Exponential Math and the Corona Virus

I understand how scary the math is. I early-voted on March 3 (the first time I've ever early-voted) and I've not left the house since.

At some point I'll have to make a grocery run, but I still have a ton of food in the refrigerator, as well as quite a few canned goods once the I get through the stuff in the refrigerator.

The rate of contagion changes once people know about it and begin avoiding it.

If everyone completely succeeded at quarantine and social distancing, it would end when the people currently infected cease to be contagious.

Probably, however, people will keep jumping that gun and thinking that it is tapering off, which will cause more infections and reset the two week countdown until all cases have passed without further transmission.

So, in other words, it will just keep creeping around the people that break quarantine and/or fail at successfully social-distancing.

If people just all gave up on quarantine and social-distancing and started going for herd-immunity, probably not as many deaths would occur as you think, but a lot of older and immune-compromised people would die unnecessarily, and that would be recorded in the history books as a mass failure of conscience.

We'll see how fast they cough up the vaccine. Probably won't be too long after the stimulus bribe, er I mean bill, gets passed.

The estimates are that over 2 million Americans will die from coronavirus if people just "gave up". Given that there are 360 million of us, this makes sense.

I agree with you that letting a large number of Americans die (old or not) will be recorded as a "mass failure of conscience".

Are you one of the people who bought all the toilet paper. I had to fall back on my sears catalog because of you!

Of course it will, but if a vaccine is developed and withheld by people waiting for the right stimulus package, they may never go on record as having developed and withheld a vaccine.

If that happens, the blame will shift to the public for failing at social-distancing.

Then, however, because blame-shifters always shift blame from decentralized public failures to government, they will ultimately blame Trump.

Reality will have been different than it was recorded in history books.

Of course Lava, that makes perfect sense.

And if the lizard people from Venus who live under the North pole are using the virus to send mind control drones to space....

yes, perfect sense.

So if I understand you right, you don't think it is possible for a vaccine to be suppressed by forces that want to maintain it as an impetus for gaining economic power?

And if no vaccine ever shows up on the radar as being withheld or otherwise, do you think history will blame the public for failing to adequately social-distance, or do you think they will blame the government for not doing enough to make them social-distance?

Face it, we could end up with a very repressive police state enforcing quarantine indefinitely because of the cultural trend to blame government for public failures instead of the public themselves.

Of course I think it is possible. With extraterrestrial subterranean Lizard People, anything is possible.

Damn your stupid sarcasm. It makes actual discussion impossible.

When you say something intelligent, I will respond intelligently. When you say something ridiculous, it seems appropriate to respond with ridicule.

These inane conspiracy theories deserve nothing but sarcasm.

You don't have to call 'conspiracy theory' inane because it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If there is a vaccine that is being withheld, or that will be withheld, for the sake of political-economic manipulation; it will get buried in conspiracy theory one way or another.

The fact that it is inane doesn't matter; all that matters is that conspiracy theory makes political-economic manipulation more difficult.

Are you on the side of political-economic manipulation or honesty and decency?

The only way we're going to get a vaccine for this virus is if honest decent people release it without trying to use it as political-economic leverage. So let's pray there are good people in the world with the ability to make a vaccine.

No. I focused on buying all the food. I have a single jumble pack of toilet paper. I didn't anticipate the possibility of a future toilet paper shortage. Hopefully that lone jumbo pack will last me for quite awhile.

Here's the person who bought all the toilet paper:

For a thread labeled Mathematics , there's damn little Math here. Superficial speculation is no substitute. Unfortunately there is enough good reason to suspect the accuracy or completeness of reported data in most affected countries to limit the value of predictions based on the Math. alone.

A few facts:
The overall mortality rate for Coronavirus disease is widely estimated to be about 1%. The Population of the United States is ~ 330 million. If this estimate is correct and everyone in the country gets the disease, then about 3.3 million here will die.

China claims to have halted the geographic spread of the disease around its point of origin in Wuhan and (if their data is to be believed) has so far experience a death rate of 4% (= deaths/cases closed). In contrast S. Korea appears to be stabilizing with a death rate of 1.4%, The death rates in other countries in which the incidence of the disease is still rising fast vary widely ( 0.5% in Norway & Russia ; 7.2% in Spain and a high of 10.1% in Italy - the U.S. is at 1.4%). Hard to know the whole truth here but I suspect a vide variation in the accuracy of reported total cases is a large part of the difference - along with the degree to which the local hospital system were and are overloaded

In fact not everyone will get the infection: at some point (say, 80% of the population) the acquired herd immunity will limit or stop the infection's spread. Furthermore, as the number of recovered (and immune) people grows the rate of growth of the infection will slow, ending the exponential phase of the infection's spread: after that case growth will slow and asymptotically approach a level attaining sufficient herd immunity. A key question for us is just how close (or far) are we now from the inflection point at which the total case growth rate ends it exponential rise, the active case load reaches a peak and caseloads rise at a decreasing rate?

The effects of coronavirus infection appear to be widely variable, with serious effects on the old and those infirmed with previously existing coronary, lung & diabetic conditions; and, in stark contrast, often mild, even undetected effects on many others. How many others? That isn't known as no one has the complete picture on this new virus. One effect of this wide variability is that there are likely many unreported people out there who have had the disease, are now immune and whose acquired immunity will limit the spread of the infection. Indeed some epidemiologists speculate that the actual mortality of the disease is very significantly less than the 1% that is widely assumed. Unfortunately none of us knows these answers for sure. The accuracy of the data collected and reported likely varies widely, both over the affected countries, and within them as time passes and response is mobilized, and this likely contributes to both these wide variations and also widespread underestimation of the actual caseload, and progress towards the inflection point, as well as overestimation of the death rates that result.

