“I’m not good at math - did that person factor in the fact that they think that 86% of people don’t even know they have it? Haven’t been tested so haven’t been counted? if that is true- it’s likely i think to lower the death rate?”
That 86% (used to be 85%, before that a mere 80%) is someone’s OCD ritual. If there were 86% of cases, undetected and wandering in the wilderness, they’d be causing hotspots like crazy. Just being asymptomatic does not mean you are not contagious (we’ve seen this, over and over).
The 86%, or 85% or 80% or 99% (yes, that has been claimed) of cases that are asymptomatic are among the already confirmed. That 99% number is absurd and clearly made up.
We won’t know the exact number of cases until everybody is tested. But if 86% of cases are unknown and still at large, expect the *worst* case scenario.
[[We won’t know the exact number of cases until everybody is tested.]]
I’m not sure, but I think they are just guesstimating, based on rate of spread of known documented cases, population densities, etc- I’m sure there is some kind of math logic with allowable variables, and accepted spreads used to calculate- but i am not sure the author of this article factored all that in- like said, i aint good at math- so i don’t know- I do remember reading several years ago about how they go about guesstimating, to come up with reasonable acceptable results which factor in all kinds of stuff-
Something about unknown probabilities, i think? - a process to try to reduce uncertainty- There is observation of the known, plus calculations for the unknown that reduce as much as possible the errors due to the unknown- or something like that-
No, not at all.
You assume that asymptomatic cases "wander in the wildness" separate from hot hotspots. That's a false assumption. There's no reason to think that they would be clustered in the same hotspots.
Imagine that there are a million people out there now in this country, who got exposed, had no symptoms at all.
The questions are:
1. Were they ever able to transmit the disease?
2. If they have no symptoms, did their immune systems even try to kill the virus?
3. If not, is the virus still living in all these people?
I guess that is the risk, millions of people who will forever be carriers. No amount of temporary distancing helps with that.
On the other hand, I am positive this is not the case, because if there were a million people out their now who could infect others, we’d have 10-100 times more reports by now of people infected with symptoms.
Unless, that is, that 98% of us are actually immune from this virus.
Which could be true. Rather than a slow-moving virus killing 2% of the population, we have a fast-moving virus that went through millions of people who were not impacted at all, and we are only seeing the results from those 2%, of which 2% of the 2% are dying.
We won’t know, until or unless we run random testing. Assuming we can test for people who had the virus, but beat it, and never had symptoms — and I don’t think the test finds those people, we are not testing for antibody protection now, we are looking for the actual virus.
BTW, the 2% theory would explain China. A billion people, all of whom should have been at high risk because of their circumstances. Millions of poeple traveling around, an epicenter with millions of people living there, and millions that came and went, and millions that fled.
If you believe CHina Numbers:
80,000 cases, 21 new ones a day, 3300 deaths.
In other words, Wuhan had a population of 11 million, china a population of 1.3 billion, 80,000 cases. If you assumed NO transmission out of wuhan, that’s .7% of the population of wuhan that got the virus. If 98% of their population was immune, and 50% of the non-immune got it, that would be : 110,000 infected, and if 2% of them died, 4400 deaths.
THis is all just speculative numbers. But the math works — you can argue that China’s numbers point to a 98% immunity with less than 50% spread and 2% death only among the non-immune.
Let’s look at italy. 60 million people. 98% immune means a possibility of 1.2 million impacted, with a 50% RATE that is 600,000 people, with 12,000 dead.
Current Italy numbers, which clearly are going up: 31,000 infected, 2500 dead. If the numbers quadruple before stopping, they will be well below the 600,000 infected and 12,000 dead. Lets see if that is the case.
Nope. If we test a million people, we will have 10,000 false positives and needless panic. OTOH we have to test, and base the testing on objective risk.
Or, if 86% of cases are unknown and still at large and have been for some time, then we can also estimate how many have had the virus and recovered. Which can mean it is hardly as deadly as warned, except to elderly.