The point you responded to, of not overreacting, is indeed correct.
Are you saying we should do nothing, and just accept some tens of thousands of deaths and overburdened hospitals across all major cities? Or that this isn't really a big deal or contagious, and we should just ignore it?
It seems to me that the prudent and responsible thing is for us all to do our best to lower the secondary infection rate, in order to guard against these outcomes.
In the end, it will spread, it will kill, and the only thing panic does is make things worse. If people washed their hands more and stayed home when sick instead of working through it, that's the most you probably should do.
e.g. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/03/fr...
It is being reported that South Korea is testing 10k per day. The USA is still having an issue in even delivering test kits where required. That's months ahead, not weeks.
Overreaction can take many forms, depending on what people think is in their individual interest (even if it's at the expense of the collective interest).
I believe I do my part for this and every flu season which literally kills 50,000 Americans each year. The extra dozen deaths from this new virus really don't change my existing habits: I wash my hands frequently, thoroughly wash fruits and veggies, I stay home if I'm sick, and I get my flu shot each year. I also get regular check ups.
I also try to eat a rich, varied diet, get good sleep, do some exercise, don't smoke and avoid over drinkings or overindulging in sweets/fats/salts.
I also, and this is real important for me at least, try to avoid getting stressed over things I have no control over. Again, this is just me.
Since the Corona virus has a 3% mortality rate, your estimate of 'at least 10x' would mean 500,000 american dead by the end of year, which would require 150,000,000 to be infected this year, or basically, 48%~ of the population getting infected this year.
I'm not saying your wrong, but can you provide a link to a reputable site such as CDC/WHO that supports your claim?
You might be right in your claims. But can you provide me with any reputable sources to verify your claim?
Anyway, deducting a conclusion from reality can be possible, though I'm not sure I agree trivial. I will say I think using statistical past experiences to model future outcomes without understanding underlying mechanisms of action would normally be consider inductive reasoning, not deductive.
But even if you arrived at your conclusion using deductive reasoning you could still create a logically valid statement that is unsound. Which is why I ask, what were the original observations that allowed you to deduct that the infection rate will be near 100%.
We can deduce that the infection rate will be nearly 100% because there is no significant subpopulation that is isolated from the rest of the population. Without isolation, the infection spreads. See also: rhinovirus-based colds, which have infected 100% of the US population despite different people having prior immunity to different strains, slowing its spread.
> 99 serotypes of human rhinoviruses affecting humans have been sequenced.
Of which, one seems to be the most contagious:
> The human Rhinovirus Strain 1A (which was at the time held responsible for at least 30 percent of the common cold infections)
Since the 'cold' is something that about 10% of the population get, and since one strain of Rhinovirus once managed to account for 30% of common cold infections, it would stand to reason that the most infectious Rhinovirus managed to infect 3% of the population in a year.
Please help me understand how that allows you to 'deduct' that COVID-19 will have a near 100% infection rate?
I won't continue since more fundamentally, I think you and I have a very, very different definition for what 'logic' and 'deduction' mean. To me these words, like the word ironic, have a very narrow definition that many people don't seem to conform to. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. I do wish you the best and think we can all agree that we hope the new virus has the smallest possible toll on humanity. :)
The flu.
I didn't say SARS-CoV-2 will achieve nearly 100% infection rate in a year, but over the lifetime of most young people today, certainly. In the next year, it will have infected enough people to dwarf the flu over that year, however much we hope against it.
Specifically, what assumptions am I making that are erroneous?
I'm open to learning, maybe you can teach me.
Maybe I misread it, but your article does not corroborate the 50% infection of the US population.
The indirect deaths will be larger still because 10x more will be hospitalized, which the medical infrastructure is not prepared to handle.
https://www.businessinsider.com/presentation-us-hospitals-pr...
As the article also references, Marc Lipsitch at Harvard projects the same.
The overreaction is perfectly illustrated by Marc Lipsitch who estimated 70% of the world population will have Corona Virus before the years end. At 7 billion, and with 3% death rate, it would mean 147,000,000 million dead by the year's end. I think we can agree that this is a VERY extraordinary assertion. I seem to also remember him making similar claims about SARS and MERS in years past.
