When Will the Coronavirus Be Controlled, and How Will We Know?

PJ Media ^ | 03/19/2020 | Charlie Martin

[SeekAndFind]

This is a question on a lot of people's minds. Sadly, I won't be able to give an exact date because the actual date will depend on a lot of other things, like if everyone has 237 rolls of toilet paper stashed behind the couch. But we have a good way to talk about it; however, warning, there will be math.

Here's the real answer, and no it really doesn't depend on how many rolls of toilet paper you have. The virus will be contained when R0 is less than 1. That's what to look for: R0 < 1.

"Fine," you say, "what is R0?"

R0, usually pronounced "R-naught," is basic reproduction number for any infectious disease. It's not really complicated: for every person who has a disease, some number of people will contract the disease. That number is R0. So, if on average one case of coronavirus infection leads to three more cases, then R0 = 3.

That doesn't mean that each person with the virus will infect exactly three more people, though. It's a statistical number — basically an average. So an R0 of, say, 2.2 is meaningful — you're not really saying that each person infects two whole people and 0.2 others, you're saying that five infected people will be expected to infect 11 others.

While the number isn't complicated, computing it is. Imagine you're a coronavirus waiting for your big break. You've infected one person, but there's nothing more important in life for a virus than to go viral. Infectivity is like dating — your first challenge as a hot young coronavirus is that not everyone you meet is open to dating you. The second challenge is that this means if you want to become viral, you have to get out and meet lots of people.

[SeekAndFind]

5 people infecting 11 more — R0 of 2.2

[no-to-illegals]

Who / what agency is enforcing the lockdown ?

[SeekAndFind]

FROM A PAPER BY by John Holland Jones at Stanford University:

https://web.stanford.edu/~jhj1/teachingdocs/Jones-on-R0.pdf

If we look at that mathematically, this comes down to three factors.

These three factors are:

1. transmissibility — the number of infections per contact, or (infections/contact), which we’ll call t

2. contact — how many contacts there are on average between an infected individual and susceptible individuals over time. So (contacts/time), which we’ll call c.

3. duration — how long someone who has become infected remains able to transmit the virus. So this is (time/infection) and we’ll call that d.

The number of new cases, R0, is proportionate to the transmissibility, times the number of contacts during the time it’s transmissible, times the length of time it is transmissible.

[Trump.Deplorable]

Chinobyl

What is the cost of lies?

[SeekAndFind]

For the mathematically inclined:

R0 ∝ t × c × d

None of these three numbers are things we can directly measure, especially in the course of an epidemic spread, but we can take other information and estimate it using models. The key point here is that R0 by definition represents the number of new cases following an individual case.

That turns the progress of an epidemic into a familiar equation:

number of new cases = number of starting cases × R0n

where n is the number of "generations".

If that doesn't look familiar, look at your credit card bill. It's the same way interest is calculated — (1+r)n. R0 here is just principle and interest.

[SeekAndFind]

RE: Who / what agency is enforcing the lockdown ?

This is being enforced at the STATE and CITY and MUNICIPALITY level.

[CodeToad]

As soon as we have communism the pressure will be off. /s

[wastoute]

Look at the number of deaths occurring each day. Yesterday it was 25 . Over the previous several days the variance was a couple of deaths. Today the number of new deaths is only 17. If it had been 37 it would indicate the data is settling down. It didn’t. The signal is still just noise, in my opinion. So, will the number of new deaths tomorrow be 50 or 15? Nerve wracking.

[Biggirl]

China’s Chernobyl.

[no-to-illegals]

Question are being asked and all requests for enforcement is going to governor’s office but governor is yet to respond. Appears the lockdown is voluntary and no enforcement exists

[DIRTYSECRET]

Football season

[wastoute]

Yes, epidemiology. No measure of “velocity”. Because every epidemic ever studied was retrospective. Now we desperately need a measure of velocity and not one with a lot of initegrals and Sigmas. The truest indicator I can think of is how many days until the number of dead each day doubles. That’s what I am watching.

[a fool in paradise]

When ‘they’ decide

[SeekAndFind]

This graph shows three cases: r0 = 0.9, R0 = 1.0, and R0 = 1.1. You can see that R0=1 is the magic number: if R0 is less than 1, the epidemic is dying out.

If we want to control an epidemic, then, what we need to do is reduce R0. We can do that by changing any of the three parameters of transmissibility, contact, and duration.

[wally_bert]

Duck season.

[a fool in paradise]

Under Communism all industry will be nationalized

Under Green Communism your cars will be verbotten and your consumption and travel and energy use will be severely restricted, comrade.

[jeffc]

Actually, I’d rather know when the hell the stores are gonna get paper products back on the shelves....

[wastoute]

I went to Med School. While infectious disease wasn’t my specialty I am aware. Thanks, though.

[a fool in paradise]

2021?

[Hojczyk]

I think most people have been exposed already...