Another Contrarian View: We are safer than a month ago
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https://finance.yahoo.com/news/100-times-safer-now-early-204833052.html
He really gets into the weeds of timing, transmission, etc.
I started wearing disposable gloves and a mask in early March. Almost everyone was looking at me as if I was some kind of a freak. Today, I don’t wear a mask when I go out and people are looking at me as if I am an idiot.
We encountered deadlier viruses like SARS, MERS, and Ebola over the last 20 years, but they fizzled out. So, I especially tried to figure how COVID-19 managed to elude our virus fighters. The answer was asymptomatic transmission.This meant the only way to stop this virus at our borders was to test everybody. Unfortunately, tests aren’t 100% accurate (some tests fail 20-30% of the time to detect someone who is actually infected), so we also have to quarantine them for a period of up to 2 weeks and retest them. That’s what China is doing today to international travelers.
Obviously we weren’t doing any of this and we didn’t close our borders to all inbound traffic, so this meant only one thing: the new coronavirus was freely spreading.
The first parameter I estimated was the life cycle of this virus. I estimated that it took an average of 5-6 days from infection to the onset of symptoms, another 5-6 days from the onset of symptoms to hospitalization, and an average of 14 days from hospitalization to death. Check out the image below from an academic article that was published a week or so ago for the actual distributions:
Insert lots of geeky stuff here:
t takes one infected person about 18 days to spread the virus to 100 people. This implies that when a country reports its first COVID-19 death, the virus has been spreading within that country freely for about 6 weeks.
If a country had 100 infected people 24 days ago, this number would double to 200 on day -21, 400 on day -18, 800 on day -15, 1600 on day -12, 3200 on day -9, 6400 on day -6, 12800 on day -3, and 25600 on day 0. Basically, when a country reports its first COVID-19 death, we know that there must be around 25,000 other infected people within the country spreading this virus freely.
This is only if we successfully identified the first COVID-19 death. If there were other unnoticed COVID-19 deaths earlier, the number of infected people would have been even higher.
On March 10th the COVID-19 death toll in the United States stood at 28. Most people weren’t alarmed by this figure. I was terrified. It meant there are potentially 700,000 people already infected with the virus and spreading it.
On March 20th I published an article with the title “Hell Is Coming: Here is the Mathematical Proof”. The U.S. death toll stood at 205 on the morning of March 20th, so the article made the following prediction:
“Except a few educated people, no one has any idea that there are already around 2 million infected people in America today and the American death toll will exceed 15,000 in just 24 days. If we don’t take strict measures, we will be reporting 1000 deaths per day in just 3 weeks. The attacks on 9/11 killed around 3000 people. We will be reporting a 9/11 every three days. That’s why we say “hell is coming”. This is a mathematical certainty. It is inevitable.”
It was indeed inevitable. Luckily, one governor after another took action and imposed “shelter in place” orders. The first state was California (March 19), followed by New Jersey (March 21) and New York (March 22). On March 23rd there were 9 states with statewide “shelter in place” orders. This number jumped to 21 states on March 26th and 30 states on March 30th. Finally, Florida joined all other most populous states and ordered its residents to stay at home effective April 3rd.Social distancing and lockdowns work.
Let’s say you live in New York City and got infected right at the moment before the state went into lockdown. On average it will take you around 5-6 days to develop symptoms. If you check out the actual distribution curve, you will see that it may take as long as 2 weeks. The probability density function in the above image also tells us that it may take you up to an additional 15 days from the onset of symptoms to get hospitalized. During this 25 day period you may potentially be infectious and can spread the virus to other people (this is the extreme case; most patients aren’t infectious after 10 days or so).
This also tells us that almost all of the people who were infected at the beginning of a statewide lockdown won’t be infectious by day 25. Though it is still possible that these people infected one of their family members around day 5 to day 10, and their family members will pose a threat to the public for the next 25 days. It is also possible that some of the infected people were among the “essential workers” and continued to spread the virus.
However, most people are extremely cautious right now. There are definitely a small number of infected left by day 25 of a statewide lockdown, but these people won’t be able to spread this virus as easily because there aren’t a lot of opportunities. There will still be a few hundreds of new infections in a state with 20 million residents though. That’s why we need to continue the current lockdowns for another few weeks to make sure that the new infections fizzle out.
Today is day 21 of the lockdown in New York State, the epicenter of the U.S. pandemic. I estimate that there are only a few hundreds of new infections. I am not talking about the numbers announced by governor Cuomo. The new cases announced by Cuomo are the infections that they were able to identify and that actually initiated 1-3 weeks ago. I am talking about the new infections that happened today. We have very few of them.
That’s why I am not afraid anymore. The probability of catching COVID-19 in New York City today is probably 100 times smaller than the probability of catching it a month ago. Yet, most people are 100 times more concerned about getting infected now than they were a month ago.
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