But going back to his extraordinary claims, even if this virus was 10x as deadly as ALL the flu strains put together we'd still be talking about 3 to 6 million dead world wide (high no doubt, but still less than tobacco deaths which stand at 7 million/year) By calculating 10x all flus we are actually calculating 30-100x worse than any single virus strain we know, since the 'flu' is an umbrella for many different viral strains. So basically, IF this virus was 100x worse than any previous virus, we'd see Lipsitch is exaggerating by a factor of 50x. And if this new virus is 'only' as bad as regular 'colds', he'd be exaggerating by 5,000x.
There seems to be a feedback loop: the more people get scared, the more the media sells fear. The more the media sells fear, the more scared they become.
Again, I can't stress this enough, Corona Virus is real, it needs to be addressed, our leaders need to make it a priority. People will die and we should avoid it. But also true is people need to stop fretting over things they can't control and the media needs to stop whipping them into a frenzy with fear mongering tactics. They should be using this to remind people that they should ALWAYS, every year, get their flu shot. That they should ALWAYS wash their hands, not just when they fear Corona Virus. Overreactions can be just as bad as under reactions and humans have a long history of mass hysteria that only make things worse.
I'll use the advice by the WHO which literally says not to panic since it hurts their response efforts: https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/03-03-2020-shortage-of-...
Instead of panicking, I'll do what they recommend, which is what I do anyway since it works against all viruses and is really quite reasonable: https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/331215/WHO-...
Also, the other article you posted from bedford.io seems to confirm this won't be a big deal. But even if it is, what do you suggest I do about it to improve the situation? I mean that question seriously.
Further more, I'm not saying that one slide doesn't exist. But maybe it isn't the end all, be all of authority? Maybe the other link you yourself posted also has some validity?
> The author of the analysis, a computational biologist named Trevor Bedford, said there are likely already at least 500 to 600 cases of Covid-19 in the greater Seattle area. He urged health authorities and the public to immediately begin adopting non-pharmaceutical interventions — imposing “social distancing” measures, telling the sick to isolate themselves, and limiting attendance at large gatherings.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/03/washington-state-risks-s...
So, practice social distancing as much as possible and encourage your friends and family to do the same (especially if you know them to be in one of the high risk groups or frequently). Similarly, advise against mass gatherings. There was just a 100,000+ person comic convention that planned to just barrel through in Seattle, but was forced to cancel because artists and attendees pushed back against it.
But I’ll add that there’s mostly also agreement from the two sources. Per the above article:
> Bedford said Seattle faces a stark choice — take aggressive actions to slow down the spread of the new coronavirus now or face the type of outbreak that engulfed Wuhan’s health facilities and led to a lockdown of the city that remains in place six weeks later.
Google translate should give you the jist.
This is either deliberately misleading, or you are not properly able to reason about and understand exponential growth. No one cares about 12 deaths. It's the exponential growth in something that has the potential to be the flu, but roughly 10x worse.
Oh I know what exponential growth is, it is a basic mathematical concept and I'm quite good at math. The thing is, extrapolating the growth rate of new phenomena is not logical. If this isn't intuitive, think of it this way: I have $1 today. I earn $100 and by tomorrow I have $101. I sell my car and the day after tomorrow I have $10,101. Would it make sense to continue projecting my increased asset accumulation at the rate of 10,000% daily for the next 10 years? Of course not, it would mean I would have more assets than exist in the world. Growth rates are higher when numbers are lower and lower when numbers are higher. It's the nature of change in any finite data set.
> roughly 10x worse
According to the WHO Corona virus has a 3% mortality rate, your estimate of 'at least 10x' would mean 500,000 american dead by the end of year, which would require 150,000,000 to be infected this year, or basically, 48%~ of the population getting infected this year.
I'm not saying your wrong, but can you provide a link to a reputable site such as CDC/WHO that supports your claim?
There are smart epidemiologists who project those claims >https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/02/covid-vac...
The CDC/WHO are still trying to push for containment, so I'm unaware of any concrete predictions they are taking with regards to the final infection rate.
More generally, the more I've been binge studying epidemiology (not claiming to be an authority), the more I'm learning that, as a field, it has difficulty with long-run predictions. That's not super surprising, I work in the statsy/ML forecasting world, and these types of unstable, unknown processes are very hard to forecast accurately.
What we do know though is that there is good reason to believe it's parameters governing infection (e.g. secondary infection distribution) are more infectious that diseases such as H1N1, which went on to infect ~20% of the world. We do know that the mortality is 1-3%, depending on ICU saturation. There are reasonable base rate scenarios to view this as a likely outcome.
