The situation here will be much worse in 30 days, too.

I'm not sure where this level of panic is coming from.

Numbers are about to spike everywhere pretty much no matter what anybody does, because better testing and funding has become available.

Quarantining an entire continent, and even worse than this badly doing it, seems to be an astonishing overreaction. The average age of death for coronavirus victims is 83. The mortality rate seems to be as low as 0.6% in South Korea or as high as 5% in Italy. Italy is especially vulnerable because it has the oldest population in Europe which is one of the factors that is leading to the 5% figure from there. It is not an End of Days zombie apocalypse.

I recently watched a speech by a US mayor which essentially said that the panic over Corona is going to do much more damage to people than the actual virus and I tend to agree. Simple quarantining measures mixed with best practices for infection control until we have more information about the virus seems perfectly fine. Blowing up the global economy is complete overkill and is a typical move from an administration whose response to topics are either to ignore them or sledgehammer them.

Estimates have said that they expect 20%-60% of people to get it (originally [1] but updated according to [2]. Something like 10-15% of those people require hospitalization [2] and something like 0.5% - 4% of people die [4]. If we use the lower bounds on all those we are talking about 6.5 million Americans hospitalized and 327,000 dead. For the sake of comparison, that is almost half the number of Americans who have ever died of HIV/AIDS [5].

[1] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-infection-outbreak-...

[2] - https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1234879949946814464?s=2...

[3] - https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/10/simple-math-alarming-ans...

[4] - https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-...

[5] - https://www.kff.org/hivaids/fact-sheet/the-hivaids-epidemic-...

EDIT: I originally didn't post sources, so I backfilled those in and slightly tweaked the numbers to match.

EDIT 2: I adjusted the numbers again because as a reply points out one of my sources updated their estimates.

I can't believe the 40-70% number. Looking it up, this underscores just how horribly the internet is set up to have these kinds of conversations. If you backsource it, you discover he said "there's a chance" it will hit 40-70%, and then only if no countermeasures are taken. That's very different than what is represented in the cbs transcript.

I saw another seemingly reputable estimate today - some disease person on Joe Rogan's podcast, who was saying that 96 million people could get it, of which 48 million would need to be hospitalized. This makes no sense unless you are predicting a virus mutation. We're not even close to seeing 50% hospitalization rates.

> I can't believe the 40-70% number.

I can. Look at how seriously China shut down cities etc and it still spreads, though much slower. Do you think western nations will take the level of action China has at all or in anyhting similar to the same time frames?

And to be clear, when I say 'I can' I'm not claiming Im right or predicting anything, I really dont know. But this seems as likely as any other scenario especially when experts are saying levels around this.

I can't pretend to be an expert on this. All I can do is defer to experts, look at the numbers as they currently stand, and do some simplistic math. I also don't have the skills to vet the various experts, but I can tell you I have more faith in the vetting process of places like CBS News, BBC, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the German government than I do Joe Rogan.

Rogan was interviewing Michael Osterholm, who seems to be of good reputation.

Why can't you believe it? It will spread until so many are immune that it stops spreading. That requires it infect a good fraction of the population.

We don’t know whether you get immunity after recovery because the antibodies can be too weak. There are also already multiple strains and immunity to one strain wouldn’t guarantee immunity to the other strain.

Source: https://futurism.com/neoscope/scientists-warn-coronavirus-mo...

FOR CLARITY - I'm not saying that there isn't a need to take measures to protect people.

However, I do believe that a lot of inaccurate information is being presented. The public attention on this subject is enormous, making it a ripe topic for the media to profit from alarmist headlines.

[0]The source of the 40%-70% figure has since dramatically altered their estimates, and added several qualifiers.

[0]https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1234879949946814464?s=2...

He lowered it from 40-70% to 20-60%, hardly a qualitative change. The fact is that under essentially any epidemiological model, if you have R0 > 1 and no countermeasures, it's going to hit a sizable fraction of the world population, because the exponential growth only gets stopped by running out of victims.

