An Alarmist Take on the CoronaVirus – SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19
An Alarmist Take on the CoronaVirus
Guys just like you my life has been altered by this coronavirus the official name of it is SAR CoV – and the disease it causes is called kovat 19 I wasn’t quite sure two weeks ago how serious a threat this is and up until just a few days ago I didn’t realize the gravity of the consequences the reality of what is about to happen hit me like a ton of bricks one last week a German mathematician by the name of Daniel Reagan Berg contacted me to share his mathematical data and how many people are likely to get infected and ultimately how many lives may be lost I read his entire paper which I translated from German thanks to Google and I was completely stunned by the data he showed me in fact I was very skeptical about it and I did not believe it but when I checked his numbers against publicly available data and checked his math I could not find any flaws so I felt it was very important to share this data and I asked him whether I could share it on my youtube channel and he agreed he’s also made a series of youtube videos with a lot more detail and the link to those is in the description below honestly I’m hoping that one of you can find a flaw in the data because what we’re about to face not only in the United States but around the world is just stunning I don’t like alarmist takes on issues but given the severity of the situation I’d rather share the data with you so that you can decide for yourself whether you want to believe it I’m hoping it’s not as bad as the mathematics indicate and in that case you know you guys can make fun of me when this is all over I’m willing to be ridiculed you know if I can help save even one person from getting sick and I want to emphasize that in this video I’m looking at the virus from a largely mathematical point of view not biological so here’s what Daniel shared with me first I want you to understand that unless you live in Antarctica this virus is going to affect you it will hit you or someone that you know and it will hit hard it may already be there and you just don’t know it second the official numbers of cases that you’re seeing and the numbers of fatalities is misleading there’s a huge lag in these numbers third in the United States a few weeks from now our health care system here is likely to be overwhelmed and could potentially collapse we in the United States appear to be on an Italy like trajectory in Italy right now medical professionals are deciding life-and-death decisions and who gets care and who gets saved by a respirator 21,000 people have died in the world as of March 25th and this is probably the tip of the iceberg.
An Alarmist Take on the CoronaVirus
The good news is that in some places like South Korea Taiwan Singapore and parts of China unprecedented control measures seem to be working so the spread of the virus happens to be slowed and hopefully even stopped there is a sequence of events that occurs and there’s a certain lag at each step the sequence goes something like this people get infected days later they get sick days later they may get tested if their symptoms require it as judged by their doctor days later they may need to be hospitalized and days later they may die so even if we were to completely stop the spread right now many more people would still be getting sick from having been infected previously an interesting thing is that you would expect that this virus might grow at different rates in different countries because of various reasons like climate you know the the demographics social interactions but surprisingly the numbers are quite consistent for just about every society every country the growth rate of infections is anywhere from 25% to 30% per day everywhere you look let’s just use an average of 27% in the middle this means that every three days the number of people getting infected with the virus doubles and that’s just simple math according to this equation so in the United States the number of infected people as of March 25th is about 62,000 in ten days it’s going to be about ten times that number or about 675 thousand and in other ten days it will be ten times that number or 7.3 million and in 10 days it’ll be 80 million after that so in one month the number increases about 1300 times again this is unmitigated growth if nothing is done now.
An Alarmist Take on the CoronaVirus
Thankfully in the United States I think most people do seem to be taking social distancing seriously so perhaps the actual numbers of infections will be less but here’s the important point to remember a University of Massachusetts Amherst study shows that the median incubation period for the virus is about five days and about ninety-eight percent of people with symptoms show it within 12 days so there are people carrying the virus right now that do not show any symptoms so the actual numbers of infected people are likely to be much higher than the sixty-two thousand that we see today so if we take the latest numbers of infected people from the Johns Hopkins University dashboard which is 62,000 as of March 25th this means that the real number of infected people is about 250,000 which we will likely see in about a week from now the math also tells us that every week the virus will infect about five times as many people so in a month the virus will be more than 1,000 times the current number again that’s math this is sobering if we don’t make some sacrifices in terms of doing our part to stay socially isolated the number of infected people in the United States could soar.
