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].
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.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.