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Arvin Ash 27 Mar 2020:

A Worst Case Scenario

- based on the computations of mathematician Daniel Regenberg.

Excellent resource: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu
Daniel Regenberg’s links, for much more detail:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXkvf...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rWBd...
Daniel’s Paper: https://medium.com/@coronamathematics...

German mathematician Daniel Regenberg contacted me to share his data on how many people are likely to get infected.  I was very skeptical and did not believe it. But when I checked his numbers against publicly available data, and checked his math, I could not find any flaws.  I felt it was important to share this data and he agreed to let me do it.

24 thousand people in the world have died as of March 26th, and 500K infections. But this is the tip of the iceberg. Surprisingly, the growth rate of infections is about the same everywhere - 25% to 30% per day. I am using an average of 27%. This means that every three days, the number of people getting infected with the virus doubles – according to this equation: 1.27^3 – 2.05. And every 10 days, the number infected goes up by 10X.

So in the U.S., the number of infected people as of March 25th is about 62,000, in 10 days will be 675,000, and in another 10 days, it will be 7.3 million, And in 10 more ays it will be 80 million. This is a 1300X increase in one month!

But here’s the important point to remember, a university of Massachusetts Amherst study shows that the median incubation period for the virus is about 5-12 days. This means that the number of people infected with the virus in the US, is likely to be 4 times what the current numbers show. 
#coronavirus
#covid19
#sarscov2

If we do not all make some sacrifices in terms of doing our part to stay socially isolated, the number of infected people in the US could soar.

How can this virus be contained?

- Lockdown the population with social distancing and mandatory shelter-in-place order.
- Massive testing and isolation of infected people
- Herd immunity. If enough people get sick, then the virus has nowhere else to go. Of course, this is a worst case scenario.

if we don’t all take action now on a personal, community, and national level, within a month or two, the number of people infected world-wide may be in billions, not millions. When will we know that this has peaked? When we reach the inflection point. This is when the ratio between the number of new cases in a day is the same or lower than the day before.

But even after we level off, we have to remain isolated, because of the lag time of 5-12 days. There will likely be a significant number of people who have the virus but are not showing any symptoms for 5-12 days.

The best case scenario is that the we put in strict controls for social isolation, test and identify those that are infected, and take strict quarantine measures not only for the person infected, but also anyone that may have come into contact with that person for the past 11 days. This can be done as is being demonstrated in Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea and China. The virus could also mutate and die out. This happened with SARS and MERS. And of course, we could develop a vaccine. But it may be too late.

The worst case is if people do not take social distancing seriously, or start going back to work too soon, the virus could spread uncontrollably until it infects as many people as possible until we reach crowd immunity through exposure.  This would mean that about 70% of the population gets infected as experts agree. This amounts to 228 million people out of a total population of 327 million. just in the United States.

How many fatalities would this mean? The official fatality rate from the World Health Organization is 3.4%. But it appears to be 1% in developed countries with good healthcare. But more like 4% when they system is overwhelmed.  This means on the low end, at a 1% fatality rate, the number of deaths would be about 2.3 million, and if our healthcare system gets overwhelmed, we are looking at 9 million fatalities.

But long before that happens, the US healthcare system would be overwhelmed. Even though the US has more hospital beds per capita than most other countries, a total of almost 1 million, out of those only about 100,000 of them are ICU or intensive care beds. And as many as 1 million people may need ICU care at the same time. And an even larger number of people may need ventilators.

In 2010, the total number of ventilators available in the US was only about 62,000.  We need ventilators fast – within 2 weeks, or hospitals will have no choice but start deciding who gets a ventilator and who does not. This could mean the hospital decides who lives and who doesn’t. 

Let’s take care of ourselves, and let’s take care of each other.