assuming current levels of social distancing and especially paranoia amongst the older, non-working cohort?

in NYC as of last night:

327 deaths under 64

32793 cases under 64

1% CFR

we can assume that not everyone under the age of 64 who is positive for the disease is not represented in the case load, especially if the 18-44 year old rate of hospitalization is 9%. it's likely that there are 1.5 - 2x as many unreported cases in that cohort.

so assume a 0.5% IFR for those 64 and older (this isn't meant for strict scrutiny)

i also assume that if anyone is abiding by severe social distancing when possible, it's the 65+ population. the virus will still get in that cohort, but at a more lower speed. that is to say, between now and July, this is the segment that would be most likely to stay the f home, simply out of self-preservation and paranoia.

so how many people would need to be infected to reach 200k dead?

200k / 0.005 = 40 MM

say that the older population does get infiltrated (but not fully) - pare back the total number of infected required to 75% of 40 MM = 30 MM

do you think 30 MM infections between now and July with the peak of deaths (which lag infections) happening in the next two weeks is plausible?

or is the key to the math that Americans of working age (who haven't yet died in NYC) will eventually die and the mortality rate in that cohort is significantly higher than what they are seeing in Italy (due to us being obese and diabetic at a younger age)?

is the short term problem with America not the older people (who heeded the advice and removed themselves from society) but the younger people who are also extremely vulnerable to this disease?

I don't see anyway we hit these numbers. Seems crazy at this point

that's a really high IFR

so either our current infection numbers are off the chart huge and everything is baked in

OR

we are going to have a much higher IFR amongst our younger cohort than other nations

I've seen it floated on here a few times to take the number of deaths and multiply by 800 to approximate the number of infections. I don't know where that number comes from, but that would equal 160M people, or about half the country.

Divide the deaths by CFR in decimal form is the easy way.

I understand that the numbers sound crazy, but remember that on March 1st we only had 75 confirmed cases and one person had died from the coronavirus in the US and today we are over 190,000 confirmed and 4,000 dead.

Yesterday's official death toll was 912, up from 558 the day before. Where does that peak end up? Birx shows it somewhere between 1,200 and 3,500 daily. In order to get 200,000 deaths in 90 days, we'd have to average 2,222 deaths per day for that period. It doesn't seem impossible for that to happen. We are already fairly close to the 1,111 deaths per day needed to get 100,000 deaths by July.


I find it uninteresting to talk about death rate anymore, because that implies some knowledge of how many people are infected and we just aren't close to knowing. Most people's guesses says more about their underlying biases than their scientific knowledge, unless you're someone like Infection Ag 11. Additionally, it seems pretty clear to me that death rate has more to do with:

1. Age distribution of the infected -- biased older will be higher death rate, biased younger will be lower death rate
2. Ability of the hospital system to accomodate -- In Italy, where their hospital system is overwhelmed, death rates are higher at the same age groups compared to other countries who had outbreaks but did not overwhelm their hospital systems.


(from 8 days ago)

"on March 1st we only had 75 confirmed cases and one person had died from the coronavirus in the US"

These numbers are severely limited by ability to actually test. We have a ramp in infections at the same time we are having a ramp in testing. It's impossible to know how much of the overall ramp can be attributed to which factor. We could easily have had deaths in early March that were COVID but not confirmed because of lack of testing to confirm. Same is true of confirmed cases.

i'm just curious how it spreads to 15+ million Americans in 4-6 weeks given the lockdown

what's the mechanism for spread? what's the venue?

unless of course 10 million Americans already have it

cone said:

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i'm just curious how it spreads to 15+ million Americans in 4-6 weeks given the lockdown

what's the mechanism for spread? what's the venue?

unless of course 10 million Americans already have it

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There is no lockdown. Look at what people were doing two weeks ago and how freely they were moving and how freely moving many still are. As long at there is a subset of the population who ignores whats's going, believes it only happens to older people, believes that maintaining the economy is more important than preserving life, believes it's no worse than the flu etc, there will be a chance for this to spread.

Long incubation period, plenty of people are still out and about (groceries, etc) and/or going to their essential job during the week.

but that subset who thinks it ain't no big thing would certainly not be the vulnerable subset

so the extent of the infection to get to 200k dead in 4-6 weeks would have be to absolutely massive

or else it'd have to be more deadly to that younger more laissez faire cohort

and i have a hard time believing the vector that gets us to 20 MM cases in 4-6 weeks is a grocery trip

Quote:

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If you say that it shouldn't be that dramatic, because our lockdown should have flattened the curve, then that still makes it seem feasible that we could have 10,000,000 confirmed cases by July.

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but the death curves have it peaking within 2-4 weeks

i get exponential growth, but i also get that humans won't run head long into a woodchipper

the more the dead pile up, the more people will be too frightened to go outside (regardless of how initially invincible they see themselves as)

that would also imply that we're reaching peak case load now, since deaths lag 2-4 weeks

so we're already in the millions of cases required to hit the ~3k/day dead

it just feels off, that's all. NYC right now has 45k cases. 8500 hospitalized. 1100 dead. but their per day case/count has decreased 6 days in a row from 3213 on 3/24 to 1241 yesterday.

I Am A Critic said:

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cone said:

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i'm just curious how it spreads to 15+ million Americans in 4-6 weeks given the lockdown

what's the mechanism for spread? what's the venue?

unless of course 10 million Americans already have it

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There is no lockdown. Look at what people were doing two weeks ago and how freely they were moving and how freely moving many still are. As long at there is a subset of the population who ignores whats's going, believes it only happens to older people, believes that maintaining the economy is more important than preserving life, believes it's no worse than the flu etc, there will be a chance for this to spread.

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I've seen plenty of YouTube models to say just 80% half assing it gets us to a sustainable death rate. That's with 20% yoloing.

Sustainable death rate is nobody dying because there is no hospital to admit them.