Coronavirus math

Please throw that 3.4% out with the bath water.

Quote: DeMango

Please throw that 3.4% out with the bath water.

DeMango, your signature is "The fool says in his heart: 'There is no God'"
Admins, please note, this fool says in his heart this is a religious statement, and steps over the forum's no religion policy.

Quote: GDBONES

I was using a rough estimate of what has been reported in the literature. Obviously with 50% of people infected being asymptomatic the number of reported positive tests are going to greatly underestimate the true number of infections.
A more accurate estimate of mortality rated would be based on countries that have done extensive testing and have a slowing rate of mortality growth (further along in the process)
Norway 4239 cases and 25 deaths
South Korea 9583 cases and 152 deaths
Which yields a mortality rate of 1.3%

However, even using a mortality rate of 3.4% means that 13,147 people were newly infected on March 5th when only 45 new cases were reported.

I'm not even sure it's a high number being tested. A man died around here, he died at home because of COVID, his wife couldn't even get tested even though she took care of him. Supposedly here in Ohio, you need to have 2 symptoms and have a fever of 101F for 2 days before they'll test you, because they say at the hospital, it's too expensive and time consuming to test people(people who are pretty obviously infected).

Quote: onenickelmiracle

I'm not even sure it's a high number being tested. A man died around here, he died at home because of COVID, his wife couldn't even get tested even though she took care of him. Supposedly here in Ohio, you need to have 2 symptoms and have a fever of 101F for 2 days before they'll test you, because they say at the hospital, it's too expensive and time consuming to test people(people who are pretty obviously infected).

That was my point, that there really was a large amount of people already infected in early March when no testing was being done and that by now there are probably at least 2 million people that have been infected. We are never going to control the spread of coronavirus in this country without expanding testing to anyone who has even a remote chance of being infected and then to anyone they may have had close contact in the previous 5-7 days. It is expensive and time consuming to do this, but when you look at a country like South Korea who aggressively did this and has now controlled the spread of the virus in their country with a return to normal economy; it's a very cheap undertaking.

Quote: GDBONES

That was my point, that there really was a large amount of people already infected in early March when no testing was being done and that by now there are probably at least 2 million people that have been infected. We are never going to control the spread of coronavirus in this country without expanding testing to anyone who has even a remote chance of being infected and then to anyone they may have had close contact in the previous 5-7 days. It is expensive and time consuming to do this, but when you look at a country like South Korea who aggressively did this and has now controlled the spread of the virus in their country with a return to normal economy; it's a very cheap undertaking.

Cheap in South Korea isn't cheap in the US. It works, people get tested before getting on buses, trains, offices, we have to spend $25 and hour here on anyone doing this. I wish we would do this, we have so many people staying home for no reason at all, they could be working or spending money. Yet, I find what we're not doing suspicious for being possibly sinister, I cannot know why, but we should want to know who is at risk, and who isn't at risk. I wonder what could be happening somewhere here with nobody watching. It just doesn't make sense our government is so useless for all the people saying how the federal government is too powerful and too big. These so-called unlimited resources seem to be pretty limited to me. I know I could do better at fixing things if I had a credit card I could use I never had to pay off.

Testing since we have no approved treatments and no vaccines isn't very helpful, but it helpful. It works to determine who has already been sick, and not at risk, and not at risk of infecting other people, and it works to find out who is sick and can infect people. The infected have to be told they're not going home, they need to basically be imprisoned until they need the hospital or they need to go home because it's cleared up. In places like South Korea, they don't go to the hospital, they go where they;re set up to not infect anyone, people are waiting in hazmat suits.

Here in the US we've now tested more people in eight days than South Korea has tested since it began. We have the testing capacity.

Wall Street Journal Opinion based on math.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-coronavirus-as-deadly-as-they-say-11585088464?emailToken=ffd3b7a8efee8314880206fae7b42084ZmCtgPUNUaBC6XnhnOdCg/HPR0Y2fiy5fODXm/AzGYPqwqDM28IT8AvISUwgUDj9Bsb/Y63/sSc8bnHJhK03O1/KPK7+fi5axTQqSlI6OgU%3D&reflink=article_copyURL_share

Quote: DeMango

Please throw that 3.4% out with the bath water.

You're premature with all of your figures. You can't dismiss all the positive infections that are yet unresolved, which so far takes most of a month or longer.

Quote: DeMango

Wall Street Journal Opinion based on math.

If you want a real world test, let's pretend it's actually only as bad as your average flu, and simply discharge all the least sickest patients until we're down to a similar flu season number of patients.

I suspect discharging the least sickest patients we would be trying to send people home who are going to die from lack of oxygen, pneumonia, and possibly even have to disconnect ventilator patients in order to pretend it's just a big exaggeration.

Nothing I've seen coming out of hospitals suggests your alternate reality.

Quote: onenickelmiracle

Cheap in South Korea isn't cheap in the US. It works, people get tested before getting on buses, trains, offices, we have to spend $25 and hour here on anyone doing this. I wish we would do this, we have so many people staying home for no reason at all, they could be working or spending money. Yet, I find what we're not doing suspicious for being possibly sinister, I cannot know why, but we should want to know who is at risk, and who isn't at risk. I wonder what could be happening somewhere here with nobody watching. It just doesn't make sense our government is so useless for all the people saying how the federal government is too powerful and too big. These so-called unlimited resources seem to be pretty limited to me. I know I could do better at fixing things if I had a credit card I could use I never had to pay off.

Testing since we have no approved treatments and no vaccines isn't very helpful, but it helpful. It works to determine who has already been sick, and not at risk, and not at risk of infecting other people, and it works to find out who is sick and can infect people. The infected have to be told they're not going home, they need to basically be imprisoned until they need the hospital or they need to go home because it's cleared up. In places like South Korea, they don't go to the hospital, they go where they;re set up to not infect anyone, people are waiting in hazmat suits.

Extensive testing is very cheap compared to spending 2 trillion dollars on a stop gap bail out of the economy. Probably somewhere between 35 and 50% of the infections are asymptomatic. Without extensive test you will never discover who these people are and who they are spreading it to.