April 3: How many will die?

It's not clear to me whether the number of deaths predicted by the models shown at the WH briefings (100-240K) refer just to "first wave" (up to the "flattening") or to the entire course of the pandemic. I suspect it's just the former. The reason is that, even without modeling sophistication, unchecked epidemics end up affecting a large % of the population.Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch, estimates it’s “plausible” that 20 to 60 percent of adults will catch the disease within a year (I have seen more dire estimates). Let's make it 40%, and that's 130M. a 1% death rate would cause 1.3 Million deaths. Social distancing doesn't "kill" the virus, it just prevents it from finding new hosts. Some authorities make it sound like with "flattening" we won the battle. The reality is that it will be the start of a long battle to slowly restart the economy and social "normalcy" while at the same time preventing the virus from "taking off" again. We'll essentially have a chance to do the things (like testing, contact tracing etc.) we should have done back in January. In Wuhan, about a month after the "flattening" they have an app that gives folks a 2 hour "green light " to go shopping, and they cannot enter the store (they give a list to a shop attendant). Non teleworkers go back to the office in small groups and at different times so there are only few people around....etc. I got this info from a report from an Italian who lives there with his wife (the photo with face masks on my last post). The upshot is that the virus will probably continue to "seep" out, hopefully closely checked and contained until a large part of the population will have been infected over time, or we finally get a vaccine. What we do "buy " in any case is the ability of the health system to treat people adequately, AND the possibility of finding effective drugs, which may reduce the death rate, again, until we finally have a vaccine. I am afraid that we'll need to be very creative in our "new normalcy". If you are curious about where we are now w/r to "flattening" our curve, take a look at the gray line in the graph below (all graphs start with the first 100 cases).


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

March 16: Reaching the "peak"

Here is a graph of the daily new number of coronavirus cases predicted in Italy. Note that the exponential growth continues for a few more days and finally peaks on March 18 (green is up to now - remember that the rest of the world goes day/month). This is very much like trying to predict where a hurricane will land. The difference (to pursue the analogy) is that what we do actually determines the path and strength of the hurricane! The "problem" with this is that if we m anage to lessen the impact of the virus, all measures taken will be viewed as having been "overreactions", when in fact they were what made the impact less severe. The "peak", if the prediction holds, will happen because of the draconian measures taken a week or so ago. Meanwhile infections and deaths will continue to rise. The expected result is a severely strained medical system. They are now putting beds everywhere they can find space, and basically scrambling to incre
Read more

April 12: A "blue marble" moment

Image
I just finished watching Bocelli's gift perfomance at Milan's Duomo, and I'm still wiping tears off my eyes. This was loaded with emotion for me. My city of birth. A city where most of my beloved relatives still live. A cathedral I have often been in and always inspired by, in appreciation of every person's longing for something "larger" than themselves. And here is a man, blind, unable to see the emptiness of the square in front of him (see the tiny figure in front of the Duomo), but certainly able to feel it. A beaut iful voice, singing on behalf of humanity... to hope and unity. I was suddenly struck by how this felt to me like a new "blue marble" moment, when astronauts on the moon looked up and, for the first time, saw our beautiful Earth, our home, in the sky. If there is a silver lining to this pandemic it may well be a powerful and hopefully lasting reminder of our common humanity.
Read more