New treatment modalities are being developed and tested in an already fast moving response to the challenge new virus. A few or perhaps several of them are likely to prove very beneficial in containing mortality from the disease. Meanwhile "social distancing" (both voluntarily and government imposed) is limiting transmission of the disease which will likely become apparent in the caseload data in a week or so. This will slow the progress of the disease towards the inflection point, but give us more time to improve both treatment effectiveness and accurate reporting (through widespread testing).

There are likely to be seasonal effects on disease transmission - thereby likely reducing or limiting the effect of the current outbreak, while also enabling follow on episodes next year and beyond. For this reason the ongoing effort to produce a vaccine are critical.

The ongoing effects on our economy cannot be ignored in all of this. Like it or not, it provides the assets with which we are fighting this disease, and too much or too long a suspension of activity could have untoward effects on everything, from public health to social order and the products and services we need to survive.

The thread is titled "Exponential Math". There is no "superficial speculation". Instead I set up the exponential function for exponential growth that matches the past couple of weeks and then calculated out to the end of April.

I noted that although we have seen pure exponential growth for a couple of weeks, that the real numbers may diverge. In fact they will diverge when we start to reach a peak. The fact is that now we are experiencing exponential growth, and the numbers I have calculated is what we will see if this exponential growth continues.

Do you disagree with my calculation, or are you just having trouble with the results. I would love to see you make calculations that can then be checked to see if they match the real growth.

If the real number track with the predictions assuming exponential growth, will you accept reality that there is no sign that we are approaching a peak in the near future?

The math is clear. I am just asking you to accept it.

Right now we are entering into the political-economic phase of struggling over stimulus packages and their corresponding market effects.

The moment powerful political-economic manipulators realize that the lack of a vaccine results in government stimulus of the stock market, that provides an incentive to contain any vaccine-developments that may occur.

As such, the government has to be extremely careful not to stimulate procrastination of vaccine-development with its stimulus package(s).

As long as global bean-counters realize that a vaccine will be better for their bottom line than no vaccine, the progress/release of a vaccine is more likely than when they think stimulus packages and medical supply spending will make them more money by delaying vaccine progress.

And yes I know people are going to say this is conspiracy theory and to that I can only reply that there are many conspiracies to price-gouge in medical and health related industries, so no one should be shocked by the notion that there are networks in the world that would conditionalize the release/progress of a vaccine to leverage political-economic goals.

Just stop it Lava, you are being ridiculous with these conspiracy theories.

I suspect that in this point, George agrees with me.

The way you pounce on them makes it seem like you are for exactly what I am warning about.

Obviously there are political-economic effects of stimulus projects.

Think about it: this whole situation is setting a precedent for pandemic-driven manipulation of the US government and thus global markets.

We live in an age of CRISPR, where people can make and manipulate viruses. Are we going to be able to discern which viruses are artificial vs. which are naturally occurring?

Even if COVID19 is a natural virus, setting a precedent that a pandemic virus can effectuate a massive economic stimulus will create an incentive for terrorists everywhere to start practicing their CRISPR chops to make pandemic viruses.

Pandemics could become the hostage-ransom game of the 2020s.

Why don't you calculate the rate of exponential spread of pandemic-virus engineering that will be stimulated by various government economic interventions?

When you figure out which economic intervention provides the least incentive for terrorists to manufacture future pandemic viruses, please post your results.

Do you have any evidence that such a conspiracy exists.? If so we all would like to see it. Alternatively, are you merely speculating …. based on what ?

The truth is that it takes considerable time and effort to develop and test any vaccine for effectiveness, and that whatever laboratory, corporation or organization is first to come up with such a vaccine will instantly achieve significant, lasting and likely very profitable rewards for the achievement .

In short your speculation looks very improbable at best.

It's just a question of how vaccine development processes are managed and how those managers are managed, etc.

You ask if I have proof of conspiracy, but do you have any evidence that people working in pharmaceutical labs and other medical research labs are not tightly controlled by corporate management to maximize the profitability of their work?


Well, there are different strategies to the rewards you describe. One is that people race to make the vaccine and test it so that it can be distributed as fast as possible to as many people as possible, without a forethought about how to cash in on their efforts.

The other strategy is to plan the progress of market developments so that economic investments can be manipulated all along the way, so that wealthy private buyers/investors can get first dibs before anything reaches the wider public, etc. etc.

Both strategies have rewards, but someone has to calculate whether it's worth it to them to try to control the progress in order to create more business opportunities along the way.

It takes a lot of imagination to think that the business world is completely free of people who would get involved with things to make more money by dragging it out a little longer than necessary.


Well, deep down inside I am a utopian that believes everyone at every level of every organizational process is only motivated by the highest and most noble interests.

Unfortunately, I don't usually see reality conforming to my imaginary ideals, so that makes me more realistic/cynical. I think it was George Carlin I recently saw quoted as saying that inside every cynic there's a utopian idealist who's been soured by reality, or something to that effect (can't remember the exact quote and I don't feel like googling it).