Please read the entire source.

> Summary: Should have said 40-70% of adults in a situation without effective controls.

There's an enormous difference between 40-70% of everyone and 20-60% of adults - specifically if no countermeasures are deployed.

But the point of this thread is discussing why countermeasures are justified. I'm saying that you should expect a disaster if no countermeasures are deployed -- which is exactly what you're saying too.

The subject of this whole discussion is that there's a travel restriction being put in place. This is why I believe promoting numbers that were arrived at prematurely (I would argue unethically, with the intention of being 'first' in the news) and that specifically don't account for countermeasures to be a bad idea.

We should be trying to promote risk assessments that are situationally correct.

Fair enough. I will update my numbers. If you have other sources to show that any of my other numbers are off, I am open to adjusting them. I have a feeling the totals at the end will still be alarming.

But they don't literally expect 20-60% - that's if no mitigation happens.

Where do you see that because that didn't come from the article and video of the full interview that I linked in that original post?

I put the sources above. If you read through, you see that not only did the numbers change but also that he specifically made predictions based on a scenario where zero attempts to mitigate infection were taken.

I mentioned that here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22552973

> [0]The source of the 40%-70% figure has since dramatically altered their estimates, and added several qualifiers.

> [0]https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1234879949946814464?s=2....

The first time I clicked on that twitter link it only showed two tweets and not that whole thread. The site was probably under unusually high load in the immediate wake of Trump's speech and the NBA news.

After reading the entire thread, he didn't say "zero attempts to mitigate infection". He said "without effective controls". He also said " Increasing evidence that the extremely intense control measures in China have reduced transmission while they are in force. As long as such intense control measures are in place it is possible to imagine keeping the number infected well below 40%. I don't believe most countries (maybe not even China) can keep such controls for months or a year, the minimum time frame for potentially having a vaccine. But even more moderate ones if effective could reduce incidence considerably". Not even Italy has gotten to the extreme measures that China was implementing. Also if you read his more recent tweets you will see that he thinks the European travel ban is futile.

Overall it sounds to me like that 20% number that I have been using since your first post is the updated number based off of our current mitigation strategy. I don't see any indication that he thinks that number is too high given the current path. Once again, I am completely open to learning otherwise if you have something that you can point to that clearly states otherwise.

There's no "they". That's one guy, making a paid appearance to the media.

We don't know enough about the virus to predict almost anything about it and are learning more every day.

I feel like people have already made up their mind about this by reading some extremely poor sources rather than bodies like the WHO so are going to panic no matter what people say.

The best option here would be for me to come back in a month and we'll reexamine the comment. 625,000 is literally insane.

That specific source is not the only one stating those numbers. Here is Angela Merkel saying as many as 70% [1]. Here is another doctor saying 40% [2] (sorry there is an autoplay video on this site).

[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51835856

[2] - https://www.wbaltv.com/article/what-percent-of-people-in-the...

Jesus. That’s pretty terrifying!

Exponential growth doesn't seem like a problem, until it is. A primary concern is reducing peak load on medical services.

https://www.flattenthecurve.com/

I tried modeling infection rates, number of infected, and total number recovered and dead. Couple of things stood out.

1. Reducing the transmission rate lowers the total number of people sick at one time. Lowers the ultimate number who contract it. And pushes the peak infection rate out.

2. The above numbers are very sensitive to r0.

3. An exponential when it hits looks like a wall. You end up with a significant percentage of the population sick at once.

Could be my model being shitty but it looks like at high r0 there is a momentum effect which drives the total number infected above what you would expect.

You’re describing a typical SIR model (susceptible infected recovered) which can be solved analytically. You can see the dependence on all those points you mentioned above.

Note this is a “mean-field” model (everyone evenly mixed together) so take it with a grain of salt...

That's what I was trying to do. I thought it would be interesting to build one and play with it. The issue with it being a mean model vs a mixes contact model noted.

Both of these models are well studied and compared in the literature

This website doesn't contradict anything I've said and I cannot see the relevance to the point.

