Dr Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins estimates that the US had 50,000 to 500,000 coronavirus cases on March 13, 2020. The cases tend to double over 5-10 day periods.
Khan Academy walks you through the undetected case math and the 20-day delay between infection and death.
SOURCES – Marty Markey, Khan Academy
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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I wonder what the actual number is in China then if they think 500K in the US have it. 10-20m?
This generation’s Y2K.
The US today has just under 6,000 recorded cases. Statistical modelling of the outbreak elsewhere, factoring in those with few or no symptoms, suggests between 5x and 10x more infections than those recorded. Based on that, the US has between 30k and 50k infections, and that’s growing at a rate of 6k to 12k per day. The situation is likely at the upper end, since in the early phases the US had very poor testing, and inconsistent healthcare coverage means people tend to stay away from doctors unless very poorly indeed.
Well, you’ve got exposed or not, then you’ve got infected or not, and then you’ve got symptomatic or not, then you’ve got ‘problem cases’ that need hospital help.
I’ve seen stats that estimate that at this point likely 85% of the NYC population’s been exposed over the last few months. Will that translate to 85% of the population catching this stuff in a serious form? No telling, but… I’m thinking no.
Willis at WUWT did an analysis of the numbers on the Diamond Princess’s petri dish.
“As you might imagine, before they knew it was a problem, the epidemic raged on the ship, with infected crew members cooking and cleaning for the guests, people all eating together, close living quarters, lots of social interaction, and a generally older population. Seems like a perfect situation for an overwhelming majority of the passengers to become infected.
And despite that, some 83% (82.7% – 83.9%) of the passengers never got the disease at all … why?”
Here’s his source document – https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20031773v2.full.pdf
And his analysis –
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/03/16/diamond-princess-mysteries/
Guess we’ll see in the upcoming week or two.
J.
The problem is that testing and social distancing aside – the virus may have been transmitted unnoticed and undetected for quite some time before cases of unknown provenance began to be noticed and quarantined (ie not known to have come from China as with the first reported one in California).
In a country like the US with no significant internal border controls and extensive air travel infrastructure across most states, this could mean any number of people travelling for business trips (or trade/trucking) across the US, transmitting the virus to others as they go, and those people passing it on exponentially to other locales.
I think a number like 500,000 is somewhat further to the high side of an estimate – but certainly not laughable given the population density of some US cities and the transport infrastructure.
It has about as much scientific basis as interpreting the patterns of tea leaves at the bottom of my cup, but I personally think the actual infection rate is closer to 30,000 than 500,000. Today, March 17th.
My reasoning is thus…
TESTING, heightened public awareness, evaluation, has ramped up significantly in the last 2 weeks. Bigly.
Person-to-person transmission has necked down quite a bit due to the same awareness, and to public gathering institutions declining to meet preplanned event obligations.
People in the last 10 days have been told over, and over, and over again that they have to wash their hands, avoid contact, don’t gather in tight social packing conditions.
It will — according to my hypothesis — start unequivocally show up in the statistics starting next week. This week is a bit soon.
Then I expect to see doubling every 7 days. And a week later, every 10 days, then a week later, ever 15 days. The rate WILL be slowing. People are ‘hunkering down’.
Still, that’s another 3 doublings or so. 10× more than today, whatever ‘today’ actually is, as unknowable as that is. 30,000 (my surmise) × 10 = 300,000… today.
⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅
grocery stores in Maryland are starting to look like they look like in Florida before a hurricane …. half empty shelves… no water etc…
makes sense… minus 20 days from first death… then multiple by 100 to get the initial infection population 20 days ago…then project forward by doubling every 5 days…. to get current estimate…
You’re great. Learn from you!