> I know I've pulled these numbers out of my nether region and so they are likely very wrong. But with some back-of-the-envelope math, I think we can have some sick people in February without a lot of deaths.
Yeah, in two ways: That's not how the growth rate math works, but if we went by your math instead of the number, that's about 4-5x faster than what we were seeing in March.
A growth rate of 1.5 means if we had X cases on day 1, we'd have X(1.5^1) on day 2, and X(1.5^2) on day 3. This virus's growth rate at the beginning of the pandemic stage was around 1.4 (or to use your math, 0.4? I'm not sure what you meant by "(1.5)^2x", is that a typo of "(1.5^2)x" or did you mean 1.5^(2x)"? The second one is straight wrong).
Which is to say, you can't just look at the population death rate and really appreciate just how dangerous this is for older populations. The CFR for over sixty is a staggering 15% in WA. That is ridiculously high and completely masked if you look at all cases.
If they're not taking any precautions (because there's no knowledge of the virus in the community) then it can spread to those types of facilities very easily. In New Zealand where only 1,500 people have have COVID-19 (likely to be very accurate, 200,000 tests have been conducted) there's already been two outbreaks in nursing homes.
I just think the total IFR actually undersells how dangerous this is.
She's 29 and otherwise healthy. I'm sure we would have noticed this disease without the high mortality rate among the elderly.
Yes, it can do damage and is very dangerous for an at risk group. No, we don't know who that is, yet. Age clearly proxies for a risk factor. But which one?
Unless you are wanting to claim that no children have gotten this. Which, seems highly unlikely. (Or is the risk whether it will provoke an immune response?)
But I also had a truly "weird cold" go through my workplace early this year in SFBA, so I still have to wonder what that was.
[0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+death+rate+*+421+pe...
To make the numbers work for the "weird cold" in early February case, I guess we have to work backwards. Assume that when we went into lockdown was the actual peak, 8 million people in New York City had COVID-19. That means that there is one death for every 500 cases. Then we have to pick a reproduction rate, which I have no idea how to pick, so I'll say that it increases by 1.5x every day (so on day one you have x cases, then on day 2 you have x + 1.5x, then on day 3 you have x + 1.5x + (1.5)^2x, etc. Going back a month from March 20 (which is approximately 30 days, and when a lot of people report their "weird cold"), that would mean we'd expect around 8 million / 383500 = 20 cases on Feb. 20. With 1 death per 500 cases, you'd have 0 deaths at that level.
I know I've pulled these numbers out of my nether region and so they are likely very wrong. But with some back-of-the-envelope math, I think we can have some sick people in February without a lot of deaths.
Obviously my 8 million total cases in NYC number is too high, and the 20 cases on 2/20 is too low for me and my friends to be those cases. But that exponential can be tweaked to make something plausible. If we make it 1.2 instead of 1.5, then we should have had about 7000 cases on 2/20, and that means around 14 deaths. That seems quite plausible to me. So I dunno. There was a weird cold. It's weird. It could mean anything.
I signed up to get an antibody test. 1 test is not data, but it will be very interesting to see the results.