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Comment by rabryan | Hacker News Reader

Millions? Where and when? Plus why criticize something thats advocating staying home in order to save lives.

The exponential growth can make it unintuitive but here are some numbers to consider:

In the last 5 days (data from CSSEGISandData) the total number of deaths (excluding china) has doubled from 20679 to 38798.

In the 5 days before that, the total number of deaths (excluding china) also doubled.

So worldwide (excluding china) the total number of deaths looks like this:

  In 5 days: 77,596
  In 10 days: 155,192
  In 15 days: 310,384
  In 20 days: 620,768
  In 25 days: 1,241,536

Unless things change really really quickly.

Its an s-curve with parameters that are changing by the hour and is sensitive to so many other variables. I’m definitely advocating as extreme a response as possible, but I see those numbers more as a pessimistic upper bound (necessary for people to take appropriate action).

And I as well hope things are changing quickly...

The US expects at least 100,000 deaths. Extrapolated to the world population at the same rate, that's 2.4 million deaths.

That's just over a quarter of the annual deaths due to malnutrition.

Is it okay for me to just shed the equal amount of tears, or are people then going to accuse me of being emotionally stunted?

Definitely an okay sentiment in my opinion. First world countries haven’t had to face reality in a while apparently...

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