Why You Must Act Now (2023 Update)

Good article and very important information. Unfortunately many people won't understand it. I wonder how many of them are running our response to the situation.

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  Rick C. 

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When it does, your healthcare system will be overwhelmed."

There was a piece in the NY Times this morning projecting that 100 million, or maybe 200 million, Americans will catch this virus. So far, the number is reported around 4K, about 13 PPM. The chart on your link shows only 400 cases in the US, about 1 PPM.

In China, the official infection count is about 80K, out of a population of 1.4 billion.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

The cork popped merrily, and Lord Peter rose to his feet.  
"Bunter", he said, "I give you a toast. The triumph of Instinct over Reason"

Why is it that Larkin posts disconnected facts and says nothing about them? He clearly either thinks he has said something about these facts, or his intent is to not say anything and let others fill in the blanks as it suits them.

Trump does that a lot too. He says some tidbit which often isn't even a co mplete sentence or thought. String a few of them together and it seems lik e he is saying something, but he's not actually said a single thing.

The article Win linked to contains a lot of very useful and revealing infor mation. It's the sort of stuff that Edward would have liked to have provid ed, but he was too busy trolling chat rooms about bio-research labs in Wuha n. Turns out Edward was totally right in a few areas.

I would have expected other countries to have seen what happened in China a nd learned from it. That doesn't seem to be happening and every country ha s to learn the same lessons, each in their own way. At least in this count ry the states can take action without waiting for the federal government. Many are shutting down schools and prohibiting public gatherings of any siz e. But it looks like that won't be enough. I'm not sure what will need to happen or who will do it for the US to contain this infection like China d id.

I guess a good start is to fix the hand cleaning station at Walmart. But c learly we need to wait until the infection rate is well above 13 PPM. I wo nder what infection rate will be enough to trigger an immune response from the country?

Too bad an engineering group doesn't have people who know how to do the mat h for exponential increases.

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  Rick C. 

  - Get 10,000 miles of free Supercharging 
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e-

m? He clearly either thinks he has said something about these facts, or hi s intent is to not say anything and let others fill in the blanks as it sui ts them.

ath for exponential increases.

Quite a few of us can do it. It's quite a while now since I pointed out tha t the - initially exponential - increase in case numbers in Wuhan had start ed rolling off and that the curve had started to look more like a logistic curve.

The problem with that - for mathematical modelling - is that the initial cu rve had reflected about three infections from each new case in the roughly five days between the new case becoming infections and starting to look sic k - and the decline in the rate of increase reflected many fewer infections from each new case - social distancing meant that anybody who got infected after it had been brought in only had a limited chance (perhaps 30% to 50% ) to infect anybody else before they started showing signs of disease and g ot isolated.

Plugging that change in the process into your mathematical model is tricky.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Winfield Hill wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@drn.newsguy.com:

Place a < and a > around your links... please.

Works better that way in a Usenet client or Internet browser.

(fixed broken link above, but wrapping will likely tear it apart again so I made a...)

TinyURL version of Winfield's original link:

I expect that Mr. Pueyo has done his due diligence, as it appears to be valid information based on what I have seen elsewhere on CDC and other valid sites.

John :-#(#

Well, no, the "" didn't work any better.

John :-#(#

Previously we had all kinds of climate alarmists.

Now we have all kinds of corona alarmists :-)

John Robertson wrote in news:6 snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:

Yeah... All Trump did was his Doo Doo Dilligence. He held another rally and barked out blames. He really is a big pile of Doo Doo!

THEN he ACTED like HE ACTED promptly. The travel restriction thing is all he has. After that he started the "common cold" "it will go away" thing. Then, it came knocking...

John Robertson wrote in news:6_qdnRheKdXzg snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:

AAAhhh! You are right!

Me try. Could be a news client thing.

snipped-for-privacy@downunder.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

You have gotten that all downside up over, man.

Make a pineapple downside up cake.

OF COURSE any exponential growth curve is always going to flatten at some point, only economists believe in exponential growth.

However, the reason that those curves do not keep growing exponentially for a while in cases of viral infections like this is not as much that the actual number of infections stops increasing, but that the capacity of the medical system to test for and count the infections gets saturated.

There are all sorts of reasons why curves don't shown persistent exponential growth.

The one thing the medical system (or at least medical systems outside of the US) seem to be able to do is to get hold of lots of virus testing kits and use them.

