Exponential Math and the Corona Virus

There is a persistent effort to minimize the impact and risk from Covid-19. Comparing it to the "seasonal flu" is ridiculous to anyone who understands math and will very soon become ridiculous to everyone else when the number of deaths from corona virus eclipses the flu.

This corona virus will very likely kill hundreds of thousands of Americans, and could kill more than a million. It is already swamping hospitals and killing health care workers who put their lives on the line as part of their job. This is the worse pandemic we have faced in at least 100 years.

The concerted push to brush this off as "no worse than the flu" is both ridiculous, and harmful.

Maybe the thing that's harmful is that we just accept the flu because it's a traditional virus and because we downplay risks and threats when they are seen as 'normal?'

Car crashes are the leading cause of death among young people, but we don't see any efforts to raise the driving age because it is seen as nothing more than a 'normal risk' of getting around, which people just assume requires driving.

The fact is that to compare coronavirus with other viruses, such as flu viruses, we would have to see them compared in the same terms.

Flu vaccines have been preventing traditional flus that used to kill lots more people whose health was already compromised to the point of being susceptible, so if you protect such a person by giving them a flu vaccine and then another virus, such as COVID19, reaches them and causes the same outcome, you shouldn't automatically assume that the virus is more aggressive/deadly than some other flu. It could just be more contagious and new.

Now understand these are not conclusions I am posting but merely points of discussion.

The point is that we should be able to compare coronavirus/COVID19 side-by-side with other viruses, such as flu viruses, to see how they are the same and what is different about them.

E.g. Does the coronavirus survive longer on surfaces? Does it spread more easily through the air because it's smaller and lighter, for example? Is it stickier than other viruses because of the kinds of proteins it's made of and/or its structure? And what about how it interacts with the immune system? Does it defy regular immune system mechanisms in ways that flu viruses can't? We learned with HIV, for example, that it destroyed the immune system itself, which led to AIDS. Does COVID19 do something special like that, or do healthy immune systems overcome it in the same way that they get through the flu?

These are valid questions. The only reason you see them as 'minimizing' the impact is because 1) you know how superficial and ignorant the general public can be in their thinking; and 2) because you take political sides and the left/Democrats are in favor of maximizing hysteria for the sake of evoking a sense of fear and instability that they can exploit for various partisan reasons.

Good news! The growth rate of the number of new cases and the number of total cases has been clearly going down over the past 5 days. The daily number of new cases is still rising, but it is no longer exponential.

I suspect that this is because of the social distancing you all have been doing.

On April 25th, I generated these projections assuming a consistent exponential growth (doubling every 3 days). My intent is to show how scary exponential growth is with the hope that we will flatten the curve.

As I noted, over the past 5 days the new cases have clearly been lower than exponential growth. This is great news and is likely due to the social distancing measures.

It is too soon to say if this trend is shown in the data for deaths.

Your post illustrates the scariest thing about this pandemiphobia, which is that there will be people in various position trying to manipulate public behavior in various ways for various interest and goals.

You say you want to scare people with exponential growth to manipulate behavior so that the curve gets flattened; but others may want to manipulate it to generate medical spending/sales, or fiscal stimulus bills, or to create a smoke screen for other deaths to be attributed to a pandemic instead of their actual causes.

The danger right now is that cabin fever is widespread and many people are biased toward taking any reason they can get to call off lockdowns and go back to normal.

We shouldn't be ending quarantining and social-distancing because data-interpretations can be manipulated to rationalize doing so.

Do you believe that we should continue the social distancing measures (i.e. closing down businesses, keeping people at home, etc)?

Please give a simple yes or no. Your post is confusing (and seems to be arguing both).

Many people take all the precautions they can to limit the spread of pathogens, and have been doing so long before coronaphobia began.

If you were such a person, you would already be aware that most people do thing that expose them to unnecessary risks, such as shaking hands and attending gatherings and shopping/etc. that aren't really necessary.

We are social animals who engage in unnecessary risk-taking because it is difficult to learn to find inner contentment in relative isolation. So many religions prescribe practices like meditation, austerity, sabbath days of rest, lent sacrifice for Catholics, etc.

Such practices of relative social isolation and the sacrifice that comes with it are difficult but beneficial in that by socially-isolating we train ourselves to be more aware of risks and dangers that happen when we are socializing. So instead of getting caught up in the moment, we will think twice and social-distance.

