Subj : Re: Pandemic
To   : Ryan Fantus
From : Dan Cross
Date : Wed Mar 18 2020 05:36 am

On 16 Mar 2020 at 06:58p, Ryan Fantus pondered and said...
 
 RF> Nice write-up. Yeah, we're screwed.

Thanks for the compliment; if only the news were better. :-(

 RF> I tried the math from a different direction. I know firsthand how hard
 RF> it is to get a test, because my girlfriend has COVID and it took us a
 RF> week of begging and basically lying to providers to finally get the
 RF> test. "Confirmed Cases" is in no way an indication of how many people
 RF> are infected.

Oh gosh; was she confirmed? How are you both doing?

 RF> So let's start with the number of people dead from the virus in the US,
 RF> which (last I checked) is 69. The virus kills at a rate of 1% of
 RF> infected people. The incubation period is typically two-ish weeks before
 RF> people are symptomatic, so let's use 14 days as our assumed "infected
 RF> person" -> "dead person" metric (which is very conservative, actually).
 RF> That means, if we pretend that everyone that died of coronavirus in the
 RF> US died TODAY (false), that two weeks ago these people were all
 RF> infected. 1% death rate means start two weeks ago with 6900 infected
 RF> persons in the US. Now multiply by 1.4 (rate of daily infection) by 14
 RF> days and...we've got at least 135k infected people in the US. We're
 RF> hosed.

Really really interesting analysis, but I'm going to
quibble with your numbers just a tad.  In particular,
the 69 deaths were cumulative, not just in one day.
But I think that changes your numbers just by days,
not fundamentally.

Yeah.  We're hosed.

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