[EternalHope]

Medical Association president and legislator Lo Wing-lok says it is too late for Hong Kong to follow Singapore and implement forced isolation to try to control the outbreak of viral pneumonia.

!!!!!!!

Lets make a few simple assumptions (a full analysis would be much more complex). Doubling time = 10 days, 300 people in Hong Kong are infected as of today.

That would mean we would have 2,400 cases in one month. Probably low enough to keep the lid on, and the hospital system can probably still cope (sort of). Anything that can possibly be done to isolate infected people should have been already instituted by this point (at the latest!).

If it continues to double every 10 days, in two months we will have 76,800 cases. Hong Kong will have panicked, and the hospital system will have been overwhelmed. World travel restrictions will have been instituted.

So... What is the doubling time for this disease, and what is the death rate once the hospital system has been overwhelmed?

Sure hope we never get to find out...

[EternalHope]

Whoops! Got distracted while posting and posted wrong numbers.

With a 10 day doubling rate there would be 2,400 cases in 30 days, 19,200 cases in 60 days, and 76,800 in 80 days.

My apologies. Post in haste, repent at leisure...

[per loin]

Lets make a few simple assumptions (a full analysis would be much more complex). Doubling time = 10 days, 300 people in Hong Kong are infected as of today.

The rate of increase for the last few days in Hong Kong has been about 10% per day. That would be a doubling time of about eight days. But, of course, so little is now known, that any such figures are wildly speculative. We don't know if there are milder cases that are infectious but not reported. We don't know how widely the disease has penetrated the community or in which social classes it is spreading. We don't know if it will tend to burn itself out, or even what causes it.