Death is not the only thing that coronavirus can do to you.

You can spend weeks or months in therapy before you are recovered, or you can get scarring in your lungs - or worse - that leaves you with a permanent disability. Not to mention damage to other organs.

I think many are discounting, or are unaware of, these other nasty possibilities. We don’t know enough yet of the prevalence of these effects, but we do know they happen.

> You can spend weeks or months in therapy before you are recovered, or you can get scarring in your lungs - or worse - that leaves you with a permanent disability. Not to mention damage to other organs.

Given that we've only been tracking the virus closely for 2 months, and we've only had a decent sample size of patients for only about 1 month, you really can't be making claims like this at this point.

I'm not making these claims. A senior doctor in Western Europe is making these claims[1].

> Fatality is the wrong yardstick. Catching the virus can mess up your life in many, many more ways than just straight-up killing you. "We are all young"—okay. "Even if we get the bug, we will survive"—fantastic. How about needing four months of physical therapy before you even feel human again. Or getting scar tissue in your lungs and having your activity level restricted for the rest of your life.

[1]: https://www.newsweek.com/young-unafraid-coronavirus-pandemic...

Some survivors of SARS had significant long-term health complications. It remains to be seen if this will be the same.

AFAIK besides spending weeks in therapy, other possibilities are not confirmed for COVID-19.

Source: https://www.newsweek.com/young-unafraid-coronavirus-pandemic...

> The mortality rate seems to be as low as 0.6% in South Korea or as high as 5% in Italy. [...] It is not an End of Days zombie apocalypse.

A few percent is a lot. World War II killed 3% of the human population, and that's where we're headed if we don't stop it.

Because World War 2 killed 3% of the general population.

The coronavirus, in a single country, has killed 5% of infected people and elder people or those with pre-existing conditions are majorly overrepresented in infection rates.

>World War II killed 3% of the human population, and that's where we're headed if we don't stop it.

This isn't just wrong. It's irresponsible for you to be saying these types of absolutely incorrect things.

The chance right now that you will know someone you love being killed by Corona is really realistic.

I'm not sure how you think how critical it is. I personally have never had this issue and do not mind at all to lay still for a whole year to try to reduce the risk of this happening.

> The chance right now that you will know someone you love being killed by Corona is really realistic.

Unless all the people you love are over 80 (in which case the chance of them dying before Corona hit was not much less realistic than it is now) that sentance is just completely false.

Why spread such fear and misinformation?

It’s not only over 80s. It’s anyone with cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension, morbid obesity, and some others, which collectively describes large swaths of the US population.

My wife is a pre-kindergarten teacher and has asthma. I'm very worried.

I tell you a secret: if not traveling for a year means that even my grandfather with 91 lives a year longer, I'm on board.

You have your math wrong.

Unless none of the people you love are over 70, that sentence is completely true.

Everything from smoking to high blood pressure to diabetes to old age to obsesity is considered a "pre-existing condition."

Yes, killing 5% of infected people is serious, especially when viruses of a similar family regularly infect 20% of the population, and the population has no inborn resistance to this partical virus, and it is, provisionially, more infectious than similar viruses.

Simple models suggest we'll have 500k deaths or so by 2021. Of course, it could be less than that, but it could also be more. It's almost certain we'll end up with some days with a 9/11 worth of deaths; it's just a question of whether that's a few days or for months on end.

No we're not. That's absolutely absurd to claim. It might -- MIGHT -- kill 2-3% of people who are highly susceptible to it, people who are in their 70s+, people with cardiac and respiratory disease. Maybe. We don't even know that will happen, because we can probably save a huge percentage of that population as well.

You're fearmongering, and it's bullshit.

You're... reverse fearmongering? Downplaying?

Additionally, for someone calling others' claims bullshit, your numbers have no correspondence to reality. In Wuhan, the 3% number was for the general population; for the 70+ age range, it was ~20%.

3% of the infected, not 3% of everyone. You can't compare it to WW2 unless you assume everyone will be infected.

