Both of his objections are true but don't really change the "you should probably panic" conclusion.
True fatality rate is likely close to what South Korea is registering, because they test everybody regardless of whether they're sick or not. It's about 0.7% there.
Exponential growth won't continue forever, but it doesn't have to. If exponential growth continues until COVID-19 has infected 30-60% of the world's population (as typical flu pandemics do), that's 2-4B infected and 15-30M dead. Those are huge numbers.
Deaths will be overwhelming concentrated among older folks (death rates are about 0.2% for < 40, up to 15% for > 80), but that basically amounts to "Would you play Russian roulette with your mother?" I certainly wouldn't.
I see little reason to think this virus will infect 30-60% of the world's population.
It has infected <0.1% of South Korea's population and the number of new cases per day has been going down for several days in a row now. Today they reported less than a hundred new cases.
It sure doesn't seem to be sweeping through the South Korea population like wildfire. It doesn't appear they will even reach 1% infected, let alone 30-60%.
It also doesn't look to be on a path to infecting 30-60% of China's population. New infections in China have dwindled to almost nothing, and the total number of cases there is less than 1/10,000th of their population. (Even if one is skeptical about China's official count, it's preposterous to think they've undercounted by tens or hundreds of millions.)
Both of them have enacted extremely rigorous (some would say "draconian") quarantine procedures. They can't keep these procedures up forever without severely damaging their economy.
The problem is that coronavirus escaped and is now circulating worldwide. So as soon as they drop the quarantines, they're likely to end up reinfected from some other country. Most of the infections in the U.S. are now coming from Italy and Iran, not China. All it takes is one asymptomatic carrier (and evidence from South Korea and the Diamond Princess indicates that close to half of cases are asymptomatic) to start a local outbreak. The Washington State and Italian outbreaks were both started from a single undetected index case, for example (Washington State was the original index case from Wuhan in Seattle, Italy was traced back to the German car manufacture that had a local outbreak in early January).
You can't really stop a highly-infectious airborne disease with no natural immunity in the population. The best you can do is buy time to develop treatments or a vaccine, or hope that it mutates into something less virulent.
also consider cultural habits. eastern asians are more likely to wear a mask or distance socially, while italians and other southern europeans are much more touchy feely , and less likely to keep distances
I never said you should trust me. I said my observation is that the virus has not spread like wildfire through the population in China and appears to not be spreading like wildfire through South Korea either, having infected significantly less than 0.1% in both countries, with new infections apparently diminishing (and definitely not exploding), so based on what has actually been happening so far, in the country where the virus has been the longest and in a nearby country that has been dealing with it longer than most, there doesn't seem to be much empirical support for the idea that this is the kind of virus that will inexorably move through the entire world infecting 30-60% the entire global population. By all means, appeal to whatever authority you want, and certainly don't trust me.
”Deaths will be overwhelming concentrated among older folks (death rates are about 0.2% for < 40, up to 15% for > 80)”
You can’t use relative risks to say something about absolute numbers; you also have to take group sizes into account.
Given the hugely varying population pyramids between countries there will be a lot of variation between countries, but with about 2% of the world’s population over 80, and about a third under 40, that factor of 75 goes down to around a factor of 5, globally. Still a large difference, but maybe not quite overwhelming.
Comments
Both of his objections are true but don't really change the "you should probably panic" conclusion.
True fatality rate is likely close to what South Korea is registering, because they test everybody regardless of whether they're sick or not. It's about 0.7% there.
Exponential growth won't continue forever, but it doesn't have to. If exponential growth continues until COVID-19 has infected 30-60% of the world's population (as typical flu pandemics do), that's 2-4B infected and 15-30M dead. Those are huge numbers.
Deaths will be overwhelming concentrated among older folks (death rates are about 0.2% for < 40, up to 15% for > 80), but that basically amounts to "Would you play Russian roulette with your mother?" I certainly wouldn't.
I see little reason to think this virus will infect 30-60% of the world's population.
It has infected <0.1% of South Korea's population and the number of new cases per day has been going down for several days in a row now. Today they reported less than a hundred new cases.
It sure doesn't seem to be sweeping through the South Korea population like wildfire. It doesn't appear they will even reach 1% infected, let alone 30-60%.
It also doesn't look to be on a path to infecting 30-60% of China's population. New infections in China have dwindled to almost nothing, and the total number of cases there is less than 1/10,000th of their population. (Even if one is skeptical about China's official count, it's preposterous to think they've undercounted by tens or hundreds of millions.)
Both of them have enacted extremely rigorous (some would say "draconian") quarantine procedures. They can't keep these procedures up forever without severely damaging their economy.
The problem is that coronavirus escaped and is now circulating worldwide. So as soon as they drop the quarantines, they're likely to end up reinfected from some other country. Most of the infections in the U.S. are now coming from Italy and Iran, not China. All it takes is one asymptomatic carrier (and evidence from South Korea and the Diamond Princess indicates that close to half of cases are asymptomatic) to start a local outbreak. The Washington State and Italian outbreaks were both started from a single undetected index case, for example (Washington State was the original index case from Wuhan in Seattle, Italy was traced back to the German car manufacture that had a local outbreak in early January).
You can't really stop a highly-infectious airborne disease with no natural immunity in the population. The best you can do is buy time to develop treatments or a vaccine, or hope that it mutates into something less virulent.
also consider cultural habits. eastern asians are more likely to wear a mask or distance socially, while italians and other southern europeans are much more touchy feely , and less likely to keep distances
South Korea cases aren't going down, they just concluded testing the 200.000 sect members: https://twitter.com/zorinaq/status/1237080923998314496
And we should trust you instead of the epidemiologist because?
I never said you should trust me. I said my observation is that the virus has not spread like wildfire through the population in China and appears to not be spreading like wildfire through South Korea either, having infected significantly less than 0.1% in both countries, with new infections apparently diminishing (and definitely not exploding), so based on what has actually been happening so far, in the country where the virus has been the longest and in a nearby country that has been dealing with it longer than most, there doesn't seem to be much empirical support for the idea that this is the kind of virus that will inexorably move through the entire world infecting 30-60% the entire global population. By all means, appeal to whatever authority you want, and certainly don't trust me.
”Deaths will be overwhelming concentrated among older folks (death rates are about 0.2% for < 40, up to 15% for > 80)”
You can’t use relative risks to say something about absolute numbers; you also have to take group sizes into account.
Given the hugely varying population pyramids between countries there will be a lot of variation between countries, but with about 2% of the world’s population over 80, and about a third under 40, that factor of 75 goes down to around a factor of 5, globally. Still a large difference, but maybe not quite overwhelming.