We can't live in total isolation, though, so the challenge is trying to live in a way that optimizes our immune system's ability to resist infection, which requires exposure to normal pathogens and allergens; but we also don't want to expose ourselves to pathogens in a way that spreads more dangerous pathogens and life-threatening diseases.

So I'm not sure how to answer your question, and I certainly can't give a simple "yes" or "no," as you say. On the one hand, we should take pathogen threats more seriously and social-distance and quarantine more, but we also have to figure out ways to function economically so that we have food, shelter, clothing, goods, recreation/entertainment.

We should also be concerned with functioning economically in a way that is not only good for our health, but also for the ecological/climate health and for a sustainable future.

So I think social distancing and quarantining are good, but yet we have to figure out ways to do so sustainably and continue to perform social, economic, and political responsibilities; i.e. developing and adapting to a sustainable climate paradigm.

I think the biggest danger right now is that people are using health and economic threats as an excuse to dismiss climate reform and other long-term sustainability issues. It's easy to say, "we have more urgent issues to deal with," but that is exactly what every smoker/alcoholic or other addict tells themselves when they don't feel like putting in the effort to resist temptation.

Remember the old silly comedy movie, Airplane, where the guy keeps saying he picked the wrong day to quit smoking/drinking/etc. because he's dealing with an air traffic crisis? Well, that is the way a lot of people react to urgent threats like COVID19, when what they should be doing is realizing that COVID19 is not the first or last pandemic threat and so we have to learn to deal with such threats as part of everything else we deal with, all within a sustainability paradigm - i.e. sustaining the life and health of not just people but also the broader ecosystem that supports us as well.

You may have noticed that I've mentioned pollen in various threads in relation to immune system health and mucus membranes, and I think a lot more research should be done on how pollen supports immune system function in various ways, because I think it:
1) stimulates mucus membranes to practice handling a broad spectrum of prickly 'corona'-shaped micro-objects (look at how similar virus 'balls' are to pollen 'balls'.
2) pollen may bond with viruses the way dust bonds with tape to make it less sticky, or the way that lint bonds with velcro to make it less sticky.

We know that air-pollution makes people more susceptible to disease, so we should be studying how it does that exactly and whether pollens and other natural ecosystemic dusts like pollen don't have more positive effects on respiratory health and immune function.

In short, we should be figuring out how to stay healthy and fight disease as part of an overall strategy of lifestyle and environmental values, and not just trying to lockdown and social-distance for a while before "going back to normal"

Best guess from COVID-19 Expert Forecast Survey #7 is:

262,500 deaths in the US, with the peak coming in May.

https://works.bepress.com/mcandrew/


It's good that they think we've flattened the curve enough to push the peak back to May.

I'm a bit disturbed by the number of experts who think there will be between 500,000 and 1,000,000 US deaths. It's a minority position, but that minority is not as small as I'd like. And it's even larger if you add in the experts who think the toll will top a million.

The number of deaths statistic is still stubbornly following the exponential growth curve with little change to the growth rate. I will post the next number tomorrow.

I think 200,000 deaths is optimistic, and Anthony Fauci is suggesting as much.

It is a fact that the number of cases is close to linear (growing at a rate less than exponential. The number of deaths is growing exponentially and has been growing at a consistent rate for three weeks now. This is not what you would expect.

My brother thinks he knows the answer. He works in public health in New York. When someone comes in with Covid-19 symptoms, they send them home with a test. The tests are saved for people with additional risk factors (either severe symptoms or an underlying health condition). If a person is not tested, they are not counted even if they have symptoms and it is likely they have covid-19.

What is growing linearly is the number of tests being given. As more more test become available, this number goes up. This is not directly related to the number of people who have the virus.

The number of deaths is the more accurate statistic to tell you what is going on. And that number is still doubling every 3 days.

That was my conclusion, exactly.

For the mathematically inclined among us, I found this article...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5348083/#!po=9.61538

They explain that for many epidemics, the growth is best modeled by a polynomial rather than an exponential function... but that when there are multiple localities at the early stage of an outbreak the total (sum) approximates exponential growth.

Great News! We have clearly diverged from exponential growth. The past few days have had significantly fewer deaths then projected by exponential growth. My prediction was that we would have 10,000 by April 6th (which I thought was conservative).

I am taking this as a sign of social distancing (finally) kicking in.

April 9: Experts Think We're Flattening The Coronavirus Curve, But Hospitalizations Haven't Peaked Yet
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/experts-think-were-flattening-the-coronavirus-curve-but-hospitalizations-havent-peaked-yet/