If you don't control a disease, the default assumption is that it infects a substantial fraction of the whole human population.

In almost all examples in human history, whenever a disease stopped, it was either because it burned through most of humanity, or because people decided to make it stop. They don't stop themselves.

That's a ridiculous assumption.

You're pretending we live in the 1400s. We don't.

You're pretending we will take no measures to control this at all. That's simply not the case.

> You're pretending we will take no measures to control this at all. That's simply not the case.

the US gov't has spent the last 1.5 months doing nothing to contain this at all. ending flights from europe isn't going to do anything to help if they aren't testing people and preventing spread inside the country

It hasn't existed in the US for the last 1.5 months.

We are testing people, and we are doing quite a bit to prevent spread inside of the country and out.

first case was Jan 21st apparently[1]

[1]https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa-coronavirus/

This is false. Studies done in Wuhan show that people with CVD have well over a 10% mortality rate. In addition, COVID-19 has the potential to cause permanent disability if it does not kill you first.

I assume the first sentence in your comment describes the rest of it?

There is a panic. Doesn't matter if its justified (its not, imho).

But it is real and it has the potential to seriously damage the economy.

A tanked economy will harm far more people than this virus.

If the ban gives sufficient reassurance to the chicken littles to induce them not to sell their stocks and invest in toilet paper, it will be a success.

So when the ICU's are all full, and more people are coming in and a space in the ICU is freed up - who gets the slot? A randomly chosen person? Triage? First come first served? Or someone who can pay extra for VIP access? Because one person will get that space, and the next ten people are going to die in the hallway before the next ICU space opens up.

The reason why it's going to go this way is because we won't have the capacity for everyone who needs critical care. And the reason we won't have the capacity is a) lack of proper investments imagining this scenario, where in Japan and South Korea they have this capacity because they've had this experience and know better; and b) lack of discipline to weld ourselves into our homes or even voluntarily self-quarantine in order to slow things down and effectively give us more critical care capacity.

I spoke to 1/2 dozen people today who are traveling. Three think they have this thing, and have 3 of 3 symptoms. I told them not to travel. They said "Oh well" and are traveling anyway. That's what we're dealing with. A total lack of personal responsibility, upon which both the free market and our democratic government is based - and so far this is about as far as we've come.

The European flights being cancelled, seems sane to me. It's not about 1 or 10 people being sick per plane. It's reasonable to assume after a 6-12 hour flight, that everyone on board is infected if there was even 1 person infected at the start of the flight. I don't know the exact number of incoming European flights per day, I think it's about 80-110K passengers? That's what this stops.

Stopping all domestic travel would be better. Short term pain translates into tens of thousands fewer deaths over the next 3 months. China got a handle on this for now because they welded people in their homes. We aren't doing that which means we haven't slowed it down that much let alone stopped it.

Stopping cargo, if that turns out to be accurate reporting, I think is an overreaction.

Europe or North America are not being quarantined off. And if people don't take measures, all healthcare is going to be overwhelmed.

I suspect improvement when the weather warms. There is little community spreading in the summer countries of Africa and southern hemisphere.

Tom hanks caught it in Australia. It's summer there now. Most of the southern hemisphere isn't developed, I don't think they're testing

Improvement due to the seasons isn't simply due to the physiology of the virus itself. People spend less inside and in confined spaces where its easier to contaminate each other. Additionally, the flu does have significant seasonality, and flu season will be tapering off in the coming weeks and months, meaning more healthcare resources to dedicate to coronavirus infections.

It mostly spread through travel, a lot of it business travel. Little spread in less developed countries are likely because of less travel activity.

It may, but improvement regarding weather is related to people staying inside and in very close contact with one another when its cold/winter, nothing to do with temperature killing the virus.

And with fewer pre-existing conditions. People that already have the flu or coughs for other reasons are more likely to need treatment. Late spring or summer usually has empty hospitals and fewer people experiencing a cold, helping with the treatment of Covid