Re:Covid: Women on exercise trip 'surrounded by police'
by LatteLazy on Friday January 08, 2021 @04:31PM
(#25690782)
That's a very fair question, I won't pretend my numbers are precise or even accurate because (amazingly to me) we've done a terrible job of estimating/measuring and communicating these basic numbers /rant.
That's 7.3%. It's gone up since I last looked, about 1month ago. But I wouldn't call it a true rate as there are plenty of people not getting tested. If half the people are asymptomatic or don't get tested for whatever reason, that gets you 3.6%. There aren't many beds left so I don't think they're admitting many people who don't need it.
I'd be happier discussing a range of anything from 2 to 10% because who the fuck knows. Fair?
To address the marginal vs absolute point, again you are quite right.
I'd actually go a bit further: good triaging would be a bit brutal but it would also mean the majority of deaths were old or otherwise ill. There is a concept in UK medicine called quality adjusted life years (QALY). This tries to mathematically account for "obviously you save a young healthy person with kids over an old, otherwise ill person". Death rates don't incorporate that at all. I'd like to see what the QALY figures are like for covid. I don't think they're public though.
A 1.2 R number (the figure being used for London, again a wild estimate...) gives you a 3% daily growth rate. That means number of infected doubles every 23 days. So assuming we stick with just current measures (reopen schools), your death rate will tend to the hospitalisation rate on a 23 day half-life. Assuming 5% hospitalisation rate (again, try it with your own numbers, I'm not wedded to 5%), the death rate will be 2.75% around Feb 7th. Then 3.5% around March 3rd. Then 3.88% around March 26th etc.
I don't know what will actually happen. And I'd add that trying to extrapolate anything exponential is a fools game. So who knows? I'm merely pointing out there are very possible, very severe outcomes.
I'm going off:
Positive tests in the UK yesterday: 52,618
https://covidgraph.com/
Patients admitted yesterday: 3867
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare
That's 7.3%. It's gone up since I last looked, about 1month ago. But I wouldn't call it a true rate as there are plenty of people not getting tested. If half the people are asymptomatic or don't get tested for whatever reason, that gets you 3.6%. There aren't many beds left so I don't think they're admitting many people who don't need it.
I'd be happier discussing a range of anything from 2 to 10% because who the fuck knows. Fair?
To address the marginal vs absolute point, again you are quite right.
I'd actually go a bit further: good triaging would be a bit brutal but it would also mean the majority of deaths were old or otherwise ill. There is a concept in UK medicine called quality adjusted life years (QALY). This tries to mathematically account for "obviously you save a young healthy person with kids over an old, otherwise ill person". Death rates don't incorporate that at all. I'd like to see what the QALY figures are like for covid. I don't think they're public though.
A 1.2 R number (the figure being used for London, again a wild estimate...) gives you a 3% daily growth rate. That means number of infected doubles every 23 days. So assuming we stick with just current measures (reopen schools), your death rate will tend to the hospitalisation rate on a 23 day half-life. Assuming 5% hospitalisation rate (again, try it with your own numbers, I'm not wedded to 5%), the death rate will be 2.75% around Feb 7th. Then 3.5% around March 3rd. Then 3.88% around March 26th etc.
I don't know what will actually happen. And I'd add that trying to extrapolate anything exponential is a fools game. So who knows? I'm merely pointing out there are very possible, very severe outcomes.