re: #229 unproven innocence

No. Please re-read the excerpted part carefully. The modelling assumes, based on confirmed cases (swear words here), and success at halting (or greatly slowing/blunting, and even reversing) the current outbreak (dubious, IMHO), so that it does not exceed 3% (of the various populations, and the US as a whole) over the next several weeks.

Personally, I think we are *way* past 3% already, that one wave is a near certainty, and so the published # deaths in the near future is therefore too low by a factor of 30 or so. The biggest uncertainty remaining is how effectively we can still SLOW IT DOWN to avoid lots of deaths overall by not utterly overwhelming (and breaking) our heathcare systems and other essential services.

We’re nowhere near 3%. Yes, the testing numbers are certainly low by a factor of 2 to 10, but that maybe gets it to .5%. If it truly is at 3%, then either we’re totally missing 300,000+ dead bodies or it really is less deadly than recent flu.

My personal worst-case projections are based on:
1. 60% of the population catching it. This is unlikely for reasons to be discussed below, but if C19 is left TOTALLY unchecked, it ought to be able to do at least that much.
2. Hospitals being overwhelmed as most of those come through in one month’s time. With hospital facilities available, fatality rate is somewhere between .5% and 2%. But depending on the source, about 10%-18% need hospitalization. So if hospitals don’t have facilities - which is more than JUST beds, but ventilators and healthcare professionals and support staff - then most of that number dies.
3. And with hospitals overwhelmed, other emergency medical care doesn’t exist, so you lose maybe another .1% to 1%.

Which (raw ballpark) numbers something like 30-40 million dead in the US.

That’s worst-case, and it’s not realistic. Reality is not simple percentages, and the truth is if millions of people are dying, then everyone with even vaguely functional brains will isolate themselves. So yeah - the first wave will, even if government utterly fails, end in some kind of containment much lower than the everyone-gets-it number. You can argue what the shape of the curve will be - I think we could see some flattening in about another week if what is being done is sufficient, but I fear that too many places are half-assing isolation efforts and we’ll end up with 5-6 day doubling on a national level at the end of April.

I could make guesses about the eventual course of things, but the problem is the fucking morons in the white house are complete fucking morons and whatever I imagine, they’re going to completely fuck up.

Some quick numbers - if we keep the current death doubling rate, we’re less than a month away from 1 million deaths. But the infection doubling rate has slowed just a bit, so it’s probably not going to go quite that fast. And maybe the states will get their asses in gear.

And maybe the horse will sing.