An Alarmist Take on the CoronaVirus
Now is there any good news how can this virus be contained now here are some ways we can contain it and stop perhaps a huge number of our people from getting sick lock down the population with social distancing and mandatory shelter in place many parts of the country are already doing this and with this we can keep our system from being overrun it should be a national order massive testing and isolation of people if we don’t test people we don’t know that they’re sick and what we have to know that they’re sick in order to isolate them heard humidity now this is interesting if enough people get sick then the virus has nowhere else to go but of course this is a worst-case scenario because it means that just about everyone that could get infected got infected and this according to experts is about 70% of the population which would be 228 million people in the United States we there could be a vaccine or medicine that treats this virus but indications are that this is at least one year away vaccines just aren’t made that quickly warmer weather may slow down the virus there is some data that shows that corona viruses tend to not be as virulent in the summer months but Australia which is on the tail end of summer does not seem to be bucking any of the world trends so I think that this hope is kind of questionable now Daniel believes and I don’t see a reason to disagree with him on this if we don’t all take action now on a personal community and national level within a month or two the number of people infected worldwide may be counted in billions and not millions when will we know that the numbers have peaked there is something called an inflection point in this exponential curve we need to look at the numbers of new cases every day then the ratio between the numbers of new cases today versus yesterday so if this ratio starts to come down over the course of several days will be closer to the inflection point and when it gets to one over successive days and we’ll be on our way to leveling off but even after we level off we have to remain isolated because you have to remember the lag time of five to twelve days there will likely be a significant number of people who have the virus but are not showing any symptoms and could be very infectious so now let’s look at some scenarios the the best-case scenario is that we put in strict controls for social isolation test and identify those that are infected and take strict quarantine measures not only for the person infected but also anyone that may have come into contact with that person for at least the past 11 days now if we do this the virus will be contained and this can be done and is being demonstrated in countries like Taiwan Singapore South Korea and China the virus could also mutate and die out this happened with SARS and MERS and of course we could develop a vaccine but even if you fast-tracked it we’re looking at six to eight months if we’re really lucky and we don’t have six to eight months.
An Alarmist Take on the CoronaVirus
The worst case is not easy to talk about we have to talk about it and be aware of what could happen if we do not contain this virus and remain in the trajectory that we are currently on if people do not take social distancing seriously or start going back to work too soon the virus could spread uncontrollably until it infects as many people as possible until we reach proud humanity this would mean that about 70% of the population gets infected this is not an exaggeration international experts from both the United States and abroad agree on this number this amounts to 228 million people out of a total population of 327 million just in the United States how many fatalities would this mean well the official fatality rate from the World Health Organization is 3.4 percent but it appears to be 1% in developed countries with typical demographics and good health care system but more like 4% where the system is overwhelmed this means on the low end at a 1% fatality rate the number of deaths would be about 2.3 million and if our health care system gets overwhelmed we’re looking at 9 million fatalities but long before that happens the US healthcare system would be overwhelmed even though the United States has more hospital beds per capita than most other countries a total of about a million out of those only about a hundred thousand of them are ICU or intensive care beds and as many as 1 million people may need ICU care at the same time in an even larger number of people may need ventilators in 2010 the total number of ventilators available in the United States was only about 60 mm we need ventilators fast within 2 weeks or hospitals will have no choice but to start deciding who gets a ventilator and who does not this could mean that hospitals decide who lives and who doesn’t u.s.
is far behind currently in testing and has done only a fraction of the tests per capita as Canada and most other European countries we appear to be on a path similar to Italy right now so it’s not looking good and there’s talk by some government officials that people should start going back to work to save the economy this would be a calamity we need to work together because we are in this together let’s take care of ourselves and let’s take care of each other.
