyone the same and had 100% mortality with distinctive causes i.e hemorrhaging. The asymptomatic or mild case rate is so high that treating confirmed cases as anything other than a speculative baseline is hard for me to accept.

titzer 6y ago

Please stop with this "10x ballpark" stuff. It just leads to absurd conclusions. For example, 10x 34 million is 340 million, leaving 7.4 billion people yet to be infected, or about 20x more than currently. 20x the number of deaths would be 20 million people. That's horrific. I don't want to even think about that. I absolutely hate this calculus. Instead I want to stop this pandemic from getting worse, and we can and should have been working together to limit the spread of this thing. I'm absolutely tired of having this conversation because it's been 6 months of this throwing around bullshit numbers (only .1% die! no only 1% die! no only 2% die! oh look it's back to 1.5%!) and people arguing from what is basically a completely selfish point of view where nothing changes, nothing impacts their lives. When in reality every time we have this conversation the absolute numbers have another zero on them. Even back when it was only 50,000 cases worldwide, experts were warning of potentially millions of worldwide deaths. And idiots were arguing not to shut things down and not to wear masks because it was overblown. Goddamn. God damn. Now there are literally one thousand times as many cases. Now 1 million people are dead. And the conversation is still the same. We'll have this argument again and again and forever and the millions of dead will keep ticking by because so many people are completely unserious about dealing with this. It is absolutely disgraceful so many people putting their own money and entertainment above the lives of others and don't even have the decency to wear goddamn masks. Sickening. Sorry, I don't mean to unload on you personally because your comment wasn't the above, but goddamn I am so tired of this throwing around numbers game. Can we just fucking fight this virus already?

nradov 6y ago
By the time there were 50000 cases we had already lost any realistic chance of eradicating the virus. That's unfortunate but we can't change the past and have to deal with reality. At this point shutting things down causes more harm than good. Wearing masks in close contact settings may be fine for a few months but it's obviously not sustainable indefinitely. Most likely this pandemic will play out much like the HCoV-OC43 pandemic did in 1889.
- titzer 6y ago
  > By the time there were 50000 cases we had already lost any realistic chance of eradicating the virus. Disagree strongly. I am currently in Australia, which shut down early and has been serious about fighting this from the beginning, despite repeated outbreaks from international travel, most recently in Victoria, which prompted a hard and long shutdown...that worked. 27,000 total cases over the course of the entire pandemic. Less than 1,000 deaths. And all of the worst of that has been lapses in vigilance and mistakes. Those 50,000 worldwide cases were the seeds of the 34 million that have been confirmed. Every one of those hotspots could have been and should have been isolated and quarantined. We'd be through this if we had responded simultaneously, fast and hard. But no one was really prepared for what that shutdown meant or looked like. But now we are stuck with a persistent infection that just keeps getting worse. > At this point shutting things down causes more harm than good. And people then were saying that a shutdown would do more harm than good. I think a 3-4 week hard simultaneous worldwide lockdown would have stopped this in its tracks, but the logistics and necessity of that were absolutely not clear. Instead we were constantly one step behind, enacting half measures and wishful thinking based on past pandemics. Incredible that people said almost exactly the same thing 6 months ago and look how screwed we are. Now we are three steps behind and there is no putting this thing back in the bottle. We're boned. Millions more deaths are coming and the only hope of even remotely normal life now is a vaccine.
  - timr 6y ago
    "Disagree strongly. I am currently in Australia, which shut down early and has been serious about fighting this from the beginning, despite repeated outbreaks from international travel, most recently in Victoria, which prompted a hard and long shutdown...that worked." Except that it didn't work. You did it once, and it came back. So now you're doing it again. And you'll keep doing it again and again, unless you plan on keeping Australia isolated from the world until a vaccine has been administered to some huge percentage of the world population. Even if you do keep Australia isolated, it's clearly not a cure, either: the current outbreak happened in spite of your country's travel ban. Reasonable people can certainly disagree about the trade-offs involved here, but you have to start from facts.