Wuhan province was doing a lot more virus testing after the new infections per day started dropping than it was earlier.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

He is being overly pessimistic there (although the US is actually blind to its true infection levels due to inadequate testing capability).

If the infection growth rate remains at the present daily value then the daily case count increases with day number N like 1.4^N going forward.

That means a roughly a million times more cases in about 40 days time.

If we can use social distancing to get the daily growth factor down to

1.2 or 1.3 then the corresponding figures are much better. Tens of thousands in the best case and a much more manageable broad hump.

US immigration appeared to be trying for the Guinness Book of records for how many people they could infect with their dumb stunt yesterday.

The infection growth rate in a free society before any lock down constraints are put on it is about 1.4^day_no or roughly 10^week_no. You can see this in the graphs for Italy, France, Spain and the UK. The UK graph actually looks *too* perfectly exponential growth for my liking.

It remains to be seen exactly how the curve will change in the UK as various measures are brought into play. There will be a lag of about 5 days for the latency of the virus before we can see their effects.

But the draconian measures they used to halt the spread will have to be taken off at some point and then the thing may well take off again. The biggest problem is that no-one has any worthwhile immunity to this novel virus that has only recently jumped species. No vaccine is in sight.

I think the UK government is probably doing the right thing based on their excellent scientific advice but they are in danger of being blown off course by panicking tabloid headlines.

In healthy adults the disease is very unpleasant but not normally life threatening unless you are very unlucky. This is a novel highly infective disease that mostly kills the elderly and infirm with pre-existing health conditions and the odd very unlucky medic.

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

Thanks for that Win. Excellent article, and I like the fact that he applied math to make sensible approximations rather than just hand waving.

e-

Social distancing can do better than that, and seems to have done so in Hub ei Province.

The critical factor is the number of people each newly infected person mana ges to infect before their infection becomes obvious (usually after about f ive days) and they go into isolation.

It's about three people in those five days with typical social interactions .

With good enough social distancing, it looks as if it can be got down to a bout one half or one third of a person, and the number of new cases per day shrinks rather than increases.

That translate into a much smaller number of people infected overall - the hump is not so much wider as smaller.

Not if people keep on paying attention.

vel virus that has only recently jumped species. No vaccine is in sight.

At least one has just gone into preliminary testing. Molecular biology has new technology to offer, and at least some people are trying to get to a va ccine faster than the traditional approaches could manage.

Nobody under nine seems to have died of it. For people in my age group - 70 to 80 it seems to kill 10% and it goes up to 15% if you are over 80.

Most of the data come from China, and smoking is more popular there - if yo u have smoked all your life (and been exposed to a lot of air pollution) it wouldn't help.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Hysterical nonsense - he's using the sitting duck theory wherein people ar e oblivious to the danger and go on about life as usual, and that's certain ly NOT the case. The virus has been circulating in the U.S. since at least October, and any deaths have been attributed to influenza. Suddenly, when t he test kit becomes available, people are dying of corona left and right. S peaking of tests, someone needs to get on the ball and develop an ELISA for this virus. This testing methodology is about 10-25 % the cost of a PCR, t he type they're now using, and it doesn't require a sophisticated lab to pr ocess the results. Sampling is a pin prick and they can really go to town a ssaying the entire population of the world if they want to. Singapore is ab out 90% of the way there but haven't developed anything scalable to commerc ial yet.

Let's see.

What's also increasing exponentially is the availability of testing kits.

Yes. There will be islands of infection that can reseed the country for many months, maybe years. If they lock down for a year, people will starve to death.

The

The US press, and TV news, and internet, are hyperbolic on this. There was Climate Change, then the Mueller/Russia thing, then impeachment, now this. Single-subject hysterical monoculture.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

The cork popped merrily, and Lord Peter rose to his feet.  
"Bunter", he said, "I give you a toast. The triumph of Instinct over Reason"

He said this on March 10:

When it does, your healthcare system will be overwhelmed.

"A matter of days" is up. The first week is almost over. We have 3700 confirmed cases in the US so far, 68 deaths. On a normal day in the US, about 10K people die.

This may be a more serious than the usual flu, or maybe not, but the hysteria level is unprecedented.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

The cork popped merrily, and Lord Peter rose to his feet.  
"Bunter", he said, "I give you a toast. The triumph of Instinct over Reason"