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.