Gavin Newsom: 56% of California will be infected with coronavirus in 8 weeks | Hacker News Reader

Gavin Newsom: 56% of California will be infected with coronavirus in 8 weeks

santacruzsentinel.com

25 pointsrevicon24 comments

Assuming this is true and mortality rate of 2%, that means 510,000 Californians will die.

Once ICUs are full, mortality will be much higher than 2%.

Why would you post something like this? We know that the fatality rates are incredibly uncertain, at best, ranging from below a percent in some countries, to over five percent in others.

So you're engaging in pure speculation. Why do it, other than to create panic?

Why try to predict anything? In a pandemic you need to prepare for the worst case scenario as soon as possible. If we do nothing many people will die and Americans need to know that is a possibility.

Nobody is preparing anything based on the predictions of HN comments.

To calibrate a rational response by governments, organizations and individuals. Without widely-disseminated good data, people could either be acting like it's Spring Break on Florida's beaches or hiding in their underground Cloverfield bunker. A rational response lies somewhere in the middle, depending on what the actual conditions are.

Hiding data, reality and/or lying to people leaves us all less prepared to take proactive steps to protect ourselves without over-spending or being caught under-prepared.

If some people panic because they can't handle reality, that's their own fault.

Yes, this is hot-nonsense. They will shut the state down entirely the day 20,000 people die on the streets surrounding a hospital.

It will be too late by then. After 20,000 people have died on the streets more than 56% of California will be infected with COVID-19.

Average mortality according to recent analysis is 0.125%

https://www.cebm.net/global-covid-19-case-fatality-rates/

Which is in consistent with the data from a cruise ship where all people could be tested.

Which means 30k deaths not 500k. Still a lot I think.

Also pretty close to flu, which makes me distrustful of this mortality rate, seeing how different it looks in Italy now compared to seasonal flu.

Italy is older, yes, but still hovering around an 8.2% death rate, far above China's 4%

Italy has been seeing overflowing hospitals in recent previous years as well during peak influenza season. So that doesn't by itself imply something truly unusual.

I wish I could find the source for this (it was a medical paper) but I've read a lot of web pages lately and not bookmarked them all systematically.

Yesterday I pointed out that dramatic news of war-like conditions in hospitals, running out of beds, erecting tents to hold extra patients and warnings of imminent collapse have happened in the recent past in ... California:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22632440

If you look you can instantly find news stories that sound exactly like those coming out of Italy at the moment, but from recent years in flu season, for almost any country.

It's fair to say that hospitals running out of beds or putting people in corridors, tents, hastily converted rooms isn't unusual. Perhaps we should ask why there isn't enough peak capacity in western health systems to handle just a bad flu season, let alone something like this.

Ad free-ish at the Sac Bee:

https://www.sacbee.com/news/coronavirus/article241349341.htm...

If 56% of CA is infected in 2 months then we aren't being told something about this virus.

Newsom's CA estimate is roughly the same percentage as the nationwide estimates by the CDC: "Between 160 million and 214 million people in the United States could be infected over the course of the epidemic" (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/us/coronavirus-deaths-est...)

I don't know where you live, but where I live they have issued a shelter in place order and my understanding is that this is widespread.

If 56% of the state gets the virus under a shelter in place order, either we all already have it or the virus is so virulent that even limited runs for essentials is extremely risky.

Newsom's statement qualified that the calculations did not take shelter-in-place into account.

So are several hundred thousand people going to die in a short period if time? Doesn't that mean martial law?

It's already being discussed.

Can someone submit an article on this topic from a news source that doesn’t completely cover up the story with ads, popovers when you have ad blocking turned on, etc? This website plus Mercury news do the same bullshit.

Perhaps here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22632739

WOULD be infected if people kept partying. With containment measures and medicine in the pipeline this scenario can be prevented as other countries show.

Isn't it predictable that incidence of infection will be proportional to population density? If so, isn 't the Northeast megalopolis most at risk?

subscription panes free link https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/california-coronaviru...

We (the public) are being misled about either the virulency, the morbidity rate, or both, with regards to SARS-CoV-2. The real numbers simply do not match the models.

This is completely unacceptable. If this happens tens of thousands will be dying on the streets and in hospital parking lots. Meanwhile other areas are able to suppress the virus, collectively buying ourselves time to develop therapeutics and vaccines. Major Asian countries are succeeding.

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