We need to do our best to contain this and keep it as a slow burn, or we will be dealing with hundreds of thousands of Americans dead, and millions hospitalized.
To be a little more specific, the deaths given a functioning health system are less concerning to me. It's the fact that this has a very high hospitalization rate of 5-20%. That's why we need to keep spread slow, so the hospitals can manage.
BTW, I completely agree that Corona Virus is an issue that needs to be addressed. I'm simply saying the reaction is out of proportion to the reality of the threat.
The WHO is seemingly asking for dramatic action, although you can judge that for yourself: https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/03/1058461
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/php/preparing-comm...
Otherwise I think you're insisting on an unreasonable burden of evidence, in that unless the CDC or WHO specifically make a prediction, then its not justified. The best known parameters on secondary infection distributions are strongly suggestive that this spreads more readily than the flu, and the flu infects ~20% of the population a year. Those are good priors to start with, given that we don't have enough realized empirical evidence to know the truth.
> Containing the COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic should still be everyone’s “top priority”
I agree. But the WHO also has an issue with people's insane reaction which are hurting the response, not helping: https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/03-03-2020-shortage-of-...
In fact, they published a guide on what to do: https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/331215/WHO-...
It basically says and I quote: "The most effective preventive measures in the community include: performing hand hygiene frequently with an alcohol-based hand rub if your hands are not visibly dirty or with soap and water if hands are dirty; avoiding touching your eyes, nose and mouth; practicing respiratory hygiene by coughing or sneezing into a bent elbow or tissue and then immediately disposing of the tissue; wearing a medical mask if you have respiratory symptoms and performing hand hygiene after disposing of the mask; maintaining social distance (a minimum of 1 m) from individuals with respiratory symptoms. "
Notice how these are basically the same precautions people should keep always, regardless of Corona Virus being there. That's why I said, what I do now is exactly what I'd do last year to avoid dying from a virus. Nothing has changed for me.
Also notice how the list of precautions doesn't include: 'horde face masks when not sick, stay indoors and cancel all travel plans'. Those actions actually hurt.
Read my original post. It never said Corona virus isn't an issue. My point was people's reaction is probably the main issue. And I tried to illustrate how illogical it is based on the risks people take when it comes to things that are currently proven to be deadly, not maybe deadly. The other day someone complained to me about the dangers of Corona Virus WHILE smoking a cigarette! (blew my mind, though I didn't say anything)
The overreaction is perfectly illustrated in the Atlantic article where they estimate 70% of the world population will have Corona Virus before the years end. At 7 billion, and with 3% death rate, it would mean 147,000,000 million dead by the year's end.
Given that you mentioned modeling on other diseases, you should be able to recognize this as wildly exaggerated fear mongering. Even if it was 10x as deadly as the flu we'd still be talking about 3 to 6 million dead world wide (high no doubt, but still less than tobacco deaths which stand at 7 million/year) And that's a pretty grim outcome since it would be 10x worse than any virus we know. This basic back of the envelop math makes me think the figure of 147,000,000 dead (the logical implication to the Atlantic's estimates) is pure quackery. There seems to be a feedback loop: the more people get scared, the more the media sells fear. The more the media sells fear, the more scared they become.
Again, I can't stress this enough, Corona Virus is real, it needs to be addressed, our leaders need to make it a priority. But also true is people need to stop fretting over things they can't control and the media needs to stop whipping them into a frenzy with fear mongering tactics. Overreactions can be just as bad as under reactions and humans have a long history of mass hysteria that only make things worse.
You seem to be unfamiliar with the Spanish Flu, which killed almost 200k Americans in October 1918 alone, and travel has gotten much easier since then. SARS was contained, and COVID-19 looks like it won't be, so it is grossly misleading to pretend the total deaths will be in the same ballpark.
That doesn't change your net worth, so it's a nonsensical example.
> I'm not saying your wrong, but can you provide a link to a reputable site such as CDC/WHO that supports your claim?
How does that need much of a "reputable site"?! It's an infectious disease with long incubation, infectiousness for a bit while not having symptoms, no vaccine and no cure ... what do you think would happen if we didn't do anything to prevent spreading?
Current R0 estimates seem to be around 3, so you would need 66% immunity to drop that below 1, currently the only likely way to get immunity is through infection and survival, so that's 200 million americans infected before infected cases shrink naturally.